better judgment in the affair." The Council had left too much to him and apparently had not dared to add anything to the documents that he had prepared. "We think," Carpentier went on to say in some significant sentences, "the rigour of justice should have been mitigated somewhat with Dutch clemency (with consideration to a nation who is our neighbour), especially if such could be done without prejudice to the state and the dignity of justice, as we think could have been done here." "It is," the Governor -General concluded impressively, "a bad war where all remain."
Months afterwards, when the facts of "the Massacre" were known in England, the country was stirred to its depths. The Lords of the Privy Council were moved to tears at the relation of the sufferings of the unhappy Englishmen. The King, though not usually given to emotion, "took it very much to heart." Even those who wished well to the Dutch "could not hear or speak of it without indignation," while the facts were so damning that "none in the Assembly of the States General (in Holland) approved the cruel tortures of the bloody executions." "For my part," wrote Chamberlain, the London historian, to Carleton, the English ambassador at the Hague, "if there were no wiser than I, we should stay or arrest the first Indian ship that comes in our way and hang up upon Dover cliffs as many as we should find faulty or actors in this business and then dispute the matter afterwards: for there is no other course to be held with such manner of men, as neither regard law nor justice, nor any other respect of equity or humanity, but only make gain their God."
The directors of the East India Company took, natur-
