He stoutly refused to do either.  The judges, astonished, took their departure, saying: 

“Then you will fare as Barneveld.  The scaffold is still standing.”

He expected consequently nothing but death, and said many years afterwards that he knew from personal experience how a man feels who goes out of prison to be beheaded.

The wife of Grotius sternly replied to urgent intimations from a high source that she should ask pardon for her husband, “I shall not do it.  If he has deserved it, let them strike off his head.”

Yet no woman could be more devoted to her husband than was Maria van Reigersbergen to Hugo de Groot, as time was to prove.  The Prince subsequently told her at a personal interview that “one of two roads must be taken, that of the law or that of pardon.”

Soon after the arrest it was rumoured that Grotius was ready to make important revelations if he could first be assured of the Prince’s protection.

His friends were indignant at the statement.  His wife stoutly denied its truth, but, to make sure, wrote to her husband on the subject.

“One thing amazes me,” she said; “some people here pretend to say that you have stated to one gentleman in private that you have something to disclose greatly important to the country, but that you desired beforehand to be taken under the protection of his Excellency.  I have not chosen to believe this, nor do I, for I hold that to be certain which you have already told me—­that you know no secrets.  I see no reason therefore why you should require the protection of any man.  And there is no one to believe this, but I thought best to write to you of it.  Let me, in order that I may contradict the story with more authority, have by the bearer of this a simple Yes or No.  Study quietly, take care of your health, have some days’ patience, for the Advocate has not yet been heard.”

The answer has not been preserved, but there is an allusion to the subject in an unpublished memorandum of Grotius written while he was in prison.

It must be confessed that the heart of the great theologian and jurist seems to have somewhat failed him after his arrest, and although he was incapable of treachery—­even if he had been possessed of any secrets, which certainly was not the case—­he did not show the same Spartan firmness as his wife, and was very far from possessing the heroic calm of Barneveld.  He was much disposed to extricate himself from his unhappy plight by making humble, if not abject, submission to Maurice.  He differed from his wife in thinking that he had no need of the Prince’s protection.  “I begged the Chamberlain, Matthew de Cors,” he said, a few days after his arrest, “that I might be allowed to speak with his Excellency of certain things which I would not willingly trust to the pen.  My meaning was to leave all public employment and to offer my service to his Excellency in his domestic affairs.  Thus I hoped that the motives for my imprisonment would cease.  This was afterwards misinterpreted as if I had had wonderful things to reveal.”