“THUMPP!!”

Pancho “El Gordo” Ramirez had just slammed his powerful fist into the stomach of Charlotte Dubois for the third time.

Drenched in the sweat of fear and suffering, Charlotte opened her mouth to scream, but the punishing impact of the blow had robbed her of the power of speech.

“Where is Lamoral, the leader of the rebels? We know he is your lover! Has he crossed into France?"

The beautiful blonde’s voice was scarcely audible. “Je ne sais pas… s’il vous plait … je ne sais pas.”

THUMPPP!!! Ramirez, the servile lackey of the tyrannical Duke of Alba, drove his fist into Charlotte’s yielding belly-flesh again, scant inches above her golden-fringed pubic hair.

“Talk, you Belgian whore!” Ramirez growled, as he clenched his fist yet again. “Or I’m going to start in on those sweet young breasts!”

In the late 1560’s the peoples of the Low Countries rose up against the iron-fisted rule of Philip II of Spain. To suppress the cries for independence in the ‘Seventeen Provinces,’ Philip dispatched the battle-hardened general Fernando Alvarez de Toledo, Third Duke of Alba, to the Spanish Netherlands.

In short order the Duke of Alba established the ‘Tribunal de los tumultos.’ To the Spanish it was known as the Council of Troubles. But the Dutch speaking people of the Low Countries called the tribunal “Bloedraad;” while the French-speaking people of the southern provinces called it “Le Conseil de Sang.”

In either language it became known, thanks to the brutalities of the Duke of Alba and his men, as ‘The Court of Blood.’

Ramirez grabbed Charlotte’s left breast in his filthy paw.

“Digame!” he bellowed. “Tell me! Where is the traitor?”

Charlotte winced as the powerful fingers of El Gordo – ‘the fat one’ - crushed her yielding breast.

“Talk!” he roared again, tightening his grip on her pleasure-mound.

“S’il vous plait… je ne sais pas... I do not know.”

Scowling with malicious pleasure, El Gordo curled the fingers of his left hand into a fist again and drove his fist into the side of Charlotte’s right breast with brutal force.

THWUCKK!!

“Aughhh!!”

“No more of your lies, wench! Talk!” Ramirez hissed. “Our spies have seen you with him!”

“He … he…”

THWUCCKK!!

El Gordo’s powerful left fist struck again, pulverizing a pert pink nipple, even as he maintained his crushing grip on Charlotte’s other breast.

“UNGHH! Mon Dieu…mon Dieu,” Charlotte gasped in agony.

“I see you are amusing yourself, Pancho.”

Upon hearing the unexpected voice, Ramirez released his death grip on Charlotte’s breast and glanced back over his shoulder at his partner, Jose Montoya, standing in the doorway of the barn.

“I thought I told you to stand watch, Montoya.”

“And let you have all the fun, amigo? Nunca en mi vida.” The swarthy Spaniard held up a switch he had cut and proceeded to strip away its last few leaves. Montoya’s cold dark eyes swept across Charlotte’s nude body. Bathed in the sunlight streaming in from the open door, her beautiful bare skin was glistening with perspiration. It was a warm day, but her sweat was not the sweat of warmth but rather the sweat of fear. He whipped the switch through the air, letting Charlotte hear its fearful hiss.

In an ingratiating tone of voice, Montoya continued. “Senorita, I beg of you. Why don’t you answer? Tell us where your lover is and we will release you.”

Montoya’s mouth seemed to be smiling, but his cold Castilian eyes were not. He and Ramirez might let this Belgian beauty live, but not before they had thoroughly plundered her young womanhood with their throbbing cocks.

It had been their good fortune to find Charlotte Dubois alone in her father’s simple farmhouse, an eight-real coin having bought the information that she might be found there. Spanish pieces of eight, Montoya knew, were treasured from Lima to Luxembourg.

Taking the young beauty by surprise, as they had, it taken Montoya and Ramirez only a minute or two to strip away her peasant dress, revealing a body that would have lit the fires of lust in the holiest Jesuit in Christendom. Her flaxen hair and gray-green eyes were lovely; her fair skin, her sleek thighs, her hourglass waist and her delectable young breasts had quickly set his cock to throbbing. Both men groped her lush breasts and the secret place between her legs as they wrestled the thrashing, cursing maiden into the barn.

Once her wrists were securely bound to the iron spikes the two men driven into the walls of the barn, Ramirez who was technically his superior, directed Montoya to go outside to keep watch. Grudgingly Montoya had done his bidding, but once he heard El Gordo’s fists thudding into soft female flesh, lust got the better of duty….

