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Updated: May 16, 2025
Grotius with more good sense laboured from his youth in the grand project of reconciling all the parties into which Christians are divided. His good intentions were known to Europe before his escape from Louvestein: Du Vair, Keeper of the Seals, complimented him on his design.
XV. Grotius had been above eighteen months shut up in Louvestein, when, on the eleventh of January, 1621 , Muys-van-Holi, his declared enemy, who had been one of his judges, informed the States-General, that he had advice from good hands their prisoner was seeking to make his escape: some persons were sent to Louvestein to examine into this matter; but notwithstanding all the enquiry that could be made, they found no reason to believe that Grotius had laid any plot to get out.
XIV. In consequence of the sentence passed against Grotius, the States-General ordered him to be carried from the Hague to the fortress of Louvestein near Gorcum in South Holland, at the point of the island formed by the Vahal and the Meuse; which was done on the 6th of June, 1619; and twenty-four sols per day assigned for his maintenance, and as much for Hoogerbetz: but their wives declared they had enough to support their husbands, and that they chose to be without an allowance which they looked on as an affront.
Such was the campaign in the Netherlands, which in all probability would have produced events of greater importance, had not the duke of Marlborough been restricted by the deputies of the states-general, who began to be influenced by the intrigues of the Louvestein faction, ever averse to a single dictator. The French king redoubled his efforts in Germany.
Grotius, while a prisoner in the Castle of Louvestein, had written, in the Dutch language, "A treatise on the Truth of the Christian Religion." He afterwards enlarged it, and translated it, so enlarged, into Latin. It was universally read and admired. French, German, English, modern Greek, Persic, and even Turkish versions of it have been made: it was equally approved by Catholics and Protestants.
She then revealed her project to him, and, after much entreaty, prevailed on him to get into the chest, and leave her in the prison. The books, which Grotius borrowed, were usually sent to Gorcum; and the chest, which contained them, passed in a boat, from the prison at Louvestein, to that town. Big with the fate of Grotius, the chest, as soon as he was enclosed in it, was moved into the boat.
He took it for granted that as the Dutch were a trading people, whose commerce had greatly suffered in the war, they could not be averse to a pacification; and he instructed his emissaries to tamper with the malcontents of the republic, especially with the remains of the Louvestein faction, which had always opposed the schemes of the stadtholder.
Hoogerbetz's situation, who, as we have seen, was condemned with Grotius, received some alleviation by the change of the Stadtholder. Four months after the death of Prince Maurice he was allowed to come out of Louvestein, and to reside at a country-house, upon condition of not leaving the country on pain of forfeiting twenty thousand florins, for which his friends and children were bound.
During his nine months confinement at the Hague he could do nothing in it; when removed to Louvestein he wanted several necessary pieces; since his happy escape he was much busied; besides it required time to range the several parts of his defence in proper order. The seventeenth displays the irregularity of the sentence passed upon them.
On his removal to Louvestein, he resumed this work, and finished it at Paris. He made several happy corrections in the text of Stobæus; some, from his own conjectures or those of his friends; others, on the authority of manuscripts in the King's library, which were politely lent him by the learned Nicholas Rigaut, librarian to his majesty.
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