Two centuries and a half have passed away.

There are now some seventy or eighty millions of the English-speaking race on both sides the Atlantic, almost equally divided between the United Kingdom and the United Republic, and the departure of those outcasts of James has interest and significance for them all.

Most fitly then, as a distinguished American statesman has remarked, does that scene on board the little English vessel, with the English pastor uttering his farewell blessing to a handful of English exiles for conscience sake; depicted on canvas by eminent artists, now adorn the halls of the American Congress and of the British Parliament.  Sympathy with one of the many imperishable bonds of union between the two great and scarcely divided peoples.

We return to Barneveld in his solitary prison.

CHAPTER XX.

Barneveld’s Imprisonment—­Ledenberg’s Examination and Death—­ Remonstrance of De Boississe—­Aerssens admitted to the order of Knights—­Trial of the Advocate—­Barneveld’s Defence—­The States proclaim a Public Fast—­Du Maurier’s Speech before the Assembly—­ Barneveld’s Sentence—­Barneveld prepares for Death—­Goes to Execution.

The Advocate had been removed within a few days after the arrest from the chamber in Maurice’s apartments, where he had originally been confined, and was now in another building.

It was not a dungeon nor a jail.  Indeed the commonplace and domestic character of the scenery in which these great events were transacted has in it something pathetic.  There was and still remains a two-storied structure, then of modern date, immediately behind the antique hall of the old Counts within the Binnenhof.  On the first floor was a courtroom of considerable extent, the seat of one of the chief tribunals of justice The story above was divided into three chambers with a narrow corridor on each side.  The first chamber, on the north-eastern side, was appropriated for the judges when the state prisoners should be tried.  In the next Hugo Grotius was imprisoned.  In the third was Barneveld.  There was a tower at the north-east angle of the building, within which a winding and narrow staircase of stone led up to the corridor and so to the prisoners’ apartments.  Rombout Hoogerbeets was confined in another building.

As the Advocate, bent with age and a life of hard work, and leaning on his staff, entered the room appropriated to him, after toiling up the steep staircase, he observed—­

“This is the Admiral of Arragon’s apartment.”

It was true.  Eighteen years before, the conqueror of Nieuwpoort had assigned this lodging to the chief prisoner of war in that memorable victory over the Spaniards, and now Maurice’s faithful and trusted counsellor at that epoch was placed in durance here, as the result of the less glorious series of victories which had just been achieved.