CHAPTER XX.

Barneveld's Imprisonment--Ledenberg's Examination and Death--

Remonstrance of De Boississe--Aerssens admitted to the order of

Knights--Trial of the Advocate--Barneveld's Defence--The States

proclaim a Public Fast--Du Maurier's Speech before the Assembly--

Barneveld's Sentence--Barneveld prepares for Death--Goes to

Execution.

The Advocate had been removed within a few days after the arrest from the

chamber in Maurice's apartments, where he had originally been confined,

and was now in another building.

It was not a dungeon nor a jail. Indeed the commonplace and domestic

character of the scenery in which these great events were transacted has

in it something pathetic. There was and still remains a two-storied

structure, then of modern date, immediately behind the antique hall of

the old Counts within the Binnenhof. On the first floor was a courtroom

of considerable extent, the seat of one of the chief tribunals of justice

The story above was divided into three chambers with a narrow corridor

on each side. The first chamber, on the north-eastern side, was

appropriated for the judges when the state prisoners should be tried.

In the next Hugo Grotius was imprisoned. In the third was Barneveld.

There was a tower at the north-east angle of the building, within which

a winding and narrow staircase of stone led up to the corridor and so to

the prisoners' apartments. Rombout Hoogerbeets was confined in another

building.

As the Advocate, bent with age and a life of hard work, and leaning on

his staff, entered the room appropriated to him, after toiling up the

steep staircase, he observed--

"This is the Admiral of Arragon's apartment."

It was true. Eighteen years before, the conqueror of Nieuwpoort had

assigned this lodging to the chief prisoner of war in that memorable

victory over the Spaniards, and now Maurice's faithful and trusted

counsellor at that epoch was placed in durance here, as the result of the

less glorious series of victories which had just been achieved.

It was a room of moderate dimensions, some twenty-five feet square, with

a high vaulted roof and decently furnished. Below and around him in the

courtyard were the scenes of the Advocate's life-long and triumphant

public services. There in the opposite building were the windows of the

beautiful "Hall of Truce," with its sumptuous carvings and gildings, its

sculptures and portraits, where he had negotiated with the

representatives of all the great powers of Christendom the famous Treaty

which had suspended the war of forty years, and where he was wont almost

daily to give audience to the envoys of the greatest sovereigns or the

least significant states of Europe and Asia, all of whom had been ever

solicitous of his approbation and support.

Farther along in the same building was the assembly room of the States-

General, where some of the most important affairs of the Republic and

of Europe had for years been conducted, and where he had been so

indispensable that, in the words of a contemporary who loved him not,

"absolutely nothing could be transacted in his absence, all great affairs

going through him alone."

There were two dull windows, closely barred, looking northward over an

irregular assemblage of tile-roofed houses and chimney-stacks, while

within a stone's throw to the west, but unseen, was his own elegant

mansion on the Voorhout, surrounded by flower gardens and shady pleasure

grounds, where now sat his aged wife and her children all plunged in deep

affliction.

He was allowed the attendance of a faithful servant, Jan Franken by name,

and a sentinel stood constantly before his door. His papers had been

taken from him, and at first he was deprived of writing materials.

He had small connection with the outward world. The news of the

municipal revolution which had been effected by the Stadholder had not

penetrated to his solitude, but his wife was allowed to send him fruit

from their garden. One day a basket of fine saffron pears was brought to

him. On slicing one with a knife he found a portion of a quill inside

it. Within the quill was a letter on thinnest paper, in minutest

handwriting in Latin. It was to this effect.

"Don't rely upon the States of Holland, for the Prince of Orange has

changed the magistracies in many cities. Dudley Carleton is not your

friend."

A sergeant of the guard however, before bringing in these pears, had put

a couple of them in his pocket to take home to his wife. The letter,

copies of which perhaps had been inserted for safety in several of them,

was thus discovered and the use of this ingenious device prevented for

the future.

Secretary Ledenberg, who had been brought to the Hague in the early days

of September, was the first of the prisoners subjected to examination.

He was much depressed at the beginning of it, and is said to have

exclaimed with many sighs, "Oh Barneveld, Barneveld, what have you

brought us to!"

He confessed that the Waartgelders at Utrecht had been enlisted on

notification by the Utrecht deputies in the Hague with knowledge of

Barneveld, and in consequence of a resolution of the States in order to

prevent internal tumults. He said that the Advocate had advised in the

previous month of March a request to the Prince not to come to Utrecht;

that the communication of the message, in regard to disbanding the

Waartgelders, to his Excellency had been postponed after the deputies of

the States of Holland had proposed a delay in that disbandment; that

those deputies had come to Utrecht of their own accord; . . . . that

they had judged it possible to keep everything in proper order in Utrecht

if the garrison in the city paid by Holland were kept quiet, and if the

States of Utrecht gave similar orders to the Waartgelders; for they did

not believe that his Excellency would bring in troops from the outside.

He said that he knew nothing of a new oath to be demanded of the

garrison. He stated that the Advocate, when at Utrecht, had exhorted

the States, according to his wont, to maintain their liberties and

privileges, representing to them that the right to decide on the Synod

and the Waartgelders belonged to them. Lastly, he denied knowing who

was the author of The Balance, except by common report.

Now these statements hardly amounted to a confession of abominable and

unpardonable crimes by Ledenberg, nor did they establish a charge of

high-treason and corrupt correspondence with the enemy against Barneveld.

It is certain that the extent of the revelations seemed far from

satisfactory to the accusers, and that some pressure would be necessary

in order to extract anything more conclusive. Lieutenant Nythof told

Grotius that Ledenberg had accordingly been threatened with torture, and

that the executioner had even handled him for that purpose. This was

however denied by the judges of instruction who had been charged with the

preliminary examination.

That examination took place on the 27th September. After it had been

concluded, Ledenberg prayed long and earnestly on returning to prison.

He then entrusted a paper written in French to his son Joost, a boy of

eighteen, who did not understand that language. The youth had been

allowed to keep his father company in his confinement, and slept in the

same room.

The next night but one, at two o'clock, Joost heard his father utter a

deep groan. He was startled, groped in the darkness towards his bed and

felt his arm, which was stone cold. He spoke to him and received no

answer. He gave the alarm, the watch came in with lights, and it was

found that Ledenberg had given himself two mortal wounds in the abdomen

with a penknife and then cut his throat with a table-knife which he had

secreted, some days before, among some papers.

The paper in French given to his son was found to be to this effect.

"I know that there is an inclination to set an example in my person,

to confront me with my best friends, to torture me, afterwards to convict

me of contradictions and falsehoods as they say, and then to found an

ignominious sentence upon points and trifles, for this it will be

necessary to do in order to justify the arrest and imprisonment. To

escape all this I am going to God by the shortest road. Against a dead

man there can be pronounced no sentence of confiscation of property.

Done 17th September (o. s.) 1618."

The family of the unhappy gentleman begged his body for decent burial.

The request was refused. It was determined to keep the dead secretary

above ground and in custody until he could be tried, and, if possible,

convicted and punished. It was to be seen whether it were so easy to

baffle the power of the States-General, the Synod, and the Stadholder,

and whether "going to God by the shortest road" was to save a culprit's

carcass from ignominy, and his property from confiscation.

The French ambassadors, who had been unwearied in their endeavour to

restore harmony to the distracted Commonwealth before the arrest of the

prisoners, now exerted themselves to throw the shield of their

sovereign's friendship around the illustrious statesman and his fellow-

sufferers.

"It is with deepest sorrow," said de Boississe, "that I have witnessed

the late hateful commotions. Especially from my heart I grieve for the

arrest of the Seignior Barneveld, who with his discretion and wise

administration for the past thirty years has so drawn the hearts of all

neighbouring princes to himself, especially that of the King my master,

that on taking up my pen to apprize him of these events I am gravely

embarrassed, fearing to infringe on the great respect due to your

Mightinesses or against the honour and merits of the Seignior Barneveld.

. . . My Lords, take heed to your situation, for a great discontent is

smouldering among your citizens. Until now, the Union has been the chief

source of your strength. And I now fear that the King my master, the

adviser of your renowned Commonwealth, maybe offended that you have taken

this resolution after consulting with others, and without communicating

your intention to his ambassador . . . . It is but a few days that an

open edict was issued testifying to the fidelity of Barneveld, and can it

be possible that within so short a time you have discovered that you have

been deceived? I summon you once more in the name of the King to lay

aside all passion, to judge these affairs without partiality, and to

inform me what I am to say to the King. Such very conflicting accounts

are given of these transactions that I must beg you to confide to me the

secret of the affair. The wisest in the land speak so strongly of these

proceedings that it will be no wonder if the King my master should give

me orders to take the Seignior Barneveld under his protection. Should

this prove to be the case, your Lordships will excuse my course . . .

I beg you earnestly in your wisdom not to give cause of offence to

neighbouring princes, especially to my sovereign, who wishes from his

heart to maintain your dignity and interests and to assure you of his

friendship."

The language was vigorous and sincere, but the Ambassador forgot that the

France of to-day was not the France of yesterday; that Louis XIII. was

not Henry IV.; that it was but a cheerful fiction to call the present

King the guide and counsellor of the Republic, and that, distraught as

she was by the present commotions, her condition was strength and

tranquillity compared with the apparently decomposing and helpless state

of the once great kingdom of France. De Boississe took little by his

demonstration.

On the 12th December both de Boississe and du Maurier came before the

States-General once more, and urged a speedy and impartial trial for the

illustrious prisoners. If they had committed acts of treason and

rebellion, they deserved exemplary punishment, but the ambassadors warned

the States-General with great earnestness against the dangerous doctrine

of constructive treason, and of confounding acts dictated by violence of

party spirit at an excited period with the crime of high-treason against

the sovereignty of the State.

"Barneveld so honourable," they said, "for his immense and long continued

services has both this Republic and all princes and commonwealths for his

witnesses. It is most difficult to believe that he has attempted the

destruction of his fatherland, for which you know that he has toiled so

faithfully."

They admitted that so grave charges ought now to be investigated. "To

this end," said the ambassadors, "you ought to give him judges who are

neither suspected nor impassioned, and who will decide according to the

laws of the land, and on clear and undeniable evidence . . . . So

doing you will show to the whole world that you are worthy to possess and

to administer this Commonwealth to whose government God has called you."

Should they pursue another and a sterner course, the envoys warned the

Assembly that the King would be deeply offended, deeming it thus proved

how little value they set upon his advice and his friendship.

The States-General replied on the 19th December, assuring the ambassadors

that the delay in the trial was in order to make the evidence of the

great conspiracy complete, and would not tend to the prejudice of the

prisoners "if they had a good consciousness of their innocence." They

promised that the sentence upon them when pronounced would give entire

satisfaction to all their allies and to the King of France in particular,

of whom they spoke throughout the document in terms of profound respect.

But they expressed their confidence that "his Majesty would not place the

importunate and unfounded solicitations of a few particular criminals or

their supporters before the general interests of the dignity and security

of the Republic."

On the same day the States-General addressed a letter filled with very

elaborate and courteous commonplaces to the King, in which they expressed

a certainty that his Majesty would be entirely satisfied with their

actions.

