At Louvain they were even permitted to receive their friends and to eat and drink with them. Naturally they took heart. Some of them began to dream of pardon, and even, over their wine-cups, to utter threats of vengeance, which of course reached the ears of the craftsmen of Brussels, and of course bred uproar. 'These blusterers must be led to the block; that was the only way to deal with them. Public safety demanded it.' In vain Vander Zype urged that it were the grossest injustice to increase the punishment of men who had been already tried and sentenced; the insurgents answered that the sum of their infamy was not then known, and that, if this boon were not granted, they would have out the Germans and cut their throats. That was enough. Sigismund was already pressing for his subjects' release, and the Regent knew that if any evil should befall them he would have to make ready for battle. On Saturday, then, the 7th of June 1421, the prisoners were led in chains to Brussels, and before sundown they were dead men. On the morrow, when Gerard Vander Zype rode through the Grand' Place along with the bride to whom he had just plighted his troth in the old Church of Saint Nicholas, the pavement was still red with their blood, and they were all of them his own kinsmen--gruesome prelude this to the banquet of which the newly married couple were about to partake in the ducal palace. Had Jeanne Vander Zype no foreboding of the horrible doom in store for her husband? And if so, did her heaving bosom gleam with those priceless jewels, the wedding gift with which Heinsberg hoped, not vainly, to purchase his redemption? Of these things De Dynter says nothing, but we know that, thanks to Gerard's good offices, the German knights were released shortly after his marriage, and that the craftsmen, mollified by the blood which he had shed, offered no resistance; and we know, too, that the man who had sacrificed his kinsfolk to avert war was made to suffer for it in his own person, but not yet. One chronicler asserts that Duke John himself was present at the executions of the 7th of June; but if this had been the case, De Dynter would have almost certainly mentioned it; and, moreover, as Wauters justly observes, the story is a most improbable one: John was so grieved at the death of his friends that he left Brussels immediately after the executions, perhaps even before they had taken place, and refused to return to the Coudenberg for two years.