But those days, however glorious from the point of view of national advancement, were also the days of plot and intrigue, and there is scarce an historical building in Holland but might tell its tale of a tragedy. On the 13th of May, 1619, the seventy-two year old prime minister of the nation at the time, Jan van Oldenbarnevelt, was put to death on a scaffold erected in the Binnenhof “for having conspired to dismember the States of the Netherlands, and greatly troubled God’s church,” according to Maurice of Orange, whose displeasure he had incurred. The learned Grotius, scholar and statesman and the then senator from Rotterdam, who was arrested at the same time as Oldenbarnevelt for alleged conspiracy with him, was sentenced to prison for life in the castle of Loevenstein, near Gorinchem. Happily, however, with the help of his wife, he effected means of escape ere he had been confined a full year. Hard by the Binnenhof stands the old Gevangenpoort, now containing a morbidly interesting collection of guillotine blocks that have seen their grewsome service, neck twisters, back breakers, and other such unhappy instruments of torture, which recall, all too vividly, perhaps, the days when they were wont to be put into actual and frequent use in that same tower. In the tower, too, they will show you some of the dark, musty old dungeons, used for the former incarceration of political prisoners. Their names, written in blood by many of the victims, can still be traced upon the walls. Here also is where, in 1672, Cornelius De Witt, falsely accused of plotting against the life of William III, and his brother John, who had unwisely hastened to the tower to intercede in his behalf, were put to their horrible deaths by the gullible mob of citizens, who, believing in the guilt of Cornelius, had assembled in the neighborhood to make a demonstration against him. The remains of the brothers De Witt rest in the Nieuwe Kerk. The Willem’splein, a large square a hundred yards or less to the east of the Binnenhof, is the center of gravity of The Hague’s traffic and street railway service. From here you may take an electric car to almost any part of the city, and to the suburbs as well. In the center of the plein stands the bronze statue of William the Silent, done by Royer and erected in 1848, with the Prince’s motto, “Tranquil Amid Raging Billows,” inscribed in Latin on the pedestal. Facing the square on the west side stand the Colonial Offices and the Ministry of Justice, while just off the northwest corner is the Mauritshuis--the Louvre, the Corcoran Gallery, the Kaiser Friedrich’s Museum of The Hague. Built in the early half of the seventeenth century as a residence for the Dutch West India Company’s Governor of Brazil, it now shelters what is probably the most notable collection of paintings gathered under one roof in Holland, the gifts to the nation of the different _stadtholders_.