TO THE DEATH OF PRINCE MAURICE

A.D. 1619—­1625

The princess-dowager of Orange, and Du Maurier, the French ambassador, had vainly implored mercy for the innocent victim at the hands of the inexorable stadtholder.  Maurice refused to see his mother-in-law:  he left the ambassador’s appeal unanswered.  This is enough for the rigid justice of history that cannot be blinded by partiality, but hands over to shame, at the close of their career, even those whom she nursed in the very cradle of heroism.  But an accusation has become current, more fatal to the fame of Prince Maurice, because it strikes at the root of his claims to feeling, which could not be impugned by a mere perseverance in severity that might have sprung from mistaken views.  It is asserted, but only as general belief, that he witnessed the execution of Barneveldt.  The little window of an octagonal tower, overlooking the square of the Binnenhof at The Hague, where the tragedy was acted, is still shown as the spot from which the prince gazed on the scene.  Almost concealed from view among the clustering buildings of the place, it is well adapted to give weight to the tradition; but it may not, perhaps, even now be too late to raise a generous incredulity as to an assertion of which no eye-witness attestation is recorded, and which might have been the invention of malignity.  There are many statements of history which it is immaterial to substantiate or disprove.  Splendid fictions of public virtue have often produced their good if once received as fact; but, when private character is at stake, every conscientious writer or reader will cherish his “historic doubts,” when he reflects on the facility with which calumny is sent abroad, the avidity with which it is received, and the careless ease with which men credit what it costs little to invent and propagate, but requires an age of trouble and an almost impossible conjunction of opportunities effectually to refute.

Grotius and Hoogerbeets were confined in the castle of Louvestein.  Moersbergen, a leading patriot of Utrecht, De Haan, pensionary of Haarlem, and Uitenbogaard, the chosen confidant of Maurice, but the friend of Barneveldt, were next accused and sentenced to imprisonment or banishment.  And thus Arminianism, deprived of its chiefs, was for the time completely stifled.  The Remonstrants, thrown into utter despair, looked to emigration as their last resource.  Gustavus Adolphus, king of Sweden, and Frederick, duke of Holstein, offered them shelter and protection in their respective states.  Several availed themselves of these offers; but the states-general, alarmed at the progress of self-expatriation, moderated their rigor, and thus checked the desolating evil.  Several of the imprisoned Arminians had the good fortune to elude the vigilance of their jailers; but the escape of Grotius is the most remarkable of all, both from his own celebrity as one of the first writers of his age in the most varied walks of literature, and from its peculiar circumstances, which only found a parallel in European history after a lapse of two centuries.  We allude to the escape of Lavalette from the prison of the Conciergerie in Paris in 1815, which so painfully excited the interest of all Europe for the intended victim’s wife, whose reason was the forfeit of her exertion.