I will not boast of any help afforded by me in that distress: but I thank the Lord GOD! who made me an instrument to appease their devilish furies. And I think that the Governor and all the Company will confess that I used mine uttermost skill and aid for the safeguard of their lives, as well as [of] mine own. But in the end, all eloquence notwithstanding; the Governor [THOMAS HETON], being a comely aged man and a person whose hoary hairs might move pity and procure reverence in any good mind; especially the uprightness of his dealing considered: they enforced him, with great danger, to bring forth all the money, plate, and jewels which were in the House; and to prepare the remnant of 12,000 crowns at such days and times as they pleased to appoint. And of the rest of our Nation, which had their goods remaining in their several pack-houses and lodgings elsewhere in the town; they took such pity that four they slew, and divers others they most cruelly and dangerously hurt: spoiling and ransoming them to the uttermost value that might be made, or esteemed, of all their goods. Yea, a certain one, they enforced to ransom his goods twice; yea, thrice: and, all that notwithstanding, took the said goods violently from them at the last. And all these injuries being opened unto their chief Governors in time convenient; and whiles yet the whole sum, set for [the] several ransoms of our countrymen and the English House in general, were not half paid; so that justice and good order might partly have qualified the former rigours proferred by the soldiers: the said Governors were as slow and deaf, as the others were quick and light, of hearing to find the bottom of every bag in the town. So that it seemeth they were fully agreed in all things: or, if any contention were, the same was but [a] strife who, or which, of them might do greatest wrongs. Keeping the said Governor and Merchants there still, without grant of passport or safe conduct, when there are scarcely any victuals to be had for any money in the town; nor yet the said Merchants have any money to buy it, where it is. And as for credit; neither credit nor pawn can now find coin in Antwerp. In these distresses, I left them the 12th of this instant November 1576; when I parted from them: not as one who was hasty to leave and abandon them in such misery; but to solicit their rueful causes here, and to deliver the same unto Her Majesty and [the Privy] Council in such sort as I beheld it there. * * * * *