On this date in 1568 the Dutch Protestant Weyn Ockers was drowned with her maid Trijn Hendricks.

Both were condemned for having taken part in the paroxysm of Calvinist anti-icon riots known as the Beeldenstorm (“icon-fury”) — specifically the 1566 sack of the then-Catholic Oude Kerk in Amsterdam. The Netherlands’ Spanish Catholic overlords were in these months of 1568 busily meting out revenge for the sacrilege.

In a somewhat iconic event of the iconoclasm, Ockers was alleged to have chucked her slipper* at an image of the Virgin Mary perched on the altar — one particularly resented by the reform-minded since the priest encouraged lucrative offerings of parishioners’ valuables to be presented to this icon. One might well doubt the fact of it; Ockers had not been arrested for this offense, but the accusation emerged from the interrogation under torture of other Protestants. Ockers copped to it under torture herself; Hendricks, made of tougher stuff, withstood torture twice and never admitted anything, but still shared her mistress’s fate.

* Not the worst missile that Marian statuary has endured.

On this day..

• 1918: Captain Alexey Schastny
• 1894: William Whaley, "the horror of the situation"
• 1936: Edward Cornelius, vicarage murderer
• 1940: Three saboteurs and a spy, "Fusilles et oublies"
• 1906: Richard Ivens, hypnotized?
• 1310: Badoer Badoer, Venetian rebel
• 1934: William Cody Kelley, the first in Colorado's gas chamber
• 1627: Francois de Montmorency and his second, for dueling
• 1535: Cardinal John Fisher
• 1669: Roux de Marsilly, employer of the Man in the Iron Mask?
• 1920: Dennis Gunn, hanged by a fingerprint
• 1711: Ifranj Ahmad, Janissary