, judicial, and recognizing no superior
save God Almighty alone.

He was amenable to no tribunal save that of their Mightinesses the States
of Holland and their ordinary judges. Not only those States but the
Prince of Orange as their governor and vassal, the nobles of Holland, the
colleges of justice, the regents of cities, and all other vassals,
magistrates, and officers were by their respective oaths bound to
maintain and protect him in these his rights.

After fortifying this position by legal argument and by an array of
historical facts within his own experience, and alluding to the repeated
instances in which, sorely against his will, he had been solicited and
almost compelled to remain in offices of which he was weary, he referred
with dignity to the record of his past life. From the youthful days when
he had served as a volunteer at his own expense in the perilous sieges of
Haarlem and Leyden down to the time of his arrest, through an unbroken
course of honourable and most arduous political services, embassies, and
great negotiations, he had ever maintained the laws and liberties of the
Fatherland and his own honour unstained.

That he should now in his seventy-second year be dragged, in violation of
every privilege and statute of the country, by extraordinary means,
before unknown judges, was a grave matter not for himself alone but for
their Mightinesses the States of Holland and for the other provinces. The
precious right 'de non evocando' had ever been dear to all the provinces,
cities, and inhabitants of the Netherlands. It was the most vital
privilege in their possession as well in civil as criminal, in secular as
in ecclesiastical affairs.

When the King of Spain in 1567, and afterwards, set up an extraordinary
tribunal and a course of extraordinary trials, it was an undeniable fact,
he said, that on the solemn complaint of the States all princes, nobles,
and citizens not only in the Netherlands but in foreign countries, and
all foreign kings and sovereigns, held those outrages to be the foremost
and fundamental reason for taking up arms against that king, and
declaring him to have forfeited his right of sovereignty.

Yet that monarch was unquestionably the born and accepted sovereign of
each one of the provinces, while the General Assembly was but a gathering
of confederates and allies, in no sense sovereign. It was an unimaginable
thing, he said, that the States of each province should allow their wh