The official answer of the States-General to the ambassadors, just cited,

gave but little comfort to the friends of the imprisoned statesman and

his companions. Such expressions as "ambitious and factious spirits,"

--"authors and patrons of the faction,"--"attempts at novelty through

changes in religion, in justice and in the fundamental laws of all orders

of polity," and the frequent mention of the word "conspiracy" boded

little good.

Information of this condition of affairs was conveyed to Hoogerbeets and

Grotius by means of an ingenious device of the distinguished scholar, who

was then editing the Latin works of the Hague poet, Janus Secundus.

While the sheets were going through the press, some of the verses were

left out, and their place supplied by others conveying the intelligence

which it was desired to send to the prisoners. The pages which contained

the secret were stitched together in such wise that in cutting the book

open they were not touched but remained closed. The verses were to this

effect. "The examination of the Advocate proceeds slowly, but there is

good hope from the serious indignation of the French king, whose envoys

are devoted to the cause of the prisoners, and have been informed that

justice will be soon rendered. The States of Holland are to assemble on

the 15th January, at which a decision will certainly be taken for

appointing judges. The preachers here at Leyden are despised, and men

are speaking strongly of war. The tumult which lately occurred at

Rotterdam may bring forth some good."

The quick-wited Grotius instantly discovered the device, read the

intelligence thus communicated in the proofsheets of Secundus, and made

use of the system to obtain further intelligence.

Hoogerbeets laid the book aside, not taking much interest at that time

in the works of the Hague poet. Constant efforts made to attract his

attention to those poems however excited suspicion among his keepers,

and the scheme was discovered before the Leyden pensionary had found

the means to profit by it.'

The allusions to the trial of the Advocate referred to the preliminary

examination which took place, like the first interrogatories of Grotius

and Hoogerbeets, in the months of November and December.

The thorough manner in which Maurice had reformed the States of Holland

has been described. There was one department of that body however which

still required attention. The Order of Knights, small in number but

potential in influence, which always voted first on great occasions, was

still through a majority of its members inclined to Barneveld. Both his

sons-in-law had seats in that college. The Stadholder had long believed

in a spirit of hostility on the part of those nobles towards himself.

He knew that a short time before this epoch there had been a scheme for

introducing his young brother, Frederic Henry, into the Chamber of

Knights. The Count had become proprietor of the barony of Naaldwyk, a

property which he had purchased of the Counts of Arenberg, and which

carried with it the hereditary dignity of Great Equerry of the Counts of

Holland. As the Counts of Holland had ceased to exist, although their

sovereignty had nearly been revived and conferred upon William the

Silent, the office of their chief of the stables might be deemed a

sinecure. But the jealousy of Maurice was easily awakened, especially by

any movement made or favoured by the Advocate. He believed that in the

election of Frederic Henry as a member of the College of Knights a plan

lay concealed to thrust him into power and to push this elder brother

from his place. The scheme, if scheme it were, was never accomplished,

but the Prince's rancour remained.

He now informed the nobles that they must receive into their body Francis

Aerssens, who had lately purchased the barony of Sommelsdyk, and Daniel

de Hartaing, Seignior of Marquette. With the presence of this deadly

enemy of Barneveld and another gentleman equally devoted to the

Stadholder's interest it seemed probable that the refractory majority of

the board of nobles would be overcome. But there were grave objections

to the admission of these new candidates. They were not eligible. The

constitution of the States and of the college of nobles prescribed that

Hollanders only of ancient and noble race and possessing estates in the

province could sit in that body. Neither Aerssens nor Hartaing was born

in Holland or possessed of the other needful qualifications.

Nevertheless, the Prince, who had just remodelled all the municipalities

throughout the Union which offered resistance to his authority, was not

to be checked by so trifling an impediment as the statutes of the House

of Nobles. He employed very much the same arguments which he had used to

"good papa" Hooft. "This time it must be so." Another time it might not

be necessary. So after a controversy which ended as controversies are

apt to do when one party has a sword in his hand and the other is seated

at a green-baize-covered table, Sommelsdyk and Marquette took their seats

among the knights. Of course there was a spirited protest. Nothing was

easier for the Stadholder than to concede the principle while trampling

it with his boot-heels in practice.

"Whereas it is not competent for the said two gentlemen to be admitted to

our board," said the nobles in brief, "as not being constitutionally

eligible, nevertheless, considering the strong desire of his Excellency

the Prince of Orange, we, the nobles and knights of Holland, admit them

with the firm promise to each other by noble and knightly faith ever in

future for ourselves and descendants to maintain the privileges of our

order now violated and never again to let them be directly or indirectly

infringed."

And so Aerssens, the unscrupulous plotter, and dire foe of the Advocate

and all his house, burning with bitter revenge for all the favours he had

received from him during many years, and the author of the venomous

pamphlets and diatribes which had done so much of late to blacken the

character of the great statesman before the public, now associated

himself officially with his other enemies, while the preliminary

proceedings for the state trials went forward.

Meantime the Synod had met at Dordtrecht. The great John Bogerman, with

fierce, handsome face, beak and eye of a bird of prey, and a deluge of

curly brown beard reaching to his waist, took his seat as president.

Short work was made with the Armenians. They and their five Points were

soon thrust out into outer darkness.

It was established beyond all gainsaying that two forms of Divine worship

in one country were forbidden by God's Word, and that thenceforth by

Netherland law there could be but one religion, namely, the Reformed or

Calvinistic creed.

It was settled that one portion of the Netherlanders and of the rest of

the human race had been expressly created by the Deity to be for ever

damned, and another portion to be eternally blessed. But this history

has little to do with that infallible council save in the political

effect of its decrees on the fate of Barneveld. It was said that the

canons of Dordtrecht were likely to shoot off the head of the Advocate.

Their sessions and the trial of the Advocate were simultaneous, but not

technically related to each other.

The conclusions of both courts were preordained, for the issue of the

great duel between Priesthood and State had been decided when the

military chieftain threw his sword into the scale of the Church.

There had been purposely a delay, before coming to a decision as to the

fate of the state prisoners, until the work of the Synod should have

approached completion.

It was thought good that the condemnation of the opinions of the

Arminians and the chastisement of their leaders should go hand-in-hand.

On the 23rd April 1619, the canons were signed by all the members of the

Synod. Arminians were pronounced heretics, schismatics, teachers of

false doctrines. They were declared incapable of filling any clerical or

academical post. No man thenceforth was to teach children, lecture to

adolescents, or preach to the mature, unless a subscriber to the

doctrines of the unchanged, unchangeable, orthodox church. On the 30th

April and 1st May the Netherland Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism

were declared to be infallible. No change was to be possible in either

formulary.

Schools and pulpits were inexorably bound to the only true religion.

On the 6th May there was a great festival at Dordtrecht in honour of the

conclusion of the Synod. The canons, the sentence, and long prayers and

orations in Latin by President Bogerman gladdened the souls of an immense

multitude, which were further enlivened by the decree that both Creed and

Catechism had stood the test of several criticisms and come out unchanged

by a single hair. Nor did the orator of the occasion forget to render

thanks "to the most magnanimous King James of Great Britain, through

whose godly zeal, fiery sympathy, and truly royal labour God had so often

refreshed the weary Synod in the midst of their toil."

The Synod held one hundred and eighty sessions between the 13th November

1618 and 29th May 1619, all the doings of which have been recorded in

chronicles innumerable. There need be no further mention of them here.

Barneveld and the companions of his fate remained in prison.

On the 7th March the trial of the great Advocate began. He had sat in

prison since the 18th of the preceding August. For nearly seven months

he had been deprived of all communication with the outward world save

such atoms of intelligence as could be secretly conveyed to him in the

inside of a quill concealed in a pear and by other devices. The man who

had governed one of the most important commonwealths of the world for

nearly a generation long--during the same period almost controlling the

politics of Europe--had now been kept in ignorance of the most

insignificant everyday events. During the long summer-heat of the dog-

days immediately succeeding his arrest, and the long, foggy, snowy, icy

winter of Holland which ensued, he had been confined in that dreary

garret-room to which he had been brought when he left his temporary

imprisonment in the apartments of Prince Maurice.

There was nothing squalid in the chamber, nothing specially cruel or

repulsive in the arrangements of his captivity. He was not in fetters,

nor fed upon bread and water. He was not put upon the rack, nor even

threatened with it as Ledenberg had been. He was kept in a mean,

commonplace, meagerly furnished, tolerably spacious room, and he was

allowed the services of his faithful domestic servant John Franken. A

sentinel paced day and night up the narrow corridor before his door. As

spring advanced, the notes of the nightingale came through the prison-

window from the neighbouring thicket. One day John Franken, opening the

window that his master might the better enjoy its song, exchanged

greeting with a fellow-servant in the Barneveld mansion who happened to

be crossing the courtyard. Instantly workmen were sent to close and

barricade the windows, and it was only after earnest remonstrances and

pledges that this resolve to consign the Advocate to darkness was

abandoned.

He was not permitted the help of lawyer, clerk, or man of business.

Alone and from his chamber of bondage, suffering from bodily infirmities

and from the weakness of advancing age, he was compelled to prepare his

defence against a vague, heterogeneous collection of charges, to meet

which required constant reference, not only to the statutes, privileges,

and customs of the country and to the Roman law, but to a thousand minute

incidents out of which the history of the Provinces during the past dozen

years or more had been compounded.

It is true that no man could be more familiar with the science and

practice of the law than he was, while of contemporary history he was

himself the central figure. His biography was the chronicle of his

country. Nevertheless it was a fearful disadvantage for him day by day

to confront two dozen hostile judges comfortably seated at a great table

piled with papers, surrounded by clerks with bags full of documents and

with a library of authorities and precedents duly marked and dog's-eared

and ready to their hands, while his only library and chronicle lay in his

brain. From day to day, with frequent intermissions, he was led down

through the narrow turret-stairs to a wide chamber on the floor

immediately below his prison, where a temporary tribunal had been

arranged for the special commission.

There had been an inclination at first on the part of his judges to

treat him as a criminal, and to require him to answer, standing, to the

interrogatories propounded to him. But as the terrible old man advanced

into the room, leaning on his staff, and surveying them with the air of

haughty command habitual to him, they shrank before his glance; several

involuntarily, rising uncovered, to salute him and making way for him to

the fireplace about which many were standing that wintry morning.

He was thenceforth always accommodated with a seat while he listened to

and answered 'ex tempore' the elaborate series of interrogatories which

had been prepared to convict him.

Nearly seven months he had sat with no charges brought against him. This

was in itself a gross violation of the laws of the land, for according to

all the ancient charters of Holland it was provided that accusation

should follow within six weeks of arrest, or that the prisoner should go

free. But the arrest itself was so gross a violation of law that respect

for it was hardly to be expected in the subsequent proceedings. He was a

great officer of the States of Holland. He had been taken under their

especial protection. He was on his way to the High Council. He was in

no sense a subject of the States-General. He was in the discharge of his

official duty. He was doubly and trebly sacred from arrest. The place

where he stood was on the territory of Holland and in the very sanctuary

of her courts and House of Assembly. The States-General were only as

guests on her soil, and had no domain or jurisdiction there whatever.

