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Title: The Life of John of Barneveld, 1617

Author: John Lothrop Motley

Release Date: January, 2004  [EBook #4894]
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THE LIFE AND DEATH of JOHN OF BARNEVELD, ADVOCATE OF HOLLAND

WITH A VIEW OF THE PRIMARY CAUSES AND MOVEMENTS OF THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR

By John Lothrop Motley, D.C.L., LL.D.



MOTLEY'S HISTORY OF THE NETHERLANDS, Project Gutenberg Edition, Volume 94

Life and Death of John of Barneveld, v8, 1617



CHAPTER XIII.

     Ferdinand of Gratz crowned King of Bohemia--His Enmity to
     Protestants--Slawata and Martinitz thrown from the Windows of the
     Hradschin--Real Beginning of the Thirty Years' War--The Elector-
     Palatine's Intrigues in Opposition to the House of Austria--He
     supports the Duke of Savoy--The Emperor Matthias visits Dresden--
     Jubilee for the Hundredth Anniversary of the Reformation.

When the forlorn emperor Rudolph had signed the permission for his
brother Matthias to take the last crown but one from his head, he bit the
pen in a paroxysm of helpless rage.  Then rushing to the window of his
apartment, he looked down on one of the most stately prospects that the
palaces of the earth can offer.  From the long monotonous architectural
lines of the Hradschin, imposing from its massiveness and its imperial
situation, and with the dome and minarets of the cathedral clustering
behind them, the eye swept across the fertile valley, through which the
rapid, yellow Moldau courses, to the opposite line of cliffs crested with
the half imaginary fortress-palaces of the Wyscherad.  There, in the
mythical legendary past of Bohemia had dwelt the shadowy Libuscha,
daughter of Krok, wife of King Premysl, foundress of Prague, who, when
wearied of her lovers, was accustomed to toss them from those heights
into the river.  Between these picturesque precipices lay the two
Pragues, twin-born and quarrelsome, fighting each other for centuries,
and growing up side by side into a double, bellicose, stormy, and most
splendid city, bristling with steeples and spires, and united by the
ancient many-statued bridge with its blackened mediaeval entrance towers.

But it was not to enjoy the prospect that the aged, discrowned, solitary
emperor, almost as dim a figure among sovereigns as the mystic Libuscha
herself, was gazing from the window upon the imperial city.

"Ungrateful Prague," he cried, "through me thou hast become thus
magnificent, and now thou hast turned upon and driven away thy
benefactor.  May the vengeance of God descend upon thee; may my curse
come upon thee and upon all Bohemia."

History has failed to record the special benefits of the Emperor
through which the city had derived its magnificence and deserved this
malediction.  But surely if ever an old man's curse was destined to be
literally fulfilled, it seemed to be this solemn imprecation of Rudolph.
Meantime the coronation of Matthias had gone on with pomp and popular
gratulations, while Rudolph had withdrawn into his apartments to pass
the little that was left to him of life in solitude and in a state of
hopeless pique with Matthias, with the rest of his brethren, with all
the world.

And now that five years had passed since his death, Matthias, who had
usurped so much power prematurely, found himself almost in the same
condition as that to which he had reduced Rudolph.

Ferdinand of Styria, his cousin, trod closely upon his heels.  He was
the presumptive successor to all his crowns, had not approved of the
movements of Matthias in the lifetime of his brother, and hated the
Vienna Protestant baker's son, Cardinal Clesel, by whom all those
movements had been directed.  Professor Taubmann, of Wittenberg,
ponderously quibbling on the name of that prelate, had said that he was
of "one hundred and fifty ass power."  Whether that was a fair measure
of his capacity may be doubted, but it certainly was not destined to be
sufficient to elude the vengeance of Ferdinand, and Ferdinand would soon
have him in his power.

Matthias, weary of ambitious intrigue, infirm of purpose, and shattered
in health, had withdrawn from affairs to devote himself to his gout and
to his fair young wife, Archduchess Anna of Tyrol, whom at the age of
fifty-four he had espoused.

On the 29th June 1617, Ferdinand of Gratz was crowned King of Bohemia.
The event was a shock and a menace to the Protestant cause all over the
world.  The sombre figure of the Archduke had for years appeared in the
background, foreshadowing as it were the wrath to come, while throughout
Bohemia and the neighbouring countries of Moravia, Silesia, and the
Austrias, the cause of Protestantism had been making such rapid progress.
The Emperor Maximilian II. had left five stalwart sons, so that there had
seemed little probability that the younger line, the sons of his brother,
would succeed.  But all the five were childless, and now the son of
Archduke Charles, who had died in 1590, had become the natural heir
after the death of Matthias to the immense family honours--his cousins
Maximilian and Albert having resigned their claims in his favour.

Ferdinand, twelve years old at his father's death, had been placed under
the care of his maternal uncle, Duke William of Bavaria.  By him the boy
was placed at the high school of Ingolstadt, to be brought up by the
Jesuits, in company with Duke William's own son Maximilian, five years
his senior.  Between these youths, besides the tie of cousinship, there
grew up the most intimate union founded on perfect sympathy in religion
and politics.

When Ferdinand entered upon the government of his paternal estates of
Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola, he found that the new religion, at which
the Jesuits had taught him to shudder as at a curse and a crime, had been
widely spreading.  His father had fought against heresy with all his
might, and had died disappointed and broken-hearted at its progress.
His uncle of Bavaria, in letters to his son and nephew, had stamped into
their minds with the enthusiasm of perfect conviction that all happiness
and blessing for governments depended on the restoration and maintenance
of the unity of the Catholic faith.  All the evils in times past and
present resulting from religious differences had been held up to the two
youths by the Jesuits in the most glaring colours.  The first duty of a
prince, they had inculcated, was to extirpate all false religions, to
give the opponents of the true church no quarter, and to think no
sacrifice too great by which the salvation of human society, brought
almost to perdition by the new doctrines, could be effected.

Never had Jesuits an apter scholar than Ferdinand.  After leaving school,
he made a pilgrimage to Loretto to make his vows to the Virgin Mary of
extirpation of heresy, and went to Rome to obtain the blessing of Pope
Clement VIII.

Then, returning to the government of his inheritance, he seized that
terrible two-edged weapon of which the Protestants of Germany had taught
him the use.

"Cujus regio ejus religio;" to the prince the choice of religion, to the
subject conformity with the prince, as if that formula of shallow and
selfish princelings, that insult to the dignity of mankind, were the
grand result of a movement which was to go on centuries after they had
all been forgotten in their tombs.  For the time however it was a valid
and mischievous maxim.  In Saxony Catholics and Calvinists were
proscribed; in Heidelberg Catholics and Lutherans.  Why should either
Calvinists or Lutherans be tolerated in Styria?  Why, indeed?  No logic
could be more inexorable, and the pupil of the Ingolstadt Jesuits
hesitated not an instant to carry out their teaching with the very
instrument forged for him by the Reformation.  Gallows were erected in
the streets of all his cities, but there was no hanging.  The sight of
them proved enough to extort obedience to his edict, that every man,
woman, and child not belonging to the ancient church should leave his
dominions.  They were driven out in hordes in broad daylight from Gratz
and other cities.  Rather reign over a wilderness than over heretics was
the device of the Archduke, in imitation of his great relative, Philip
II. of Spain.  In short space of time his duchies were as empty of
Protestants as the Palatinate of Lutherans, or Saxony of Calvinists, or
both of Papists.  Even the churchyards were rifled of dead Lutherans and
Utraquists, their carcasses thrown where they could no longer pollute the
true believers mouldering by their side.

It was not strange that the coronation as King of Bohemia of a man of
such decided purposes--a country numbering ten Protestants to one
Catholic--should cause a thrill and a flutter.  Could it be doubted that
the great elemental conflict so steadily prophesied by Barneveld and
instinctively dreaded by all capable of feeling the signs of the time
would now begin?  It had begun.  Of what avail would be Majesty-Letters
and Compromises extorted by force from trembling or indolent emperors,
now that a man who knew his own mind, and felt it to be a crime not to
extirpate all religions but the one orthodox religion, had mounted the
throne?  It is true that he had sworn at his coronation to maintain the
laws of Bohemia, and that the Majesty-Letter and the Compromise were part
of the laws.

But when were doctors ever wanting to prove the unlawfulness of law
which interferes with the purposes of a despot and the convictions
of the bigot?

"Novus rex, nova lex," muttered the Catholics, lifting up their heads
and hearts once more out of the oppression and insults which they had
unquestionably suffered at the hands of the triumphant Reformers.  "There
are many empty poppy-heads now flaunting high that shall be snipped off,"
said others.  "That accursed German Count Thurn and his fellows, whom the
devil has sent from hell to Bohemia for his own purposes, shall be
disposed of now," was the general cry.

It was plain that heresy could no longer be maintained except by the
sword.  That which had been extorted by force would be plucked back by
force.  The succession of Ferdinand was in brief a warshout to be echoed
by all the Catholics of Europe.  Before the end of the year the
Protestant churches of Brunnau were sealed up.  Those at Klostergrab were
demolished in three days by command of the Archbishop of Prague.  These
dumb walls preached in their destruction more stirring sermons than
perhaps would ever have been heard within them had they stood.  This
tearing in pieces of the Imperial patent granting liberty of Protestant
worship, this summary execution done upon senseless bricks and mortar,
was an act of defiance to the Reformed religion everywhere.
Protestantism was struck in the face, spat upon, defied.

The effect was instantaneous.  Thurn and the other defenders of the
Protestant faith were as prompt in action as the Catholics had been in
words.  A few months passed away.  The Emperor was in Vienna, but his ten
stadholders were in Prague.  The fateful 23rd of May 1618 arrived.

Slawata, a Bohemian Protestant, who had converted himself to the Roman
Church in order to marry a rich widow, and who converted his peasants by
hunting them to mass with his hounds, and Martinitz, the two stadholders
who at Ferdinand's coronation had endeavoured to prevent him from
including the Majesty-Letter among the privileges he was swearing to
support, and who were considered the real authors of the royal letters
revoking all religious rights of Protestants, were the most obnoxious of
all.  They were hurled from the council-chamber window of the Hradschin.
The unfortunate secretary Fabricius was tossed out after them.  Twenty-
eight ells deep they fell, and all escaped unhurt by the fall; Fabricius
being subsequently ennobled by a grateful emperor with the well-won title
of Baron Summerset.

The Thirty Years' War, which in reality had been going on for several
years already, is dated from that day.  A provisional government was
established in Prague by the Estates under Protestant guidance,
a college of thirty directors managing affairs.

The Window-Tumble, as the event has always been called in history,
excited a sensation in Europe.  Especially the young king of France,
whose political position should bring him rather into alliance with the
rebels than the Emperor, was disgusted and appalled.  He was used to
rebellion.  Since he was ten years old there had been a rebellion against
himself every year.  There was rebellion now.  But his ministers had
never been thrown out of window.  Perhaps one might take some day to
tossing out kings as well.  He disapproved the process entirely.

Thus the great conflict of Christendom, so long impending, seemed at
last to have broken forth in full fury on a comparatively insignificant
incident.  Thus reasoned the superficial public, as if the throwing out
of window of twenty stadholders could have created a general war in
Europe had not the causes of war lain deep and deadly in the whole
framework of society.

The succession of Ferdinand to the throne of the holy Wenzel, in which
his election to the German Imperial crown was meant to be involved, was
a matter which concerned almost every household in Christendom.  Liberty
of religion, civil franchise, political charters, contract between
government and subject, right to think, speak, or act, these were the
human rights everywhere in peril.  A compromise between the two religious
parties had existed for half a dozen years in Germany, a feeble
compromise by which men had hardly been kept from each others' throats.
That compromise had now been thrown to the winds.  The vast conspiracy
of Spain, Rome, the House of Austria, against human liberty had found a
chief in the docile, gloomy pupil of the Jesuits now enthroned in
Bohemia, and soon perhaps to wield the sceptre of the Holy Roman Empire.
There was no state in Europe that had not cause to put hand on sword-
hilt.  "Distrust and good garrisons," in the prophetic words of
Barneveld, would now be the necessary resource for all intending
to hold what had been gained through long years of toil, martyrdom,
and hard fighting,

The succession of Ferdinand excited especial dismay and indignation in
the Palatinate.  The young elector had looked upon the prize as his own.
The marked advance of Protestant sentiment throughout the kingdom and its
neighbour provinces had seemed to render the succession of an extreme
Papist impossible.  When Frederic had sued for and won the hand of the
fair Elizabeth, daughter of the King of Great Britain, it was understood
that the alliance would be more brilliant for her than it seemed.  James
with his usual vanity spoke of his son-in-law as a future king.

It was a golden dream for the Elector and for the general cause of the
Reformed religion.  Heidelberg enthroned in the ancient capital of the
Wenzels, Maximilians, and Rudolphs, the Catechism and Confession enrolled
among the great statutes of the land, this was progress far beyond flimsy
Majesty-Letters and Compromises, made only to be torn to pieces.

Through the dim vista of futurity and in ecstatic vision no doubt even
the Imperial crown might seem suspended over the Palatine's head.  But
this would be merely a midsummer's dream.  Events did not whirl so
rapidly as they might learn to do centuries later, and--the time for a
Protestant to grasp at the crown of Germany could then hardly be imagined
as ripening.

But what the Calvinist branch of the House of Wittelsbach had indeed long
been pursuing was to interrupt the succession of the House of Austria to
the German throne.  That a Catholic prince must for the immediate future
continue to occupy it was conceded even by Frederic, but the electoral
votes might surely be now so manipulated as to prevent a slave of Spain
and a tool of the Jesuits from wielding any longer the sceptre of
Charlemagne.

On the other hand the purpose of the House of Austria was to do away with
the elective principle and the prescriptive rights of the Estates in
Bohemia first, and afterwards perhaps to send the Golden Bull itself to
the limbo of wornout constitutional devices.  At present however their
object was to secure their hereditary sovereignty in Prague first, and
then to make sure of the next Imperial election at Frankfurt.  Time
afterwards might fight still more in their favour, and fix them in
hereditary possession of the German throne.

The Elector-Palatine had lost no time.  His counsellors even before the
coronation of Ferdinand at Prague had done their best to excite alarm
throughout Germany at the document by which Archdukes Maximilian and
Albert had resigned all their hereditary claims in favour of Ferdinand
and his male children.  Should there be no such issue, the King of Spain
claimed the succession for his own sons as great-grandchildren of Emperor
Maximilian, considering himself nearer in the line than the Styrian
branch, but being willing to waive his own rights in favour of so ardent
a Catholic as Ferdinand.  There was even a secret negotiation going on a
long time between the new king of Bohemia and Philip to arrange for the
precedence of the Spanish males over the Styrian females to the
hereditary Austrian states, and to cede the province of Alsace
to Spain.

It was not wonderful that Protestant Germany should be alarmed.  After a
century of Protestantism, that Spain should by any possibility come to be
enthroned again over Germany was enough to raise both Luther and Calvin
from their graves.  It was certainly enough to set the lively young
palatine in motion.  So soon as the election of Frederic was proclaimed,
he had taken up the business in person.  Fond of amusement, young,
married to a beautiful bride of the royal house of England, he had
hitherto left politics to his counsellors.

Finding himself frustrated in his ambition by the election of another to
the seat he had fondly deemed his own, he resolved to unseat him if he
could, and, at any rate, to prevent the ulterior consequences of his
elevation.  He made a pilgrimage to Sedan, to confer with that
irrepressible intriguer and Huguenot chieftain, the Duc de Bouillon.
He felt sure of the countenance of the States-General, and, of course,
of his near relative the great stadholder.  He was resolved to invite
the Duke of Lorraine to head the anti-Austrian party, and to stand for
the kingship of the Romans and the Empire in opposition to Ferdinand.
An emissary sent to Nancy came back with a discouraging reply.  The Duke
not only flatly refused the candidacy, but warned the Palatine that if it
really came to a struggle he could reckon on small support anywhere, not
even from those who now seemed warmest for the scheme.  Then Frederic
resolved to try his cousin, the great Maximilian of Bavaria, to whom all
Catholics looked with veneration and whom all German Protestants
respected.  Had the two branches of the illustrious house of Wittelsbach
been combined in one purpose, the opposition to the House of Austria
might indeed have been formidable.  But what were ties of blood compared
to the iron bands of religious love and hatred?  How could Maximilian,
sternest of Papists, and Frederick V., flightiest of Calvinists, act
harmoniously in an Imperial election?  Moreover, Maximilian was united by
ties of youthful and tender friendship as well as by kindred and perfect
religious sympathy to his other cousin, King Ferdinand himself.  The case
seemed hopeless, but the Elector went to Munich, and held conferences
with his cousin.  Not willing to take No for an answer so long as it was
veiled under evasive or ornamental phraseology, he continued to negotiate
with Maximilian through his envoys Camerarius and Secretary Neu, who held
long debates with the Duke's chief councillor, Doctor Jocher.  Camerarius
assured Jocher that his master was the Hercules to untie the Gordian
knot, and the lion of the tribe of Judah.  How either the lion of Judah
or Hercules were to untie the knot which was popularly supposed to have
been cut by the sword of Alexander did not appear, but Maximilian at any
rate was moved neither by entreaties nor tropes.  Being entirely averse
from entering himself for the German crown, he grew weary at last of the
importunity with which the scheme was urged.  So he wrote a short billet
to his councillor, to be shown to Secretary Neu.

"Dear Jocher," he said, "I am convinced one must let these people
understand the matter in a little plainer German.  I am once for
all determined not to let myself into any misunderstanding or even
amplifications with the House of Austria in regard to the succession.
I think also that it would rather be harmful than useful to my house
to take upon myself so heavy a burthen as the German crown."

This time the German was plain enough and produced its effect.
Maximilian was too able a statesman and too conscientious a friend
to wish to exchange his own proud position as chief of the League,
acknowledged head of the great Catholic party, for the slippery,
comfortless, and unmeaning throne of the Holy Empire, which he
considered Ferdinand's right.

