This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience. Learn more
The ordinary pleasures of festivals were mingled with all this, such as dances in beast-masks, sham fights and children's games, but the type of a religious function was a sickening butchery followed by a cannibal feast.
Then the army under Alva's son, Don Frederick of Toledo, marched northwards, and the sack of Zutphen and the inhuman butchery of Naarden are among the blackest records of history.
On the 8th of July, King Ferdinand arrived from Palermo, and the state trials, conducted in the most arbitrary fashion, resulted in wholesale butchery; hundreds of persons were executed, including some of the best men in the veng g country, such as the philosopher Mario Pagano, the scientist Cirillo, Manthone, the minister of war under the republic, Massa, the defender of Castel dell' Uovo, and Ettore Caraffa, the defender of Pescara, who had been captured by treachery, while thousands of others were immured in horrible dungeons or exiled.
An unsuccessful diplomatist, his chief services in arms were the butchery in the north after the Pilgrimage of Grace and the raid into Scotland which ended with the rout of Solway Moss.
The remaining 200 victims, who had escaped the bullets of the siege and survived the butchery of the river bank, were massacred afterwards and cast down the famous well of Cawnpore, which is now marked by a memorial and surrounded by gardens.