He was not apprehended by any warrant or form of law. It was in time of

peace, and there was no pretence of martial law. The highest civil

functionary of Holland was invited in the name of its first military

officer to a conference, and thus entrapped was forcibly imprisoned.

At last a board of twenty-four commissioners was created, twelve from

Holland and two from each of the other six provinces. This affectation

of concession to Holland was ridiculous. Either the law 'de non

evocando'--according to which no citizen of Holland could be taken out

of the province for trial--was to be respected or it was to be trampled

upon. If it was to be trampled upon, it signified little whether more

commissioners were to be taken from Holland than from each of the other

provinces, or fewer, or none at all. Moreover it was pretended that a

majority of the whole board was to be assigned to that province. But

twelve is not a majority of twenty-four. There were three fascals or

prosecuting officers, Leeuwen of Utrecht, Sylla of Gelderland, and Antony

Duyck of Holland. Duyck was notoriously the deadly enemy of Barneveld,

and was destined to succeed to his offices. It would have been as well

to select Francis Aerssens himself.

It was necessary to appoint a commission because there was no tribunal

appertaining to the States-General. The general government of the

confederacy had no power to deal with an individual. It could only

negotiate with the sovereign province to which the individual was

responsible, and demand his punishment if proved guilty of an offence.

There was no supreme court of appeal. Machinery was provided for

settling or attempting to settle disputes among the members of the

confederacy, and if there was a culprit in this great process it was

Holland itself. Neither the Advocate nor any one of his associates had

done any act except by authority, express or implied, of that sovereign

State. Supposing them unquestionably guilty of blackest crimes against

the Generality, the dilemma was there which must always exist by the very

nature of things in a confederacy. No sovereign can try a fellow

sovereign. The subject can be tried at home by no sovereign but his own.

The accused in this case were amenable to the laws of Holland only.

It was a packed tribunal. Several of the commissioners, like Pauw and

Muis for example, were personal enemies of Barneveld. Many of them were

totally ignorant of law. Some of them knew not a word of any language

but their mother tongue, although much of the law which they were to

administer was written in Latin.

Before such a court the foremost citizen of the Netherlands, the first

living statesman of Europe, was brought day by day during a period of

nearly three months; coming down stairs from the mean and desolate room

where he was confined to the comfortable apartment below, which had been

fitted up for the commission.

There was no bill of indictment, no arraignment, no counsel. There were

no witnesses and no arguments. The court-room contained, as it were,

only a prejudiced and partial jury to pronounce both on law and fact

without a judge to direct them, or advocates to sift testimony and

contend for or against the prisoner's guilt. The process, for it could

not be called a trial, consisted of a vast series of rambling and tangled

interrogatories reaching over a space of forty years without apparent

connection or relevancy, skipping fantastically about from one period to

another, back and forthwith apparently no other intent than to puzzle the

prisoner, throw him off his balance, and lead him into self-

contradiction.

The spectacle was not a refreshing one. It was the attempt of a

multitude of pigmies to overthrow and bind the giant.

Barneveld was served with no articles of impeachment. He asked for a

list in writing of the charges against him, that he might ponder his

answer. The demand was refused. He was forbidden the use of pen and ink

or any writing materials. His papers and books were all taken from him.

He was allowed to consult neither with an advocate nor even with a single

friend. Alone in his chamber of bondage he was to meditate on his

defence. Out of his memory and brain, and from these alone, he was to

supply himself with the array of historical facts stretching over a

longer period than the lifetime of many of his judges, and with the

proper legal and historical arguments upon those facts for the

justification of his course. That memory and brain were capacious and

powerful enough for the task. It was well for the judges that they had

bound themselves, at the outset, by an oath never to make known what

passed in the courtroom, but to bury all the proceedings in profound

secrecy forever. Had it been otherwise, had that been known to the

contemporary public which has only been revealed more than two centuries

later, had a portion only of the calm and austere eloquence been heard in

which the Advocate set forth his defence, had the frivolous and ignoble

nature of the attack been comprehended, it might have moved the very

stones in the streets to mutiny. Hateful as the statesman had been made

by an organized system of calumny, which was continued with unabated

vigour and increased venom sine he had been imprisoned, there was enough

of justice and of gratitude left in the hearts of Netherlanders to resent

the tyranny practised against their greatest man, and the obloquy thus

brought against a nation always devoted to their liberties and laws.

That the political system of the country was miserably defective was no

fault of Barneveld. He was bound by oath and duty to administer, not

make the laws. A handful of petty feudal sovereignties such as had once

covered the soil of Europe, a multitude of thriving cities which had

wrested or purchased a mass of liberties, customs, and laws from their

little tyrants, all subjected afterwards, without being blended together,

to a single foreign family, had at last one by one, or two by two,

shaken off that supremacy, and, resuming their ancient and as it were

decapitated individualities, had bound themselves by treaty in the midst

of a war to stand by each other, as if they were but one province, for

purposes of common defence against the common foe.

There had been no pretence of laying down a constitution, of enacting an

organic law. The day had not come for even the conception of a popular

constitution. The people had not been invented. It was not provinces

only, but cities, that had contracted with each other, according to the

very first words of the first Article of Union. Some of these cities,

like Ghent, Bruges, Antwerp, were Catholic by overwhelming majority, and

had subsequently either fallen away from the confederacy or been

conquered.

And as if to make assurance doubly sure, the Articles of Union not only

reserved to each province all powers not absolutely essential for

carrying on the war in common, but by an express article (the 13th),

declared that Holland and Zealand should regulate the matter of religion

according to their own discretion, while the other provinces might

conform to the provisions of the "Religious Peace" which included mutual

protection for Catholics and Protestants--or take such other order as

seemed most conducive to the religious and secular rights of the

inhabitants. It was stipulated that no province should interfere with

another in such matters, and that every individual in them all should

remain free in his religion, no man being molested or examined on account

of his creed. A farther declaration in regard to this famous article was

made to the effect that no provinces or cities which held to the Roman

Catholic religion were to be excluded from the League of Union if they

were ready to conform to its conditions and comport themselves

patriotically. Language could not be devised to declare more plainly

than was done by this treaty that the central government of the League

had neither wish nor right to concern itself with the religious affairs

of the separate cities or provinces. If it permitted both Papists and

Protestants to associate themselves against the common foe, it could

hardly have been imagined, when the Articles were drawn, that it would

have claimed the exclusive right to define the minutest points in a

single Protestant creed.

And if the exclusively secular parts of the polity prevailing in the

country were clumsy, irregular, and even monstrous, and if its defects

had been flagrantly demonstrated by recent events, a more reasonable

method of reforming the laws might have been found than the imprisonment

of a man who had faithfully administered them forty years long.

A great commonwealth had grown out of a petty feudal organism, like an

oak from an acorn in a crevice, gnarled and distorted, though wide-

spreading and vigorous. It seemed perilous to deal radically with such a

polity, and an almost timid conservatism on the part of its guardians in

such an age of tempests might be pardonable.

Moreover, as before remarked, the apparent imbecility resulting from

confederacy and municipalism combined was for a season remedied by the

actual preponderance of Holland. Two-thirds of the total wealth and

strength of the seven republics being concentrated in one province, the

desired union seemed almost gained by the practical solution of all in

that single republic. But this was one great cause of the general

disaster.

It would be a thankless and tedious task to wander through the wilderness

of interrogatories and answers extending over three months of time, which

stood in the place of a trial. The defence of Barneveld was his own

history, and that I have attempted to give in the preceding pages. A

great part of the accusation was deduced from his private and official

correspondence, and it is for this reason that I have laid such copious

extracts from it before the reader. No man except the judges and the

States-General had access to those letters, and it was easy therefore, if

needful, to give them a false colouring. It is only very recently that

they have been seen at all, and they have never been published from that

day to this.

Out of the confused mass of documents appertaining to the trial, a few

generalizations can be made which show the nature of the attack upon him.

He was accused of having permitted Arminius to infuse new opinions into

the University of Leyden, and of having subsequently defended the

appointment of Vorstius to the same place. He had opposed the National

Synod. He had made drafts of letters for the King of Great Britain to

sign, recommending mutual toleration on the five disputed points

regarding predestination. He was the author of the famous Sharp

Resolution. He had recommended the enlistment by the provinces and towns

of Waartgelders or mercenaries. He had maintained that those mercenaries

as well as the regular troops were bound in time of peace to be obedient

and faithful, not only to the Generality and the stadholders, but to the

magistrates of the cities and provinces where they were employed, and to

the states by whom they were paid. He had sent to Leyden, warning the

authorities of the approach of the Prince. He had encouraged all the

proceedings at Utrecht, writing a letter to the secretary of that

province advising a watch to be kept at the city gates as well as in the

river, and ordering his letter when read to be burned. He had received

presents from foreign potentates. He had attempted to damage the

character of his Excellency the Prince by declaring on various occasions

that he aspired to the sovereignty of the country. He had held a

ciphered correspondence on the subject with foreign ministers of the

Republic. He had given great offence to the King of Great Britain by

soliciting from him other letters in the sense of those which his Majesty

had written in 1613, advising moderation and mutual toleration. He had

not brought to condign punishment the author of 'The Balance', a pamphlet

in which an oration of the English ambassador had been criticised, and

aspersions made on the Order of the Garter. He had opposed the formation

of the West India Company. He had said many years before to Nicolas van

Berk that the Provinces had better return to the dominion of Spain. And

in general, all his proceedings had tended to put the Provinces into a

"blood bath."

There was however no accusation that he had received bribes from the

enemy or held traitorous communication with him, or that he had committed

any act of high-treason.

His private letters to Caron and to the ambassadors in Paris, with which

the reader has been made familiar, had thus been ransacked to find

treasonable matter, but the result was meagre in spite of the minute and

microscopic analysis instituted to detect traces of poison in them.

But the most subtle and far-reaching research into past transactions was

due to the Greffier Cornelis Aerssens, father of the Ambassador Francis,

and to a certain Nicolas van Berk, Burgomaster of Utrecht.

The process of tale-bearing, hearsay evidence, gossip, and invention went

back a dozen years, even to the preliminary and secret conferences in

regard to the Treaty of Truce.

Readers familiar with the history of those memorable negotiations are

aware that Cornelis van Aerssens had compromised himself by accepting a

valuable diamond and a bill of exchange drawn by Marquis Spinola on a

merchant in Amsterdam, Henry Beekman by name, for 80,000 ducats. These

were handed by Father Neyen, the secret agent of the Spanish government,

to the Greffier as a prospective reward for his services in furthering

the Truce. He did not reject them, but he informed Prince Maurice and

the Advocate of the transaction. Both diamond and bill of exchange were

subsequently deposited in the hands of the treasurer of the States-

General, Joris de Bie, the Assembly being made officially acquainted with

the whole course of the affair.

It is passing strange that this somewhat tortuous business, which

certainly cast a shade upon the fair fame of the elder Aerssens, and

required him to publish as good a defence as he could against the

consequent scandal, should have furnished a weapon wherewith to strike

at the Advocate of Holland some dozen years later.