The chiefs of the anti-Austrian party, especially the Prince of Anhalt
and the Margrave of Anspach, in unison with the Heidelberg cabinet, were
forced to look for another candidate.  Accordingly the Margrave and the
Elector-Palatine solemnly agreed that it was indispensable to choose an
emperor who should not be of the House of Austria nor a slave of Spain.
It was, to be sure, not possible to think of a Protestant prince.
Bavaria would not oppose Austria, would also allow too much influence to
the Jesuits.  So there remained no one but the Duke of Savoy.  He was a
prince of the Empire.  He was of German descent, of Saxon race, a great
general, father of his soldiers, who would protect Europe against a
Turkish invasion better than the bastions of Vienna could do.  He would
be agreeable to the Catholics, while the Protestants could live under him
without anxiety because the Jesuits would be powerless with him.  It
would be a master-stroke if the princes would unite upon him.  The King
of France would necessarily be pleased with it, the King of Great Britain
delighted.

At last the model candidate had been found.  The Duke of Savoy having
just finished for a second time his chronic war with Spain, in which the
United Provinces, notwithstanding the heavy drain on their resources, had
allowed him 50,000 florins a month besides the soldiers under Count
Ernest of Nassau, had sent Mansfeld with 4000 men to aid the revolted
estates in Bohemia.  Geographically, hereditarily, necessarily the deadly
enemy of the House of Austria, he listened favourably to the overtures
made to him by the princes of the Union, expressed undying hatred for the
Imperial race, and thought the Bohemian revolt a priceless occasion for
expelling them from power.  He was informed by the first envoy sent to
him, Christopher van Dohna, that the object of the great movement now
contemplated was to raise him to the Imperial throne at the next
election, to assist the Bohemian estates, to secure the crown of Bohemia
for the Elector-Palatine, to protect the Protestants of Germany, and to
break down the overweening power of the Austrian house.

The Duke displayed no eagerness for the crown of Germany, while approving
the election of Frederic, but expressed entire sympathy with the
enterprise.  It was indispensable however to form a general federation in
Europe of England, the Netherlands, Venice, together with Protestant
Germany and himself, before undertaking so mighty a task.  While the
negotiations were going on, both Anspach and Anhalt were in great
spirits.  The Margrave cried out exultingly, "In a short time the means
will be in our hands for turning the world upside down."  He urged the
Prince of Anhalt to be expeditious in his decisions and actions.  "He who
wishes to trade," he said, "must come to market early."

There was some disappointment at Heidelberg when the first news from
Turin arrived, the materials for this vast scheme for an overwhelming and
universal European war not seeming to be at their disposition.  By and by
the Duke's plans seem to deepen and broaden.  He told Mansfeld, who,
accompanied by Secretary Neu, was glad at a pause in his fighting and
brandschatzing in Bohemia to be employed on diplomatic business, that on
the whole he should require the crown of Bohemia for himself.  He also
proposed to accept the Imperial crown, and as for Frederic, he would
leave him the crown of Hungary, and would recommend him to round himself
out by adding to his hereditary dominions the province of Alsace, besides
Upper Austria and other territories in convenient proximity to the
Palatinate.

Venice, it had been hoped, would aid in the great scheme and might
in her turn round herself out with Friuli and Istria and other tempting
possessions of Ferdinand, in reward for the men and money she was
expected to furnish.  That republic had however just concluded a war with
Ferdinand, caused mainly by the depredations of the piratical Uscoques,
in which, as we have seen, she had received the assistance of 4000
Hollanders under command of Count John of Nassau.  The Venetians had
achieved many successes, had taken the city of Gortz, and almost reduced
the city of Gradiska.  A certain colonel Albert Waldstein however,
of whom more might one day be heard in the history of the war now begun,
had beaten the Venetians and opened a pathway through their ranks for
succour to the beleaguered city.  Soon afterwards peace was made on an
undertaking that the Uscoques should be driven from their haunts, their
castles dismantled, and their ships destroyed.

Venice declined an engagement to begin a fresh war.

She hated Ferdinand and Matthias and the whole Imperial brood, but, as
old Barbarigo declared in the Senate, the Republic could not afford to
set her house on fire in order to give Austria the inconvenience of the
smoke.

Meantime, although the Elector-Palatine had magnanimously agreed to use
his influence in Bohemia in favour of Charles Emmanuel, the Duke seems at
last to have declined proposing himself for that throne.  He knew, he
said, that King James wished that station for his son-in-law.  The
Imperial crown belonged to no one as yet after the death of Matthias,
and was open therefore to his competition.

Anhalt demanded of Savoy 15,000 men for the maintenance of the good
cause, asserting that "it would be better to have the Turk or the devil
himself on the German throne than leave it to Ferdinand."

The triumvirate ruling at Prague-Thurn, Ruppa, and Hohenlohe--were
anxious for a decision from Frederic.  That simple-hearted and ingenuous
young elector had long been troubled both with fears lest after all he
might lose the crown of Bohemia and with qualms of conscience as to the
propriety of taking it even if he could get it.  He wrestled much in
prayer and devout meditation whether as anointed prince himself he were
justified in meddling with the anointment of other princes.  Ferdinand
had been accepted, proclaimed, crowned.  He artlessly sent to Prague to
consult the Estates whether they possessed the right to rebel, to set
aside the reigning dynasty, and to choose a new king.  At the same time,
with an eye to business, he stipulated that on account of the great
expense and trouble devolving upon him the crown must be made hereditary
in his family.  The impression made upon the grim Thurn and his
colleagues by the simplicity of these questions may be imagined.  The
splendour and width of the Savoyard's conceptions fascinated the leaders
of the Union.  It seemed to Anspach and Anhalt that it was as well that
Frederic should reign in Hungary as in Bohemia, and the Elector was
docile.  All had relied however on the powerful assistance of the great
defender of the Protestant faith, the father-in-law of the Elector, the
King of Great Britain.  But James had nothing but cold water and
Virgilian quotations for his son's ardour.  He was more under the
influence of Gondemar than ever before, more eagerly hankering for the
Infanta, more completely the slave of Spain.  He pledged himself to that
government that if the Protestants in Bohemia continued rebellious, he
would do his best to frustrate their designs, and would induce his son-
in-law to have no further connection with them.  And Spain delighted his
heart not by immediately sending over the Infanta, but by proposing that
he should mediate between the contending parties.  It would be difficult
to imagine a greater farce.  All central Europe was now in arms.  The
deepest and gravest questions about which men can fight: the right to
worship God according to their conscience and to maintain civil
franchises which have been earned by the people with the blood and
treasure of centuries, were now to be solved by the sword, and the pupil
of Buchanan and the friend of Buckingham was to step between hundreds of
thousands of men in arms with a classical oration.  But James was very
proud of the proposal and accepted it with alacrity.

"You know, my dear son," he wrote to Frederic, "that we are the only
king in Europe that is sought for by friend and foe for his mediation.
It would be for this our lofty part very unbecoming if we were capable
of favouring one of the parties.  Your suggestion that we might secretly
support the Bohemians we must totally reject, as it is not our way to do
anything that we would not willingly confess to the whole world."

And to do James justice, he had never fed Frederic with false hopes,
never given a penny for his great enterprise, nor promised him a penny.
He had contented himself with suggesting from time to time that he might
borrow money of the States-General.  His daughter Elizabeth must take
care of herself, else what would become of her brother's marriage to the
daughter of Spain.

And now it was war to the knife, in which it was impossible that Holland,
as well as all the other great powers should not soon be involved.  It
was disheartening to the cause of freedom and progress, not only that the
great kingdom on which the world, had learned to rely in all movements
upward and onward should be neutralized by the sycophancy of its monarch
to the general oppressor, but that the great republic which so long had
taken the lead in maintaining the liberties of Europe should now be torn
by religious discord within itself, and be turning against the great
statesman who had so wisely guided her councils and so accurately
foretold the catastrophe which was now upon the world.

Meantime the Emperor Matthias, not less forlorn than through his
intrigues and rebellions his brother Rudolph had been made, passed his
days in almost as utter retirement as if he had formally abdicated.
Ferdinand treated him as if in his dotage.  His fair young wife too had
died of hard eating in the beginning of the winter to his inexpressible
grief, so that there was nothing left to solace him now but the
Rudolphian Museum.

He had made but one public appearance since the coronation of Ferdinand
in Prague.  Attended by his brother Maximilian, by King Ferdinand, and by
Cardinal Khlesl, he had towards the end of the year 1617 paid a visit to
the Elector John George at Dresden.  The Imperial party had been received
with much enthusiasm by the great leader of Lutheranism.  The Cardinal
had seriously objected to accompanying the Emperor on this occasion.
Since the Reformation no cardinal had been seen at the court of Saxony.
He cared not personally for the pomps and glories of his rank, but still
as prince of the Church he had settled right of precedence over electors.
To waive it would be disrespectful to the Pope, to claim it would lead to
squabbles.  But Ferdinand had need of his skill to secure the vote of
Saxony at the next Imperial election.  The Cardinal was afraid of
Ferdinand with good reason, and complied.  By an agreeable fiction he was
received at court not as cardinal but as minister, and accommodated with
an humble place at table.  Many looking on with astonishment thought he
would have preferred to dine by himself in retirement.  But this was not
the bitterest of the mortifications that the pastor and guide of Matthias
was to suffer at the hands of Ferdinand before his career should be
closed.  The visit at Dresden was successful, however.  John George,
being a claimant, as we have seen, for the Duchies of Cleve and Julich,
had need of the Emperor.  The King had need of John George's vote.  There
was a series of splendid balls, hunting parties, carousings.

The Emperor was an invalid, the King was abstemious, but the Elector was
a mighty drinker.  It was not his custom nor that of his councillors to
go to bed.  They were usually carried there.  But it was the wish of
Ferdinand to be conciliatory, and he bore himself as well as he could at
the banquet.  The Elector was also a mighty hunter.  Neither of his
Imperial guests cared for field sports, but they looked out contentedly
from the window of a hunting-lodge, before which for their entertainment
the Elector and his courtiers slaughtered eight bears, ten stags, ten
pigs, and eleven badgers, besides a goodly number of other game; John
George shooting also three martens from a pole erected for that purpose
in the courtyard.  It seemed proper for him thus to exhibit a specimen of
the skill for which he was justly famed.  The Elector before his life
closed, so says the chronicle, had killed 28,000 wild boars, 208 bears,
3543 wolves, 200 badgers, 18,967 foxes, besides stags and roedeer in
still greater number, making a grand total of 113,629 beasts.  The leader
of the Lutheran party of Germany had not lived in vain.

Thus the great chiefs of Catholicism and of Protestantism amicably
disported themselves in the last days of the year, while their respective
forces were marshalling for mortal combat all over Christendom.  The
Elector certainly loved neither Matthias nor Ferdinand, but he hated the
Palatine.  The chief of the German Calvinists disputed that Protestant
hegemony which John George claimed by right.  Indeed the immense
advantage enjoyed by the Catholics at the outbreak of the religious war
from the mutual animosities between the two great divisions of the
Reformed Church was already terribly manifest.  What an additional power
would it derive from the increased weakness of the foe, should there be
still other and deeper and more deadly schisms within one great division
itself!

"The Calvinists and Lutherans," cried the Jesuit Scioppius, "are so
furiously attacking each other with calumnies and cursings and are
persecuting each other to such extent as to give good hope that the
devilish weight and burthen of them will go to perdition and shame of
itself, and the heretics all do bloody execution upon each other.
Certainly if ever a golden time existed for exterminating the heretics,
it is the present time."

The Imperial party took their leave of Dresden, believing themselves to
have secured the electoral vote of Saxony; the Elector hoping for
protection to his interests in the duchies through that sequestration to
which Barneveld had opposed such vigorous resistance.  There had been
much slavish cringing before these Catholic potentates by the courtiers
of Dresden, somewhat amazing to the ruder churls of Saxony, the common
people, who really believed in the religion which their prince had
selected for them and himself.

And to complete the glaring contrast, Ferdinand and Matthias had scarcely
turned their backs before tremendous fulminations upon the ancient church
came from the Elector and from all the doctors of theology in Saxony.

For the jubilee of the hundredth anniversary of the Reformation was
celebrated all over Germany in the autumn of this very year, and nearly
at the exact moment of all this dancing, and fuddling, and pig shooting
at Dresden in honour of emperors and cardinals.  And Pope Paul V. had
likewise ordained a jubilee for true believers at almost the same time.

The Elector did not mince matters in his proclamation from any regard
to the feelings of his late guests.  He called on all Protestants to
rejoice, "because the light of the Holy Gospel had now shone brightly in
the electoral dominions for a hundred years, the Omnipotent keeping it
burning notwithstanding the raging and roaring of the hellish enemy and
all his scaly servants."

The doctors of divinity were still more emphatic in their phraseology.
They called on all professors and teachers of the true Evangelical
churches, not only in Germany but throughout Christendom, to keep the
great jubilee.  They did this in terms not calculated certainly to
smother the flames of religious and party hatred, even if it had been
possible at that moment to suppress the fire.  "The great God of Heaven,"
they said, "had caused the undertaking of His holy instrument Mr. Doctor
Martin Luther to prosper.  Through His unspeakable mercy he has driven
away the Papal darkness and caused the sun of righteousness once more to
beam upon the world.  The old idolatries, blasphemies, errors, and
horrors of the benighted Popedom have been exterminated in many kingdoms
and countries.  Innumerable sheep of the Lord Christ have been fed on
the wholesome pasture of the Divine Word in spite of those monstrous,
tearing, ravenous wolves, the Pope and his followers.  The enemy of God
and man, the ancient serpent, may hiss and rage.  Yes, the Roman
antichrist in his frantic blusterings may bite off his own tongue, may
fulminate all kinds of evils, bans, excommunications, wars, desolations,
and burnings, as long and as much as he likes.  But if we take refuge
with the Lord God, what can this inane, worn-out man and water-bubble do
to us?"  With more in the same taste.

The Pope's bull for the Catholic jubilee was far more decorous and lofty
in tone, for it bewailed the general sin in Christendom, and called on
all believers to flee from the wrath about to descend upon the earth,
in terms that were almost prophetic.  He ordered all to pray that the
Lord might lift up His Church, protect it from the wiles of the enemy,
extirpate heresies, grant peace and true unity among Christian princes,
and mercifully avert disasters already coming near.

But if the language of Paul V. was measured and decent, the swarm of
Jesuit pamphleteers that forthwith began to buzz and to sting all over
Christendom were sufficiently venomous.  Scioppius, in his Alarm Trumpet
to the Holy War, and a hundred others declared that all heresies and
heretics were now to be extirpated, the one true church to be united and
re-established, and that the only road to such a consummation was a path
of blood.

The Lutheran preachers, on the other hand, obedient to the summons from
Dresden, vied with each other in every town and village in heaping
denunciations, foul names, and odious imputations on the Catholics;
while the Calvinists, not to be behindhand with their fellow Reformers,
celebrated the jubilee, especially at Heidelberg, by excluding Papists
from hope of salvation, and bewailing the fate of all churches sighing
under the yoke of Rome.

And not only were the Papists and the Reformers exchanging these blasts
and counterblasts of hatred, not less deadly in their effects than the
artillery of many armies, but as if to make a thorough exhibition of
human fatuity when drunk with religious passion, the Lutherans were
making fierce paper and pulpit war upon the Calvinists.  Especially Hoe,
court preacher of John George, ceaselessly hurled savage libels against
them.  In the name of the theological faculty of Wittenberg, he addressed
a "truehearted warning to all Lutheran Christians in Bohemia, Moravia,
Silesia, and other provinces, to beware of the erroneous Calvinistic
religion."  He wrote a letter to Count Schlick, foremost leader in the
Bohemian movement, asking whether "the unquiet Calvinist spirit, should
it gain ascendency, would be any more endurable than the Papists.  Oh
what woe, what infinite woe," he cried, "for those noble countries if
they should all be thrust into the jaws of Calvinism!"

Did not preacher Hoe's master aspire to the crown of Bohemia himself?
Was he not furious at the start which Heidelberg had got of him in the
race for that golden prize?  Was he not mad with jealousy of the
Palatine, of the Palatine's religion, and of the Palatine's claim to
"hegemony" in Germany?

Thus embittered and bloodthirsty towards each other were the two great
sections of the Reformed religion on the first centennial jubilee of the
Reformation.  Such was the divided front which the anti-Catholic party
presented at the outbreak of the war with Catholicism.

Ferdinand, on the other hand, was at the head of a comparatively united
party.  He could hardly hope for more than benevolent neutrality from the
French government, which, in spite of the Spanish marriages, dared not
wholly desert the Netherlands and throw itself into the hands of Spain;
but Spanish diplomacy had enslaved the British king, and converted what
should have been an active and most powerful enemy into an efficient if
concealed ally.  The Spanish and archiducal armies were enveloping the
Dutch republic, from whence the most powerful support could be expected
for the Protestant cause.  Had it not been for the steadiness of
Barneveld, Spain would have been at that moment established in full
panoply over the whole surface of those inestimable positions, the
disputed duchies.  Venice was lukewarm, if not frigid; and Savoy,
although deeply pledged by passion and interest to the downfall of the
House of Austria, was too dangerously situated herself, too distant, too
poor, and too Catholic to be very formidable.

Ferdinand was safe from the Turkish side.  A twenty years' peace,
renewable by agreement, between the Holy Empire and the Sultan had been
negotiated by those two sons of bakers, Cardinal Khlesl and the Vizier
Etmekdschifade.  It was destined to endure through all the horrors of the
great war, a stronger protection to Vienna than all the fortifications
which the engineering art could invent.  He was safe too from Poland,
King Sigmund being not only a devoted Catholic but doubly his brother-in-
law.

Spain, therefore, the Spanish Netherlands, the Pope, and the German
League headed by Maximilian of Bavaria, the ablest prince on the
continent of Europe, presented a square, magnificent phalanx on which
Ferdinand might rely.  The States-General, on the other hand, were a most
dangerous foe.  With a centennial hatred of Spain, splendidly disciplined
armies and foremost navy of the world, with an admirable financial system
and vast commercial resources, with a great stadholder, first captain of
the age, thirsting for war, and allied in blood as well as religion to
the standard-bearer of the Bohemian revolt; with councils directed by the
wisest and most experienced of living statesman, and with the very life
blood of her being derived from the fountain of civil and religious
liberty, the great Republic of the United Netherlands--her Truce with the
hereditary foe just expiring was, if indeed united, strong enough at the
head of the Protestant forces of Europe to dictate to a world in arms.

Alas! was it united?

