Meantime the Counts Egmont and Horn had been kept in rigorous confinement at Ghent.  Not a warrant had been read or drawn up for their arrest.  Not a single preliminary investigation, not the shadow of an information had preceded the long imprisonment of two men so elevated in rank, so distinguished in the public service.  After the expiration of two months, however, the Duke condescended to commence a mock process against them.  The councillors appointed to this work were Vargas and Del Rio, assisted by Secretary Praets.  These persons visited the Admiral on the 10th, 11th, 12th and 17th of November, and Count Egmont on the 12th, 13th, 14th, and 16th, of the same month; requiring them to respond to a long, confused, and rambling collection of interrogatories.  They were obliged to render these replies in prison, unassisted by any advocates, on penalty of being condemned ‘in contumaciam’.  The questions, awkwardly drawn up as they seemed, were yet tortuously and cunningly arranged with a view of entrapping the prisoners into self-contradiction.  After this work had been completed, all the papers by which they intended to justify their answers were taken away from them.  Previously, too, their houses and those of their secretaries, Bakkerzeel and Alonzo de la Loo, had been thoroughly ransacked, and every letter and document which could be found placed in the hands of government.  Bakkerzeel, moreover, as already stated, had been repeatedly placed upon the rack, for the purpose of extorting confessions which might implicate his master.  These preliminaries and precautionary steps having been taken, the Counts had again been left to their solitude for two months longer.  On the 10th January, each was furnished with a copy of the declarations or accusations filed against him by the procurator-general.  To these documents, drawn up respectively in sixty-three, and in ninety articles, they were required, within five days’ time, without the assistance of an advocate, and without consultation with any human being, to deliver a written answer, on pain, as before, of being proceeded against and condemned by default.

This order was obeyed within nearly the prescribed period and here, it may be said, their own participation in their trial ceased; while the rest of the proceedings were buried in the deep bosom of the Blood-Council.  After their answers had been delivered, and not till then, the prisoners were, by an additional mockery, permitted to employ advocates.  These advocates, however, were allowed only occasional interviews with their clients, and always in the presence of certain persons, especially deputed for that purpose by the Duke.  They were also allowed commissioners to collect evidence and take depositions, but before the witnesses were ready, a purposely premature day, 8th of May, was fixed upon for declaring the case closed, and not a single tittle of their evidence, personal or documentary, was admitted.—­Their advocates petitioned for an exhibition of the evidence