But so it was. Krauwels, a relative of Aerssens, through whom Father

Neyen had first obtained access to the Greffier, had stated, so it

seemed, that the monk had, in addition to the bill, handed to him another

draft of Spinola's for 100,000 ducats, to be given to a person of more

consideration than Aerssens. Krauwels did not know who the person was,

nor whether he took the money. He expressed his surprise however that

leading persons in the government "even old and authentic beggars"--

should allow themselves to be so seduced as to accept presents from the

enemy. He mentioned two such persons, namely, a burgomaster at Delft and

a burgomaster at Haarlem. Aerssens now deposed that he had informed the

Advocate of this story, who had said, "Be quiet about it, I will have it

investigated," and some days afterwards on being questioned stated that

he had made enquiry and found there was something in it.

So the fact that Cornelis Aerssens had taken bribes, and that two

burgomasters were strongly suspected by Aerssens of having taken bribes,

seems to have been considered as evidence that Barneveld had taken a

bribe. It is true that Aerssens by advice of Maurice and Barneveld had

made a clean breast of it to the States-General and had given them over

the presents. But the States-General could neither wear the diamond nor

cash the bill of exchange, and it would have been better for the Greffier

not to contaminate his fingers with them, but to leave the gifts in the

monk's palm. His revenge against the Advocate for helping him out of his

dilemma, and for subsequently advancing his son Francis in a brilliant

diplomatic career, seems to have been--when the clouds were thickening

and every man's hand was against the fallen statesman--to insinuate that

he was the anonymous personage who had accepted the apocryphal draft for

100,000 ducats.

The case is a pregnant example of the proceedings employed to destroy the

Advocate.

The testimony of Nicolas van Berk was at any rate more direct.

On the 21st December 1618 the burgomaster testified that the Advocate had

once declared to him that the differences in regard to Divine Worship

were not so great but that they might be easily composed; asking him at

the same time "whether it would not be better that we should submit

ourselves again to the King of Spain." Barneveld had also referred, so

said van Berk, to the conduct of the Spanish king towards those who had

helped him to the kingdom of Portugal. The Burgomaster was unable

however to specify the date, year, or month in which the Advocate had

held this language. He remembered only that the conversation occurred

when Barneveld was living on the Spui at the Hague, and that having been

let into the house through the hall on the side of the vestibule, he had

been conducted by the Advocate down a small staircase into the office.

The only fact proved by the details seems to be that the story had lodged

in the tenacious memory of the Burgomaster for eight years, as Barneveld

had removed from the Spui to Arenberg House in the Voorhout in the year

1611.

No other offers from the King of Spain or the Archdukes had ever been

made to him, said van Berk, than those indicated in this deposition

against the Advocate as coming from that statesman. Nor had Barneveld

ever spoken to him upon such subjects except on that one occasion.

It is not necessary and would be wearisome to follow the unfortunate

statesman through the long line of defence which he was obliged to make,

in fragmentary and irregular form, against these discursive and confused

assaults upon him. A continuous argument might be built up with the

isolated parts which should be altogether impregnable. It is

superfluous.

Always instructive to his judges as he swept at will through the record

of nearly half a century of momentous European history, in which he was

himself a conspicuous figure, or expounding the ancient laws and customs

of the country with a wealth and accuracy of illustration which testified

to the strength of his memory, he seemed rather like a sage expounding

law and history to a class of pupils than a criminal defending himself

before a bench of commissioners. Moved occasionally from his austere

simplicity, the majestic old man rose to a strain of indignant eloquence

which might have shaken the hall of a vast assembly and found echo in the

hearts of a thousand hearers as he denounced their petty insults or

ignoble insinuations; glaring like a caged lion at his tormentors, who

had often shrunk before him when free, and now attempted to drown his

voice by contradictions, interruptions, threats, and unmeaning howls.

He protested, from the outset and throughout the proceedings, against the

jurisdiction of the tribunal. The Treaty of Union on which the Assembly

and States-General were founded gave that assembly no power over him.

They could take no legal cognizance of his person or his acts. He had

been deprived of writing materials, or he would have already drawn up his

solemn protest and argument against the existence of the commission. He

demanded that they should be provided for him, together with a clerk to

engross his defence. It is needless to say that the demand was refused.

It was notorious to all men, he said, that on the day when violent

hands were laid upon him he was not bound to the States-General by oath,

allegiance, or commission. He was a well-known inhabitant of the Hague,

a householder there, a vassal of the Commonwealth of Holland, enfeoffed

of many notable estates in that country, serving many honourable offices

by commission from its government. By birth, promotion, and conferred

dignities he was subject to the supreme authority of Holland, which for

forty years had been a free state possessed of all the attributes of

sovereignty, political, religious, judicial, and recognizing no superior

save God Almighty alone.

He was amenable to no tribunal save that of their Mightinesses the States

of Holland and their ordinary judges. Not only those States but the

Prince of Orange as their governor and vassal, the nobles of Holland,

the colleges of justice, the regents of cities, and all other vassals,

magistrates, and officers were by their respective oaths bound to

maintain and protect him in these his rights.

After fortifying this position by legal argument and by an array of

historical facts within his own experience, and alluding to the repeated

instances in which, sorely against his will, he had been solicited and

almost compelled to remain in offices of which he was weary, he referred

with dignity to the record of his past life. From the youthful days when

he had served as a volunteer at his own expense in the perilous sieges of

Haarlem and Leyden down to the time of his arrest, through an unbroken

course of honourable and most arduous political services, embassies, and

great negotiations, he had ever maintained the laws and liberties of the

Fatherland and his own honour unstained.

That he should now in his seventy-second year be dragged, in violation of

every privilege and statute of the country, by extraordinary means,

before unknown judges, was a grave matter not for himself alone but for

their Mightinesses the States of Holland and for the other provinces.

The precious right 'de non evocando' had ever been dear to all the

provinces, cities, and inhabitants of the Netherlands. It was the most

vital privilege in their possession as well in civil as criminal, in

secular as in ecclesiastical affairs.

When the King of Spain in 1567, and afterwards, set up an extraordinary

tribunal and a course of extraordinary trials, it was an undeniable fact,

he said, that on the solemn complaint of the States all princes, nobles,

and citizens not only in the Netherlands but in foreign countries, and

all foreign kings and sovereigns, held those outrages to be the foremost

and fundamental reason for taking up arms against that king, and

declaring him to have forfeited his right of sovereignty.

Yet that monarch was unquestionably the born and accepted sovereign

of each one of the provinces, while the General Assembly was but a

gathering of confederates and allies, in no sense sovereign. It was an

unimaginable thing, he said, that the States of each province should

allow their whole authority and right of sovereignty to be transferred to

a board of commissioners like this before which he stood. If, for

example, a general union of France, England, and the States of the United

Netherlands should be formed (and the very words of the Act of Union

contemplated such possibility), what greater absurdity could there be

than to suppose that a college of administration created for the specific

purposes of such union would be competent to perform acts of sovereignty

within each of those countries in matters of justice, polity, and

religion?

It was known to mankind, he said, that when negotiations were entered

into for bestowing the sovereignty of the Provinces on France and on

England, special and full powers were required from, and furnished by,

the States of each individual province.

Had the sovereignty been in the assembly of the States-General, they

might have transferred it of their own motion or kept it for themselves.

Even in the ordinary course of affairs the commissioners from each

province to the General Assembly always required a special power from

their constituents before deciding any matter of great importance.

In regard to the defence of the respective provinces and cities, he had

never heard it doubted, he said, that the states or the magistrates of

cities had full right to provide for it by arming a portion of their own

inhabitants or by enlisting paid troops. The sovereign counts of Holland

and bishops of Utrecht certainly possessed and exercised that right for

many hundred years, and by necessary tradition it passed to the states

succeeding to their ancient sovereignty. He then gave from the stores of

his memory innumerable instances in which soldiers had been enlisted by

provinces and cities all over the Netherlands from the time of the

abjuration of Spain down to that moment. Through the whole period of

independence in the time of Anjou, Matthias, Leicester, as well as under

the actual government, it had been the invariable custom thus to provide

both by land and sea and on the rivers against robbers, rebels, pirates,

mischief-makers, assailing thieves, domestic or foreign. It had been

done by the immortal William the Silent on many memorable occasions, and

in fact the custom was so notorious that soldiers so enlisted were known

by different and peculiar nicknames in the different provinces and towns.

That the central government had no right to meddle with religious

matters was almost too self-evident an axiom to prove. Indeed the

chief difficulty under which the Advocate laboured throughout this whole

process was the monstrous assumption by his judges of a political and

judicial system which never had any existence even in imagination. The

profound secrecy which enwrapped the proceedings from that day almost to

our own and an ignorant acquiescence of a considerable portion of the

public in accomplished facts offer the only explanation of a mystery

which must ever excite our wonder. If there were any impeachment at all,

it was an impeachment of the form of government itself. If language

could mean anything whatever, a mere perusal of the Articles of Union

proved that the prisoner had never violated that fundamental pact. How

could the general government prescribe an especial formulary for the

Reformed Church, and declare opposition to its decrees treasonable, when

it did not prohibit, but absolutely admitted and invited, provinces and

cities exclusively Catholic to enter the Union, guaranteeing to them

entire liberty of religion?

Barneveld recalled the fact that when the stadholdership of Utrecht

thirty years before had been conferred on Prince Maurice the States of

that province had solemnly reserved for themselves the disposition over

religious matters in conformity with the Union, and that Maurice had

sworn to support that resolution.

Five years later the Prince had himself assured a deputation from Brabant

that the States of each province were supreme in religious matters, no

interference the one with the other being justifiable or possible. In

1602 the States General in letters addressed to the States of the

obedient provinces under dominion of the Archdukes had invited them to

take up arms to help drive the Spaniards from the Provinces and to join

the Confederacy, assuring them that they should regulate the matter of

religion at their good pleasure, and that no one else should be allowed

to interfere therewith.

The Advocate then went into an historical and critical disquisition, into

which we certainly have no need to follow him, rapidly examining the

whole subject of predestination and conditional and unconditional

damnation from the days of St. Augustine downward, showing a thorough

familiarity with a subject of theology which then made up so much of the

daily business of life, political and private, and lay at the bottom of

the terrible convulsion then existing in the Netherlands. We turn from

it with a shudder, reminding the reader only how persistently the

statesman then on his trial had advocated conciliation, moderation, and

kindness between brethren of the Reformed Church who were not able to

think alike on one of the subtlest and most mysterious problems that

casuistry has ever propounded.

For fifty years, he said, he had been an enemy of all compulsion of the

human conscience. He had always opposed rigorous ecclesiastical decrees.

He had done his best to further, and did not deny having inspired, the

advice given in the famous letters from the King of Great Britain to the

States in 1613, that there should be mutual toleration and abstinence

from discussion of disputed doctrines, neither of them essential to

salvation. He thought that neither Calvin nor Beza would have opposed

freedom of opinion on those points. For himself he believed that the

salvation of mankind would be through God's unmerited grace and the

redemption of sins though the Saviour, and that the man who so held and

persevered to the end was predestined to eternal happiness, and that his

children dying before the age of reason were destined not to Hell but to

Heaven. He had thought fifty years long that the passion and sacrifice

of Christ the Saviour were more potent to salvation than God's wrath and

the sin of Adam and Eve to damnation. He had done his best practically

to avert personal bickerings among the clergy. He had been, so far as

lay in his power, as friendly to Remonstrants as to Contra-Remonstrants,

to Polyander and Festus Hommius as to Uytenbogaert and Episcopius. He

had almost finished a negotiation with Councillor Kromhout for the

peaceable delivery of the Cloister Church on the Thursday preceding the

Sunday on which it had been forcibly seized by the Contra-Remonstrants.