As regarded internal affairs of most pressing interest, the electoral
vote at the next election at Frankfurt had been calculated as being
likely to yield a majority of one for the opposition candidate, should
the Savoyard or any other opposition candidate be found.  But the
calculation was a close one and might easily be fallacious.  Supposing
the Palatine elected King of Bohemia by the rebellious estates, as was
probable, he could of course give the vote of that electorate and his own
against Ferdinand, and the vote of Brandenburg at that time seemed safe.
But Ferdinand by his visit to Dresden had secured the vote of Saxony,
while of the three ecclesiastical electors, Cologne and Mayence were sure
for him.  Thus it would be three and three, and the seventh and decisive
vote would be that of the Elector-Bishop of Treves.  The sanguine
Frederic thought that with French influence and a round sum of money this
ecclesiastic might be got to vote for the opposition candidate.  The
ingenious combination was not destined to be successful, and as there has
been no intention in the present volume to do more than slightly indicate
the most prominent movements and mainsprings of the great struggle so far
as Germany is concerned, without entering into detail, it may be as well
to remind the reader that it proved wonderfully wrong.  Matthias died on
the 20th March, 1619, the election of a new emperor took place at
Frankfurt On the 28th of the following August, and not only did Saxony
and all three ecclesiastical electors vote for Ferdinand, but Brandenburg
likewise, as well as the Elector-Palatine himself, while Ferdinand,
personally present in the assembly as Elector of Bohemia, might according
to the Golden Bull have given the seventh vote for himself had he chosen
to do so.  Thus the election was unanimous.

Strange to say, as the electors proceeded through the crowd from the hall
of election to accompany the new emperor to the church where he was to
receive the popular acclaim, the news reached them from Prague that the
Elector-Palatine had been elected King of Bohemia.

Thus Frederic, by voting for Ferdinand, had made himself voluntarily a
rebel should he accept the crown now offered him.  Had the news arrived
sooner, a different result and even a different history might have been
possible.




CHAPTER XIV.

Barneveld connected with the East India Company, but opposed to the West
India Company--Carleton comes from Venice inimical to Barneveld--
Maurice openly the Chieftain of the Contra-Remonstrants--Tumults
about the Churches--"Orange or Spain" the Cry of Prince Maurice and
his Party--They take possession of the Cloister Church--"The Sharp
Resolve"--Carleton's Orations before the States-General.

King James never forgave Barneveld for drawing from him those famous
letters to the States in which he was made to approve the Five Points
and to admit the possibility of salvation under them.  These epistles
had brought much ridicule upon James, who was not amused by finding his
theological discussions a laughing-stock.  He was still more incensed by
the biting criticisms made upon the cheap surrender of the cautionary
towns, and he hated more than ever the statesman who, as he believed,
had twice outwitted him.

On the other hand, Maurice, inspired by his brother-in-law the Duke of
Bouillon and by the infuriated Francis Aerssens, abhorred Barneveld's
French policy, which was freely denounced by the French Calvinists and
by the whole orthodox church.  In Holland he was still warmly sustained
except in the Contra-Remonstrant Amsterdam and a few other cities of less
importance.  But there were perhaps deeper reasons for the Advocate's
unpopularity in the great commercial metropolis than theological
pretexts.  Barneveld's name and interests were identified with the great
East India Company, which was now powerful and prosperous beyond anything
ever dreamt of before in the annals of commerce.  That trading company
had already founded an empire in the East.  Fifty ships of war,
fortresses guarded by 4000 pieces of artillery and 10,000 soldiers and
sailors, obeyed the orders of a dozen private gentlemen at home seated in
a back parlour around a green table.  The profits of each trading voyage
were enormous, and the shareholders were growing rich beyond their
wildest imaginings.  To no individual so much as to Holland's Advocate
was this unexampled success to be ascribed.  The vast prosperity of the
East India Company had inspired others with the ambition to found a
similar enterprise in the West.  But to the West India Company then
projected and especially favoured in Amsterdam, Barneveld was firmly
opposed.  He considered it as bound up with the spirit of military
adventure and conquest, and as likely to bring on prematurely and
unwisely a renewed conflict with Spain.  The same reasons which had
caused him to urge the Truce now influenced his position in regard
to the West India Company.

Thus the clouds were gathering every day more darkly over the head of
the Advocate.  The powerful mercantile interest in the great seat of
traffic in the Republic, the personal animosity of the Stadholder,
the execrations of the orthodox party in France, England, and all the
Netherlands, the anger of the French princes and all those of the old
Huguenot party who had been foolish enough to act with the princes in
their purely selfish schemes against the, government, and the overflowing
hatred of King James, whose darling schemes of Spanish marriages and a
Spanish alliance had been foiled by the Advocate's masterly policy in
France and in the duchies, and whose resentment at having been so
completely worsted and disarmed in the predestination matter and in the
redemption of the great mortgage had deepened into as terrible wrath as
outraged bigotry and vanity could engender; all these elements made up a
stormy atmosphere in which the strongest heart might have quailed.  But
Barneveld did not quail.  Doubtless he loved power, and the more danger
he found on every side the less inclined he was to succumb.  But he
honestly believed that the safety and prosperity of the country he had
so long and faithfully served were identified with the policy which he
was pursuing.  Arrogant, overbearing, self-concentrated, accustomed to
lead senates and to guide the councils and share the secrets of kings,
familiar with and almost an actor in every event in the political history
not only of his own country but of every important state in Christendom
during nearly two generations of mankind, of unmatched industry, full
of years and experience, yet feeling within him the youthful strength
of a thousand intellects compared to most of those by which he was
calumniated, confronted, and harassed; he accepted the great fight which
was forced upon him.  Irascible, courageous, austere, contemptuous, he
looked around and saw the Republic whose cradle he had rocked grown to be
one of the most powerful and prosperous among the states of the world,
and could with difficulty imagine that in this supreme hour of her
strength and her felicity she was ready to turn and rend the man whom
she was bound by every tie of duty to cherish and to revere.

Sir Dudley Carleton, the new English ambassador to the States, had
arrived during the past year red-hot from Venice.  There he had perhaps
not learned especially to love the new republic which had arisen among
the northern lagunes, and whose admission among the nations had been at
last accorded by the proud Queen of the Adriatic, notwithstanding the
objections and the intrigues both of French and English representatives.
He had come charged to the brim with the political spite of James against
the Advocate, and provided too with more than seven vials of theological
wrath.  Such was the King's revenge for Barneveld's recent successes.
The supporters in the Netherlands of the civil authority over the Church
were moreover to be instructed by the political head of the English
Church that such supremacy, although highly proper for a king, was
"thoroughly unsuitable for a many-headed republic."  So much for church
government.  As for doctrine, Arminianism and Vorstianism were to be
blasted with one thunderstroke from the British throne.

"In Holland," said James to his envoy, "there have been violent and sharp
contestations amongst the towns in the cause of religion .  .  .  .  .
If they shall be unhappily revived during your time, you shall not forget
that you are the minister of that master whom God hath made the sole
protector of His religion."

There was to be no misunderstanding in future as to the dogmas which
the royal pope of Great Britain meant to prescribe to his Netherland
subjects.  Three years before, at the dictation of the Advocate, he had
informed the States that he was convinced of their ability to settle the
deplorable dissensions as to religion according to their wisdom and the
power which belonged to them over churches and church servants.  He had
informed them of his having learned by experience that such questions
could hardly be decided by the wranglings of theological professors, and
that it was better to settle them by public authority and to forbid their
being brought into the pulpit or among common people.  He had recommended
mutual toleration of religious difference until otherwise ordained by the
public civil authority, and had declared that neither of the two opinions
in regard to predestination was in his opinion far from the truth or
inconsistent with Christian faith or the salvation of souls.

It was no wonder that these utterances were quite after the Advocate's
heart, as James had faithfully copied them from the Advocate's draft.

But now in the exercise of his infallibility the King issued other
decrees.  His minister was instructed to support the extreme views of the
orthodox both as to government and dogma, and to urge the National Synod,
as it were, at push of pike.  "Besides the assistance," said he to
Carleton, "which we would have you give to the true professors of the
Gospel in your discourse and conferences, you may let fall how hateful
the maintenance of these erroneous opinions is to the majesty of God, how
displeasing unto us their dearest friends, and how disgraceful to the
honour and government of that state."

And faithfully did the Ambassador act up to his instructions.  Most
sympathetically did he embody the hatred of the King.  An able,
experienced, highly accomplished diplomatist and scholar, ready with
tongue and pen, caustic, censorious, prejudiced, and partial, he was soon
foremost among the foes of the Advocate in the little court of the Hague,
and prepared at any moment to flourish the political and theological goad
when his master gave the word.

Nothing in diplomatic history is more eccentric than the long sermons
upon abstruse points of divinity and ecclesiastical history which the
English ambassador delivered from time to time before the States-General
in accordance with elaborate instructions drawn up by his sovereign with
his own hand.  Rarely has a king been more tedious, and he bestowed all
his tediousness upon My Lords the States-General.  Nothing could be more
dismal than these discourses, except perhaps the contemporaneous and
interminable orations of Grotius to the states of Holland, to the
magistrates of Amsterdam, to the states of Utrecht; yet Carleton was a
man of the world, a good debater, a ready writer, while Hugo Grotius was
one of the great lights of that age and which shone for all time.

Among the diplomatic controversies of history, rarely refreshing at best,
few have been more drouthy than those once famous disquisitions, and they
shall be left to shrivel into the nothingness of the past, so far as is
consistent with the absolute necessities of this narrative.

The contest to which the Advocate was called had become mainly a personal
and a political one, although the weapons with which it was fought were
taken from ecclesiastical arsenals.  It was now an unequal contest.

For the great captain of the country and of his time, the son of William
the Silent, the martial stadholder, in the fulness of his fame and vigour
of his years, had now openly taken his place as the chieftain of the
Contra-Remonstrants.  The conflict between the civil and the military
element for supremacy in a free commonwealth has never been more vividly
typified than in this death-grapple between Maurice and Barneveld.

The aged but still vigorous statesman, ripe with half a century of
political lore, and the high-born, brilliant, and scientific soldier,
with the laurels of Turnhout and Nieuwpoort and of a hundred famous
sieges upon his helmet, reformer of military science, and no mean
proficient in the art of politics and government, were the
representatives and leaders of the two great parties into which the
Commonwealth had now unhappily divided itself.  But all history shows
that the brilliant soldier of a republic is apt to have the advantage,
in a struggle for popular affection and popular applause, over the
statesman, however consummate.  The general imagination is more excited
by the triumphs of the field than by those of the tribune, and the man
who has passed many years of life in commanding multitudes with
necessarily despotic sway is often supposed to have gained in the process
the attributes likely to render him most valuable as chief citizen of a
flee commonwealth.  Yet national enthusiasm is so universally excited by
splendid military service as to forbid a doubt that the sentiment is
rooted deeply in our nature, while both in antiquity and in modern times
there are noble although rare examples of the successful soldier
converting himself into a valuable and exemplary magistrate.

In the rivalry of Maurice and Barneveld however for the national
affection the chances were singularly against the Advocate.  The great
battles and sieges of the Prince had been on a world's theatre, had
enchained the attention of Christendom, and on their issue had frequently
depended, or seemed to depend, the very existence of the nation.  The
labours of the statesman, on the contrary, had been comparatively secret.
His noble orations and arguments had been spoken with closed doors to
assemblies of colleagues--rather envoys than senators--were never printed
or even reported, and could be judged of only by their effects; while his
vast labours in directing both the internal administration and especially
the foreign affairs of the Commonwealth had been by their very nature as
secret as they were perpetual and enormous.

Moreover, there was little of what we now understand as the democratic
sentiment in the Netherlands.  There was deep and sturdy attachment to
ancient traditions, privileges, special constitutions extorted from a
power acknowledged to be superior to the people.  When partly to save
those chartered rights, and partly to overthrow the horrible
ecclesiastical tyranny of the sixteenth century, the people had
accomplished a successful revolt, they never dreamt of popular
sovereignty, but allowed the municipal corporations, by which their
local affairs had been for centuries transacted, to unite in offering
to foreign princes, one after another, the crown which they had torn
from the head of the Spanish king.  When none was found to accept the
dangerous honour, they had acquiesced in the practical sovereignty of the
States; but whether the States-General or the States-Provincial were the
supreme authority had certainly not been definitely and categorically
settled.  So long as the States of Holland, led by the Advocate, had
controlled in great matters the political action of the States-General,
while the Stadholder stood without a rival at the head of their military
affairs, and so long as there were no fierce disputes as to government
and dogma within the bosom of the Reformed Church, the questions which
were now inflaming the whole population had been allowed to slumber.

The termination of the war and the rise of Arminianism were almost
contemporaneous.  The Stadholder, who so unwillingly had seen the
occupation in which he had won so much glory taken from him by the Truce,
might perhaps find less congenial but sufficiently engrossing business as
champion of the Church and of the Union.

The new church--not freedom of worship for different denominations of
Christians, but supremacy of the Church of Heidelberg and Geneva--seemed
likely to be the result of the overthrow of the ancient church.  It is
the essence of the Catholic Church to claim supremacy over and immunity
from the civil authority, and to this claim for the Reformed Church, by
which that of Rome had been supplanted, Barneveld was strenuously
opposed.

The Stadholder was backed, therefore, by the Church in its purity, by the
majority of the humbler classes--who found in membership of the oligarchy
of Heaven a substitute for those democratic aspirations on earth which
were effectually suppressed between the two millstones of burgher
aristocracy and military discipline--and by the States-General,
a majority of which were Contra-Remonstrant in their faith.

If the sword is usually an overmatch for the long robe in political
struggles, the cassock has often proved superior to both combined.  But
in the case now occupying our attention the cassock was in alliance with
the sword.  Clearly the contest was becoming a desperate one for the
statesman.

And while the controversy between the chiefs waged hotter and hotter, the
tumults around the churches on Sundays in every town and village grew
more and more furious, ending generally in open fights with knives,
bludgeons, and brickbats; preachers and magistrates being often too glad
to escape with a whole skin.  One can hardly be ingenuous enough to
consider all this dirking, battering, and fisticuffing as the legitimate
and healthy outcome of a difference as to the knotty point whether all
men might or might not be saved by repentance and faith in Christ.

The Greens and Blues of the Byzantine circus had not been more typical
of fierce party warfare in the Lower Empire than the greens and blues
of predestination in the rising commonwealth, according to the real or
imagined epigram of Prince Maurice.

"Your divisions in religion," wrote Secretary Lake to Carleton, "have, I
doubt not, a deeper root than is discerned by every one, and I doubt not
that the Prince Maurice's carriage doth make a jealousy of affecting a
party under the pretence of supporting one side, and that the States
fear his ends and aims, knowing his power with the men of war; and that
howsoever all be shadowed under the name of religion there is on either
part a civil end, of the one seeking a step of higher authority, of the
other a preservation of liberty."

And in addition to other advantages the Contra-Remonstrants had now got a
good cry--an inestimable privilege in party contests.

"There are two factions in the land," said Maurice, "that of Orange and
that of Spain, and the two chiefs of the Spanish faction are those
political and priestly Arminians, Uytenbogaert and Oldenbarneveld."

Orange and Spain!  the one name associated with all that was most
venerated and beloved throughout the country, for William the Silent
since his death was almost a god; the other ineradicably entwined at that
moment with, everything execrated throughout the land.  The Prince of
Orange's claim to be head of the Orange faction could hardly be disputed,
but it was a master stroke of political malice to fix the stigma of
Spanish partisanship on the Advocate.  If the venerable patriot who had
been fighting Spain, sometimes on the battle-field and always in the
council, ever since he came to man's estate, could be imagined even in
a dream capable of being bought with Spanish gold to betray his country,
who in the ranks of the Remonstrant party could be safe from such
accusations?  Each party accused the other of designs for altering or
subverting the government.  Maurice was suspected of what were called
Leicestrian projects, "Leycestrana consilia"--for the Earl's plots to
gain possession of Leyden and Utrecht had never been forgotten--while
the Prince and those who acted with him asserted distinctly that it was
the purpose of Barneveld to pave the way for restoring the Spanish
sovereignty and the Popish religion so soon as the Truce had reached its
end?

Spain and Orange.  Nothing for a faction fight could be neater.  Moreover
the two words rhyme in Netherlandish, which is the case in no other
language, "Spanje-Oranje."  The sword was drawn and the banner unfurled.

The "Mud Beggars" of the Hague, tired of tramping to Ryswyk of a Sunday
to listen to Henry Rosaeus, determined on a private conventicle in the
capital.  The first barn selected was sealed up by the authorities, but
Epoch Much, book-keeper of Prince Maurice, then lent them his house.  The
Prince declared that sooner than they should want a place of assembling
he would give them his own.  But he meant that they should have a public
church to themselves, and that very soon.  King James thoroughly approved
of all these proceedings.  At that very instant such of his own subjects
as had seceded from the Established Church to hold conventicles in barns
and breweries and backshops in London were hunted by him with bishops'
pursuivants and other beagles like vilest criminals, thrown into prison
to rot, or suffered to escape from their Fatherland into the trans-
Atlantic wilderness, there to battle with wild beasts and savages, and
to die without knowing themselves the fathers of a more powerful United
States than the Dutch Republic, where they were fain to seek in passing a
temporary shelter.  He none the less instructed his envoy at the Hague to
preach the selfsame doctrines for which the New England Puritans were
persecuted, and importunately and dictatorially to plead the cause of
those Hollanders who, like Bradford and Robinson, Winthrop and Cotton,
maintained the independence of the Church over the State.

Logic is rarely the quality on which kings pride themselves, and
Puritanism in the Netherlands, although under temporary disadvantage at
the Hague, was evidently the party destined to triumph throughout the
country.  James could safely sympathize therefore in Holland with what he
most loathed in England, and could at the same time feed fat the grudge
he owed the Advocate.  The calculations of Barneveld as to the respective
political forces of the Commonwealth seem to have been to a certain
extent defective.

He allowed probably too much weight to the Catholic party as a motive
power at that moment, and he was anxious both from that consideration and
from his honest natural instinct for general toleration; his own broad
and unbigoted views in religious matters, not to force that party into a
rebellious attitude dangerous to the state.  We have seen how nearly a
mutiny in the important city of Utrecht, set on foot by certain Romanist
conspirators in the years immediately succeeding the Truce, had subverted
the government, had excited much anxiety amongst the firmest allies of
the Republic, and had been suppressed only by the decision of the
Advocate and a show of military force.

He had informed Carleton not long after his arrival that in the United
Provinces, and in Holland in particular, were many sects and religions of
which, according to his expression, "the healthiest and the richest part
were the Papists, while the Protestants did not make up one-third part of
the inhabitants."

