From now on we may speak of the “Spanish rule.” The traditionally lax policy of Emperor Charles was gone. The tyranny of Spain was destined to crush the Belgians. That task was intrusted to the Duke of Alva, who came to Belgium as governor in 1567. Don Luis Alvarez de Toledo, Duke of Alva and Marquess of Soria, was a cold and implacable warrior. The greatness of his king was for him the greatness of Spain. He hated the Belgians, who had dared to ask for liberty of conscience, as much as he hated the heretics. He accomplished his terrible mission unwaveringly and remorselessly; his method of government was terror. Accustomed to fight the Moslem Moors of Spain, he knew only two weapons with which to crush the heretics--the sword and the stake. He wrote in one of his letters: “It is infinitely better to keep, by means of war, for God and for the King, an impoverished and even ruined country, than to keep it, without war, undamaged, for the devil and his partisans, the heretics.” Such was the terrible warrior to whom Philip II intrusted a double task: to chastise the rebels and heretics and to subject the nation to the rule of Madrid. Alva arrived in Belgium with a large number of the best Spanish troops. Contrary to all customs in the free Netherlands, they were billeted in the cities. A fortress was ordered built at Antwerp. The counts of Egmont and Horn and the burgomaster of Antwerp were treacherously arrested and imprisoned. But the real leader of the opposition, the Prince of Orange, could not be taken. More clear-sighted than his friends, he had fled to Holland before the coming vengeance. In defiance of all national privileges, Alva established an extraordinary tribunal, which the people soon called the “Council of Blood”; that court of justice, established and conducted in a thoroughly revolutionary manner, condemned scores of people who were more or less guilty of revolt against the King. About two thousand victims were sentenced to death and executed. Only political crimes were taken into account, and the condemnation was followed by the confiscation of property--a remarkably remunerative operation for the Spanish treasure chest. Terror fell upon the Belgians. All who had engaged in the slightest degree in the revolt of 1566 fled to foreign countries; Lutherans and Calvinists, panic-stricken, left the Netherlands in large numbers. Meanwhile the Prince of Orange had sought for help among the German Protestant princes; he gathered an army and invaded Belgium. He had expected a general revolt of the people against Alva at the first news of his campaign. But the soldiers of his army, merely hirelings, and many of them fanatical Protestants, pillaged churches and convents on their way; they disgusted the naturally religious populace of Belgium, and the campaign of William the Silent proved a complete failure. The prince was compelled to seek refuge in France, where he hoped to get help from Coligny and the French Huguenots.