On the 7th March the trial of the great Advocate began.  He had sat in prison since the 18th of the preceding August.  For nearly seven months he had been deprived of all communication with the outward world save such atoms of intelligence as could be secretly conveyed to him in the inside of a quill concealed in a pear and by other devices.  The man who had governed one of the most important commonwealths of the world for nearly a generation long—­during the same period almost controlling the politics of Europe—­had now been kept in ignorance of the most insignificant everyday events.  During the long summer-heat of the dog-days immediately succeeding his arrest, and the long, foggy, snowy, icy winter of Holland which ensued, he had been confined in that dreary garret-room to which he had been brought when he left his temporary imprisonment in the apartments of Prince Maurice.

There was nothing squalid in the chamber, nothing specially cruel or repulsive in the arrangements of his captivity.  He was not in fetters, nor fed upon bread and water.  He was not put upon the rack, nor even threatened with it as Ledenberg had been.  He was kept in a mean, commonplace, meagerly furnished, tolerably spacious room, and he was allowed the services of his faithful domestic servant John Franken.  A sentinel paced day and night up the narrow corridor before his door.  As spring advanced, the notes of the nightingale came through the prison-window from the neighbouring thicket.  One day John Franken, opening the window that his master might the better enjoy its song, exchanged greeting with a fellow-servant in the Barneveld mansion who happened to be crossing the courtyard.  Instantly workmen were sent to close and barricade the windows, and it was only after earnest remonstrances and pledges that this resolve to consign the Advocate to darkness was abandoned.

He was not permitted the help of lawyer, clerk, or man of business.  Alone and from his chamber of bondage, suffering from bodily infirmities and from the weakness of advancing age, he was compelled to prepare his defence against a vague, heterogeneous collection of charges, to meet which required constant reference, not only to the statutes, privileges, and customs of the country and to the Roman law, but to a thousand minute incidents out of which the history of the Provinces during the past dozen years or more had been compounded.

It is true that no man could be more familiar with the science and practice of the law than he was, while of contemporary history he was himself the central figure.  His biography was the chronicle of his country.  Nevertheless it was a fearful disadvantage for him day by day to confront two dozen hostile judges comfortably seated at a great table piled with papers, surrounded by clerks with bags full of documents and with a library of authorities and precedents duly marked and dog’s-eared and ready to their hands, while his only library and chronicle lay in his brain.  From day to day, with frequent intermissions, he was led down through the narrow turret-stairs to a wide chamber on the floor immediately below his prison, where a temporary tribunal had been arranged for the special commission.