# The First Sir Percy — Character guide

> Key figures in The First Sir Percy by Baroness Orczy.

- [Lord Stoutenburg](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_first_sir_percy_se/characters/lord_stoutenburg.md): Stoutenburg moves through the story as the exiled magnate whose feud with the Stadtholder has cost him land, honour, and peace, and who now stakes everything on one audacious stroke. He is magnetic, spiritually-browed, a
- [Gilda Beresteyn](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_first_sir_percy_se/characters/gilda_beresteyn.md): Gilda has just been torn from a wedding-day happiness into the train of the Lord of Stoutenburg, who means to make her his queen in a usurped kingdom. She offers no resistance and no tears, only a calm that unnerves the 
- [Mynheer Beresteyn](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_first_sir_percy_se/characters/mynheer_beresteyn.md): Beresteyn is the dignified civic patriarch whose private apartments Stoutenburg's musketeers now command, and whose quiet admonitions to Gilda in the small hours reveal a father steeling his child for ordeal. Stoutenburg
- [Diogenes](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_first_sir_percy_se/characters/diogenes.md): Diogenes is the mysterious stranger at the story's centre — sightless, quick-tongued, and cool enough to yawn on the brink of the gallows, dangling a secret about the Stadtholder's confidence to buy himself wine and time
- [Jan](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_first_sir_percy_se/characters/jan.md): Jan is the enforcer at Stoutenburg's elbow, already at attention under the lintel when the command to hang the blind vagabond is given, and personally eager for it after the humiliation that drove his master from the lan
- [Pythagoras](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_first_sir_percy_se/characters/pythagoras.md): Pythagoras arrives at Amersfoort feverish and half-dead, having pretended drunkenness while Stoutenburg and an accomplice talked freely of De Berg crossing the Ijssel and Isembourg marching from Kleve. He recognizes his 
- [Socrates](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_first_sir_percy_se/characters/socrates.md): Socrates belongs to the raffish trio of sword-sellers — with Diogenes and the potbellied Pythagoras — who haunt the edges of respectable Dutch life. When he is lifted, groaning, from his horse at the height of the Berest
- [Maurice of Nassau](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_first_sir_percy_se/characters/maurice_of_nassau.md): Maurice of Nassau sits enthroned at the wedding feast, the political sun around which every guest orbits, deferential and watched. He is the target of Stoutenburg's vengeance, a prince whose death would hand the Netherla
- [Heemskerk](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_first_sir_percy_se/characters/heemskerk.md): Heemskerk moves between Stoutenburg's desolate hideout and the Spanish camp, carrying assurances to De Berg and the Archduchess. He knows Stoutenburg's consuming hatred of Gilda and Diogenes, and though he finds the man 
- [The Stadtholder](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_first_sir_percy_se/characters/the_stadtholder.md): As Stadtholder, Maurice commands the state, the army, and the deference of every burgher in Amersfoort — yet his power has made him the target of a conspiracy born from the old feud with the sons of Barneveldt. He presid
- [Kaatje van den Poele](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_first_sir_percy_se/characters/kaatje_van_den_poele.md): Kaatje van den Poele belongs to the comfortable burgher world that gathers for the double wedding at Amersfoort — her husband a shipowner and East India Company man, her family pompous and fleshy with prosperity. She sta
- [Burgomaster Beresteyn](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_first_sir_percy_se/characters/burgomaster_beresteyn.md): Burgomaster Beresteyn is the city's foremost civic authority, second only to the Stadtholder in council, and the anxious father presiding over his children's double wedding. He has already suffered much, and now faces St
- [De Berg](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_first_sir_percy_se/characters/de_berg.md): A count and conspirator allied with Stoutenburg.
- [Marquet](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_first_sir_percy_se/characters/marquet.md): A French nobleman and fellow conspirator of Stoutenburg.
- [De Keysere](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_first_sir_percy_se/characters/de_keysere.md): A minor character, possibly a servant or official.
- [De Voocht](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_first_sir_percy_se/characters/de_voocht.md): A minor character, possibly a steward or official.
- [Olden Barneveldt](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_first_sir_percy_se/characters/olden_barneveldt.md): A historical Dutch statesman, referenced in the political context.

HTML index: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_first_sir_percy_se/characters