When asked by one of his judges how he presumed to hope for toleration

between two parties, each of which abhorred the other's opinions, and

likened each other to Turks and devil-worshippers, he replied that he had

always detested and rebuked those mutual revilings by every means in his

power, and would have wished to put down such calumniators of either

persuasion by the civil authority, but the iniquity of the times and the

exasperation of men's humours had prevented him.

Being perpetually goaded by one judge after another as to his

disrespectful conduct towards the King of Great Britain, and asked why

his Majesty had not as good right to give the advice of 1617 as the

recommendation of tolerance in 1613, he scrupulously abstained, as he had

done in all his letters, from saying a disrespectful word as to the

glaring inconsistency between the two communications, or to the hostility

manifested towards himself personally by the British ambassador. He had

always expressed the hope, he said, that the King would adhere to his

original position, but did not dispute his right to change his mind, nor

the good faith which had inspired his later letters. It had been his

object, if possible, to reconcile the two different systems recommended

by his Majesty into one harmonious whole.

His whole aim had been to preserve the public peace as it was the duty of

every magistrate, especially in times of such excitement, to do. He

could never comprehend why the toleration of the Five Points should be a

danger to the Reformed religion. Rather, he thought, it would strengthen

the Church and attract many Lutherans, Baptists, Catholics, and other

good patriots into its pale. He had always opposed the compulsory

acceptance by the people of the special opinions of scribes and doctors.

He did not consider, he said, the difference in doctrine on this disputed

point between the Contra-Remonstrants and Remonstrants as one-tenth the

value of the civil authority and its right to make laws and ordinances

regulating ecclesiastical affairs.

He believed the great bulwark of the independence of the country to be

the Reformed Church, and his efforts had ever been to strengthen that

bulwark by preventing the unnecessary schism which might prove its ruin.

Many questions of property, too, were involved in the question--the

church buildings, lands and pastures belonging to the Counts of Holland

and their successors--the States having always exercised the right of

church patronage--'jus patronatus'--a privilege which, as well as

inherited or purchased advowsons, had been of late flagrantly interfered

with.

He was asked if he had not said that it had never been the intention of

the States-General to carry on the war for this or that religion.

He replied that he had told certain clergymen expressing to him their

opinion that the war had been waged solely for the furtherance of their

especial shade of belief, that in his view the war had been undertaken

for the conservation of the liberties and laws of the land, and of its

good people. Of that freedom the first and foremost point was the true

Christian religion and liberty of conscience and opinion. There must be

religion in the Republic, he had said, but that the war was carried on to

sustain the opinion of one doctor of divinity or another on--differential

points was something he had never heard of and could never believe. The

good citizens of the country had as much right to hold by Melancthon as

by Calvin or Beza. He knew that the first proclamations in regard to the

war declared it to be undertaken for freedom of conscience, and so to

his, own knowledge it had been always carried on.

He was asked if he had not promised during the Truce negotiations so to

direct matters that the Catholics with time might obtain public exercise

of their religion.

He replied that this was a notorious falsehood and calumny, adding that

it ill accorded with the proclamation against the Jesuits drawn up by

himself some years after the Truce. He furthermore stated that it was

chiefly by his direction that the discourse of President Jeannin--urging

on part of the French king that liberty of worship might be granted to

the Papists--was kept secret, copies of it not having been furnished even

to the commissioners of the Provinces.

His indignant denial of this charge, especially taken in connection with

his repeated assertions during the trial, that among the most patriotic

Netherlanders during and since the war were many adherents of the ancient

church, seems marvellously in contradiction with his frequent and most

earnest pleas for liberty of conscience. But it did not appear

contradictory even to his judges nor to any contemporary. His position

had always been that the civil authority of each province was supreme in

all matters political or ecclesiastical. The States-General, all the

provinces uniting in the vote, had invited the Catholic provinces on more

than one occasion to join the Union, promising that there should be no

interference on the part of any states or individuals with the internal

affairs religious or otherwise of the provinces accepting the invitation.

But it would have been a gross contradiction of his own principle if he

had promised so to direct matters that the Catholics should have public

right of worship in Holland where he knew that the civil authority was

sure to refuse it, or in any of the other six provinces in whose internal

affairs he had no voice whatever. He was opposed to all tyranny over

conscience, he would have done his utmost to prevent inquisition into

opinion, violation of domicile, interference with private worship,

compulsory attendance in Protestant churches of those professing the

Roman creed. This was not attempted. No Catholic was persecuted on

account of his religion. Compared with the practice in other countries

this was a great step in advance. Religious tolerance lay on the road to

religious equality, a condition which had hardly been imagined then and

scarcely exists in Europe even to this day. But among the men in history

whose life and death contributed to the advancement of that blessing, it

would be vain to deny that Barneveld occupies a foremost place.

Moreover, it should be remembered that religious equality then would have

been a most hazardous experiment. So long as Church and State were

blended, it was absolutely essential at that epoch for the preservation

of Protestantism to assign the predominance to the State. Should the

Catholics have obtained religious equality, the probable result would

before long have been religious inequality, supremacy of the Catholics

in the Church, and supremacy of the Church over the State. The fruits of

the forty years' war would have become dust and ashes. It would be mere

weak sentimentalism to doubt--after the bloody history which had just

closed and the awful tragedy, then reopening--that every spark of

religious liberty would have soon been trodden out in the Netherlands.

The general onslaught of the League with Ferdinand, Maximilian of

Bavaria, and Philip of Spain at its head against the distracted,

irresolute, and wavering line of Protestantism across the whole of Europe

was just preparing. Rather a wilderness to reign over than a single

heretic, was the war-cry of the Emperor. The King of Spain, as we have

just been reading in his most secret, ciphered despatches to the Archduke

at Brussels, was nursing sanguine hopes and weaving elaborate schemes for

recovering his dominion over the United Netherlands, and proposing to

send an army of Jesuits thither to break the way to the reconquest.

To play into his hands then, by granting public right of worship to the

Papists, would have been in Barneveld's opinion like giving up Julich and

other citadels in the debatable land to Spain just as the great war

between Catholicism and Protestantism was breaking out. There had been

enough of burning and burying alive in the Netherlands during the century

which had closed. It was not desirable to give a chance for their

renewal now.

In regard to the Synod, Barneveld justified his course by a simple

reference to the 13th Article of the Union. Words could not more plainly

prohibit the interference by the States-General with the religious

affairs of any one of the Provinces than had been done by that celebrated

clause. In 1583 there had been an attempt made to amend that article by

insertion of a pledge to maintain the Evangelical, Reformed, religion

solely, but it was never carried out. He disdained to argue so self-

evident a truth, that a confederacy which had admitted and constantly

invited Catholic states to membership, under solemn pledge of

noninterference with their religious affairs, had no right to lay down

formulas for the Reformed Church throughout all the Netherlands. The

oath of stadholder and magistrates in Holland to maintain the Reformed

religion was framed before this unhappy controversy on predestination had

begun, and it was mere arrogant assumption on the part of the Contra-

Remonstrants to claim a monopoly of that religion, and to exclude the

Remonstrants from its folds.

He had steadily done his utmost to assuage those dissensions while

maintaining the laws which he was sworn to support. He had advocated a

provincial synod to be amicably assisted by divines from neighbouring

countries. He had opposed a National Synod unless unanimously voted by

the Seven Provinces, because it would have been an open violation of the

fundamental law of the confederacy, of its whole spirit, and of liberty

of conscience. He admitted that he had himself drawn up a protest on the

part of three provinces (Holland, Utrecht, and Overyssel) against the

decree for the National Synod as a breach of the Union, declaring it to

be therefore null and void and binding upon no man. He had dictated the

protest as oldest member present, while Grotius as the youngest had acted

as scribe. He would have supported the Synod if legally voted, but would

have preferred the convocation, under the authority of all the provinces,

of a general, not a national, synod, in which, besides clergy and laymen

from the Netherlands, deputations from all Protestant states and churches

should take part; a kind of Protestant oecumenical council.

As to the enlistment, by the States of a province, of soldiers to keep

the peace and suppress tumults in its cities during times of political

and religious excitement, it was the most ordinary of occurrences. In

his experience of more than forty years he had never heard the right even

questioned. It was pure ignorance of law and history to find it a

novelty.

To hire temporarily a sufficient number of professional soldiers, he

considered a more wholesome means of keeping the peace than to enlist one

portion of the citizens of a town against another portion, when party and

religious spirit was running high. His experience had taught him that

the mutual hatred of the inhabitants, thus inflamed, became more lasting

and mischievous than the resentment caused through suppression of

disorder by an armed and paid police of strangers.

It was not only the right but the most solemn duty of the civil authority

to preserve the tranquillity, property, and lives of citizens committed

to their care. "I have said these fifty years," said Barneveld, "that it

is better to be governed by magistrates than mobs. I have always

maintained and still maintain that the most disastrous, shameful, and

ruinous condition into which this land can fall is that in which the

magistrates are overcome by the rabble of the towns and receive laws

from them. Nothing but perdition can follow from that."

There had been good reason to believe that the French garrisons as

well as some of the train bands could not be thoroughly relied upon

in emergencies like those constantly breaking out, and there had been

advices of invasion by sympathizers from neighbouring countries. In many

great cities the civil authority had been trampled upon and mob rule had

prevailed. Certainly the recent example in the great commercial capital

of the country--where the house of a foremost citizen had been besieged,

stormed, and sacked, and a virtuous matron of the higher class hunted

like a wild beast through the streets by a rabble grossly ignorant of the

very nature of the religious quibble which had driven them mad, pelted

with stones, branded with vilest names, and only saved by accident from

assassination, while a church-going multitude looked calmly on--with

constantly recurring instances in other important cities were sufficient

reasons for the authorities to be watchful.

He denied that he had initiated the proceedings at Utrecht in

conversation with Ledenberg or any one else, but he had not refused, he

said, his approval of the perfectly legal measures adopted for keeping

the peace there when submitted to him. He was himself a born citizen of

that province, and therefore especially interested in its welfare, and

there was an old and intimate friendship between Utrecht and Holland. It

would have been painful to him to see that splendid city in the control

of an ignorant mob, making use of religious problems, which they did not

comprehend, to plunder the property and take the lives of peaceful

citizens more comfortably housed than themselves.

He had neither suggested nor controlled the proceedings at Utrecht. On

the contrary, at an interview with the Prince and Count William on the

13th July, and in the presence of nearly thirty members of the general

assembly, he had submitted a plan for cashiering the enlisted soldiery

and substituting for them other troops, native-born, who should be sworn

in the usual form to obey the laws of the Union. The deputation from

Holland to Utrecht, according to his personal knowledge, had received no

instructions personal or oral to authorize active steps by the troops of

the Holland quota, but to abstain from them and to request the Prince

that they should not be used against the will and commands of the States

of Utrecht, whom they were bound by oath to obey so long as they were in

garrison there.

