Groeneveld ascended it with perfect composure.  The man who had been browbeaten into crime by an overbearing and ferocious brother, who had quailed before the angry waves of the North Sea, which would have borne him to a place of entire security, now faced his fate with a smile upon his lips.  He took off his hat, cloak, and sword, and handed them to his valet.  He calmly undid his ruff and wristbands of pointlace, and tossed them on the ground.  With his own hands and the assistance of his servant he unbuttoned his doublet, laying breast and neck open without suffering the headsman’s hands to approach him.

He then walked to the heap of sand and spoke a very few words to the vast throng of spectators.

“Desire of vengeance and evil counsel,” he said, “have brought me here.  If I have wronged any man among you, I beg him for Christ’s sake to forgive me.”

Kneeling on the sand with his face turned towards his father’s house at the end of the Kneuterdyk, he said his prayers.  Then putting a red velvet cap over his eyes, he was heard to mutter: 

“O God! what a man I was once, and what am I now?”

Calmly folding his hands, he said, “Patience.”

The executioner then struck off his head at a blow.  His body, wrapped in a black cloak, was sent to his house and buried in his father’s tomb.

Van Dyk and Korenwinder were executed immediately afterwards.  They were quartered and their heads exposed on stakes.  The joiner Gerritsen and the three sailors had already been beheaded.  The Blansaerts and William Party, together with the grim Slatius, who was savage and turbulent to the last, had suffered on the 5th of May.

Fourteen in all were executed for this crime, including an unfortunate tailor and two other mechanics of Leyden, who had heard something whispered about the conspiracy, had nothing whatever to do with it, but from ignorance, apathy, or timidity did not denounce it.  The ringleader and the equally guilty van der Dussen had, as has been seen, effected their escape.

Thus ended the long tragedy of the Barnevelds.  The result of this foul conspiracy and its failure to effect the crime proposed strengthened immensely the power, popularity, and influence of the Stadholder, made the orthodox church triumphant, and nearly ruined the sect of the Remonstrants, the Arminians—­most unjustly in reality, although with a pitiful show of reason—­being held guilty of the crime of Stoutenburg and Slatius.

The Republic—­that magnificent commonwealth which in its infancy had confronted, single-handed, the greatest empire of the earth, and had wrested its independence from the ancient despot after a forty years’ struggle—­had now been rent in twain, although in very unequal portions, by the fiend of political and religious hatred.  Thus crippled, she was to go forth and take her share in that awful conflict now in full blaze, and of which after-ages were to speak with a shudder as the Thirty Years’ War.