“Sir…” Charlotte pleaded desperately, “ I have already told you. Monsieur Lamoral is not my lover. He is a friend of my father. Don’t you know he is married, you fool? With many children?”

Montoya lashed out with the switch, THWICKK!! leaving a trail of fire across the tops of Charlotte’s shapely thighs.

“Aahhh!!

“It is you who are the fool, Senorita! Only a fool would dare to lie to the soldiers of the Duke of Alba,” Montoya rasped, as he lashed the switch across the tender flesh of her pubic mound. Beads of crimson sprung up from beneath the pale tendrils of Charlotte’s blonde triangle.

THWICKK!!

“Aiiaah!!”

“She needs more persuading, my friend,” Montoya muttered to El Gordo.

“No hay problema!” Ramirez muttered as he clenched his fingers and drove his right fist into Charlotte’s left breast.

THWUCKKK!!!

Charlotte gasped in pain, as trickles of saliva leaked out of the corners of her mouth and down her chin. El Gordo’s ham-fist had hardly left her nipple, when Montoya slashed his switch squarely across the center of her pale aureoles, drawing fresh drops of scarlet from her tender breast-globes.

THWICKK!

Charlotte’s feral groan of agony resulting from the blow struck by Ramirez, quickly leapt a few octaves, when the hissing switch seared her sweet young nipples.

“NGHHHAAIEEII!!

Charlotte tore furiously at her bonds, every lithe muscle in her young body fighting for freedom. But the ropes were too tight.

Her green eyes wild with fury, Charlotte glared at Ramirez and spat out the word, “Cochon!”

Ramirez gave her a sneering smile. “You should not have said that, Senorita,” he whispered as he slammed his fist into Charlotte’s left breast once again, drawing another animalistic wail of pain from his beautiful prisoner.

“You see, ma cherie,” he whispered, as he signaled Montoya to lash Charlotte across the breasts yet again.

THWICCCKKK!! Another nipple scorcher.

“I was born in the Spanish Pyrenees, not far from the French border. So, por supuesta, I know that un cochon is a pig.” The fat one leered at Charlotte’s quivering breasts.

“Un otro,” he barked to Montoya.

Jose Montoya willingly obliged, delivering another withering switch-stroke to the very centers of Charlotte’s scarlet-smeared pleasure-globes.

THWICCKK!!

“Aaghhh!!”

“But wait,” El Gordo murmured. “What have we here?” The fat one waddled across to a dark corner of the barn and returned with a pitchfork.

Charlotte shuddered in horror as she stared at the glistening tines of the pitchfork.

“Non … non …” she begged.

“One last chance, mademoiselle,” Ramirez muttered. “Where is the traitor Lamoral?”

But Charlotte was petrified with fear; perhaps she could not have spoken even had she known.

Glaring malevolently at Charlotte’s nude body, Ramirez broke the pitchfork over his knee with a single swift movement surprising for a man of his corpulence.

He held up the two halves, one a four-pronged weapon of fearful sharpness, the other a rough-edged cylindrical club whose shape and girth revealed a gruesome intended purpose.

“Which half would you like, amigo?’ El Gordo muttered to his partner with a sadistic grin.

As Montoya considered his options, Charlotte heard the sound of several horses’ hooves approaching from a distance.

Her tormentors froze in their tracks as the hoofbeats drew closer and closer.

Were they the horses of Lamoral and his men coming to liberate their nubile captive?

Or were they the horses of other Spanish soldiers, soldiers who would pay in silver and gold for an hour with this defenseless beauty once she had surrendered her secret?

Charlotte, Ramirez and Montoya are, of course, fictional characters. But the Duke of Alba, and Lamoral, Count of Egmont are actual historical figures.

Egmont was something of the George Washington of the Netherlands, both a capable general and a capable statesman. In the short term Egmont failed, in that he was imprisoned and executed by the Duke of Alba’s men in 1568. But his heroism lingered on in the hearts of his countrymen, both Protestant and Catholic, and at the conclusion of The Eighty Years War, in 1648, the Dutch Republic won its independence from Hapsburg Spain. Unfortunately it took Belgium another two centuries to achieve its own independence in 1830.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, perhaps Germany’s greatest man of letters, wrote a play about “Egmont” in 1788, perhaps inspired in part by the recently concluded American Revolution. In 1809 the Burgtheater in Vienna revived the play and they asked a fellow named Beethoven to compose an overture for it. The play “Egmont” is pretty much forgotten outside of Germany, but Beethoven’s “Egmont Overture” is still heard on concert stages around the world.