No man knew better than he whether the military oath which was called

new-fangled were a novelty or not, for he had himself, he said, drawn it

up thirty years before at command of the States-General by whom it was

then ordained. From that day to this he had never heard a pretence that

it justified anything not expressly sanctioned by the Articles of Union,

and neither the States of Holland nor those of Utrecht had made any

change in the oath. The States of Utrecht were sovereign within their

own territory, and in the time of peace neither the Prince of Orange

without their order nor the States-General had the right to command the

troops in their territory. The governor of a province was sworn to obey

the laws of the province and conform to the Articles of the General

Union.

He was asked why he wrote the warning letter to Ledenberg, and why he was

so anxious that the letter should be burned; as if that were a deadly

offence.

He said that he could not comprehend why it should be imputed to him

as a crime that he wished in such turbulent times to warn so important

a city as Utrecht, the capital of his native province, against tumults,

disorders, and sudden assaults such as had often happened to her in times

past. As for the postscript requesting that the letter might be put in

the fire, he said that not being a member of, the government of that

province he was simply unwilling to leave a record that "he had been too

curious in aliens republics, although that could hardly be considered a

grave offence."

In regard to the charge that he had accused Prince Maurice of aspiring to

the sovereignty of the country, he had much to say. He had never brought

such accusation in public or private. He had reason to believe however--

he had indeed convincing proofs--that many people, especially those

belonging to the Contra-Remonstrant party, cherished such schemes. He

had never sought to cast suspicion on the Prince himself on account of

those schemes. On the contrary, he had not even formally opposed them.

What he wished had always been that such projects should be discussed

formally, legally, and above board. After the lamentable murder of the

late Prince he had himself recommended to the authorities of some of the

cities that the transaction for bestowing the sovereignty of Holland upon

William, interrupted by his death, "should be completed in favour of

Prince Maurice in despite of the Spaniard." Recently he had requested

Grotius to look up the documents deposited in Rotterdam belonging to this

affair, in order that they might be consulted.

He was asked whether according to Buzenval, the former French ambassador,

Prince Maurice had not declared he would rather fling himself from the

top of the Hague tower than accept the sovereignty. Barneveld replied

that the Prince according to the same authority had added "under the

conditions which had been imposed upon his father;" a clause which

considerably modified the self-denying statement. It was desirable

therefore to search the acts for the limitations annexed to the

sovereignty.

Three years long there had been indications from various sources that a

party wished to change the form of government. He had not heard nor ever

intimated that the Prince suggested such intrigues. In anonymous

pamphlets and common street and tavern conversations the Contra-

Remonstrants were described by those of their own persuasion as

"Prince's Beggars" and the like. He had received from foreign countries

information worthy of attention, that it was the design of the Contra-

Remonstrants to raise the Prince to the sovereignty. He had therefore in

1616 brought the matter before the nobles and cities in a communication

setting forth to the best of his recollection that under these religious

disputes something else was intended. He had desired ripe conclusions on

the matter, such as should most conduce to the service of the country.

This had been in good faith both to the Prince and the Provinces, in

order that, should a change in the government be thought desirable,

proper and peaceful means might be employed to bring it about. He had

never had any other intention than to sound the inclinations of those

with whom he spoke, and he had many times since that period, by word of

mouth and in writing, so lately as the month of April last assured the

Prince that he had ever been his sincere and faithful servant and meant

to remain so to the end of his life, desiring therefore that he would

explain to him his wishes and intentions.

Subsequently he had publicly proposed in full Assembly of Holland that

the States should ripely deliberate and roundly declare if they were

discontented with the form of government, and if so, what change they

would desire. He had assured their Mightinesses that they might rely

upon him to assist in carrying out their intentions whatever they might

be. He had inferred however from the Prince's intimations, when he had

broached the subject to him in 1617, that he was not inclined towards

these supposed projects, and had heard that opinion distinctly expressed

from the mouth of Count William.

That the Contra-Remonstrants secretly entertained these schemes,

he had been advised from many quarters, at home and abroad. In the year

1618 he had received information to that effect from France. Certain

confidential counsellors of the Prince had been with him recently to

confer on the subject. He had told them that, if his Excellency chose

to speak to him in regard to it, would listen to his reasoning about it,

both as regarded the interests of the country and the Prince himself,

and then should desire him to propose and advocate it before the

Assembly, he would do so with earnestness, zeal, and affection. He had

desired however that, in case the attempt failed, the Prince would allow

him to be relieved from service and to leave the country. What he wished

from the bottom of his heart was that his Excellency would plainly

discover to him the exact nature of his sentiments in regard to the

business.

He fully admitted receiving a secret letter from Ambassador Langerac,

apprising him that a man of quality in France had information of the

intention of the Contra-Remonstrants throughout the Provinces, should

they come into power, to raise Prince Maurice to the sovereignty. He

had communicated on the subject with Grotius and other deputies in order

that, if this should prove to be the general inclination, the affair

might be handled according to law, without confusion or disorder. This,

he said, would be serving both the country and the Prince most

judiciously.

He was asked why he had not communicated directly with Maurice. He

replied that he had already seen how unwillingly the Prince heard him

allude to the subject, and that moreover there was another clause in

the letter of different meaning, and in his view worthy of grave

consideration by the States.

No question was asked him as to this clause, but we have seen that it

referred to the communication by du Agean to Langerac of a scheme for

bestowing the sovereignty of the Provinces on the King of France. The

reader will also recollect that Barneveld had advised the Ambassador to

communicate the whole intelligence to the Prince himself.

Barneveld proceeded to inform the judges that he had never said a word to

cast suspicion upon the Prince, but had been actuated solely by the

desire to find out the inclination of the States. The communications

which he had made on the subject were neither for discrediting the Prince

nor for counteracting the schemes for his advancement. On the contrary,

he had conferred with deputies from great cities like Dordtrecht,

Enkhuyzen, and Amsterdam, most devoted to the Contra-Remonstrant party,

and had told them that, if they chose to propose the subject themselves,

he would conduct himself to the best of his abilities in accordance with

the wishes of the Prince.

It would seem almost impossible for a statesman placed in Barneveld's

position to bear himself with more perfect loyalty both to the country

and to the Stadholder. His duty was to maintain the constitution and

laws so long as they remained unchanged. Should it appear that the

States, which legally represented the country, found the constitution

defective, he was ready to aid in its amendment by fair public and legal

methods.

If Maurice wished to propose himself openly as a candidate for the

sovereignty, which had a generation before been conferred upon his

father, Barneveld would not only acquiesce in the scheme, but propose it.

Should it fail, he claimed the light to lay down all his offices and go

into exile.

He had never said that the Prince was intriguing for, or even desired,

the sovereignty. That the project existed among the party most opposed

to himself, he had sufficient proof. To the leaders of that party

therefore he suggested that the subject should be publicly discussed,

guaranteeing freedom of debate and his loyal support so far as lay within

his power.

This was his answer to the accusation that he had meanly, secretly, and

falsely circulated statements that the Prince was aspiring to the

sovereignty.

[Great pains were taken, in the course of the interrogatories, to

elicit proof that the Advocate had concealed important diplomatic

information from the Prince. He was asked why, in his secret

instructions to Ambassador Langerac, he ordered him by an express

article to be very cautious about making communications to the

Prince. Searching questions were put in regard to these secret

instructions, which I have read in the Archives, and a copy of which

now lies before me. They are in the form of questions, some of them

almost puerile ones, addressed to Barneveld by the Ambassador then

just departing on his mission to France in 1614, with the answers

written in the margin by the Advocate. The following is all that

has reference to the Prince:

"Of what matters may I ordinarily write to his Excellency?"

Answer--"Of all great and important matters."

It was difficult to find much that was treasonable in that.]

Among the heterogeneous articles of accusation he was asked why he had

given no attention to those who had so, frequently proposed the formation

of the West India Company.

He replied that it had from old time been the opinion of the States of

Holland, and always his own, that special and private licenses for

traffic, navigation, and foreign commerce, were prejudicial to the

welfare of the land. He had always been most earnestly opposed to them,

detesting monopolies which interfered with that free trade and navigation

which should be common to all mankind. He had taken great pains however

in the years 1596 and 1597 to study the nature of the navigation and

trade to the East Indies in regard to the nations to be dealt with in

those regions, the nature of the wares bought and sold there, the

opposition to be encountered from the Spaniards and Portuguese against

the commerce of the Netherlanders, and the necessity of equipping vessels

both for traffic and defence, and had come to the conclusion that these

matters could best be directed by a general company. He explained in

detail the manner in which he had procured the blending of all the

isolated chambers into one great East India Corporation, the enormous

pains which it had cost him to bring it about, and the great commercial

and national success which had been the result. The Admiral of Aragon,

when a prisoner after the battle of Nieuwpoort, had told him, he said,

that the union of these petty corporations into one great whole had been

as disastrous a blow to the kingdoms of Spain and Portugal as the Union

of the Provinces at Utrecht had been. In regard to the West India

Company, its sole object, so far as he could comprehend it, had been to

equip armed vessels, not for trade but to capture and plunder Spanish

merchantmen and silver fleets in the West Indies and South America. This

was an advantageous war measure which he had favoured while the war

lasted. It was in no sense a commercial scheme however, and when the

Truce had been made--the company not having come into existence--he

failed to comprehend how its formation could be profitable for the

Netherlanders. On the contrary it would expressly invite or irritate the

Spaniards into a resumption of the war, an object which in his humble

opinion was not at all desirable.

Certainly these ideas were not especially reprehensible, but had they

been as shallow and despicable as they seem to us enlightened, it is

passing strange that they should have furnished matter for a criminal

prosecution.

It was doubtless a disappointment for the promoters of the company, the

chief of whom was a bankrupt, to fail in obtaining their charter, but it

was scarcely high-treason to oppose it. There is no doubt however that

the disapprobation with which Barneveld regarded the West India Company,

the seat of which was at Amsterdam, was a leading cause of the deadly

hostility entertained for him by the great commercial metropolis.

It was bad enough for the Advocate to oppose unconditional predestination

and the damnation of infants, but to frustrate a magnificent system of

privateering on the Spaniards in time of truce was an unpardonable crime.

The patience with which the venerable statesman submitted to the taunts,

ignorant and insolent cross-questionings, and noisy interruptions of his

judges, was not less remarkable than the tenacity of memory which enabled

him thus day after day, alone, unaided by books, manuscripts, or friendly

counsel, to reconstruct the record of forty years, and to expound the

laws of the land by an array of authorities, instances, and illustrations

in a manner that would be deemed masterly by one who had all the

resources of libraries, documents, witnesses, and secretaries at command.

Only when insidious questions were put tending to impute to him

corruption, venality, and treacherous correspondence with the enemy--for

they never once dared formally to accuse him of treason--did that almost

superhuman patience desert him.

He was questioned as to certain payments made by him to a certain van der

Vecken in Spanish coin. He replied briefly at first that his money

transactions with that man of business extended over a period of twenty

or thirty years, and amounted to many hundred thousands of florins,

growing out of purchases and sales of lands, agricultural enterprises on

his estates, moneys derived from his professional or official business

and the like. It was impossible for him to remember the details of every

especial money payment that might have occurred between them.

