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THE LIFE AND DEATH of JOHN OF BARNEVELD, ADVOCATE OF HOLLAND
WITH A VIEW OF THE PRIMARY CAUSES AND MOVEMENTS OF THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR
By John Lothrop Motley, D.C.L., LL.D.
MOTLEY'S HISTORY OF THE NETHERLANDS, Project Gutenberg Edition, Volume 86
The Life and Death of John of Barneveld, v1, 1609
PREFACE:
These volumes make a separate work in themselves. They form also the
natural sequel to the other histories already published by the Author,
as well as the necessary introduction to that concluding portion of his
labours which he has always desired to lay before the public; a History
of the Thirty Years' War.
For the two great wars which successively established the independence
of Holland and the disintegration of Germany are in reality but one;
a prolonged Tragedy of Eighty Years. The brief pause, which in the
Netherlands was known as the Twelve Years' Truce with Spain, was
precisely the epoch in which the elements were slowly and certainly
gathering for the renewal over nearly the whole surface of civilized
Europe of that immense conflict which for more than forty years had been
raging within the narrow precincts of the Netherlands.
The causes and character of the two wars were essentially the same.
There were many changes of persons and of scenery during a struggle which
lasted for nearly three generations of mankind; yet a natural succession
both of actors, motives, and events will be observed from the beginning
to the close.
The designs of Charles V. to establish universal monarchy, which he had
passionately followed for a lifetime through a series of colossal crimes
against humanity and of private misdeeds against individuals, such as it
has rarely been permitted to a single despot to perpetrate, had been
baffled at last. Disappointed, broken, but even to our own generation
never completely unveiled, the tyrant had withdrawn from the stage of
human affairs, leaving his son to carry on the great conspiracy against
Human Right, independence of nations, liberty of thought, and equality of
religions, with the additional vigour which sprang from intensity of
conviction.
For Philip possessed at least that superiority over his father that he
was a sincere bigot. In the narrow and gloomy depths of his soul he had
doubtless persuaded himself that it was necessary for the redemption of
the human species that the empire of the world should be vested in his
hands, that Protestantism in all its forms should be extirpated as a
malignant disease, and that to behead, torture, burn alive, and bury
alive all heretics who opposed the decree of himself and the Holy Church
was the highest virtue by which he could merit Heaven.
The father would have permitted Protestantism if Protestantism would have
submitted to universal monarchy. There would have been small difficulty
in the early part of his reign in effecting a compromise between Rome and
Augsburg, had the gigantic secular ambition of Charles not preferred to
weaken the Church and to convert conscientious religious reform into
political mutiny; a crime against him who claimed the sovereignty of
Christendom.
The materials for the true history of that reign lie in the Archives of
Spain, Austria, Rome, Venice, and the Netherlands, and in many other
places. When out of them one day a complete and authentic narrative
shall have been constructed, it will be seen how completely the policy of
Charles foreshadowed and necessitated that of Philip, how logically,
under the successors of Philip, the Austrian dream of universal empire
ended in the shattering, in the minute subdivision, and the reduction to
a long impotence of that Germanic Empire which had really belonged to
Charles.
Unfortunately the great Republic which, notwithstanding the aid of
England on the one side and of France on the other, had withstood almost
single-handed the onslaughts of Spain, now allowed the demon of religious
hatred to enter into its body at the first epoch of peace, although it
had successfully exorcised the evil spirit during the long and terrible
war.
There can be no doubt whatever that the discords within the interior of
the Dutch Republic during the period of the Truce, and their tragic
catastrophe, had weakened her purpose and partially paralysed her arm.
When the noble Commonwealth went forward to the renewed and general
conflict which succeeded the concentrated one in which it had been the
chief actor, the effect of those misspent twelve years became apparent.
Indeed the real continuity of the war was scarcely broken by the fitful,
armistice. The death of John of Cleve, an event almost simultaneous with
the conclusion of the Truce, seemed to those gifted with political vision
the necessary precursor of a new and more general war.
The secret correspondence of Barneveld shows the almost prophetic
accuracy with which he indicated the course of events and the approach of
an almost universal conflict, while that tragedy was still in the future,
and was to be enacted after he had been laid in his bloody grave. No man
then living was so accustomed as he was to sweep the political horizon,
and to estimate the signs and portents of the times. No statesman was
left in Europe during the epoch of the Twelve Years' Truce to compare
with him in experience, breadth of vision, political tact, or
administrative sagacity.
Imbued with the grand traditions and familiar with the great personages
of a most heroic epoch; the trusted friend or respected counsellor of
William the Silent, Henry IV., Elizabeth, and the sages and soldiers on
whom they leaned; having been employed during an already long lifetime in
the administration of greatest affairs, he stood alone after the deaths
of Henry of France and the second Cecil, and the retirement of Sully,
among the natural leaders of mankind.
To the England of Elizabeth, of Walsingham, Raleigh, and the Cecils, had
succeeded the Great Britain of James, with his Carrs and Carletons,
Nauntons, Lakes, and Winwoods. France, widowed of Henry and waiting for
Richelieu, lay in the clutches of Concini's, Epernons, and Bouillons,
bound hand and foot to Spain. Germany, falling from Rudolph to Matthias,
saw Styrian Ferdinand in the background ready to shatter the fabric of a
hundred years of attempted Reformation. In the Republic of the
Netherlands were the great soldier and the only remaining statesman of
the age. At a moment when the breathing space had been agreed upon
before the conflict should be renewed; on a wider field than ever,
between Spanish-Austrian world-empire and independence of the nations;
between the ancient and only Church and the spirit of religious Equality;
between popular Right and royal and sacerdotal Despotism; it would have
been desirable that the soldier and the statesman should stand side by
side, and that the fortunate Confederacy, gifted with two such champions
and placed by its own achievements at the very head of the great party of
resistance, should be true to herself.
