Meantime hue and cry was made after the fugitive conspirators.  The Blansaerts and William Party having set off from Leyden towards the Hague on Monday night, in order, as they said, to betray their employers, whose money they had taken, and whose criminal orders they had agreed to execute, attempted to escape, but were arrested within ten days.  They were exhibited at their prison at Amsterdam to an immense concourse at a shilling a peep, the sums thus collected being distributed to the poor.  Slatius made his way disguised as a boor into Friesland, and after various adventures attempted to cross the Bourtange Moors to Lingen.  Stopping to refresh himself at a tavern near Koevorden, he found himself in the tap-room in presence of Quartermaster Blau and a company of soldiers from the garrison.  The dark scowling boor, travel-stained and weary, with felt hat slouched over his forbidding visage, fierce and timorous at once like a hunted wild beast, excited their suspicion.  Seeing himself watched, he got up, paid his scot, and departed, leaving his can of beer untasted.  This decided the quartermaster, who accordingly followed the peasant out of the house, and arrested him as a Spanish spy on the watch for the train of specie which the soldiers were then conveying into Koevorden Castle.

Slatius protested his innocence of any such design, and vehemently besought the officer to release him, telling him as a reason for his urgency and an explanation of his unprepossessing aspect—­that he was an oculist from Amsterdam, John Hermansen by name, that he had just committed a homicide in that place, and was fleeing from justice.

The honest quartermaster saw no reason why a suspected spy should go free because he proclaimed himself a murderer, nor why an oculist should escape the penalties of homicide.  “The more reason,” he said, “why thou shouldst be my prisoner.”  The ex-preacher was arrested and shut up in the state prison at the Hague.

The famous engraver Visser executed a likeness on copper-plate of the grim malefactor as he appeared in his boor’s disguise.  The portrait, accompanied by a fiercely written broadsheet attacking the Remonstrant Church, had a great circulation, and deepened the animosity against the sect upon which the unfrocked preacher had sworn vengeance.  His evil face and fame thus became familiar to the public, while the term Hendrik Slaet became a proverb at pot-houses, being held equivalent among tipplers to shirking the bottle.

Korenwinder, the treasurer of the association, coming to visit Stoutenburg soon after van Dyk had left him, was informed of the discovery of the plot and did his best to escape, but was arrested within a fortnight’s time.