Therefore, 'tis necessary for you to decide now, whether to be utterly ruined, yourselves and your children, or to continue firmly the work which you have begun boldly, and rather to die a hundred thousand deaths than to make a treaty with them, which can only end in your ruin.

Be assured that the measure dealt to you will be ignominy as well as destruction.

Let not your leaders expect the honorable scaffolds of Counts Egmont and Horn.

The whipping-post and then the gibbet will be their certain fate." Having by this and similar language, upon various occasions, sought to impress upon his countrymen the gravity of the position, he led them to seek the remedy in audacity and in union.

He familiarized them with his theory, that the legal, historical government of the provinces belonged to the states-general, to a congress of nobles, clergy, and commons, appointed from each of the seventeen provinces.