had been compelled to treat with her revolted provinces as with free states and her equals.  He had promoted the union of the Protestant princes and their alliance with France and the United States in opposition to the designs of Spain and the League.  He had organized and directed the policy by which the forces of England, France, and Protestant Germany had possessed themselves of the debateable land.  He had resisted every scheme by which it was hoped to force the States from their hold of those important citadels.  He had been one of the foremost promoters of the East India Company, an organization which the Spaniards confessed had been as damaging to them as the Union of the Provinces itself had been.

The idiotic and circumstantial statements, that he had conducted Burgomaster van Berk through a secret staircase of his house into his private study for the purpose of informing him that the only way for the States to get out of the war was to submit themselves once more to their old masters, so often forced upon him by the judges, he contradicted with disdain and disgust.  He had ever abhorred and dreaded, he said, the House of Spain, Austria, and Burgundy.  His life had passed in open hostility to that house, as was known to all mankind.  His mere personal interests, apart from higher considerations, would make an approach to the former sovereign impossible, for besides the deeds he had already alluded to, he had committed at least twelve distinct and separate acts, each one of which would be held high-treason by the House of Austria, and he had learned from childhood that these are things which monarchs never forget.  The tales of van Berk were those of a personal enemy, falsehoods scarcely worth contradicting.

He was grossly and enormously aggrieved by the illegal constitution of the commission.  He had protested and continued to protest against it.  If that protest were unheeded, he claimed at least that those men should be excluded from the board and the right to sit in judgment upon his person and his deeds who had proved themselves by words and works to be his capital enemies, of which fact he could produce irrefragable evidence.  He claimed that the Supreme Court of Holland, or the High Council, or both together, should decide upon that point.  He held as his personal enemies, he said, all those who had declared that he, before or since the Truce down to the day of his arrest, had held correspondence with the Spaniards, the Archdukes, the Marquis Spinola, or any one on that side, had received money, money value, or promises of money from them, and in consequence had done or omitted to do anything whatever.  He denounced such tales as notorious, shameful, and villainous falsehoods, the utterers and circulators of them as wilful liars, and this he was ready to maintain in every appropriate way for the vindication of the truth and his own honour.  He declared solemnly before God Almighty to the States-General and to the States of Holland that his course in the religious matter had been solely directed to the strengthening of the Reformed religion and to the political security of the provinces and cities.  He had simply desired that, in the awful and mysterious matter of predestination, the consciences of many preachers and many thousands of good citizens might be placed in tranquillity, with moderate and Christian limitations against all excesses.