This old church, since the removal of the Court, had been suffered to fall into decay, and Lambert himself tells us that he found the tomb of his ancestress in a state of deplorable neglect, and that this was the reason why he transferred her relics to his new church on Saint Michael's Mount. Here they were reverently treasured for over five hundred years: in Lambert's church as long as it stood, and afterwards, in the church which succeeded it, until 1579. The Calvinists were busy then purging the land, as they said, of idols, destroying, that is, works of art, wrecking and plundering wherever they could the temples of the old faith. On the night of the 7th of June they visited the Church of Saint Gudila. Amongst the loot which they carried off was her costly shrine; it was of gold, studded with jewels, and God knows what they did with the ashes which it contained. Shrines and coffins, too, had been broken open in the hope of discovering treasure, and next morning the floor of the church was found to be strewn with human bones. These were afterwards carefully collected and buried in the Chapel of Saint Mary Magdalen, and it may well be that amongst them are the bones of 'gentle Gudila.' The mother church of Brussels, the church, that is, to which all the other Brussels churches were formerly submitted, in origin the most ancient of them all, the largest, too, and the most interesting in many respects, perhaps not the most beautiful, but certainly the most picturesque, not only of Brussels churches, but of all the churches of Brabant, is not so much the monument of the people of Brussels as the family monument of the princes who governed them, and more especially of the princes of the great house of Louvain: from Godfrey III. onwards almost all of them had a hand in it. The work was continued by several of their successors, and was at last brought to completion during the reign of Duke Philip VI. (Philip IV. of Spain), in 1653. During the latter half of the ten hundreds the original Church of Saint Gudila, which stood on the spot now occupied by the nave of the present building, had been greatly damaged by fire. No attempt seems to have been made to restore it, and when Godfrey III. ascended the throne in 1142 it was fast falling into decay. He therefore determined to raise up a new church, which should be second to none in the Low Country, and of such vast dimensions that it could be built over the old church, which would thus be available for public worship whilst the work was in progress.