sm.
Yet it lay in the proud and highly tempered character of the
Netherlanders. There can be no doubt that the Advocate would have
expressly dictated this proceeding if he had been consulted. It was
precisely the course adopted by himself. Death rather than life with a
false acknowledgment of guilt and therefore with disgrace. The loss of
his honour would have been an infinitely greater triumph to his enemies
than the loss of his head.

There was no delay in drawing up the sentence. Previously to this
interview with the widow of William the Silent, the family of the
Advocate had presented to the judges three separate documents, rather in
the way of arguments than petitions, undertaking to prove by elaborate
reasoning and citations of precedents and texts of the civil law that the
proceedings against him were wholly illegal, and that he was innocent of
every crime.

No notice had been taken of those appeals.

Upon the questions and answers as already set forth the sentence soon
followed, and it may be as well that the reader should be aware, at this
point in the narrative, of the substance of that sentence so soon to be
pronounced. There had been no indictment, no specification of crime.
There had been no testimony or evidence. There had been no argument for
the prosecution or the defence. There had been no trial whatever. The
prisoner was convicted on a set of questions to which he had put in
satisfactory replies. He was sentenced on a preamble. The sentence was a
string of vague generalities, intolerably long, and as tangled as the
interrogatories. His proceedings during a long career had on the whole
tended to something called a "blood bath"--but the blood bath had never
occurred.

With an effrontery which did not lack ingenuity, Barneveld's defence was
called by the commissioners his confession, and was formally registered
as such in the process and the sentence; while the fact that he had not
been stretched upon the rack during his trial, nor kept in chains for the
eight months of his imprisonment, were complacently mentioned as proofs
of exceptionable indulgence.

"Whereas the prisoner John of Barneveld," said the sentence, "without
being put to the torture and without fetters of iron, has confessed . . .
to having perturbed religion, greatly afflicted the Church of God, and
carried into practice exorbitant and pernicious maxims of State . . .
inculcating by himself and accomplices that each province had the