mpany, an organization which the Spaniards
confessed had been as damaging to them as the Union of the Provinces
itself had been.

The idiotic and circumstantial statements, that he had conducted
Burgomaster van Berk through a secret staircase of his house into his
private study for the purpose of informing him that the only way for the
States to get out of the war was to submit themselves once more to their
old masters, so often forced upon him by the judges, he contradicted with
disdain and disgust. He had ever abhorred and dreaded, he said, the House
of Spain, Austria, and Burgundy. His life had passed in open hostility to
that house, as was known to all mankind. His mere personal interests,
apart from higher considerations, would make an approach to the former
sovereign impossible, for besides the deeds he had already alluded to, he
had committed at least twelve distinct and separate acts, each one of
which would be held high-treason by the House of Austria, and he had
learned from childhood that these are things which monarchs never forget.
The tales of van Berk were those of a personal enemy, falsehoods scarcely
worth contradicting.

He was grossly and enormously aggrieved by the illegal constitution of
the commission. He had protested and continued to protest against it. If
that protest were unheeded, he claimed at least that those men should be
excluded from the board and the right to sit in judgment upon his person
and his deeds who had proved themselves by words and works to be his
capital enemies, of which fact he could produce irrefragable evidence. He
claimed that the Supreme Court of Holland, or the High Council, or both
together, should decide upon that point. He held as his personal enemies,
he said, all those who had declared that he, before or since the Truce
down to the day of his arrest, had held correspondence with the
Spaniards, the Archdukes, the Marquis Spinola, or any one on that side,
had received money, money value, or promises of money from them, and in
consequence had done or omitted to do anything whatever. He denounced
such tales as notorious, shameful, and villainous falsehoods, the
utterers and circulators of them as wilful liars, and this he was ready
to maintain in every appropriate way for the vindication of the truth and
his own honour. He declared solemnly before God Almighty to the
States-General and to the States of Holland that his course in the
religious matter had been solely d