the doomed magnates were led out to the tower and thrown into prison to await the morn. When day broke, Christiern ordered the trumpets sounded and proclamation made that no citizen should leave his house. About noon the condemned patriots were led from their dungeons to the Grand Square, and huddled together beneath the platform on which they were to bleed. The citizens had by this time been permitted to leave their houses and had gathered around the foot of the scaffold, from which they were addressed in soothing language by several of the Danish Cabinet, whose words however were interrupted by constant cries of the victims calling on their fellow-countrymen to avenge them. At last the agony of suspense was over. One after another the condemned mounted the scaffold and were decapitated with all the refinement of cruelty that the bloodthirsty monarch and his satellites could devise. Over seventy in all were slaughtered, and their gory bodies piled up in one promiscuous mass in the centre of the square. On the following day the scene of carnage was renewed, several suspected citizens being seized in their houses and dragged to the place of blood. One poor wretch was executed for no other reason than because he was discovered weeping at the sight of his friends' death. Not till the following Saturday was the carnage over and the weltering mass conveyed outside the town. The body of Sture, together with the body of one of his babes, was dug up by Christiern's orders and burned, and the property of all who were slaughtered was seized and confiscated. Having thus effected his diabolical purpose and ridded himself of the flower of the Swedish patriots, the gory monarch set his officers at the head of affairs, and taking Christina and her two boys with him, marched through the land to Denmark, where he threw Christina and her children into prison.[52]