On the morning of the 5th of November, Antwerp presented a ghastly sight.

The magnificent marble Town-house, celebrated as a "world's wonder," even in that age and country, in which so much splendour was lavished on municipal palaces, stood a blackened ruin--all but the walls destroyed, while its archives, accounts, and other valuable contents, had perished.

The more splendid portion of the city had been consumed; at least five hundred palaces, mostly of marble or hammered stone, being a smouldering mass of destruction.

The dead bodies of those fallen in the massacre were on every side, in greatest profusion around the Place de Meer, among the Gothic pillars of the Exchange, and in the streets near the Town-house.
The German soldiers lay in their armor, some with their heads burned from their bodies, some with legs and arms consumed by the flames through which they had fought.

The Margrave Goswyn Verreyck, the burgomaster Van der Meere, the magistrates Lancelot Van Urselen, Nicholas Van Boekholt, and other leading citizens, lay among piles of less distinguished slain.
They remained unburied until the overseers of the poor, on whom the living had then more importunate claims than the dead, were compelled by Roda to bury them out of the pauper fund.