Certainly, if these statistics were correct or nearly correct, there
could be nothing more stupid from a purely political point of view than
to exasperate so influential a portion of the community to madness and
rebellion by refusing them all rights of public worship.  Yet because
the Advocate had uniformly recommended indulgence, he had incurred more
odium at home than from any other cause.  Of course he was a Papist in
disguise, ready to sell his country to Spain, because he was willing that
more than half the population of the country should be allowed to worship
God according to their conscience.  Surely it would be wrong to judge the
condition of things at that epoch by the lights of to-day, and perhaps in
the Netherlands there had before been no conspicuous personage, save
William the Silent alone, who had risen to the height of toleration
on which the Advocate essayed to stand.  Other leading politicians
considered that the national liberties could be preserved only by
retaining the Catholics in complete subjection.

At any rate the Advocate was profoundly convinced of the necessity of
maintaining harmony and mutual toleration among the Protestants
themselves, who, as he said, made up but one-third of the whole people.
In conversing with the English ambassador he divided them into "Puritans
and double Puritans," as they would be called, he said, in England.  If
these should be at variance with each other, he argued, the Papists would
be the strongest of all.  "To prevent this inconvenience," he said, "the
States were endeavouring to settle some certain form of government in the
Church; which being composed of divers persecuted churches such as in the
beginning of the wars had their refuge here, that which during the wars
could not be so well done they now thought seasonable for a time of
truce; and therefore would show their authority in preventing the schism
of the Church which would follow the separation of those they call
Remonstrants and Contra-Remonstrants."

There being no word so offensive to Carleton's sovereign as the word
Puritan, the Ambassador did his best to persuade the Advocate that a
Puritan in Holland was a very different thing from a Puritan in England.
In England he was a noxious vermin, to be hunted with dogs.  In the
Netherlands he was the governing power.  But his arguments were vapourous
enough and made little impression on Barneveld.  "He would no ways
yield," said Sir Dudley.

Meantime the Contra-Remonstrants of the Hague, not finding sufficient
accommodation in Enoch Much's house, clamoured loudly for the use of a
church.  It was answered by the city magistrates that two of their
persuasion, La Motte and La Faille, preached regularly in the Great
Church, and that Rosaeus had been silenced only because he refused
to hold communion with Uytenbogaert.  Maurice insisted that a separate
church should be assigned them.  "But this is open schism," said
Uytenbogaert.

Early in the year there was a meeting of the Holland delegation to the
States-General, of the state council, and of the magistracy of the Hague,
of deputies from the tribunals, and of all the nobles resident in the
capital.  They sent for Maurice and asked his opinion as to the alarming
situation of affairs.  He called for the register-books of the States of
Holland, and turning back to the pages on which was recorded his
accession to the stadholderate soon after his father's murder, ordered
the oath then exchanged between himself and the States to be read aloud.

That oath bound them mutually to support the Reformed religion till the
last drop of blood in their veins.

"That oath I mean to keep," said the Stadholder, "so long as I live."

No one disputed the obligation of all parties to maintain the Reformed
religion.  But the question was whether the Five Points were inconsistent
with the Reformed religion.  The contrary was clamorously maintained by
most of those present: In the year 1586 this difference in dogma had not
arisen, and as the large majority of the people at the Hague, including
nearly all those of rank and substance, were of the Remonstrant
persuasion, they naturally found it not agreeable to be sent out of the
church by a small minority.  But Maurice chose to settle the question
very summarily.  His father had been raised to power by the strict
Calvinists, and he meant to stand by those who had always sustained
William the Silent.  "For this religion my father lost his life, and this
religion will I defend," said he.

"You hold then," said Barneveld, "that the Almighty has created one child
for damnation and another for salvation, and you wish this doctrine to be
publicly preached."

"Did you ever hear any one preach that?" replied the Prince.

"If they don't preach it, it is their inmost conviction," said the other.
And he proceeded to prove his position by copious citations.

"And suppose our ministers do preach this doctrine, is there anything
strange in it, any reason why they should not do so?"

The Advocate expressed his amazement and horror at the idea.

"But does not God know from all eternity who is to be saved and who to be
damned; and does He create men for any other end than that to which He
from eternity knows they will come?"

And so they enclosed themselves in the eternal circle out of which it was
not probable that either the soldier or the statesman would soon find an
issue.

"I am no theologian," said Barneveld at last, breaking off the
discussion.

"Neither am I," said the Stadholder.  "So let the parsons come together.
Let the Synod assemble and decide the question.  Thus we shall get out of
all this."

Next day a deputation of the secessionists waited by appointment on
Prince Maurice.  They found him in the ancient mediaeval hall of the
sovereign counts of Holland, and seated on their old chair of state.
He recommended them to use caution and moderation for the present,
and to go next Sunday once more to Ryswyk.  Afterwards he pledged himself
that they should have a church at the Hague, and, if necessary, the Great
Church itself.

But the Great Church, although a very considerable Catholic cathedral
before the Reformation, was not big enough now to hold both Henry Rosaeus
and John Uytenbogaert.  Those two eloquent, learned, and most pugnacious
divines were the respective champions in the pulpit of the opposing
parties, as were the Advocate and the Stadholder in the council.  And
there was as bitter personal rivalry between the two as between the
soldier and statesman.

"The factions begin to divide themselves," said Carleton, "betwixt his
Excellency and Monsieur Barneveld as heads who join to this present
difference their ancient quarrels.  And the schism rests actually between
Uytenbogaert and Rosaeus, whose private emulation and envy (both being
much applauded and followed) doth no good towards the public
pacification."  Uytenbogaert repeatedly offered, however, to resign his
functions and to leave the Hague.  "He was always ready to play the
Jonah," he said.

A temporary arrangement was made soon afterwards by which Rosaeus and his
congregation should have the use of what was called the Gasthuis Kerk,
then appropriated to the English embassy.

Carleton of course gave his consent most willingly.  The Prince declared
that the States of Holland and the city magistracy had personally
affronted him by the obstacles they had interposed to the public worship
of the Contra-Remonstrants.  With their cause he had now thoroughly
identified himself.

The hostility between the representatives of the civil and military
authority waxed fiercer every hour.  The tumults were more terrible than
ever.  Plainly there was no room in the Commonwealth for the Advocate and
the Stadholder.  Some impartial persons believed that there would be no
peace until both were got rid of.  "There are many words among this free-
spoken people," said Carleton, "that to end these differences they must
follow the example of France in Marshal d'Ancre's case, and take off the
heads of both chiefs."

But these decided persons were in a small minority.  Meantime the States
of Holland met in full assembly; sixty delegates being present.

It was proposed to invite his Excellency to take part in the
deliberations.  A committee which had waited upon him the day before
had reported him as in favour of moderate rather than harsh measures in
the church affair, while maintaining his plighted word to the seceders.

Barneveld stoutly opposed the motion.

"What need had the sovereign states of Holland of advice from a
stadholder, from their servant, their functionary?" he cried.

But the majority for once thought otherwise.  The Prince was invited to
come.  The deliberations were moderate but inconclusive.  He appeared
again at an adjourned meeting when the councils were not so harmonious.

Barneveld, Grotius, and other eloquent speakers endeavoured to point out
that the refusal of the seceders to hold communion with the Remonstrant
preachers and to insist on a separation was fast driving the state to
perdition.  They warmly recommended mutual toleration and harmony.
Grotius exhausted learning and rhetoric to prove that the Five Points
were not inconsistent with salvation nor with the constitution of the
United Provinces.

The Stadholder grew impatient at last and clapped his hand on his rapier.

"No need here," he said, "of flowery orations and learned arguments.
With this good sword I will defend the religion which my father planted
in these Provinces, and I should like to see the man who is going to
prevent me!"

The words had an heroic ring in the ears of such as are ever ready to
applaud brute force, especially when wielded by a prince.  The argumentum
ad ensem, however, was the last plea that William the Silent would have
been likely to employ on such an occasion, nor would it have been easy to
prove that the Reformed religion had been "planted" by one who had drawn
the sword against the foreign tyrant, and had made vast sacrifices for
his country's independence years before abjuring communion with the Roman
Catholic Church.

When swords are handled by the executive in presence of civil assemblies
there is usually but one issue to be expected.

Moreover, three whales had recently been stranded at Scheveningen,
one of them more than sixty feet long, and men wagged their beards
gravely as they spoke of the event, deeming it a certain presage of
civil commotions.  It was remembered that at the outbreak of the great
war two whales had been washed ashore in the Scheldt.  Although some
free-thinking people were inclined to ascribe the phenomenon to a
prevalence of strong westerly gales, while others found proof in it of a
superabundance of those creatures in the Polar seas, which should rather
give encouragement to the Dutch and Zealand fisheries, it is probable
that quite as dark forebodings of coming disaster were caused by this
accident as by the trumpet-like defiance which the Stadholder had just
delivered to the States of Holland.

Meantime the seceding congregation of the Hague had become wearied of the
English or Gasthuis Church, and another and larger one had been promised
them.  This was an ancient convent on one of the principal streets of the
town, now used as a cannon-foundry.  The Prince personally superintended
the preparations for getting ready this place of worship, which was
thenceforth called the Cloister Church.  But delays were, as the Contra-
Remonstrants believed, purposely interposed, so that it was nearly
Midsummer before there were any signs of the church being fit for use.

They hastened accordingly to carry it, as it were, by assault.  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.  The miscellaneous pieces of artillery
and other fire-arms lying about, with piles of cannon-ball which there
had not been time to remove, were hardly less belligerent and threatening
of aspect than the stern faces of the crowd occupied in thoroughly
preparing the house for its solemn destination.  It was determined that
there should be accommodation on the next Sunday for all who came to the
service.  An army of carpenters, joiners, glaziers, and other workmen-
assisted by a mob of citizens of all ranks and ages, men and women,
gentle and simple were busily engaged in bringing planks and benches;
working with plane, adze, hammer and saw, trowel and shovel, to complete
the work.

On the next Sunday the Prince attended public worship for the last time
at the Great Church under the ministration of Uytenbogaert.  He was
infuriated with the sermon, in which the bold Remonstrant bitterly
inveighed against the proposition for a National Synod.  To oppose that
measure publicly in the very face of the Stadholder, who now considered
himself as the Synod personified, seemed to him flat blasphemy.  Coming
out of the church with his step-mother, the widowed Louise de Coligny,
Princess of Orange, he denounced the man in unmeasured terms.  "He is the
enemy of God," said Maurice.  At least from that time forth, and indeed
for a year before, Maurice was the enemy of the preacher.

On the following Sunday, July 23, Maurice went in solemn state to the
divine service at the Cloister Church now thoroughly organized.  He was
accompanied by his cousin, the famous Count William Lewis of Nassau,
Stadholder of Friesland, who had never concealed his warm sympathy with
the Contra-Remonstrants, and by all the chief officers of his household
and members of his staff.  It was an imposing demonstration and meant for
one.  As the martial stadholder at the head of his brilliant cavalcade
rode forth across the drawbridge from the Inner Court of the old moated
palace--where the ancient sovereign Dirks and Florences of Holland had so
long ruled their stout little principality--along the shady and stately
Kneuterdyk and so through the Voorhout, an immense crowd thronged around
his path and accompanied him to the church.  It was as if the great
soldier were marching to siege or battle-field where fresher glories
than those of Sluys or Geertruidenberg were awaiting him.

The train passed by Barneveld's house and entered the cloister.  More
than four thousand persons were present at the service or crowded around
the doors vainly attempting to gain admission into the overflowing
aisles; while the Great Church was left comparatively empty, a few
hundred only worshipping there.  The Cloister Church was thenceforth
called the Prince's Church, and a great revolution was beginning even
in the Hague.

The Advocate was wroth as he saw the procession graced by the two
stadholders and their military attendants.  He knew that he was now to
bow his head to the Church thus championed by the chief personage and
captain-general of the state, to renounce his dreams of religious
toleration, to sink from his post of supreme civic ruler, or to accept an
unequal struggle in which he might utterly succumb.  But his iron nature
would break sooner than bend.  In the first transports of his indignation
he is said to have vowed vengeance against the immediate instruments by
which the Cloister Church had, as he conceived, been surreptitiously and
feloniously seized.  He meant to strike a blow which should startle the
whole population of the Hague, send a thrill of horror through the
country, and teach men to beware how they trifled with the sovereign
states of Holland, whose authority had so long been undisputed, and with
him their chief functionary.

He resolved--so ran the tale of the preacher Trigland, who told it to
Prince Maurice, and has preserved it in his chronicle--to cause to be
seized at midnight from their beds four men whom he considered the
ringleaders in this mutiny, to have them taken to the place of execution
on the square in the midst of the city, to have their heads cut off at
once by warrant from the chief tribunal without any previous warning, and
then to summon all the citizens at dawn of day, by ringing of bells and
firing of cannon, to gaze on the ghastly spectacle, and teach them to
what fate this pestilential schism and revolt against authority had
brought its humble tools.  The victims were to be Enoch Much, the
Prince's book-keeper, and three others, an attorney, an engraver, and an
apothecary, all of course of the Contra-Remonstrant persuasion.  It was
necessary, said the Advocate, to make once for all an example, and show
that there was a government in the land.

He had reckoned on a ready adhesion to this measure and a sentence from
the tribunal through the influence of his son-in-law, the Seignior van
Veenhuyzen, who was president of the chief court.  His attempt was foiled
however by the stern opposition of two Zealand members of the court, who
managed to bring up from a bed of sickness, where he had long been lying,
a Holland councillor whom they knew to be likewise opposed to the fierce
measure, and thus defeated it by a majority of one.

Such is the story as told by contemporaries and repeated from that day to
this.  It is hardly necessary to say that Barneveld calmly denied having
conceived or even heard of the scheme.  That men could go about looking
each other in the face and rehearsing such gibberish would seem
sufficiently dispiriting did we not know to what depths of credulity men
in all ages can sink when possessed by the demon of party malice.

If it had been narrated on the Exchange at Amsterdam or Flushing during
that portentous midsummer that Barneveld had not only beheaded but
roasted alive, and fed the dogs and cats upon the attorney, the
apothecary, and the engraver, there would have been citizens in
plenty to devour the news with avidity.

But although the Advocate had never imagined such extravagances as these,
it is certain that he had now resolved upon very bold measures, and that
too without an instant's delay.  He suspected the Prince of aiming at
sovereignty not only over Holland but over all the provinces and to be
using the Synod as a principal part of his machinery.  The gauntlet was
thrown down by the Stadholder, and the Advocate lifted it at once.  The
issue of the struggle would depend upon the political colour of the town
magistracies.  Barneveld instinctively felt that Maurice, being now
resolved that the Synod should be held, would lose no time in making a
revolution in all the towns through the power he held or could plausibly
usurp.  Such a course would, in his opinion, lead directly to an
unconstitutional and violent subversion of the sovereign rights of each
province, to the advantage of the central government.  A religious creed
would be forced upon Holland and perhaps upon two other provinces which
was repugnant to a considerable majority of the people.  And this would
be done by a majority vote of the States-General, on a matter over which,
by the 13th Article of the fundamental compact--the Union of Utrecht--
the States-General had no control, each province having reserved the
disposition of religious affairs to itself.  For let it never be
forgotten that the Union of the Netherlands was a compact, a treaty, an
agreement between sovereign states.  There was no pretence that it was an
incorporation, that the people had laid down a constitution, an organic
law.  The people were never consulted, did not exist, had not for
political purposes been invented.  It was the great primal defect of
their institutions, but the Netherlanders would have been centuries
before their age had they been able to remedy that defect.  Yet the
Netherlanders would have been much behind even that age of bigotry had
they admitted the possibility in a free commonwealth, of that most sacred
and important of all subjects that concern humanity, religious creed--the
relation of man to his Maker--to be regulated by the party vote of a
political board.

It was with no thought of treason in his heart or his head therefore that
the Advocate now resolved that the States of Holland and the cities of
which that college was composed should protect their liberties and
privileges, the sum of which in his opinion made up the sovereignty of
the province he served, and that they should protect them, if necessary,
by force.  Force was apprehended.  It should be met by force.  To be
forewarned was to be forearmed.  Barneveld forewarned the States of
Holland.

On the 4th August 1617, he proposed to that assembly a resolution which
was destined to become famous.  A majority accepted it after brief
debate.  It was to this effect.

The States having seen what had befallen in many cities, and especially
in the Hague, against the order, liberties, and laws of the land, and
having in vain attempted to bring into harmony with the States certain
cities which refused to co-operate with the majority, had at last
resolved to refuse the National Synod, as conflicting with the
sovereignty and laws of Holland.  They had thought good to set forth in
public print their views as to religious worship, and to take measures to
prevent all deeds of violence against persons and property.  To this end
the regents of cities were authorized in case of need, until otherwise
ordained, to enrol men-at-arms for their security and prevention of
violence.  Furthermore, every one that might complain of what the regents
of cities by strength of this resolution might do was ordered to have
recourse to no one else than the States of Holland, as no account would
be made of anything that might be done or undertaken by the tribunals.

Finally, it was resolved to send a deputation to Prince Maurice, the
Princess-Widow, and Prince Henry, requesting them to aid in carrying
out this resolution.

Thus the deed was done.  The sword was drawn.  It was drawn in self-
defence and in deliberate answer to the Stadholder's defiance when he
rapped his sword hilt in face of the assembly, but still it was drawn.
The States of Holland were declared sovereign and supreme.  The National
Synod was peremptorily rejected.  Any decision of the supreme courts of
the Union in regard to the subject of this resolution was nullified in
advance.  Thenceforth this measure of the 4th August was called the
"Sharp Resolve."  It might prove perhaps to be double-edged.

It was a stroke of grim sarcasm on the part of the Advocate thus solemnly
to invite the Stadholder's aid in carrying out a law which was aimed
directly at his head; to request his help for those who meant to defeat
with the armed hand that National Synod which he had pledged himself to
bring about.

The question now arose what sort of men-at-arms it would be well for the
city governments to enlist.  The officers of the regular garrisons had
received distinct orders from Prince Maurice as their military superior
to refuse any summons to act in matters proceeding from the religious
question.  The Prince, who had chief authority over all the regular
troops, had given notice that he would permit nothing to be done against
"those of the Reformed religion," by which he meant the Contra-
Remonstrants and them only.

