The friends of Barneveld became alarmed at the sinister language of this
proclamation, in which for the first time allusions had been made to a
forthcoming sentence against the accused.

Especially the staunch and indefatigable du Maurier at once addressed
himself again to the States-General. De Boississe had returned to France,
having found that the government of a country torn, weakened, and
rendered almost impotent by its own internecine factions, was not likely
to exert any very potent influence on the fate of the illustrious
prisoner.

The States had given him to understand that they were wearied with his
perpetual appeals, intercessions, and sermons in behalf of mercy. They
made him feel in short that Lewis XIII. and Henry IV. were two entirely
different personages.

Du Maurier however obtained a hearing before the Assembly on the 1st May,
where he made a powerful and manly speech in presence of the Prince,
urging that the prisoners ought to be discharged unless they could be
convicted of treason, and that the States ought to show as much deference
to his sovereign as they had always done to Elizabeth of England. He made
a personal appeal to Prince Maurice, urging upon him how much it would
redound to his glory if he should now in generous and princely fashion
step forward in behalf of those by whom he deemed himself to have been
personally offended.

His speech fell upon ears hardened against such eloquence and produced no
effect.

Meantime the family of Barneveld, not yet reduced to despair, chose to
take a less gloomy view of the proclamation. Relying on the innocence of
the great statesman, whose aims, in their firm belief, had ever been for
the welfare and glory of his fatherland, and in whose heart there had
never been kindled one spark of treason, they bravely expected his
triumphant release from his long and, as they deemed it, his iniquitous
imprisonment.

On this very 1st of May, in accordance with ancient custom, a may-pole
was erected on the Voorhout before the mansion of the captive statesman,
and wreaths of spring flowers and garlands of evergreen decorated the
walls within which were such braised and bleeding hearts. These
demonstrations of a noble hypocrisy, if such it were, excited the wrath,
not the compassion, of the Stadholder, who thought that the aged matron
and her sons and daughters, who dwelt in that house of mourning, should
rather have sat in sackcloth with ashes on their heads