Not wishing peaceably to accept as a boon from the civil authority what they claimed as an indefeasible right, they suddenly took possession one Sunday night of the Cloister Church.
It was in a state of utter confusion--part monastery, part foundry, part conventicle.

There were few seats, no altar, no communion-table, hardly any sacramental furniture, but a pulpit was extemporized.

Rosaeus preached in triumph to an enthusiastic congregation, and three children were baptized with the significant names of William, Maurice, and Henry.
On the following Monday there was a striking scene on the Voorhout.

This most beautiful street of a beautiful city was a broad avenue, shaded by a quadruple row of limetrees, reaching out into the thick forest of secular oaks and beeches--swarming with fallow-deer and alive with the notes of singing birds--by which the Hague, almost from time immemorial, has been embowered.

The ancient cloisterhouse and church now reconverted to religious uses--was a plain, rather insipid structure of red brick picked out with white stone, presenting three symmetrical gables to the street, with a slender belfry and spire rising in the rear.
Nearly adjoining it on the north-western side was the elegant and commodious mansion of Barneveld, purchased by him from the representatives of the Arenberg family, surrounded by shrubberies and flower-gardens; not a palace, but a dignified and becoming abode for the first citizen of a powerful republic.
On that midsummer's morning it might well seem that, in rescuing the old cloister from the military purposes to which it had for years been devoted, men had given an even more belligerent aspect to the scene than if it had been left as a foundry.