In some cities there were no garrisons, but only train-bands.  But the
train bands (Schutters) could not be relied on to carry out the Sharp
Resolve, for they were almost to a man Contra-Remonstrants.  It was
therefore determined to enlist what were called "Waartgelders;" soldiers,
inhabitants of the place, who held themselves ready to serve in time of
need in consideration of a certain wage; mercenaries in short.

This resolution was followed as a matter of course by a solemn protest
from Amsterdam and the five cities who acted with her.

On the same day Maurice was duly notified of the passage of the law.  His
wrath was great.  High words passed between him and the deputies.  It
could hardly have been otherwise expected.  Next-day he came before the
Assembly to express his sentiments, to complain of the rudeness with
which the resolution of 4th August had been communicated to him, and to
demand further explanations.  Forthwith the Advocate proceeded to set
forth the intentions of the States, and demanded that the Prince should
assist the magistrates in carrying out the policy decided upon.  Reinier
Pauw, burgomaster of Amsterdam, fiercely interrupted the oration of
Barneveld, saying that although these might be his views, they were not
to be held by his Excellency as the opinions of all.  The Advocate, angry
at the interruption, answered him sternly, and a violent altercation,
not unmixed with personalities, arose.  Maurice, who kept his temper
admirably on this occasion, interfered between the two and had much
difficulty in quieting the dispute.  He then observed that when he took
the oath as stadholder these unfortunate differences had not arisen, but
all had been good friends together.  This was perfectly true, but he
could have added that they might all continue good friends unless the
plan of imposing a religious creed upon the minority by a clerical
decision were persisted in.  He concluded that for love of one of the two
great parties he would not violate the oath he had taken to maintain the
Reformed religion to the last drop of his blood.  Still, with the same
'petitio principii' that the Reformed religion and the dogmas of the
Contra-Remonstrants were one and the same thing, he assured the Assembly
that the authority of the magistrates would be sustained by him so long
as it did not lead to the subversion of religion.

Clearly the time for argument had passed.  As Dudley Carleton observed,
men had been disputing 'pro aris' long enough.  They would soon be
fighting 'pro focis.'

In pursuance of the policy laid down by the Sharp Resolution, the States
proceeded to assure themselves of the various cities of the province by
means of Waartgelders.  They sent to the important seaport of Brielle and
demanded a new oath from the garrison.  It was intimated that the Prince
would be soon coming there in person to make himself master of the place,
and advice was given to the magistrates to be beforehand with him.  These
statements angered Maurice, and angered him the more because they
happened to be true.  It was also charged that he was pursuing his
Leicestrian designs and meant to make himself, by such steps, sovereign
of the country.  The name of Leicester being a byword of reproach ever
since that baffled noble had a generation before left the Provinces in
disgrace, it was a matter of course that such comparisons were
excessively exasperating.  It was fresh enough too in men's memory that
the Earl in his Netherland career had affected sympathy with the
strictest denomination of religious reformers, and that the profligate
worldling and arrogant self-seeker had used the mask of religion to cover
flagitious ends.  As it had indeed been the object of the party at the
head of which the Advocate had all his life acted to raise the youthful
Maurice to the stadholderate expressly to foil the plots of Leicester,
it could hardly fail to be unpalatable to Maurice to be now accused of
acting the part of Leicester.

He inveighed bitterly on the subject before the state council: The state
council, in a body, followed him to a meeting of the States-General.
Here the Stadholder made a vehement speech and demanded that the States
of Holland should rescind the "Sharp Resolution," and should desist from
the new oaths required from the soldiery.  Barneveld, firm as a rock, met
these bitter denunciations.  Speaking in the name of Holland, he repelled
the idea that the sovereign States of that province were responsible to
the state council or to the States-General either.  He regretted, as all
regretted, the calumnies uttered against the Prince, but in times of such
intense excitement every conspicuous man was the mark of calumny.

The Stadholder warmly repudiated Leicestrian designs, and declared that
he had been always influenced by a desire to serve his country and
maintain the Reformed religion.  If he had made mistakes, he desired to
be permitted to improve in the future.

Thus having spoken, the soldier retired from the Assembly with the state
council at his heels.

The Advocate lost no time in directing the military occupation of the
principal towns of Holland, such as Leyden, Gouda, Rotterdam,
Schoonhoven, Hoorn, and other cities.

At Leyden especially, where a strong Orange party was with difficulty
kept in obedience by the Remonstrant magistracy, it was found necessary
to erect a stockade about the town-hall and to plant caltrops and other
obstructions in the squares and streets.

The broad space in front; of the beautiful medieval seat of the municipal
government, once so sacred for the sublime and pathetic scenes enacted
there during the famous siege and in the magistracy of Peter van der
Werff, was accordingly enclosed by a solid palisade of oaken planks,
strengthened by rows of iron bars with barbed prongs: The entrenchment
was called by the populace the Arminian Fort, and the iron spear heads
were baptized Barneveld's teeth.  Cannon were planted at intervals along
the works, and a company or two of the Waartgelders, armed from head to
foot, with snaphances on their shoulders, stood ever ready to issue forth
to quell any disturbances.  Occasionally a life or two was lost of
citizen or soldier, and many doughty blows were interchanged.

It was a melancholy spectacle.  No commonwealth could be more fortunate
than this republic in possessing two such great leading minds.  No two
men could be more patriotic than both Stadholder and Advocate.  No two
men could be prouder, more overbearing, less conciliatory.

"I know Mons. Barneveld well," said Sir Ralph Winwood, "and know that he
hath great powers and abilities, and malice itself must confess that man
never hath done more faithful and powerful service to his country than
he.  But 'finis coronat opus' and 'il di lodi lacera; oportet imperatorem
stantem mori.'"

The cities of Holland were now thoroughly "waartgeldered," and Barneveld
having sufficiently shown his "teeth" in that province departed for
change of air to Utrecht.  His failing health was assigned as the pretext
for the visit, although the atmosphere of that city has never been
considered especially salubrious in the dog-days.

Meantime the Stadholder remained quiet, but biding his time.  He did not
choose to provoke a premature conflict in the strongholds of the
Arminians as he called them, but with a true military instinct preferred
making sure of the ports.  Amsterdam, Enkhuyzen, Flushing, being without
any effort of his own within his control, he quietly slipped down the
river Meuse on the night of the 29th September, accompanied by his
brother Frederic Henrys and before six o'clock next morning had
introduced a couple of companies of trustworthy troops into Brielle, had
summoned the magistrates before him, and compelled them to desist from
all further intention of levying mercenaries.  Thus all the fortresses
which Barneveld had so recently and in such masterly fashion rescued from
the grasp of England were now quietly reposing in the hands of the
Stadholder.

Maurice thought it not worth his while for the present to quell the
mutiny--as he considered it the legal and constitutional defence of
vested right--as great jurists like Barneveld and Hugo Grotius accounted
the movement--at its "fountain head Leyden or its chief stream Utrecht;"
to use the expression of Carleton.  There had already been bloodshed in
Leyden, a burgher or two having been shot and a soldier stoned to death
in the streets, but the Stadholder deemed it unwise to precipitate
matters.  Feeling himself, with his surpassing military knowledge and
with a large majority of the nation at his back, so completely master of
the situation, he preferred waiting on events.  And there is no doubt
that he was proving himself a consummate politician and a perfect master
of fence.  "He is much beloved and followed both of soldiers and people,"
said the English ambassador, "he is a man 'innoxiae popularitatis' so as
this jealousy cannot well be fastened upon him; and in this cause of
religion he stirred not until within these few months he saw he must
declare himself or suffer the better party to be overborne."

The chief tribunal-high council so called-of the country soon gave
evidence that the "Sharp Resolution" had judged rightly in reckoning on
its hostility and in nullifying its decisions in advance.

They decided by a majority vote that the Resolution ought not to be
obeyed, but set aside.  Amsterdam, and the three or four cities usually
acting with her, refused to enlist troops.

Rombout Hoogerbeets, a member of the tribunal, informed Prince Maurice
that he "would no longer be present on a bench where men disputed the
authority of the States of Holland, which he held to be the supreme
sovereignty over him."

This was plain speaking; a distinct enunciation of what the States' right
party deemed to be constitutional law.

And what said Maurice in reply?

"I, too, recognize the States of Holland as sovereign; but we might at
least listen to each other occasionally."

Hoogerbeets, however, deeming that listening had been carried far enough,
decided to leave the tribunal altogether, and to resume the post which he
had formerly occupied as Pensionary or chief magistrate of Leyden.

Here he was soon to find himself in the thick of the conflict.  Meantime
the States-General, in full assembly, on 11th November 1617, voted that
the National Synod should be held in the course of the following year.
The measure was carried by a strict party vote and by a majority of one.
The representatives of each province voting as one, there were four in
favour of to three against the Synod.  The minority, consisting of
Holland, Utrecht, and Overyssel, protested against the vote as an
outrageous invasion of the rights of each province, as an act of
flagrant tyranny and usurpation.

The minority in the States of Holland, the five cities often named,
protested against the protest.

The defective part of the Netherland constitutions could not be better
illustrated.  The minority of the States of Holland refused to be bound
by a majority of the provincial assembly.  The minority of the States-
General refused to be bound by the majority of the united assembly.

This was reducing politics to an absurdity and making all government
impossible.  It is however quite certain that in the municipal
governments a majority had always governed, and that a majority vote in
the provincial assemblies had always prevailed.  The present innovation
was to govern the States-General by a majority.

Yet viewed by the light of experience and of common sense, it would be
difficult to conceive of a more preposterous proceeding than thus to cram
a religious creed down the throats of half the population of a country by
the vote of a political assembly.  But it was the seventeenth and not the
nineteenth century.

Moreover, if there were any meaning in words, the 13th Article of Union,
reserving especially the disposition over religious matters to each
province, had been wisely intended to prevent the possibility of such
tyranny.

When the letters of invitation to the separate states and to others were
drawing up in the general assembly, the representatives of the three
states left the chamber.  A solitary individual from Holland remained
however, a burgomaster of Amsterdam.

Uytenbogaert, conversing with Barneveld directly afterwards, advised him
to accept the vote.  Yielding to the decision of the majority, it would
be possible, so thought the clergyman, for the great statesman so to
handle matters as to mould the Synod to his will, even as he had so long
controlled the States-Provincial and the States-General.

"If you are willing to give away the rights of the land," said the
Advocate very sharply, "I am not."

Probably the priest's tactics might have proved more adroit than the
stony opposition on which Barneveld was resolved.

But it was with the aged statesman a matter of principle, not of policy.
His character and his personal pride, the dignity of opinion and office,
his respect for constitutional law, were all at stake.

Shallow observers considered the struggle now taking place as a personal
one.  Lovers of personal government chose to look upon the Advocate's
party as a faction inspired with an envious resolve to clip the wings
of the Stadholder, who was at last flying above their heads.

There could be no doubt of the bitter animosity between the two men.
There could be no doubt that jealousy was playing the part which that
master passion will ever play in all the affairs of life.  But there
could be no doubt either that a difference of principle as wide as the
world separated the two antagonists.

Even so keen an observer as Dudley Carleton, while admitting the man's
intellectual power and unequalled services, could see nothing in the
Advocate's present course but prejudice, obstinacy, and the insanity of
pride.  "He doth no whit spare himself in pains nor faint in his
resolution," said the Envoy, "wherein notwithstanding he will in all
appearance succumb ere afore long, having the disadvantages of a weak
body, a weak party, and a weak cause."  But Carleton hated Barneveld,
and considered it the chief object of his mission to destroy him, if he
could.  In so doing he would best carry out the wishes of his sovereign.

The King of Britain had addressed a somewhat equivocal letter to the
States-General on the subject of religion in the spring of 1617.  It
certainly was far from being as satisfactory as, the epistles of 1613
prepared under the Advocate's instructions, had been, while the exuberant
commentary upon the royal text, delivered in full assembly by his
ambassador soon after the reception of the letter, was more than usually
didactic, offensive, and ignorant.  Sir Dudley never omitted an
opportunity of imparting instruction to the States-General as to the
nature of their constitution and the essential dogmas on which their
Church was founded.  It is true that the great lawyers and the great
theologians of the country were apt to hold very different opinions from
his upon those important subjects, but this was so much the worse for the
lawyers and theologians, as time perhaps might prove.

The King in this last missive had proceeded to unsay the advice which he
had formerly bestowed upon the States, by complaining that his earlier
letters had been misinterpreted.  They had been made use of, he said, to
authorize the very error against which they had been directed.  They had
been held to intend the very contrary of what they did mean.  He felt
himself bound in conscience therefore, finding these differences ready to
be "hatched into schisms," to warn the States once more against pests so
pernicious.

Although the royal language was somewhat vague so far as enunciation of
doctrine, a point on which he had once confessed himself fallible, was
concerned, there was nothing vague in his recommendation of a National
Synod.  To this the opposition of Barneveld was determined not upon
religious but upon constitutional grounds.  The confederacy did not
constitute a nation, and therefore there could not be a national synod
nor a national religion.

Carleton came before the States-General soon afterwards with a prepared
oration, wearisome as a fast-day sermon after the third turn of the hour-
glass, pragmatical as a schoolmaster's harangue to fractious little boys.

He divided his lecture into two heads--the peace of the Church, and the
peace of the Provinces--starting with the first.  "A Jove principium," he
said, "I will begin with that which is both beginning and end.  It is the
truth of God's word and its maintenance that is the bond of our common
cause.  Reasons of state invite us as friends and neighbours by the
preservation of our lives and property, but the interest of religion
binds us as Christians and brethren to the mutual defence of the liberty
of our consciences."

He then proceeded to point out the only means by which liberty of
conscience could be preserved.  It was by suppressing all forms of
religion but one, and by silencing all religious discussion.  Peter
Titelman and Philip II. could not have devised a more pithy formula.  All
that was wanting was the axe and faggot to reduce uniformity to practice.
Then liberty of conscience would be complete.

"One must distinguish," said the Ambassador, "between just liberty and
unbridled license, and conclude that there is but one truth single and
unique.  Those who go about turning their brains into limbecks for
distilling new notions in religious matters only distract the union of
the Church which makes profession of this unique truth.  If it be
permitted to one man to publish the writings and fantasies of a sick
spirit and for another moved by Christian zeal to reduce this wanderer
'ad sanam mentem;' why then 'patet locus adversus utrumque,' and the
common enemy (the Devil) slips into the fortress."  He then proceeded to
illustrate this theory on liberty of conscience by allusions to Conrad
Vorstius.

This infamous sectary had in fact reached such a pitch of audacity, said
the Ambassador, as not only to inveigh against the eternal power of God
but to indulge in irony against the honour of his Majesty King James.

And in what way had he scandalized the government of the Republic?  He
had dared to say that within its borders there was religious toleration.
He had distinctly averred that in the United Provinces heretics were not
punished with death or with corporal chastisement.

"He declares openly," said Carleton, "that contra haereticos etiam vere
dictos (ne dum falso et calumniose sic traductos) there is neither
sentence of death nor other corporal punishment, so that in order to
attract to himself a great following of birds of the name feather he
publishes to all the world that here in this country one can live and
die a heretic, unpunished, without being arrested and without danger."

In order to suppress this reproach upon the Republic at which the
Ambassador stood aghast, and to prevent the Vorstian doctrines of
religious toleration and impunity of heresy from spreading among "the
common people, so subject by their natures to embrace new opinions," he
advised of course that "the serpent be sent back to the nest where he was
born before the venom had spread through the whole body of the Republic."

A week afterwards a long reply was delivered on part of the States-
General to the Ambassador's oration.  It is needless to say that it was
the work of the Advocate, and that it was in conformity with the opinions
so often exhibited in the letters to Caron and others of which the reader
has seen many samples.

That religious matters were under the control of the civil government,
and that supreme civil authority belonged to each one of the seven
sovereign provinces, each recognizing no superior within its own sphere,
were maxims of state always enforced in the Netherlands and on which the
whole religious controversy turned.

"The States-General have always cherished the true Christian Apostolic
religion," they said, "and wished it to be taught under the authority and
protection of the legal government of these Provinces in all purity, and
in conformity with the Holy Scriptures, to the good people of these
Provinces.  And My Lords the States and magistrates of the respective
provinces, each within their own limits, desire the same."

They had therefore given express orders to the preachers "to keep the
peace by mutual and benign toleration of the different opinions on the
one side and the other at least until with full knowledge of the subject
the States might otherwise ordain.  They had been the more moved to this
because his Majesty having carefully examined the opinions of the learned
hereon each side had found both consistent with Christian belief and the
salvation of souls."

It was certainly not the highest expression of religious toleration for
the civil authority to forbid the clergymen of the country from
discussing in their pulpits the knottiest and most mysterious points of
the schoolmen lest the "common people" should be puzzled.  Nevertheless,
where the close union of Church and State and the necessity of one church
were deemed matters of course, it was much to secure subordination of the
priesthood to the magistracy, while to enjoin on preachers abstention
from a single exciting cause of quarrel, on the ground that there was
more than one path to salvation, and that mutual toleration was better
than mutual persecution, was; in that age, a stride towards religious
equality.  It was at least an advance on Carleton's dogma, that there was
but one unique and solitary truth, and that to declare heretics not
punishable with death was an insult to the government of the Republic.

The States-General answered the Ambassador's plea, made in the name of
his master, for immediate and unguaranteed evacuation of the debatable
land by the arguments already so often stated in the Advocate's
instructions to Caron.  They had been put to great trouble and expense
already in their campaigning and subsequent fortification of important
places in the duchies.  They had seen the bitter spirit manifested by the
Spaniards in the demolition of the churches and houses of Mulheim and
other places.  "While the affair remained in its present terms of utter
uncertainty their Mightinesses," said the States-General, "find it most
objectionable to forsake the places which they have been fortifying and
to leave the duchies and all their fellow-religionists, besides the
rights of the possessory princes a prey to those who have been hankering
for the territories for long years, and who would unquestionably be able
to make themselves absolute masters of all within a very few days."

A few months later Carleton came before the States-General again and
delivered another elaborate oration, duly furnished to him by the King,
upon the necessity of the National Synod, the comparative merits of
Arminianism and Contra-Remonstrantism, together with a full exposition of
the constitutions of the Netherlands.

It might be supposed that Barneveld and Grotius and Hoogerbeets knew
something of the law and history of their country.

But James knew much better, and so his envoy endeavoured to convince his
audience.

