sonal 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 directed to the strengthening of the
Reformed religion and to the political security of the provinces and
cities. He had simply desired that, in the awful and mysterious matter of
predestination, the consciences of many preachers and many thousands of
good citizens might be placed in tranquillity, with moderate and
Christian limitations against all excesses.

From all these reasons, he said, the commissioners, the States-General,
the Prince, and every man in the land could clearly see, and were bound
to see, that he was the same man now that he was at the beginning of the
war, had ever been, and with God's help should ever remain.

The proceedings were kept secret from the public and, as a matter of
course, there had been conflicting rumours from day to day as to the
probable result of these great state trials. In general however it was
thought that the prisoner would be acquitted of the graver charges, or
that at most he would be permanently displaced from all office and
declared incapable thenceforth to serve the State. The triumph of the
Contra-Remonstrants since the Stadholder had