Catholic League and the Papal Nuncio, the French King refused Sir Francis Walsingham's demands for Verstegan's extradition to England to stand trial for high treason and the exiled Englishman was quietly released. After his release, Verstegan lived briefly in Rome, where he was the recipient of a temporary pension from Pope Sixtus V. In 1595, Verstegan published at Antwerp the Latin-Elizabethan English translation of An Epistle in the Person of Jesus Christ to the Faithful Soule by John Justus of Landsberg, which St. Philip Howard had made while imprisoned for Recusancy in the Tower of London. St. Philip Howard's literary translation of Marko Marulić's Renaissance Latin religious poem Carmen de doctrina Domini nostri Iesu Christi pendentis in cruce ("A Dialogue Betwixt a Christian and Christ Hanging on the Crosse"), was also published in lieu of an introduction in the Antwerp edition. From 1617 to about 1630 Verstegan was a prolific writer in Dutch, producing epigrams, characters, jestbooks, polemics. He also penned journalistic commentaries, satires and editorials for the Nieuwe Tijdinghen (New Tidings) printed in Antwerp by Abraham Verhoeven from 1620 to 1629. This makes him one of the earliest identifiable newspaper journalists in Europe. According to Louise Imogen Guiney, "The poet passed his remaining days in Antwerp, beloved by the best names of his time, English or foreign; his closest friends were such men, among Protestants, as Ortelius or Bochins, Sir Thomas Gresham and Sir Robert Cotton, the index of whose manuscript collection in the British Museum names Verstegan more than once. He was also a friend and great correspondent of Father Robert Persons, S.J.: many of Verstegan's letters to the latter figure in the Westminster Cathedral Archives." Although the exact date of Verstegan's death remains unknown, his will survives in Antwerp and bears the date of 26 February 1640. Legacy Poetry The verses on the defeat of the uprising by the Irish clans under Aodh Mór Ó Néill, Lord of Tír Eoghain, and entitled England's Joy, by R. R. (1601), have mistakenly been attributed to him, as have other poems that were in reality composed, "by the notorious Richard Vennar or Vennard." Verstegan did, however, compose an Elizabethan English elegy about the 1584 martyrdom of Blessed Dermot O'Hurley outside the walls of Dublin and entitled "The Fall of the Baron of Slane", several poems in praise of Thomas More, occasioned by the 1630 publication of the biography by the