It was not a dungeon nor a jail.  Indeed the commonplace and domestic character of the scenery in which these great events were transacted has in it something pathetic.  There was and still remains a two-storied structure, then of modern date, immediately behind the antique hall of the old Counts within the Binnenhof.  On the first floor was a courtroom of considerable extent, the seat of one of the chief tribunals of justice The story above was divided into three chambers with a narrow corridor on each side.  The first chamber, on the north-eastern side, was appropriated for the judges when the state prisoners should be tried.  In the next Hugo Grotius was imprisoned.  In the third was Barneveld.  There was a tower at the north-east angle of the building, within which a winding and narrow staircase of stone led up to the corridor and so to the prisoners’ apartments.  Rombout Hoogerbeets was confined in another building.

As the Advocate, bent with age and a life of hard work, and leaning on his staff, entered the room appropriated to him, after toiling up the steep staircase, he observed—­

“This is the Admiral of Arragon’s apartment.”

It was true.  Eighteen years before, the conqueror of Nieuwpoort had assigned this lodging to the chief prisoner of war in that memorable victory over the Spaniards, and now Maurice’s faithful and trusted counsellor at that epoch was placed in durance here, as the result of the less glorious series of victories which had just been achieved.

It was a room of moderate dimensions, some twenty-five feet square, with a high vaulted roof and decently furnished.  Below and around him in the courtyard were the scenes of the Advocate’s life-long and triumphant public services.  There in the opposite building were the windows of the beautiful “Hall of Truce,” with its sumptuous carvings and gildings, its sculptures and portraits, where he had negotiated with the representatives of all the great powers of Christendom the famous Treaty which had suspended the war of forty years, and where he was wont almost daily to give audience to the envoys of the greatest sovereigns or the least significant states of Europe and Asia, all of whom had been ever solicitous of his approbation and support.

Farther along in the same building was the assembly room of the States-General, where some of the most important affairs of the Republic and of Europe had for years been conducted, and where he had been so indispensable that, in the words of a contemporary who loved him not, “absolutely nothing could be transacted in his absence, all great affairs going through him alone.”

There were two dull windows, closely barred, looking northward over an irregular assemblage of tile-roofed houses and chimney-stacks, while within a stone’s throw to the west, but unseen, was his own elegant mansion on the Voorhout, surrounded by flower gardens and shady pleasure grounds, where now sat his aged wife and her children all plunged in deep affliction.