He received on the spot a temperate but conclusive reply from the
delegates of Holland.  They informed him that the war with Spain--the
cause of the Utrecht Union--was not begun about religion but on account
of the violation of liberties, chartered rights and privileges, not the
least of which rights was that of each province to regulate religious
matters within its borders.

A little later a more vehement reply was published anonymously in the
shape of a pamphlet called 'The Balance,' which much angered the
Ambassador and goaded his master almost to frenzy.  It was deemed so
blasphemous, so insulting to the Majesty of England, so entirely
seditious, that James, not satisfied with inditing a rejoinder, insisted
through Carleton that a reward should be offered by the States for the
detection of the author, in order that he might be condignly punished.
This was done by a majority vote, 1000 florins being offered for the
discovery of the author and 600 for that of the printer.

Naturally the step was opposed in the States-General; two deputies in
particular making themselves conspicuous.  One of them was an audacious
old gentleman named Brinius of Gelderland, "much corrupted with
Arminianism," so Carleton informed his sovereign.  He appears to have
inherited his audacity through his pedigree, descending, as it was
ludicrously enough asserted he did, from a chief of the Caninefates, the
ancient inhabitants of Gelderland, called Brinio.  And Brinio the
Caninefat had been as famous for his stolid audacity as for his
illustrious birth; "Erat in Caninefatibus stolidae audaciae Brinio
claritate natalium insigni."

The patronizing manner in which the Ambassador alluded to the other
member of the States-General who opposed the decree was still more
diverting.  It was "Grotius, the Pensioner of Rotterdam, a young petulant
brain, not unknown to your Majesty," said Carleton.

Two centuries and a half have rolled away, and there are few majesties,
few nations, and few individuals to whom the name of that petulant youth
is unknown; but how many are familiar with the achievements of the able
representative of King James?

Nothing came of the measure, however, and the offer of course helped the
circulation of the pamphlet.

It is amusing to see the ferocity thus exhibited by the royal pamphleteer
against a rival; especially when one can find no crime in 'The Balance'
save a stinging and well-merited criticism of a very stupid oration.

Gillis van Ledenberg was generally supposed to be the author of it.
Carleton inclined, however, to suspect Grotius, "because," said he,
"having always before been a stranger to my house, he has made me the day
before the publication thereof a complimentary visit, although it was
Sunday and church time; whereby the Italian proverb, 'Chi ti caresse piu
che suole,' &c.,' is added to other likelihoods."

It was subsequently understood however that the pamphlet was written by a
Remonstrant preacher of Utrecht, named Jacobus Taurinus; one of those who
had been doomed to death by the mutinous government in that city seven
years before.

It was now sufficiently obvious that either the governments in the three
opposition provinces must be changed or that the National Synod must be
imposed by a strict majority vote in the teeth of the constitution and of
vigorous and eloquent protests drawn up by the best lawyers in the
country.  The Advocate and Grotius recommended a provincial synod first
and, should that not succeed in adjusting the differences of church
government, then the convocation of a general or oecumenical synod.  They
resisted the National Synod because, in their view, the Provinces were
not a nation.  A league of seven sovereign and independent Mates was all
that legally existed in the Netherlands.  It was accordingly determined
that the governments should be changed, and the Stadholder set himself to
prepare the way for a thorough and, if possible, a bloodless revolution.
He departed on the 27th November for a tour through the chief cities, and
before leaving the Hague addressed an earnest circular letter to the
various municipalities of Holland.

A more truly dignified, reasonable, right royal letter, from the
Stadholder's point of view, could not have been indited.  The Imperial
"we" breathing like a morning breeze through the whole of it blew away
all legal and historical mistiness.

But the clouds returned again nevertheless.  Unfortunately for Maurice it
could not be argued by the pen, however it might be proved by the sword,
that the Netherlands constituted a nation, and that a convocation of
doctors of divinity summoned by a body of envoys had the right to dictate
a creed to seven republics.

All parties were agreed on one point.  There must be unity of divine
worship.  The territory of the Netherlands was not big enough to hold
two systems of religion, two forms of Christianity, two sects of
Protestantism.  It was big enough to hold seven independent and sovereign
states, but would be split into fragments--resolved into chaos--should
there be more than one Church or if once a schism were permitted in that
Church.  Grotius was as much convinced of this as Gomarus.  And yet the
13th Article of the Union stared them all in the face, forbidding the
hideous assumptions now made by the general government.  Perhaps no man
living fully felt its import save Barneveld alone.  For groping however
dimly and hesitatingly towards the idea of religious liberty, of general
toleration, he was denounced as a Papist, an atheist, a traitor,
a miscreant, by the fanatics for the sacerdotal and personal power.
Yet it was a pity that he could never contemplate the possibility of his
country's throwing off the swaddling clothes of provincialism which had
wrapped its infancy.  Doubtless history, law, tradition, and usage
pointed to the independent sovereignty of each province.  Yet the period
of the Truce was precisely the time when a more generous constitution,
a national incorporation might have been constructed to take the place
of the loose confederacy by which the gigantic war had been fought out.
After all, foreign powers had no connection with the States, and knew
only the Union with which and with which alone they made treaties, and
the reality of sovereignty in each province was as ridiculous as in
theory it was impregnable.  But Barneveld, under the modest title of
Advocate of one province, had been in reality president and prime
minister of the whole commonwealth.  He had himself been the union and
the sovereignty.  It was not wonderful that so imperious a nature
objected to transfer its powers to the Church, to the States-General,
or to Maurice.

Moreover, when nationality assumed the unlovely form of rigid religious
uniformity; when Union meant an exclusive self-governed Church enthroned
above the State, responsible to no civic authority and no human law, the
boldest patriot might shiver at emerging from provincialism.




CHAPTER XV.

     The Commonwealth bent on Self-destruction--Evils of a Confederate
     System of Government--Rem Bischop's House sacked--Aerssens'
     unceasing Efforts against Barneveld--The Advocate's Interview with
     Maurice--The States of Utrecht raise the Troops--The Advocate at
     Utrecht--Barneveld urges mutual Toleration--Barneveld accused of
     being Partisan of Spain--Carleton takes his Departure.

It is not cheerful after widely contemplating the aspect of Christendom
in the year of supreme preparation to examine with the minuteness
absolutely necessary the narrow theatre to which the political affairs of
the great republic had been reduced.

That powerful commonwealth, to which the great party of the Reformation
naturally looked for guidance in the coming conflict, seemed bent on
self-destruction.  The microcosm of the Netherlands now represented,
alas! the war of elements going on without on a world-wide scale.  As the
Calvinists and Lutherans of Germany were hotly attacking each other
even in sight of the embattled front of Spain and the League, so the
Gomarites and the Arminians by their mutual rancour were tearing the
political power of the Dutch Republic to shreds and preventing her from
assuming a great part in the crisis.  The consummate soldier, the
unrivalled statesman, each superior in his sphere to any contemporary
rival, each supplementing the other, and making up together, could they
have been harmonized, a double head such as no political organism then
existing could boast, were now in hopeless antagonism to each other.  A
mass of hatred had been accumulated against the Advocate with which he
found it daily more and more difficult to struggle.  The imperious,
rugged, and suspicious nature of the Stadholder had been steadily wrought
upon by the almost devilish acts of Francis Aerssens until he had come to
look upon his father's most faithful adherent, his own early preceptor in
statesmanship and political supporter, as an antagonist, a conspirator,
and a tyrant.

The soldier whose unrivalled ability, experience, and courage in the
field should have placed him at the very head of the great European army
of defence against the general crusade upon Protestantism, so constantly
foretold by Barneveld, was now to be engaged in making bloodless but
mischievous warfare against an imaginary conspiracy and a patriot foe.

The Advocate, keeping steadily in view the great principles by which his
political life had been guided, the supremacy of the civil authority in
any properly organized commonwealth over the sacerdotal and military,
found himself gradually forced into mortal combat with both.  To the
individual sovereignty of each province he held with the tenacity of a
lawyer and historian.  In that he found the only clue through the
labyrinth which ecclesiastical and political affairs presented.  So close
was the tangle, so confused the medley, that without this slender guide
all hope of legal issue seemed lost.

No doubt the difficulty of the doctrine of individual sovereignty was
great, some of the provinces being such slender morsels of territory,
with resources so trivial, as to make the name of sovereignty ludicrous.
Yet there could be as little doubt that no other theory was tenable.  If
so powerful a mind as that of the Advocate was inclined to strain the
theory to its extreme limits, it was because in the overshadowing
superiority of the one province Holland had been found the practical
remedy for the imbecility otherwise sure to result from such provincial
and meagre federalism.

Moreover, to obtain Union by stretching all the ancient historical
privileges and liberties of the separate provinces upon the Procrustean
bed of a single dogma, to look for nationality only in common subjection
to an infallible priesthood, to accept a Catechism as the palladium upon
which the safety of the State was to depend for all time, and beyond
which there was to be no further message from Heaven--such was not
healthy constitutionalism in the eyes of a great statesman.  No doubt
that without the fervent spirit of Calvinism it would have been difficult
to wage war with such immortal hate as the Netherlands had waged it, no
doubt the spirit of republican and even democratic liberty lay hidden
within that rigid husk, but it was dishonour to the martyrs who had died
by thousands at the stake and on the battle field for the rights of
conscience if the only result of their mighty warfare against wrong had
been to substitute a new dogma for an old one, to stifle for ever the
right of free enquiry, theological criticism, and the hope of further
light from on high, and to proclaim it a libel on the Republic that
within its borders all heretics, whether Arminian or Papist, were safe
from the death penalty or even from bodily punishment.  A theological
union instead of a national one and obtained too at the sacrifice of
written law and immemorial tradition, a congress in which clerical
deputations from all the provinces and from foreign nations should
prescribe to all Netherlanders an immutable creed and a shadowy
constitution, were not the true remedies for the evils of confederacy,
nor, if they had been, was the time an appropriate one for their
application.

It was far too early in the world's history to hope for such
redistribution of powers and such a modification of the social compact
as would place in separate spheres the Church and the State, double the
sanctions and the consolations of religion by removing it from the
pollutions of political warfare, and give freedom to individual
conscience by securing it from the interference of government.

It is melancholy to see the Republic thus perversely occupying its
energies.  It is melancholy to see the great soldier becoming gradually
more ardent for battle with Barneveld and Uytenbogaert than with Spinola
and Bucquoy, against whom he had won so many imperishable laurels.  It is
still sadder to see the man who had been selected by Henry IV. as the one
statesman of Europe to whom he could confide his great projects for the
pacification of Christendom, and on whom he could depend for counsel and
support in schemes which, however fantastic in some of their details, had
for their object to prevent the very European war of religion against
which Barneveld had been struggling, now reduced to defend himself
against suspicion hourly darkening and hatred growing daily more insane.

The eagle glance and restless wing, which had swept the whole political
atmosphere, now caged within the stifling limits of theological casuistry
and personal rivalry were afflicting to contemplate.

The evils resulting from a confederate system of government, from a
league of petty sovereignties which dared not become a nation, were as
woefully exemplified in the United Provinces as they were destined to be
more than a century and a half later, and in another hemisphere, before
that most fortunate and sagacious of written political instruments, the
American Constitution of 1787, came to remedy the weakness of the old
articles of Union.

Meantime the Netherlands were a confederacy, not a nation.  Their general
government was but a committee.

It could ask of, but not command, the separate provinces.  It had no
dealings with nor power over the inhabitants of the country; it could say
"Thou shalt" neither to state nor citizen; it could consult only with
corporations--fictitious and many-headed personages--itself incorporate.
There was no first magistrate, no supreme court, no commander-in-chief,
no exclusive mint nor power of credit, no national taxation, no central
house of representation and legislation, no senate.  Unfortunately it had
one church, and out of this single matrix of centralism was born more
discord than had been produced by all the centrifugal forces of
provincialism combined.

There had been working substitutes found, as we well know, for the
deficiencies of this constitution, but the Advocate felt himself bound to
obey and enforce obedience to the laws and privileges of his country so
long as they remained without authorized change.  His country was the
Province of Holland, to which his allegiance was due and whose servant he
was.  That there was but one church paid and sanctioned by law, he
admitted, but his efforts were directed to prevent discord within that
church, by counselling moderation, conciliation, mutual forbearance, and
abstention from irritating discussion of dogmas deemed by many thinkers
and better theologians than himself not essential to salvation.  In this
he was much behind his age or before it.  He certainly was not with the
majority.

And thus, while the election of Ferdinand had given the signal of war
all over Christendom, while from the demolished churches in Bohemia the
tocsin was still sounding, whose vibrations were destined to be heard a
generation long through the world, there was less sympathy felt with the
call within the territory of the great republic of Protestantism than
would have seemed imaginable a few short years before.  The capture of
the Cloister Church at the Hague in the summer of 1617 seemed to minds
excited by personal rivalries and minute theological controversy a more
momentous event than the destruction of the churches in the Klostergrab
in the following December.  The triumph of Gomarism in a single Dutch
city inspired more enthusiasm for the moment than the deadly buffet to
European Protestantism could inspire dismay.

The church had been carried and occupied, as it were, by force, as if an
enemy's citadel.  It seemed necessary to associate the idea of practical
warfare with a movement which might have been a pacific clerical success.
Barneveld and those who acted with him, while deploring the intolerance
out of which the schism had now grown to maturity, had still hoped for
possible accommodation of the quarrel.  They dreaded popular tumults
leading to oppression of the magistracy by the mob or the soldiery and
ending in civil war.  But what was wanted by the extreme partisans on
either side was not accommodation but victory.

"Religious differences are causing much trouble and discontents in many
cities," he said.  "At Amsterdam there were in the past week two
assemblages of boys and rabble which did not disperse without violence,
crime, and robbery.  The brother of Professor Episcopius (Rem Bischop)
was damaged to the amount of several thousands.  We are still hoping that
some better means of accommodation may be found."

The calmness with which the Advocate spoke of these exciting and painful
events is remarkable.  It was exactly a week before the date of his
letter that this riot had taken place at Amsterdam; very significant in
its nature and nearly tragical in its results.  There were no Remonstrant
preachers left in the city, and the people of that persuasion were
excluded from the Communion service.  On Sunday morning, 17th February
(1617), a furious mob set upon the house of Rem Bischop, a highly
respectable and wealthy citizen, brother of the Remonstrant professor
Episcopius, of Leyden.  The house, an elegant mansion in one of the
principal streets, was besieged and after an hour's resistance carried by
storm.  The pretext of the assault was that Arminian preaching was going
on within its walls, which was not the fact.  The mistress of the house,
half clad, attempted to make her escape by the rear of the building, was
pursued by the rabble with sticks and stones, and shrieks of "Kill the
Arminian harlot, strike her dead," until she fortunately found refuge in
the house of a neighbouring carpenter.  There the hunted creature fell
insensible on the ground, the master of the house refusing to give her
up, though the maddened mob surged around it, swearing that if the
"Arminian harlot"--as respectable a matron as lived in the city--were not
delivered over to them, they would tear the house to pieces.  The hope of
plunder and of killing Rem Bischop himself drew them at last back to his
mansion.  It was thoroughly sacked; every portable article of value,
linen, plate, money, furniture, was carried off, the pictures and objects
of art destroyed, the house gutted from top to bottom.  A thousand
spectators were looking on placidly at the work of destruction as they
returned from church, many of them with Bible and Psalm-book in their
hands.  The master effected his escape over the roof into an adjoining
building.  One of the ringleaders, a carpenter by trade, was arrested
carrying an armful of valuable plunder.  He was asked by the magistrate
why he had entered the house.  "Out of good zeal," he replied; "to help
beat and kill the Arminians who were holding conventicle there."  He was
further asked why he hated the Arminians so much.  "Are we to suffer such
folk here," he replied, "who preach the vile doctrine that God has
created one man for damnation and another for salvation?"--thus ascribing
the doctrine of the church of which he supposed himself a member to the
Arminians whom he had been plundering and wished to kill.

Rem Bischop received no compensation for the damage and danger; the
general cry in the town being that the money he was receiving from
Barneveld and the King of Spain would make him good even if not a stone
of the house had been left standing.  On the following Thursday two
elders of the church council waited upon and informed him that he must
in future abstain from the Communion service.

It may well be supposed that the virtual head of the government liked
not the triumph of mob law, in the name of religion, over the civil
authority.  The Advocate was neither democrat nor demagogue.  A lawyer,
a magistrate, and a noble, he had but little sympathy with the humbler
classes, which he was far too much in the habit of designating as rabble
and populace.  Yet his anger was less against them than against the
priests, the foreigners, the military and diplomatic mischief-makers, by
whom they were set upon to dangerous demonstrations.  The old patrician
scorned the arts by which highborn demagogues in that as in every age
affect adulation for inferiors whom they despise.  It was his instinct to
protect, and guide the people, in whom he recognized no chartered nor
inherent right to govern.  It was his resolve, so long as breath was in
him, to prevent them from destroying life and property and subverting the
government under the leadership of an inflamed priesthood.

It was with this intention, as we have just seen, and in order to avoid
bloodshed, anarchy, and civil war in the streets of every town and
village, that a decisive but in the Advocate's opinion a perfectly legal
step had been taken by the States of Holland.  It had become necessary to
empower the magistracies of towns to defend themselves by enrolled troops
against mob violence and against an enforced synod considered by great
lawyers as unconstitutional.

Aerssens resided in Zealand, and the efforts of that ex-ambassador were
unceasing to excite popular animosity against the man he hated and to
trouble the political waters in which no man knew better than he how to
cast the net.

"The States of Zealand," said the Advocate to the ambassador in London,
"have a deputation here about the religious differences, urging the
holding of a National Synod according to the King's letters, to which
some other provinces and some of the cities of Holland incline.  The
questions have not yet been defined by a common synod, so that a national
one could make no definition, while the particular synods and clerical
personages are so filled with prejudices and so bound by mutual
engagements of long date as to make one fear an unfruitful issue.
We are occupied upon this point in our assembly of Holland to devise
some compromise and to discover by what means these difficulties may
be brought into a state of tranquillity."

It will be observed that in all these most private and confidential
utterances of the Advocate a tone of extreme moderation, an anxious wish
to save the Provinces from dissensions, dangers, and bloodshed, is
distinctly visible.  Never is he betrayed into vindictive, ambitious, or
self-seeking expressions, while sometimes, although rarely, despondent in
mind.  Nor was his opposition to a general synod absolute.  He was
probably persuaded however, as we have just seen, that it should of
necessity be preceded by provincial ones, both in due regard to the laws
of the land and to the true definition of the points to be submitted to
its decision.  He had small hope of a successful result from it.