Then suddenly breaking forth into a storm of indignation; he could mark

from these questions, he said, that his enemies, not satisfied with

having wounded his heart with their falsehoods, vile forgeries, and

honour-robbing libels, were determined to break it. This he prayed that

God Almighty might avert and righteously judge between him and them.

It was plain that among other things they were alluding to the stale and

senseless story of the sledge filled with baskets of coin sent by the

Spanish envoys on their departure from the Hague, on conclusion of the

Truce, to defray expenses incurred by them for board and lodging of

servants, forage of horses, and the like-which had accidentally stopped

at Barneveld's door and was forthwith sent on to John Spronssen,

superintendent of such affairs. Passing over this wanton bit of calumny

with disgust, he solemnly asserted that he had never at any period of his

life received one penny nor the value of one penny from the King of

Spain, the Archdukes, Spinola, or any other person connected with the

enemy, saving only the presents publicly and mutually conferred according

to invariable custom by the high contracting parties, upon the respective

negotiators at conclusion of the Treaty of Truce. Even these gifts

Barneveld had moved his colleagues not to accept, but proposed that they

should all be paid into the public treasury. He had been overruled, he

said, but that any dispassionate man of tolerable intelligence could

imagine him, whose whole life had been a perpetual offence to Spain,

to be in suspicious relations with that power seemed to him impossible.

The most intense party spirit, yea, envy itself, must confess that he had

been among the foremost to take up arms for his country's liberties, and

had through life never faltered in their defence. And once more in that

mean chamber, and before a row of personal enemies calling themselves

judges, he burst into an eloquent and most justifiable sketch of the

career of one whom there was none else to justify and so many to assail.

From his youth, he said, he had made himself by his honourable and

patriotic deeds hopelessly irreconcilable with the Spaniards. He was one

of the advocates practising in the Supreme Court of Holland, who in the

very teeth of the Duke of Alva had proclaimed him a tyrant and had sworn

obedience to the Prince of Orange as the lawful governor of the land. He

was one of those who in the same year had promoted and attended private

gatherings for the advancement of the Reformed religion. He had helped

to levy, and had contributed to, funds for the national defence in the

early days of the revolt. These were things which led directly to the

Council of Blood and the gibbet. He had borne arms himself on various

bloody fields and had been perpetually a deputy to the rebel camps. He

had been the original mover of the Treaty of Union which was concluded

between the Provinces at Utrecht. He had been the first to propose and

to draw up the declaration of Netherland independence and the abjuration

of the King of Spain. He had been one of those who had drawn and passed

the Act establishing the late Prince of Orange as stadholder. Of the

sixty signers of these memorable declarations none were now living save

himself and two others. When the Prince had been assassinated, he had

done his best to secure for his son Maurice the sovereign position of

which murder had so suddenly deprived the father. He had been member of

the memorable embassies to France and England by which invaluable support

for the struggling Provinces had been obtained.

And thus he rapidly sketched the history of the great war of independence

in which he had ever been conspicuously employed on the patriotic side.

When the late King of France at the close of the century had made peace

with Spain, he had been sent as special ambassador to that monarch, and

had prevailed on him, notwithstanding his treaty with the enemy, to

continue his secret alliance with the States and to promise them a large

subsidy, pledges which had been sacredly fulfilled. It was on that

occasion that Henry, who was his debtor for past services, professional,

official, and perfectly legitimate, had agreed, when his finances should

be in better condition, to discharge his obligations; over and above the

customary diplomatic present which he received publicly in common with

his colleague Admiral Nassau. This promise, fulfilled a dozen years

later, had been one of the senseless charges of corruption brought

against him. He had been one of the negotiators of the Truce in which

Spain had been compelled to treat with her revolted provinces as with

free states and her equals. He had promoted the union of the Protestant

princes and their alliance with France and the United States in

opposition to the designs of Spain and the League. He had organized and

directed the policy by which the forces of England, France, and

Protestant Germany had possessed themselves of the debateable land. He

had resisted every scheme by which it was hoped to force the States from

their hold of those important citadels. He had been one of the foremost

promoters of the East India Company, an organization which the Spaniards

confessed had been as damaging to them as the Union of the Provinces

itself had been.

The idiotic and circumstantial statements, that he had conducted

Burgomaster van Berk through a secret staircase of his house into his

private study for the purpose of informing him that the only way for the

States to get out of the war was to submit themselves once more to their

old masters, so often forced upon him by the judges, he contradicted with

disdain and disgust. He had ever abhorred and dreaded, he said, the

House of Spain, Austria, and Burgundy. His life had passed in open

hostility to that house, as was known to all mankind. His mere personal

interests, apart from higher considerations, would make an approach to

the former sovereign impossible, for besides the deeds he had already

alluded to, he had committed at least twelve distinct and separate acts,

each one of which would be held high-treason by the House of Austria, and

he had learned from childhood that these are things which monarchs never

forget. The tales of van Berk were those of a personal enemy, falsehoods

scarcely worth contradicting.

He was grossly and enormously aggrieved by the illegal constitution of

the commission. He had protested and continued to protest against it.

If that protest were unheeded, he claimed at least that those men should

be excluded from the board and the right to sit in judgment upon his

person and his deeds who had proved themselves by words and works to be

his capital enemies, of which fact he could produce irrefragable

evidence. He claimed that the Supreme Court of Holland, or the High

Council, or both together, should decide upon that point. He held as his

personal enemies, he said, all those who had declared that he, before or

since the Truce down to the day of his arrest, had held correspondence

with the Spaniards, the Archdukes, the Marquis Spinola, or any one on

that side, had received money, money value, or promises of money from

them, and in consequence had done or omitted to do anything whatever.

He denounced such tales as notorious, shameful, and villainous

falsehoods, the utterers and circulators of them as wilful liars, and

this he was ready to maintain in every appropriate way for the

vindication of the truth and his own honour. He declared solemnly before

God Almighty to the States-General and to the States of Holland that his

course in the religious matter had been solely directed to the

strengthening of the Reformed religion and to the political security of

the provinces and cities. He had simply desired that, in the awful and

mysterious matter of predestination, the consciences of many preachers

and many thousands of good citizens might be placed in tranquillity, with

moderate and Christian limitations against all excesses.

From all these reasons, he said, the commissioners, the States-General,

the Prince, and every man in the land could clearly see, and were bound

to see, that he was the same man now that he was at the beginning of the

war, had ever been, and with God's help should ever remain.

The proceedings were kept secret from the public and, as a matter of

course, there had been conflicting rumours from day to day as to the

probable result of these great state trials. In general however it was

thought that the prisoner would be acquitted of the graver charges, or

that at most he would be permanently displaced from all office and

declared incapable thenceforth to serve the State. The triumph of the

Contra-Remonstrants since the Stadholder had placed himself at the head

of them, and the complete metamorphosis of the city governments even in

the strongholds of the Arminian party seemed to render the permanent

political disgrace of the Advocate almost a matter of certainty.

The first step that gave rise to a belief that he might be perhaps more

severely dealt with than had been anticipated was the proclamation by the

States-General of a public fast and humiliation for the 17th April.

In this document it was announced that "Church and State--during several

years past having been brought into great danger of utter destruction

through certain persons in furtherance of their ambitious designs--had

been saved by the convocation of a National Synod; that a lawful sentence

was soon to be expected upon those who had been disturbing the

Commonwealth; that through this sentence general tranquillity would

probably be restored; and that men were now to thank God for this result,

and pray to Him that He would bring the wicked counsels and stratagems of

the enemy against these Provinces to naught."

All the prisoners were asked if they too would like in their chambers

of bondage to participate in the solemnity, although the motive for the

fasting and prayer was not mentioned to them. Each of them in his

separate prison room, of course without communication together, selected

the 7th Psalm and sang it with his servant and door-keeper.

From the date of this fast-day Barneveld looked upon the result of his

trial as likely to be serious.

Many clergymen refused or objected to comply with the terms of this

declaration. Others conformed with it greedily, and preached lengthy

thanksgiving sermons, giving praise to God that, He had confounded the

devices of the ambitious and saved the country from the "blood bath"

which they had been preparing for it.

The friends of Barneveld became alarmed at the sinister language of this

proclamation, in which for the first time allusions had been made to a

forthcoming sentence against the accused.

Especially the staunch and indefatigable du Maurier at once addressed

himself again to the States-General. De Boississe had returned to

France, having found that the government of a country torn, weakened, and

rendered almost impotent by its own internecine factions, was not likely

to exert any very potent influence on the fate of the illustrious

prisoner.

The States had given him to understand that they were wearied with his

perpetual appeals, intercessions, and sermons in behalf of mercy. They

made him feel in short that Lewis XIII. and Henry IV. were two entirely

different personages.

Du Maurier however obtained a hearing before the Assembly on the 1st May,

where he made a powerful and manly speech in presence of the Prince,

urging that the prisoners ought to be discharged unless they could be

convicted of treason, and that the States ought to show as much deference

to his sovereign as they had always done to Elizabeth of England. He

made a personal appeal to Prince Maurice, urging upon him how much it

would redound to his glory if he should now in generous and princely

fashion step forward in behalf of those by whom he deemed himself to have

been personally offended.

His speech fell upon ears hardened against such eloquence and produced no

effect.

Meantime the family of Barneveld, not yet reduced to despair, chose to

take a less gloomy view of the proclamation. Relying on the innocence of

the great statesman, whose aims, in their firm belief, had ever been for

the welfare and glory of his fatherland, and in whose heart there had

never been kindled one spark of treason, they bravely expected his

triumphant release from his long and, as they deemed it, his iniquitous

imprisonment.

On this very 1st of May, in accordance with ancient custom, a may-pole

was erected on the Voorhout before the mansion of the captive statesman,

and wreaths of spring flowers and garlands of evergreen decorated the

walls within which were such braised and bleeding hearts. These

demonstrations of a noble hypocrisy, if such it were, excited the wrath,

not the compassion, of the Stadholder, who thought that the aged matron

and her sons and daughters, who dwelt in that house of mourning, should

rather have sat in sackcloth with ashes on their heads than indulge in

these insolent marks of hope and joyful expectation.

It is certain however that Count William Lewis, who, although most

staunch on the Contra-Remonstrant side, had a veneration for the Advocate

and desired warmly to save him, made a last and strenuous effort for that

purpose.

It was believed then, and it seems almost certain, that, if the friends

of the Advocate had been willing to implore pardon for him, the sentence

would have been remitted or commuted. Their application would have been

successful, for through it his guilt would seem to be acknowledged.

Count William sent for the Fiscal Duyck. He asked him if there were no

means of saving the life of a man who was so old and had done the country

so much service. After long deliberation, it was decided that Prince

Maurice should be approached on the subject. Duyck wished that the Count

himself would speak with his cousin, but was convinced by his reasoning

that it would be better that the Fiscal should do it. Duyck had a long

interview accordingly with Maurice, which was followed by a very secret

one between them both and Count William. The three were locked up

together, three hours long, in the Prince's private cabinet. It was

then decided that Count William should go, as if of his own accord,

to the Princess-Dowager Louise, and induce her to send for some one of

Barneveld's children and urge that the family should ask pardon for him.

She asked if this was done with the knowledge of the Prince of Orange, or

whether he would not take it amiss. The Count eluded the question, but

implored her to follow his advice.

