Captain Henchman, who had been taken prisoner in a skirmish a few days before the surrender of Deventer, was now brought to that city, and earnestly entreated by Tassis and by Stanley to seize this opportunity of entering the service of Spain.

“You shall have great advancement and preferment,” said Tassis.  “His Catholic Majesty has got ready very many ships for Ireland, and Sir William Stanley is to be general of the expedition.”

“And you shall choose your own preferment,” said Stanley, “for I know you to be a brave man.”

“I would rather,” replied Henchman, “serve my prince in loyalty as a beggar, than to be known and reported a rich traitor, with breach of conscience.”

“Continue so,” replied Stanley, unabashed; “for this is the very principle of my own enlargement:  for, before, I served the devil, and now I am serving God.”

The offers and the arguments of the Spaniard and the renegade were powerless with the blunt captain, and notwithstanding “divers other traitorous alledgements by Sir William for his most vile facts,” as Henchman expressed it, that officer remained in poverty and captivity until such time as he could be exchanged.

Stanley subsequently attempted in various ways to defend his character.  He had a commission from Leicester, he said, to serve whom he chose—­as if the governor-general had contemplated his serving Philip ii. with that commission; he had a passport to go whither he liked—­as if his passport entitled him to take the city of Deventer along with him; he owed no allegiance to the States; he was discharged from his promise to the Earl; he was his own master; he wanted neither money nor preferment; he had been compelled by his conscience and his duty to God to restore the city to its lawful master, and so on, and so on.

But whether he owed the States allegiance or not, it is certain that he had accepted their money to relieve himself and his troops eight days before his treason.  That Leicester had discharged him from his promises to such an extent as to justify his surrendering a town committed to his honour for safe keeping, certainly deserved no answer; that his duty to conscience required him to restore the city argued a somewhat tardy awakening of that monitor in the breast of the man who three months before had wrested the place with the armed hand from men suspected of Catholic inclinations; that his first motive however was not the mere love of money, was doubtless true.  Attachment to his religion, a desire to atone for his sins against it, the insidious temptings of his evil spirit, York, who was the chief organizer of the conspiracy, and the prospect of gratifying a wild and wicked ambition—­these were the springs that moved him.  Sums—­varying from L30,000 to a pension of 1500 pistolets a year—­were mentioned, as the stipulated price of his treason, by Norris, Wilkes, Conway, and others; but the Duke of Parma, in narrating the whole affair in a private letter to the King, explicitly stated that he had found Stanley “singularly disinterested.”