The British king gave him infinite distress.  As towards France so
towards England the Advocate kept steadily before him the necessity of
deferring to powerful sovereigns whose friendship was necessary to the
republic he served, however misguided, perverse, or incompetent those
monarchs might be.

"I had always hoped," he said, "that his Majesty would have adhered to
his original written advice, that such questions as these ought to be
quietly settled by authority of law and not by ecclesiastical persons,
and I still hope that his Majesty's intention is really to that effect,
although he speaks of synods."

A month later he felt even more encouraged.  "The last letter of his
Majesty concerning our religious questions," he said, "has given rise to
various constructions, but the best advised, who have peace and unity at
heart, understand the King's intention to be to conserve the state of
these Provinces and the religion in its purity.  My hope is that his
Majesty's good opinion will be followed and adopted according to the most
appropriate methods."

Can it be believed that the statesman whose upright patriotism,
moderation, and nobleness of purpose thus breathed through every word
spoken by him in public or whispered to friends was already held up by
a herd of ravening slanderers to obloquy as a traitor and a tyrant?

He was growing old and had suffered much from illness during this
eventful summer, but his anxiety for the Commonwealth, caused by these
distressing and superfluous squabbles, were wearing into him more deeply
than years or disease could do.

"Owing to my weakness and old age I can't go up-stairs as well
as I used," he said,--[Barneveld to Caron 31 July and 21 Aug.  1617.
(H. Arch.  MS.)]--"and these religious dissensions cause me sometimes
such disturbance of mind as will ere long become intolerable, because of
my indisposition and because of the cry of my heart at the course people
are pursuing here.  I reflect that at the time of Duke Casimir and the
Prince of Chimay exactly such a course was held in Flanders and in Lord
Leicester's time in the city of Utrecht, as is best known to yourself.
My hope is fixed on the Lord God Almighty, and that He will make those
well ashamed who are laying anything to heart save his honour and glory
and the welfare of our country with maintenance of its freedom and laws.
I mean unchangeably to live and die for them .  .  .  .  Believe firmly
that all representations to the contrary are vile calumnies."

Before leaving for Vianen in the middle of August of this year (1617)
the Advocate had an interview with the Prince.  There had been no open
rupture between them, and Barneveld was most anxious to avoid a quarrel
with one to whose interests and honour he had always been devoted.  He
did not cling to power nor office.  On the contrary, he had repeatedly
importuned the States to accept his resignation, hoping that perhaps
these unhappy dissensions might be quieted by his removal from the scene.
He now told the Prince that the misunderstanding between them arising
from these religious disputes was so painful to his heart that he would
make and had made every possible effort towards conciliation and amicable
settlement of the controversy.  He saw no means now, he said, of bringing
about unity, unless his Excellency were willing to make some proposition
for arrangement.  This he earnestly implored the Prince to do, assuring
him of his sincere and upright affection for him and his wish to support
such measures to the best of his ability and to do everything for the
furtherance of his reputation and necessary authority.  He was so
desirous of this result, he said, that he would propose now as he did at
the time of the Truce negotiations to lay down all his offices, leaving
his Excellency to guide the whole course of affairs according to his
best judgment.  He had already taken a resolution, if no means of
accommodation were possible, to retire to his Gunterstein estate and
there remain till the next meeting of the assembly; when he would ask
leave to retire for at least a year; in order to occupy himself with a
revision and collation of the charters, laws, and other state papers of
the country which were in his keeping, and which it was needful to bring
into an orderly condition.  Meantime some scheme might be found for
arranging the religious differences, more effective than any he had been
able to devise.

His appeal seems to have glanced powerlessly upon the iron reticence of
Maurice, and the Advocate took his departure disheartened.  Later in the
autumn, so warm a remonstrance was made to him by the leading nobles and
deputies of Holland against his contemplated withdrawal from his post
that it seemed a dereliction of duty on his part to retire.  He remained
to battle with the storm and to see "with anguish of heart," as he
expressed it, the course religious affairs were taking.

The States of Utrecht on the 26th August resolved that on account of
the gathering of large masses of troops in the countries immediately
adjoining their borders, especially in the Episcopate of Cologne, by aid
of Spanish money, it was expedient for them to enlist a protective force
of six companies of regular soldiers in order to save the city from
sudden and overwhelming attack by foreign troops.

Even if the danger from without were magnified in this preamble, which is
by no means certain, there seemed to be no doubt on the subject in the
minds of the magistrates.  They believed that they had the right to
protect and that they were bound to protect their ancient city from
sudden assault, whether by Spanish soldiers or by organized mobs
attempting, as had been done in Rotterdam, Oudewater, and other towns, to
overawe the civil authority in the interest of the Contra-Remonstrants.

Six nobles of Utrecht were accordingly commissioned to raise the troops.
A week later they had been enlisted, sworn to obey in all things the
States of Utrecht, and to take orders from no one else.  Three days later
the States of Utrecht addressed a letter to their Mightinesses the
States-General and to his Excellency the Prince, notifying them that for
the reasons stated in the resolution cited the six companies had been
levied.  There seemed in these proceedings to be no thought of mutiny or
rebellion, the province considering itself as acting within its
unquestionable rights as a sovereign state and without any exaggeration
of the imperious circumstances of the case.

Nor did the States-General and the Stadholder at that moment affect to
dispute the rights of Utrecht, nor raise a doubt as to the legality of
the proceedings.  The committee sent thither by the States-General, the
Prince, and the council of state in their written answer to the letter of
the Utrecht government declared the reasons given for the enrolment of
the six companies to be insufficient and the measure itself highly
dangerous.  They complained, but in very courteous language, that the
soldiers had been levied without giving the least notice thereof to the
general government, without asking its advice, or waiting for any
communication from it, and they reminded the States of Utrecht that they
might always rely upon the States-General and his Excellency, who were
still ready, as they had been seven years before (1610), to protect them
against every enemy and any danger.

The conflict between a single province of the confederacy and the
authority of the general government had thus been brought to a direct
issue; to the test of arms.  For, notwithstanding the preamble to the
resolution of the Utrecht Assembly just cited, there could be little
question that the resolve itself was a natural corollary of the famous
"Sharp Resolution," passed by the States of Holland three weeks before.
Utrecht was in arms to prevent, among other things at least, the forcing
upon them by a majority of the States-General of the National Synod to
which they were opposed, the seizure of churches by the Contra-
Remonstrants, and the destruction of life and property by inflamed mobs.

There is no doubt that Barneveld deeply deplored the issue,
but that he felt himself bound to accept it.  The innate absurdity of a
constitutional system under which each of the seven members was sovereign
and independent and the head was at the mercy of the members could not be
more flagrantly illustrated.  In the bloody battles which seemed
impending in the streets of Utrecht and in all the principal cities of
the Netherlands between the soldiers of sovereign states and soldiers of
a general government which was not sovereign, the letter of the law and
the records of history were unquestionably on the aide of the provincial
and against the general authority.  Yet to nullify the authority of the
States-General by force of arms at this supreme moment was to stultify
all government whatever.  It was an awful dilemma, and it is difficult
here fully to sympathize with the Advocate, for he it was who inspired,
without dictating, the course of the Utrecht proceedings.

With him patriotism seemed at this moment to dwindle into provincialism,
the statesman to shrink into the lawyer.

Certainly there was no guilt in the proceedings.  There was no crime in
the heart of the Advocate.  He had exhausted himself with appeals in
favour of moderation, conciliation, compromise.  He had worked night
and day with all the energy of a pure soul and a great mind to assuage
religious hatreds and avert civil dissensions.  He was overpowered.
He had frequently desired to be released from all his functions, but as
dangers thickened over the Provinces, he felt it his duty so long as he
remained at his post to abide by the law as the only anchor in the storm.
Not rising in his mind to the height of a national idea, and especially
averse from it when embodied in the repulsive form of religious
uniformity, he did not shrink from a contest which he had not provoked,
but had done his utmost to avert.  But even then he did not anticipate
civil war.  The enrolling of the Waartgelders was an armed protest,
a symbol of legal conviction rather than a serious effort to resist the
general government.  And this is the chief justification of his course
from a political point of view.  It was ridiculous to suppose that with a
few hundred soldiers hastily enlisted--and there were less than 1800
Waartgelders levied throughout the Provinces and under the orders of
civil magistrates--a serious contest was intended against a splendidly
disciplined army of veteran troops, commanded by the first general of the
age.

From a legal point of view Barneveld considered his position impregnable.

The controversy is curious, especially for Americans, and for all who are
interested in the analysis of federal institutions and of republican
principles, whether aristocratic or democratic.  The States of Utrecht
replied in decorous but firm language to the committee of the States-
General that they had raised the six companies in accordance with their
sovereign right so to do, and that they were resolved to maintain them.
They could not wait as they had been obliged to do in the time of the
Earl of Leicester and more recently in 1610 until they had been surprised
and overwhelmed by the enemy before the States-General and his Excellency
the Prince could come to their rescue.  They could not suffer all the
evils of tumults, conspiracies, and foreign invasion, without defending
themselves.

Making use, they said, of the right of sovereignty which in their
province belonged to them alone, they thought it better to prevent in
time and by convenient means such fire and mischief than to look on while
it kindled and spread into a conflagration, and to go about imploring aid
from their fellow confederates who, God better it, had enough in these
times to do at home.  This would only be to bring them as well as this
province into trouble, disquiet, and expense.  "My Lords the States of
Utrecht have conserved and continually exercised this right of
sovereignty in its entireness ever since renouncing the King of Spain.
Every contract, ordinance, and instruction of the States-General has been
in conformity with it, and the States of Utrecht are convinced that the
States of not one of their confederate provinces would yield an atom of
its sovereignty."

They reminded the general government that by the 1st article of the
"Closer Union" of Utrecht, on which that assembly was founded, it was
bound to support the States of the respective provinces and strengthen
them with counsel, treasure, and blood if their respective rights, more
especially their individual sovereignty, the most precious of all, should
be assailed.  To refrain from so doing would be to violate a solemn
contract.  They further reminded the council of state that by its
institution the States-Provincial had not abdicated their respective
sovereignties, but had reserved it in all matters not specifically
mentioned in the original instruction by which it was created.

Two days afterwards Arnold van Randwyck and three other commissioners
were instructed by the general government to confer with the States of
Utrecht, to tell them that their reply was deemed unsatisfactory, that
their reasons for levying soldiers in times when all good people should
be seeking to restore harmony and mitigate dissension were insufficient,
and to request them to disband those levies without prejudice in so doing
to the laws and liberties of the province and city of Utrecht.

Here was perhaps an opening for a compromise, the instruction being not
without ingenuity, and the word sovereignty in regard either to the
general government or the separate provinces being carefully omitted.
Soon afterwards, too, the States-General went many steps farther in the
path of concession, for they made another appeal to the government of
Utrecht to disband the Waartgelders on the ground of expediency,
and in so doing almost expressly admitted the doctrine of provincial
sovereignty.  It is important in regard to subsequent events to observe
this virtual admission.

"Your Honours lay especial stress upon the right of sovereignty as
belonging to you alone in your province," they said, "and dispute
therefore at great length upon the power and authority of the Generality,
of his Excellency, and of the state council.  But you will please to
consider that there is here no question of this, as our commissioners
had no instructions to bring this into dispute in the least, and most
certainly have not done so.  We have only in effect questioned whether
that which one has an undoubted right to do can at all times be
appropriately and becomingly done, whether it was fitting that your
Honours, contrary to custom, should undertake these new levies upon a
special oath and commission, and effectively complete the measure without
giving the slightest notice thereof to the Generality."

It may fairly be said that the question in debate was entirely conceded
in this remarkable paper, which was addressed by the States-General, the
Prince-Stadholder, and the council of state to the government of Utrecht.
It should be observed, too, that while distinctly repudiating the
intention of disputing the sovereignty of that province, they carefully
abstain from using the word in relation to themselves, speaking only of
the might and authority of the Generality, the Prince, and the council.

There was now a pause in the public discussion.  The soldiers were not
disbanded, as the States of Utrecht were less occupied with establishing
the soundness of their theory than with securing its practical results.
They knew very well, and the Advocate knew very well, that the intention
to force a national synod by a majority vote of the Assembly of the
States-General existed more strongly than ever, and they meant to resist
it to the last.  The attempt was in their opinion an audacious violation
of the fundamental pact on which the Confederacy was founded.  Its
success would be to establish the sacerdotal power in triumph over the
civil authority.

During this period the Advocate was resident in Utrecht.  For change of
air, ostensibly at least, he had absented himself from the seat of
government, and was during several weeks under the hands of his old
friend and physician Dr. Saul.  He was strictly advised to abstain
altogether from political business, but he might as well have attempted
to abstain from food and drink.  Gillis van Ledenberg, secretary of the
States of Utrecht, visited him frequently.  The proposition to enlist the
Waartgelders had been originally made in the Assembly by its president,
and warmly seconded by van Ledenberg, who doubtless conferred afterwards
with Barneveld in person, but informally and at his lodgings.

It was almost inevitable that this should be the case, nor did the
Advocate make much mystery as to the course of action which he deemed
indispensable at this period.  Believing it possible that some sudden and
desperate attempt might be made by evil disposed people, he agreed with
the States of Utrecht in the propriety of taking measures of precaution.
They were resolved not to look quietly on while soldiers and rabble under
guidance perhaps of violent Contra-Remonstrant preachers took possession
of the churches and even of the city itself, as had already been done in
several towns.

The chief practical object of enlisting the six companies was that the
city might be armed against popular tumults, and they feared that the
ordinary military force might be withdrawn.

When Captain Hartvelt, in his own name and that of the other officers
of those companies, said that they were all resolved never to use their
weapons against the Stadholder or the States-General, he was answered
that they would never be required to do so.  They, however, made oath to
serve against those who should seek to trouble the peace of the Province
of Utrecht in ecclesiastical or political matters, and further against
all enemies of the common country.  At the same time it was deemed
expedient to guard against a surprise of any kind and to keep watch and
ward.

"I cannot quite believe in the French companies," said the Advocate in a
private billet to Ledenberg.  "It would be extremely well that not only
good watch should be kept at the city gates, but also that one might from
above and below the river Lek be assuredly advised from the nearest
cities if any soldiers are coming up or down, and that the same might be
done in regard to Amersfoort."  At the bottom of this letter, which was
destined to become historical and will be afterwards referred to, the
Advocate wrote, as he not unfrequently did, upon his private notes, "When
read, burn, and send me back the two enclosed letters."

The letter lies in the Archives unburned to this day, but, harmless as it
looked, it was to serve as a nail in more than one coffin.

In his confidential letters to trusted friends he complained of "great
physical debility growing out of heavy sorrow,"  and described himself as
entering upon his seventy-first year and no longer fit for hard political
labour.  The sincere grief, profound love of country, and desire that
some remedy might be found for impending disaster, is stamped upon all
his utterances whether official or secret.

"The troubles growing out of the religious differences," he said, "are
running into all sorts of extremities.  It is feared that an attempt will
be made against the laws of the land through extraordinary ways, and by
popular tumults to take from the supreme authority of the respective
provinces the right to govern clerical persons and regulate clerical
disputes, and to place it at the disposition of ecclesiastics and of a
National Synod.

"It is thought too that the soldiers will be forbidden to assist the
civil supreme power and the government of cities in defending themselves
from acts of violence which under pretext of religion will be attempted
against the law and the commands of the magistrates.

"This seems to conflict with the common law of the respective provinces,
each of which from all times had right of sovereignty and supreme
authority within its territory and specifically reserved it in all
treaties and especially in that of the Nearer Union .  .  .  .  The
provinces have always regulated clerical matters each for itself.  The
Province of Utrecht, which under the pretext of religion is now most
troubled, made stipulations to this effect, when it took his Excellency
for governor, even more stringent than any others.  As for Holland, she
never imagined that one could ever raise a question on the subject .  .
.  .  All good men ought to do their best to prevent the enemies to the
welfare of these Provinces from making profit out of our troubles."

The whole matter he regarded as a struggle between the clergy and the
civil power for mastery over the state, as an attempt to subject
provincial autonomy to the central government purely in the interest of
the priesthood of a particular sect.  The remedy he fondly hoped for was
moderation and union within the Church itself.  He could never imagine
the necessity for this ferocious animosity not only between Christians
but between two branches of the Reformed Church.  He could never be made
to believe that the Five Points of the Remonstrance had dug an abyss too
deep and wide ever to be bridged between brethren lately of one faith as
of one fatherland.  He was unceasing in his prayers and appeals for
"mutual toleration on the subject of predestination."  Perhaps the
bitterness, almost amounting to frenzy, with which abstruse points of
casuistry were then debated, and which converted differences of opinion
upon metaphysical divinity into deadly hatred and thirst for blood, is
already obsolete or on the road to become so.  If so, then was Barneveld
in advance of his age, and it would have been better for the peace of the
world and the progress of Christianity if more of his contemporaries had
placed themselves on his level.

He was no theologian, but he believed himself to be a Christian, and he
certainly was a thoughtful and a humble one.  He had not the arrogance to
pierce behind the veil and assume to read the inscrutable thoughts of the
Omnipotent.  It was a cruel fate that his humility upon subjects which he
believed to be beyond the scope of human reason should have been tortured
by his enemies into a crime, and that because he hoped for religious
toleration he should be accused of treason to the Commonwealth.

"Believe and cause others to believe," he said, "that I am and with the
grace of God hope to continue an upright patriot as I have proved myself
to be in these last forty-two years spent in the public service.  In the
matter of differential religious points I remain of the opinions which I
have held for more than fifty years, and in which I hope to live and die,
to wit, that a good Christian man ought to believe that he is predestined
to eternal salvation through God's grace, giving for reasons that he
through God's grace has a firm belief that his salvation is founded
purely on God's grace and the expiation of our sins through our Saviour
Jesus Christ, and that if he should fall into any sins his firm trust is
that God will not let him perish in them, but mercifully turn him to
repentance, so that he may continue in the same belief to the last."

These expressions were contained in a letter to Caron with the intention
doubtless that they should be communicated to the King of Great Britain,
and it is a curious illustration of the spirit of the age, this picture
of the leading statesman of a great republic unfolding his religious
convictions for private inspection by the monarch of an allied nation.
More than anything else it exemplifies the close commixture of theology,
politics, and diplomacy in that age, and especially in those two
countries.

