The author writes, "By an example of the trials, adventures, and victories of a burgher family of the generation of Philip II and William the Silent, he strives to set before readers of to-day something of the life of those who lived through perhaps the most fearful tyranny that the western world has known. How did they live, one wonders; how is it that they did not die of very terror, those of them who escaped the scaffold, the famine and the pestilence?" This publication from Boomer Books is specially designed and typeset for comfortable reading.