Soon after the capture of Mons, Alva went to Brussels and left the conduct of the war to his son, Frederick de Toledo. Zutphen and Naarden successively yielded to Frederick's arms, and became the scenes of the most detestable violence. Alva ordered his son not to leave a single man alive in Zutphen, and to burn down all the houses--commands which were almost literally obeyed. The treatment of Naarden was still more revolting. The town had capitulated, and Don Julian Romero, an officer of Don Frederick's, had pledged his word that the lives and property of the inhabitants should be respected. Romero then entered the town with some five hundred musketeers, for whom the citizens provided a sumptuous feast; and he summoned the inhabitants to assemble in the Gast Huis Church, then used as a town hall. More than five hundred of them had entered the church when a priest, suddenly rushing in, bade them prepare for death. Scarcely had the announcement been made when a band of Spanish soldiers entered and, after discharging a volley into the defenceless crowd, attacked them sword in hand. The church was then fired and the dead and dying consumed together. But these cruelties only steeled the Hollanders to a more obstinate resistance; nor must it be concealed that in these _plusquam civilia bella_, where civil hatred was still further embittered by sectarian malignancy, the Dutch sometimes displayed as much savageness as their adversaries. Thus, during the struggle in Zealand, a surgeon at Veer cut out the heart of a Spanish prisoner, and, fixing it on the prow of a vessel, invited his fellow-townsmen to fix their teeth in it, an invitation with which many complied.