Formerly, as we have seen, the King considered a too curious fathoming of
divine mysteries as highly reprehensible, particularly for the common
people.  Although he knew more about them than any one else, he avowed
that even his knowledge in this respect was not perfect.  It was matter
of deep regret with the Advocate that his Majesty had not held to his
former positions, and that he had disowned his original letters.

"I believe my sentiments thus expressed," he said, "to be in accordance
with Scripture, and I have always held to them without teasing my brains
with the precise decrees of reprobation, foreknowledge, or the like, as
matters above my comprehension.  I have always counselled Christian
moderation.  The States of Holland have followed the spirit of his
Majesty's letters, but our antagonists have rejected them and with
seditious talk, sermons, and the spreading of infamous libels have
brought matters to their present condition.  There have been excesses on
the other side as well."

He then made a slight, somewhat shadowy allusion to schemes known to be
afloat for conferring the sovereignty upon Maurice.  We have seen that at
former periods he had entertained this subject and discussed it privately
with those who were not only friendly but devoted to the Stadholder, and
that he had arrived at the conclusion that it would not be for the
interest of the Prince to encourage the project.  Above all he was
sternly opposed to the idea of attempting to compass it by secret
intrigue.  Should such an arrangement be publicly discussed and legally
completed, it would not meet with his unconditional opposition.

"The Lord God knows," he said, "whether underneath all these movements
does not lie the design of the year 1600, well known to you.  As for me,
believe that I am and by God's grace hope to remain, what I always was,
an upright patriot, a defender of the true Christian religion, of the
public authority, and of all the power that has been and in future may be
legally conferred upon his Excellency.  Believe that all things said,
written, or spread to the contrary are falsehoods and calumnies."

He was still in Utrecht, but about to leave for the Hague, with health
somewhat improved and in better spirits in regard to public matters.

"Although I have entered my seventy-first year," he said, "I trust still
to be of some service to the Commonwealth and to my friends .  .  .  .
Don't consider an arrangement of our affairs desperate.  I hope for
better things."

Soon after his return he was waited upon one Sunday evening, late in
October--being obliged to keep his house on account of continued
indisposition--by a certain solicitor named Nordlingen and informed that
the Prince was about to make a sudden visit to Leyden at four o'clock
next morning.

Barneveld knew that the burgomasters and regents were holding a great
banquet that night, and that many of them would probably have been
indulging in potations too deep to leave them fit for serious business.
The agitation of people's minds at that moment made the visit seem rather
a critical one, as there would probably be a mob collected to see the
Stadholder, and he was anxious both in the interest of the Prince and the
regents and of both religious denominations that no painful incidents
should occur if it was in his power to prevent them.

He was aware that his son-in-law, Cornelis van der Myle, had been invited
to the banquet, and that he was wont to carry his wine discreetly.  He
therefore requested Nordlingen to proceed to Leyden that night and seek
an interview with van der Myle without delay.  By thus communicating the
intelligence of the expected visit to one who, he felt sure, would do his
best to provide for a respectful and suitable reception of the Prince,
notwithstanding the exhilarated condition in which the magistrates would
probably find themselves, the Advocate hoped to prevent any riot or
tumultuous demonstration of any kind.  At least he would act conformably
to his duty and keep his conscience clear should disasters ensue.

Later in the night he learned that Maurice was going not to Leyden but to
Delft, and he accordingly despatched a special messenger to arrive before
dawn at Leyden in order to inform van der Myle of this change in the
Prince's movements.  Nothing seemed simpler or more judicious than these
precautions on the part of Barneveld.  They could not fail, however, to
be tortured into sedition, conspiracy, and treason.

Towards the end of the year a meeting of the nobles and knights of
Holland under the leadership of Barneveld was held to discuss the famous
Sharp Resolution of 4th August and the letters and arguments advanced
against it by the Stadholder and the council of state.  It was
unanimously resolved by this body, in which they were subsequently
followed by a large majority of the States of Holland, to maintain that
resolution and its consequences and to oppose the National Synod.  They
further resolved that a legal provincial synod should be convoked by the
States of Holland and under their authority and supervision.  The object
of such synod should be to devise "some means of accommodation, mutual
toleration, and Christian settlement of differences in regard to the Five
Points in question."

In case such compromise should unfortunately not be arranged, then it was
resolved to invite to the assembly two or three persons from France, as
many from England, from Germany, and from Switzerland, to aid in the
consultations.  Should a method of reconciliation and mutual toleration
still remain undiscovered, then, in consideration that the whole
Christian world was interested in composing these dissensions, it was
proposed that a "synodal assembly of all Christendom," a Protestant
oecumenical council, should in some solemn manner be convoked.

These resolutions and propositions were all brought forward by the
Advocate, and the draughts of them in his handwriting remain.  They are
the unimpeachable evidences of his earnest desire to put an end to these
unhappy disputes and disorders in the only way which he considered
constitutional.

Before the close of the year the States of Holland, in accordance with
the foregoing advice of the nobles, passed a resolution, the minutes of
which were drawn up by the hand of the Advocate, and in which they
persisted in their opposition to the National Synod.  They declared by a
large majority of votes that the Assembly of the States-General without
the unanimous consent of the Provincial States were not competent
according to the Union of Utrecht--the fundamental law of the General
Assembly--to regulate religious affairs, but that this right belonged to
the separate provinces, each within its own domain.

They further resolved that as they were bound by solemn oath to maintain
the laws and liberties of Holland, they could not surrender this right to
the Generality, nor allow it to be usurped by any one, but in order to
settle the question of the Five Points, the only cause known to them of
the present disturbances, they were content under: their own authority to
convoke a provincial synod within three months, at their own cost, and to
invite the respective provinces, as many of them as thought good, to send
to this meeting a certain number of pious and learned theologians.

It is difficult to see why the course thus unanimously proposed by the
nobles of Holland, under guidance of Barneveld, and subsequently by a
majority of the States of that province, would not have been as expedient
as it was legal.  But we are less concerned with that point now than with
the illustrations afforded by these long buried documents of the
patriotism and sagacity of a man than whom no human creature was
ever more foully slandered.

It will be constantly borne in mind that he regarded this religious
controversy purely from a political, legal, and constitutional--and not
from a theological-point of view.  He believed that grave danger to the
Fatherland was lurking under this attempt, by the general government, to
usurp the power of dictating the religious creed of all the provinces.
Especially he deplored the evil influence exerted by the King of England
since his abandonment of the principles announced in his famous letter to
the States in the year 1613.  All that the Advocate struggled for was
moderation and mutual toleration within the Reformed Church.  He felt
that a wider scheme of forbearance was impracticable.  If a dream of
general religious equality had ever floated before him or before any one
in that age, he would have felt it to be a dream which would be a reality
nowhere until centuries should have passed away.  Yet that moderation,
patience, tolerance, and respect for written law paved the road to that
wider and loftier region can scarcely be doubted.

Carleton, subservient to every changing theological whim of his master,
was as vehement and as insolent now in enforcing the intolerant views of
James as he had previously been in supporting the counsels to tolerance
contained in the original letters of that monarch.

The Ambassador was often at the Advocate's bed-side during his illness
that summer, enforcing, instructing, denouncing, contradicting.  He was
never weary of fulfilling his duties of tuition, but the patient
Barneveld; haughty and overbearing as he was often described to be,
rarely used a harsh or vindictive word regarding him in his letters.

"The ambassador of France," he said, "has been heard before the Assembly
of the States-General, and has made warm appeals in favour of union and
mutual toleration as his Majesty of Great Britain so wisely did in his
letters of 1613 .  .  .  .  If his Majesty could only be induced to write
fresh letters in similar tone, I should venture to hope better fruits
from them than from this attempt to thrust a national synod upon our
necks, which many of us hold to be contrary to law, reason, and the Act
of Union."

So long as it was possible to hope that the action of the States of
Holland would prevent such a catastrophe, he worked hard to direct them
in what he deemed the right course.

"Our political and religious differences," he said, "stand between hope
and fear."

The hope was in the acceptance of the Provincial Synod--the fear lest the
National Synod should be carried by a minority of the cities of Holland
combining with a majority of the other Provincial States.

"This would be in violation," he said, "of the so-called Religious Peace,
the Act of Union, the treaty with the Duke of Anjou, the negotiations of
the States of Utrecht, and with Prince Maurice in 1590 with cognizance of
the States-General and those of Holland for, the governorship of that
province, the custom of the Generality for the last thirty years
according to which religious matters have always been left to the
disposition of the States of each province .  .  .  .  Carleton is
strenuously urging this course in his Majesty's name, and I fear that
in the present state of our humours great troubles will be the result."

The expulsion by an armed mob, in the past year, of a Remonstrant
preacher at Oudewater, the overpowering of the magistracy and the forcing
on of illegal elections in that and other cities, had given him and all
earnest patriots grave cause for apprehension.  They were dreading, said
Barneveld, a course of crimes similar to those which under the Earl of
Leicester's government had afflicted Leyden and Utrecht.

"Efforts are incessant to make the Remonstrants hateful," he said to
Caron, "but go forward resolutely and firmly in the conviction that our
friends here are as animated in their opposition to the Spanish dominion
now and by God's grace will so remain as they have ever proved themselves
to be, not only by words, but works.  I fear that Mr. Carleton gives too
much belief to the enviers of our peace and tranquillity under pretext of
religion, but it is more from ignorance than malice."

Those who have followed the course of the Advocate's correspondence,
conversation, and actions, as thus far detailed, can judge of the
gigantic nature of the calumny by which he was now assailed.  That this
man, into every fibre of whose nature was woven undying hostility to
Spain, as the great foe to national independence and religious liberty
throughout the continent of Europe, whose every effort, as we have seen,
during all these years of nominal peace had been to organize a system of
general European defence against the war now actually begun upon
Protestantism, should be accused of being a partisan of Spain, a creature
of Spain, a pensioner of Spain, was enough to make honest men pray that
the earth might be swallowed up.  If such idiotic calumnies could be
believed, what patriot in the world could not be doubted?  Yet they were
believed.  Barneveld was bought by Spanish gold.  He had received whole
boxes full of Spanish pistoles, straight from Brussels!  For his part in
the truce negotiations he had received 120,000 ducats in one lump.

"It was plain," said the greatest man in the country to another great
man, "that Barneveld and his party are on the road to Spain."

"Then it were well to have proof of it," said the great man.

"Not yet time," was the reply.  "We must flatten out a few of them
first."

Prince Maurice had told the Princess-Dowager the winter before (8th
December 1616) that those dissensions would never be decided except by
use of weapons;  and he now mentioned to her that he had received
information from Brussels, which he in part believed, that the Advocate
was a stipendiary of Spain.  Yet he had once said, to the same Princess
Louise, of this stipendiary that "the services which the Advocate had
rendered to the House of Nassau were so great that all the members of
that house might well look upon him not as their friend but their
father."  Councillor van Maldere, President of the States of Zealand, and
a confidential friend of Maurice, was going about the Hague saying that
"one must string up seven or eight Remonstrants on the gallows; then
there might be some improvement."

As for Arminius and Uytenbogaert, people had long told each other and
firmly believed it, and were amazed when any incredulity was expressed in
regard to it, that they were in regular and intimate correspondence with
the Jesuits, that they had received large sums from Rome, and that both
had been promised cardinals' hats.  That Barneveld and his friend
Uytenbogaert were regular pensioners of Spain admitted of no dispute
whatever.  "It was as true as the Holy Evangel."  The ludicrous chatter
had been passed over with absolute disdain by the persons attacked, but
calumny is often a stronger and more lasting power than disdain.  It
proved to be in these cases.

"You have the plague mark on your flesh, oh pope, oh pensioner," said one
libeller.  "There are letters safely preserved to make your process for
you.  Look out for your head.  Many have sworn your death, for it is more
than time that you were out of the world.  We shall prove, oh great
bribed one, that you had the 120,000 little ducats."  The preacher
Uytenbogaert was also said to have had 80,000 ducats for his share.
"Go to Brussels," said the pamphleteer; "it all stands clearly written
out on the register with the names and surnames of all you great bribe-
takers."

These were choice morsels from the lampoon of the notary Danckaerts.

"We are tortured more and more with religious differences," wrote
Barneveld; "with acts of popular violence growing out of them the more
continuously as they remain unpunished, and with ever increasing
jealousies and suspicions.  The factious libels become daily more
numerous and more impudent, and no man comes undamaged from the field.
I, as a reward for all my troubles, labours, and sorrows, have three
double portions of them.  I hope however to overcome all by God's grace
and to defend my actions with all honourable men so long as right and
reason have place in the world, as to which many begin to doubt.  If his
Majesty had been pleased to stick to the letters of 1613, we should never
have got into these difficulties .  .  .  .  It were better in my opinion
that Carleton should be instructed to negotiate in the spirit of those
epistles rather than to torment us with the National Synod, which will do
more harm than good."

It is impossible not to notice the simplicity and patience with which the
Advocate, in the discharge of his duty as minister of foreign affairs,
kept the leading envoys of the Republic privately informed of events
which were becoming day by day more dangerous to the public interests and
his own safety.  If ever a perfectly quiet conscience was revealed in the
correspondence of a statesman, it was to be found in these letters.

Calmly writing to thank Caron for some very satisfactory English beer
which the Ambassador had been sending him from London, he proceeded to
speak again of the religious dissensions and their consequences.  He sent
him the letter and remonstrance which he had felt himself obliged to
make, and which he had been urged by his ever warm and constant friend
the widow of William the Silent to make on the subject of "the seditious
libels, full of lies and calumnies got up by conspiracy against him."
These letters were never published, however, until years after he had
been in his grave.

"I know that you are displeased with the injustice done me," he said,
"but I see no improvement.  People are determined to force through the
National Synod.  The two last ones did much harm.  This will do ten times
more, so intensely embittered are men's tempers against each other."
Again he deplored the King's departure from his letters of 1613, by
adherence to which almost all the troubles would have been spared.

It is curious too to observe the contrast between public opinion in Great
Britain, including its government, in regard to the constitution of the
United Provinces at that period of domestic dissensions and incipient
civil war and the general impressions manifested in the same nation two
centuries and a half later, on the outbreak of the slavery rebellion, as
to the constitution of the United States.

The States in arms against the general government on the other side of
the Atlantic were strangely but not disingenuously assumed to be
sovereign and independent, and many statesmen and a leading portion of
the public justified them in their attempt to shake off the central
government as if it were but a board of agency established by treaty and
terminable at pleasure of any one of among sovereigns and terminable at
pleasure of any one of them.

Yet even a superficial glance at the written constitution of the Republic
showed that its main object was to convert what had been a confederacy
into an Incorporation; and that the very essence of its renewed political
existence was an organic law laid down by a whole people in their
primitive capacity in place of a league banding together a group of
independent little corporations.  The chief attributes of sovereignty--
the rights of war and peace, of coinage, of holding armies and navies, of
issuing bills of credit, of foreign relations, of regulating and taxing
foreign commerce--having been taken from the separate States by the
united people thereof and bestowed upon a government provided with a
single executive head, with a supreme tribunal, with a popular house of
representatives and a senate, and with power to deal directly with the
life and property of every individual in the land, it was strange indeed
that the feudal, and in America utterly unmeaning, word Sovereign should
have been thought an appropriate term for the different States which had
fused themselves three-quarters of a century before into a Union.

When it is remembered too that the only dissolvent of this Union was the
intention to perpetuate human slavery, the logic seemed somewhat perverse
by which the separate sovereignty of the States was deduced from the
constitution of 1787.

On the other hand, the Union of Utrecht of 1579 was a league of petty
sovereignties; a compact less binding and more fragile than the Articles
of Union made almost exactly two hundred years later in America, and the
worthlessness of which, after the strain of war was over, had been
demonstrated in the dreary years immediately following the peace of 1783.
One after another certain Netherland provinces had abjured their
allegiance to Spain, some of them afterwards relapsing under it, some
having been conquered by the others, while one of them, Holland, had for
a long time borne the greater part of the expense and burthen of the war.

"Holland," said the Advocate, "has brought almost all the provinces to
their liberty.  To receive laws from them or from their clerical people
now is what our State cannot endure.  It is against her laws and customs,
in the enjoyment of which the other provinces and his Excellency as
Governor of Holland are bound to protect us."

And as the preservation of chattel slavery in the one case seemed a
legitimate ground for destroying a government which had as definite an
existence as any government known to mankind, so the resolve to impose a
single religious creed upon many millions of individuals was held by the
King and government of Great Britain to be a substantial reason for
imagining a central sovereignty which had never existed at all.  This was
still more surprising as the right to dispose of ecclesiastical affairs
and persons had been expressly reserved by the separate provinces in
perfectly plain language in the Treaty of Union.

"If the King were better informed," said Barneveld, "of our system and
laws, we should have better hope than now.  But one supposes through
notorious error in foreign countries that the sovereignty stands with the
States-General which is not the case, except in things which by the
Articles of Closer Union have been made common to all the provinces,
while in other matters, as religion, justice, and polity, the sovereignty
remains with each province, which foreigners seem unable to comprehend."

Early in June, Carleton took his departure for England on leave of
absence.  He received a present from the States of 3000 florins, and went
over in very ill-humour with Barneveld.  "Mr. Ambassador is much offended
and prejudiced," said the Advocate, "but I know that he will religiously
carry out the orders of his Majesty.  I trust that his Majesty can admit
different sentiments on predestination and its consequences, and that in
a kingdom where the supreme civil authority defends religion the system
of the Puritans will have no foothold."

Certainly James could not be accused of allowing the system of the
Puritans much foothold in England, but he had made the ingenious
discovery that Puritanism in Holland was a very different thing from
Puritanism in the Netherlands.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Acts of violence which under pretext of religion
Adulation for inferiors whom they despise
Calumny is often a stronger and more lasting power than disdain
Created one child for damnation and another for salvation
Depths of credulity men in all ages can sink
Devote himself to his gout and to his fair young wife
Furious mob set upon the house of Rem Bischop
Highborn demagogues in that as in every age affect adulation
In this he was much behind his age or before it
Logic is rarely the quality on which kings pride themselves
Necessity of deferring to powerful sovereigns
Not his custom nor that of his councillors to go to bed
Partisans wanted not accommodation but victory
Puritanism in Holland was a very different thing from England
Seemed bent on self-destruction
Stand between hope and fear
The evils resulting from a confederate system of government
To stifle for ever the right of free enquiry





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