The result was an interview between the Princess and Madame de

Groeneveld, wife of the eldest son. That lady was besought to apply,

with the rest of the Advocate's children, for pardon to the Lords States,

but to act as if it were done of her own impulse, and to keep their

interview profoundly secret.

Madame de Groeneveld took time to consult the other members of the family

and some friends. Soon afterwards she came again to the Princess, and

informed her that she had spoken with the other children, and that they

could not agree to the suggestion. "They would not move one step in it--

no, not if it should cost him his head."

The Princess reported the result of this interview to Count William, at

which both were so distressed that they determined to leave the Hague.

There is something almost superhuman in the sternness of this

stoicism. Yet it lay in the proud and highly tempered character of

the Netherlanders. There can be no doubt that the Advocate would have

expressly dictated this proceeding if he had been consulted. It was

precisely the course adopted by himself. Death rather than life with a

false acknowledgment of guilt and therefore with disgrace. The loss of

his honour would have been an infinitely greater triumph to his enemies

than the loss of his head.

There was no delay in drawing up the sentence. Previously to this

interview with the widow of William the Silent, the family of the

Advocate had presented to the judges three separate documents, rather in

the way of arguments than petitions, undertaking to prove by elaborate

reasoning and citations of precedents and texts of the civil law that the

proceedings against him were wholly illegal, and that he was innocent of

every crime.

No notice had been taken of those appeals.

Upon the questions and answers as already set forth the sentence soon

followed, and it may be as well that the reader should be aware, at this

point in the narrative, of the substance of that sentence so soon to be

pronounced. There had been no indictment, no specification of crime.

There had been no testimony or evidence. There had been no argument for

the prosecution or the defence. There had been no trial whatever. The

prisoner was convicted on a set of questions to which he had put in

satisfactory replies. He was sentenced on a preamble. The sentence was

a string of vague generalities, intolerably long, and as tangled as the

interrogatories. His proceedings during a long career had on the whole

tended to something called a "blood bath"--but the blood bath had never

occurred.

With an effrontery which did not lack ingenuity, Barneveld's defence was

called by the commissioners his confession, and was formally registered

as such in the process and the sentence; while the fact that he had not

been stretched upon the rack during his trial, nor kept in chains for the

eight months of his imprisonment, were complacently mentioned as proofs

of exceptionable indulgence.

"Whereas the prisoner John of Barneveld," said the sentence, "without

being put to the torture and without fetters of iron, has confessed . .

. . to having perturbed religion, greatly afflicted the Church of God,

and carried into practice exorbitant and pernicious maxims of State . .

. . inculcating by himself and accomplices that each province had the

right to regulate religious affairs within its own territory, and that

other provinces were not to concern themselves therewith"--therefore and

for many other reasons he merited punishment.

He had instigated a protest by vote of three provinces against the

National Synod. He had despised the salutary advice of many princes and

notable personages. He had obtained from the King of Great Britain

certain letters furthering his own opinions, the drafts of which he had

himself suggested, and corrected and sent over to the States' ambassador

in London, and when written out, signed, and addressed by the King to the

States-General, had delivered them without stating how they had been

procured.

Afterwards he had attempted to get other letters of a similar nature from

the King, and not succeeding had defamed his Majesty as being a cause of

the troubles in the Provinces. He had permitted unsound theologians to

be appointed to church offices, and had employed such functionaries in

political affairs as were most likely to be the instruments of his own

purposes. He had not prevented vigorous decrees from being enforced in

several places against those of the true religion. He had made them

odious by calling them Puritans, foreigners, and "Flanderizers," although

the United Provinces had solemnly pledged to each other their lives,

fortunes, and blood by various conventions, to some of which the prisoner

was himself a party, to maintain the Reformed, Evangelical, religion

only, and to, suffer no change in it to be made for evermore.

In order to carry out his design and perturb the political state of the

Provinces he had drawn up and caused to be enacted the Sharp Resolution

of 4th August 1617. He had thus nullified the ordinary course of

justice. He had stimulated the magistrates to disobedience, and advised

them to strengthen themselves with freshly enlisted military companies.

He had suggested new-fangled oaths for the soldiers, authorizing them to

refuse obedience to the States-General and his Excellency. He had

especially stimulated the proceedings at Utrecht. When it was understood

that the Prince was to pass through Utrecht, the States of that province

not without the prisoner's knowledge had addressed a letter to his

Excellency, requesting him not to pass through their city. He had

written a letter to Ledenberg suggesting that good watch should be held

at the town gates and up and down the river Lek. He had desired that

Ledenberg having read that letter should burn it. He had interfered with

the cashiering of the mercenaries at Utrecht. He had said that such

cashiering without the consent of the States of that province was an act

of force which would justify resistance by force.

Although those States had sent commissioners to concert measures

with the Prince for that purpose, he had advised them to conceal their

instructions until his own plan for the disbandment could be carried out.

At a secret meeting in the house of Tresel, clerk of the States-General,

between Grotius, Hoogerbeets, and other accomplices, it was decided that

this advice should be taken. Report accordingly was made to the

prisoner. He had advised them to continue in their opposition to the

National Synod.

He had sought to calumniate and blacken his Excellency by saying

that he aspired to the sovereignty of the Provinces. He had received

intelligence on that subject from abroad in ciphered letters.

He had of his own accord rejected a certain proposed, notable alliance

of the utmost importance to this Republic.

[This refers, I think without doubt, to the conversation between

King James and Caron at the end of the year 1815.]

He had received from foreign potentates various large sums of money and

other presents.

All "these proceedings tended to put the city of Utrecht into a blood-

bath, and likewise to bring the whole country, and the person of his

Excellency into the uttermost danger."

This is the substance of the sentence, amplified by repetitions and

exasperating tautology into thirty or forty pages.

It will have been perceived by our analysis of Barneveld's answers to the

commissioners that all the graver charges which he was now said to have

confessed had been indignantly denied by him or triumphantly justified.

It will also be observed that he was condemned for no categorical crime--

lese-majesty, treason, or rebellion. The commissioners never ventured to

assert that the States-General were sovereign, or that the central

government had a right to prescribe a religious formulary for all the

United Provinces. They never dared to say that the prisoner had been

in communication with the enemy or had received bribes from him.

Of insinuation and implication there was much, of assertion very little,

of demonstration nothing whatever.

But supposing that all the charges had been admitted or proved, what

course would naturally be taken in consequence? How was a statesman who

adhered to the political, constitutional, and religious opinions on which

he had acted, with the general acquiescence, during a career of more than

forty years, but which were said to be no longer in accordance with

public opinion, to be dealt with? Would the commissioners request him

to retire honourably from the high functions which he had over and over

again offered to resign? Would they consider that, having fairly

impeached and found him guilty of disturbing the public peace by

continuing to act on his well-known legal theories, they might deprive

him summarily of power and declare him incapable of holding office again?

The conclusion of the commissioners was somewhat more severe than either

of these measures. Their long rambling preamble ended with these

decisive words:

"Therefore the judges, in name of the Lords States-General, condemn the

prisoner to be taken to the Binnenhof, there to be executed with the

sword that death may follow, and they declare all his property

confiscated."

The execution was to take place so soon as the sentence had been read to

the prisoner.

After the 1st of May Barneveld had not appeared before his judges. He

had been examined in all about sixty times.

In the beginning of May his servant became impatient. "You must not be

impatient," said his master. "The time seems much longer because we get

no news now from the outside. But the end will soon come. This delay

cannot last for ever."

Intimation reached him on Saturday the 11th May that the sentence was

ready and would soon be pronounced.

"It is a bitter folk," said Barneveld as he went to bed. "I have

nothing good to expect of them." Next day was occupied in sewing up and

concealing his papers, including a long account of his examination, with

the questions and answers, in his Spanish arm-chair. Next day van der

Meulen said to the servant, "I will bet you a hundred florins that you'll

not be here next Thursday."

The faithful John was delighted, not dreaming of the impending result.

It was Sunday afternoon, 12th May, and about half past five o'clock.

Barneveld sat in his prison chamber, occupied as usual in writing,

reviewing the history of the past, and doing his best to reduce into

something like order the rambling and miscellaneous interrogatories, out

of which his trial had been concocted, while the points dwelt in his

memory, and to draw up a concluding argument in his own defence. Work

which according to any equitable, reasonable, or even decent procedure

should have been entrusted to the first lawyers of the country--preparing

the case upon the law and the facts with the documents before them, with

the power of cross-questioning witnesses and sifting evidence, and

enlightened by constant conferences with the illustrious prisoner

himself--came entirely upon his own shoulders, enfeebled as he was

by age, physical illness, and by the exhaustion of along imprisonment.

Without books, notes of evidence, or even copies of the charges of which

he stood accused, he was obliged to draw up his counter-arguments against

the impeachment and then by aid of a faithful valet to conceal his

manuscript behind the tapestry of the chamber, or cause them to be sewed

up in the lining of his easy-chair, lest they should be taken from him by

order of the judges who sat in the chamber below.

While he was thus occupied in preparations for his next encounter with

the tribunal, the door opened, and three gentlemen entered. Two were the

prosecuting officers of the government, Fiscal Sylla and Fiscal van

Leeuwen. The other was the provost-marshal, Carel de Nijs. The servant

was directed to leave the room.

Barneveld had stepped into his dressing-room on hearing footsteps, but

came out again with his long furred gown about him as the three entered.

He greeted them courteously and remained standing, with his hands placed

on the back of his chair and with one knee resting carelessly against the

arm of it. Van Leeuwen asked him if he would not rather be seated, as

they brought a communication from the judges. He answered in the

negative. Von Leeuwen then informed him that he was summoned to appear

before the judges the next morning to hear his sentence of death.

"The sentence of death!" he exclaimed, without in the least changing his

position; "the sentence of death! the sentence of death!" saying the

words over thrice, with an air of astonishment rather than of horror.

"I never expected that! I thought they were going to hear my defence

again. I had intended to make some change in my previous statements,

having set some things down when beside myself with choler."

He then made reference to his long services. Van Leeuwen expressed

himself as well acquainted with them. "He was sorry," he said, "that his

lordship took this message ill of him."

"I do not take it ill of you," said Barneveld, "but let them," meaning

the judges, "see how they will answer it before God. Are they thus to

deal with a true patriot? Let me have pen, ink, and paper, that for the

last time I may write farewell to my wife."

"I will go ask permission of the judges," said van Leenwen, "and I cannot

think that my lord's request will be refused."

While van Leeuwen was absent, the Advocate exclaimed, looking at the

other legal officer:

"Oh, Sylla, Sylla, if your father could only have seen to what uses they

would put you!"

Sylla was silent.

Permission to write the letter was soon received from de Voogt, president

of the commission. Pen, ink, and paper were brought, and the prisoner

calmly sat down to write, without the slightest trace of discomposure

upon his countenance or in any of his movements.

While he was writing, Sylla said with some authority, "Beware, my lord,

what you write, lest you put down something which may furnish cause for

not delivering the letter."

Barneveld paused in his writing, took the glasses from his eyes, and

looked Sylla in the face.

"Well, Sylla," he said very calmly, "will you in these my last moments

lay down the law to me as to what I shall write to my wife?"