Each of the entrances to the square had been securely guarded by Maurice’s orders, and cannon planted to command all the streets.  A single company of the famous Waartgelders was stationed in the Neu or near it.  The Prince rode calmly towards them and ordered them to lay down their arms.  They obeyed without a murmur.  He then sent through the city to summon all the other companies of Waartgelders to the Neu.  This was done with perfect promptness, and in a short space of time the whole body of mercenaries, nearly 1000 in number, had laid down their arms at the feet of the Prince.

The snaphances and halberds being then neatly stacked in the square, the Stadholder went home to his early breakfast.  There was an end to those mercenaries thenceforth and for ever.  The faint and sickly resistance to the authority of Maurice offered at Utrecht was attempted nowhere else.

For days there had been vague but fearful expectations of a “blood bath,” of street battles, rioting, and plunder.  Yet the Stadholder with the consummate art which characterized all his military manoeuvres had so admirably carried out his measure that not a shot was fired, not a blow given, not a single burgher disturbed in his peaceful slumbers.  When the population had taken off their nightcaps, they woke to find the awful bugbear removed which had so long been appalling them.  The Waartgelders were numbered with the terrors of the past, and not a cat had mewed at their disappearance.

Charter-books, parchments, 13th Articles, Barneveld’s teeth, Arminian forts, flowery orations of Grotius, tavern talk of van Ostrum, city immunities, States’ rights, provincial laws, Waartgelders and all—­the martial Stadholder, with the orange plume in his hat and the sword of Nieuwpoort on his thigh, strode through them as easily as through the whirligigs and mountebanks, the wades and fritters, encumbering the streets of Utrecht on the night of his arrival.

Secretary Ledenberg and other leading members of the States had escaped the night before.  Grotius and his colleagues also took a precipitate departure.  As they drove out of town in the twilight, they met the deputies of the six opposition cities of Holland just arriving in their coach from the Hague.  Had they tarried an hour longer, they would have found themselves safely in prison.

Four days afterwards the Stadholder at the head of his body-guard appeared at the town-house.  His halberdmen tramped up the broad staircase, heralding his arrival to the assembled magistracy.  He announced his intention of changing the whole board then and there.  The process was summary.  The forty members were required to supply forty other names, and the Prince added twenty more.  From the hundred candidates thus furnished the Prince appointed forty magistrates such as suited himself.  It is needless to say that but few of the old bench remained, and that those few were devoted to the Synod, the States-General, and the Stadholder.  He furthermore announced that these new magistrates were to hold office for life, whereas the board had previously been changed every year.  The cathedral church was at once assigned for the use of the Contra-Remonstrants.