There was a great difference in the conduct of the Germans of West Prussia with respect to proselytising Jesuits and Sclavonian tyranny. The immigrant German nobles became Roman Catholic and Polish, but the citizens and peasants remained stubborn Protestants. To the opposition of languages was added the opposition of confessions; to the hatred of race, the fury of contending faiths. In the century of enlightenment there was a fanatical persecution of the Germans in these provinces; one Protestant church after another was pulled down, the wooden ones were burnt; when a church was burnt, the villages lost the right of having bells; German preachers and schoolmasters were driven away and shamefully ill-used "_Vexa Lutheranum dabit thalerum_" was the usual saying of the Poles against the Germans. One of the great landed proprietors of the country, Starost of Gnesen, from the family of Birnbaum, was condemned to death, by tearing out his tongue and chopping off his hands, because he had copied into a record from German books some biting remarks against the Jesuits. There was no law and no protection. The national party of Polish nobles, in alliance with fanatical priests, persecuted most violently those whom they hated as Germans and Protestants. All the predatory rabble joined themselves to the patriots or confederates; they hired hordes who went plundering about the country and fell upon small cities and German villages. Ever more vehement became the rage against the Germans, not only from zeal for the faith, but still more from covetousness. The Polish nobleman Roskowski put on a red and a black boot: the one signified fire, and the other death; thus he rode from one place to another, laying all under contribution; at last, in Jastrow, he caused the hands, feet, and finally the head of the Evangelical preacher Wellick to be cut off, and the limbs to be thrown into a bog. This happened in 1768.