Later Life in Holland
Reael left the East Indies in January 1620 for Holland where for several years he focused on poetry, partially because his sympathies for the remonstrants (Arminius had been his brother in law after all) prevented him from holding public office. He acquainted, among others, the poets Pieter Cornelisz Hooft and Joost van den Vondel and became part of the Muiderkring. In 1623 Vondel dedicated his poem Lof der Zeevaart (Ode to Seafaring) to him.
After the death of Maurice of Nassau, Reael's standings were restored, and on June 9, 1625 he became a member of the Amsterdam Chamber of the VOC, which he would remain until the end of his life. From 1625 - 1627 he was Vice-Admiral of Holland and West-Friesland with the Amsterdam Admiralty, and he commanded a fleet of ships fighting the Spanish at the Barbary Coast alongside the English (the "second expedition to Spain" from 12 November 1626 to 10 July 1627). In 1626 he represented the Dutch Republic at the crowning of Charles I of England, who knighted him at the occasion. From 18 August 1627 he was acting Lieutenant-Admiral of Holland and West-Friesland after the death of Lieutenant-Admiral Willem van Nassau.
At the end of 1627, he was sent as a diplomat to Denmark, which at that time was at war with Ferdinand II of Austria. On his way back early in 1628, he suffered a shipwreck of the coast of Jutland, where Austrian imperial troops happened to be camped. These captured him and sent him to Vienna, where he would remain imprisoned until February 1629. On his return he was not reinstated in his naval functions. In the summer of that year he married, and in 1630 he became councillor and in 1632 alderman (schepen) of the city of Amsterdam.
In 1637 he was considered for the function of Fleet Admiral of the confederate Dutch fleet to replace the incompetent Philips van Dorp, but in October, after losing his two young sons earlier in the year, he died of bubonic plague in Amsterdam. He was buried in the Westerkerk.
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