Stoutenburg himself acted with his usual promptness and coolness.  Having gone straightway to his brother to notify him of the discovery and to urge him to instant flight, he contrived to disappear.  A few days later a chest of merchandise was brought to the house of a certain citizen of Rotterdam, who had once been a fiddler, but was now a man of considerable property.  The chest, when opened, was found to contain the Seigneur de Stoutenburg, who in past times had laid the fiddler under obligations, and in whose house he now lay concealed for many days, and until the strictness with which all roads and ferries in the neighbourhood were watched at first had somewhat given way.  Meantime his cousin van der Dussen had also effected his escape, and had joined him in Rotterdam.  The faithful fiddler then, for a thousand florins, chartered a trading vessel commanded by one Jacob Beltje to take a cargo of Dutch cheese to Wesel on the Rhine.  By this means, after a few adventures, they effected their escape, and, arriving not long afterwards at Brussels, were formally taken under the protection of the Archduchess Isabella.

Stoutenburg afterwards travelled in France and Italy, and returned to Brussels.  His wife, loathing his crime and spurning all further communication with him, abandoned him to his fate.  The daughter of Marnix of Sainte-Aldegonde had endured poverty, obscurity, and unmerited obloquy, which had become the lot of the great statesman’s family after his tragic end, but she came of a race that would not brook dishonour.  The conspirator and suborner of murder and treason, the hirer and companion of assassins, was no mate for her.

Stoutenburg hesitated for years as to his future career, strangely enough keeping up a hope of being allowed to return to his country.

Subsequently he embraced the cause of his country’s enemies, converted himself to the Roman Church, and obtained a captaincy of horse in the Spanish service.  He was seen one day, to the disgust of many spectators, to enter Antwerp in black foreign uniform, at the head of his troopers, waving a standard with a death’s-head embroidered upon it, and wearing, like his soldiers, a sable scarf and plume.  History disdains to follow further the career of the renegade, traitor, end assassin.

When the Seigneur de Groeneveld learned from his younger brother, on the eventful 6th of February, that the plot had been discovered, he gave himself up for lost.  Remorse and despair, fastening upon his naturally feeble character, seemed to render him powerless.  His wife, of more hopeful disposition than himself and of less heroic mould than Walburg de Marnix, encouraged him to fly.  He fled accordingly, through the desolate sandy downs which roll between the Hague and the sea, to Scheveningen, then an obscure fishing village on the coast, at a league’s distance from the capital.  Here a fisherman, devoted to him and his family, received him in his hut, disguised him in boatman’s attire, and went with him to the strand, proposing to launch his pinkie, put out at once to sea, and to land him on the English coast, the French coast, in Hamburg—­where he would.