When I was at Alkmaar about thirty years ago, I strolled to the neighbouring village of Heilo, on the road to Limmen, where I saw, surrounded by a moat, the foundations of the castle of Ypenstein. A view of this once noble pile is to be found in the well-known work of Rademaker, Kabinet van Nederlandsche en Kleefsche Oudheden. This place, as tradition tells, once witnessed the perpetration of a violent deed. When the son of the unfortunate Charles I. was an exile in our country, this house Ypenstein was occupied by a family of English emigrants, high in rank, who lived here for a while in quiet. How far these exiles were even here secure from the spies of Cromwell appeared on a certain dark night, after a suspicious vessel had been seen from the village of Egmond, when an armed band of the Protector's Puritans, led by a guide, marched over the heath to the house Ypenstein, seized all the inhabitants, and carried them off, by the way they had come, to the coast, put them on board, and transported them most probably to England. In such secresy and silence was this violation of territory and the rights of hospitality perpetrated, that no one in the neighbourhood perceived anything of the occurrence, except a miller who saw the troop crossing the pathless heath in the direction of the coast, but could not conceive what had brought so many persons together in such a place at midnight.

I would gladly learn whether anything is known of this transaction; and if so, where I may find farther particulars of this English family, their probable political importance, &c. To investigate the truth of this tradition, that we may acquit or convict the far-famed Cromwell of so foul a crime, cannot certainly be untimely now that two celebrated learned men have undertaken to vindicate his memory.—From the Navorscher.

Inquaeritor.