The Synod held one hundred and eighty sessions between the 13th November
1618 and 29th May 1619, all the doings of which have been recorded in
chronicles innumerable. There need be no further mention of them here.

Barneveld and the companions of his fate remained in prison.

On the 7th March the trial of the great Advocate began. He had sat in
prison since the 18th of the preceding August. For nearly seven months
he had been deprived of all communication with the outward world save
such atoms of intelligence as could be secretly conveyed to him in the
inside of a quill concealed in a pear and by other devices. The man who
had governed one of the most important commonwealths of the world for
nearly a generation long--during the same period almost controlling the
politics of Europe--had now been kept in ignorance of the most
insignificant everyday events. During the long summer-heat of the dog-
days immediately succeeding his arrest, and the long, foggy, snowy, icy
winter of Holland which ensued, he had been confined in that dreary
garret-room to which he had been brought when he left his temporary
imprisonment in the apartments of Prince Maurice.

There was nothing squalid in the chamber, nothing specially cruel or
repulsive in the arrangements of his captivity. He was not in fetters,
nor fed upon bread and water. He was not put upon the rack, nor even
threatened with it as Ledenberg had been. He was kept in a mean,
commonplace, meagerly furnished, tolerably spacious room, and he was
allowed the services of his faithful domestic servant John Franken. A
sentinel paced day and night up the narrow corridor before his door. As
spring advanced, the notes of the nightingale came through the prison-
window from the neighbouring thicket. One day John Franken, opening the
window that his master might the better enjoy its song, exchanged