These volumes contain a slight and rapid sketch of Barneveld's career up
to the point at which the Twelve Years' Truce with Spain was signed in
the year 1609. In previous works the Author has attempted to assign the
great Advocate's place as part and parcel of history during the
continuance of the War for Independence. During the period of the Truce
he will be found the central figure. The history of Europe, especially
of the Netherlands, Britain, France, and Germany, cannot be thoroughly
appreciated without a knowledge of the designs, the labours, and the fate
of Barneveld.
The materials for estimating his character and judging his judges lie in
the national archives of the land of which he was so long the foremost
citizen. But they have not long been accessible. The letters, state
papers, and other documents remain unprinted, and have rarely been read.
M. van Deventer has published three most interesting volumes of the
Advocate's correspondence, but they reach only to the beginning of 1609.
He has suspended his labours exactly at the moment when these volumes
begin. I have carefully studied however nearly the whole of that
correspondence, besides a mass of other papers. The labour is not light,
for the handwriting of the great Advocate is perhaps the worst that ever
existed, and the papers, although kept in the admirable order which
distinguishes the Archives of the Hague, have passed through many hands
at former epochs before reaching their natural destination in the
treasure-house of the nation. Especially the documents connected with
the famous trial were for a long time hidden from mortal view, for
Barneveld's judges had bound themselves by oath to bury the proceedings
out of sight. And the concealment lasted for centuries. Very recently
a small portion of those papers has been published by the Historical
Society of Utrecht. The "Verhooren," or Interrogatories of the Judges,
and the replies of Barneveld, have thus been laid before the reading
public of Holland, while within the last two years the distinguished and
learned historian, Professor Fruin, has edited the "Verhooren" of Hugo
Grotius.
But papers like these, important as they are, make but a slender portion
of the material out of which a judgment concerning these grave events can
be constructed. I do not therefore offer an apology for the somewhat
copious extracts which I have translated and given in these volumes from
the correspondence of Barneveld and from other manuscripts of great
value--most of them in the Royal Archives of Holland and Belgium--which
are unknown to the public.
I have avoided as much as possible any dealings with the theological
controversies so closely connected with the events which I have attempted
to describe. This work aims at being a political study. The subject is
full of lessons, examples, and warnings for the inhabitants of all free
states. Especially now that the republican system of government is
undergoing a series of experiments with more or less success in one
hemisphere--while in our own land it is consolidated, powerful, and
unchallenged--will the conflicts between the spirits of national
centralization and of provincial sovereignty, and the struggle between
the church, the sword, and the magistracy for supremacy in a free
commonwealth, as revealed in the first considerable republic of modern
history, be found suggestive of deep reflection.
Those who look in this work for a history of the Synod of Dordtrecht will
look in vain. The Author has neither wish nor power to grapple with the
mysteries and passions which at that epoch possessed so many souls. The
Assembly marks a political period. Its political aspects have been
anxiously examined, but beyond the ecclesiastical threshold there has
been no attempt to penetrate.
It was necessary for my purpose to describe in some detail the relations
of Henry IV. with the Dutch Republic during the last and most pregnant
year of his life, which makes the first of the present history. These
relations are of European importance, and the materials for appreciating
them are of unexpected richness, in the Dutch and Belgian Archives.
Especially the secret correspondence, now at the Hague, of that very able
diplomatist Francis Aerssens with Barneveld during the years 1609, 1610,
and 1611, together with many papers at Brussels, are full of vital
importance.
They throw much light both on the vast designs which filled the brain of
Henry at this fatal epoch and on his extraordinary infatuation for the
young Princess of Conde by which they were traversed, and which was
productive of such widespread political anal tragical results. This
episode forms a necessary portion of my theme, and has therefore been set
forth from original sources.
I am under renewed obligations to my friend M. Gachard, the eminent
publicist and archivist of Belgium, for his constant and friendly offices
to me (which I have so often experienced before), while studying the
documents under his charge relating to this epoch; especially the secret
correspondence of Archduke Albert with Philip III, and his ministers, and
with Pecquius, the Archduke's agent at Paris.
It is also a great pleasure to acknowledge the unceasing courtesy and
zealous aid rendered me during my renewed studies in the Archives at the
Hague--lasting through nearly two years--by the Chief Archivist, M. van
den Berg, and the gentlemen connected with that institution, especially
M. de Jonghe and M. Hingman, without whose aid it would have been
difficult for me to decipher and to procure copies of the almost
illegible holographs of Barneveld.
I must also thank M. van Deventer for communicating copies of some
curious manuscripts relating to my subject, some from private archives in
Holland, and others from those of Simancas.
A single word only remains to be said in regard to the name of the
statesman whose career I have undertaken to describe.
His proper appellation and that by which he has always been known in his
own country is Oldenbarneveld, but in his lifetime and always in history
from that time to this he has been called Barneveld in English as well as
French, and this transformation, as it were, of the name has become so
settled a matter that after some hesitation it has been adopted in the
present work.
The Author would take this opportunity of expressing his gratitude for
the indulgence with which his former attempts to illustrate an important
period of European history have been received by the public, and his
anxious hope that the present volumes may be thought worthy of attention.
They are the result at least of severe and conscientious labour at the
original sources of history, but the subject is so complicated and
difficult that it may well be feared that the ability to depict and
unravel is unequal to the earnestness with which the attempt has been
made.
LONDON, 1873.
The Life and Death of John of Barneveld, v1, 1609
CHAPTER I.
John of Barneveld the Founder of the Commonwealth of the United
Provinces--Maurice of Orange Stadholder, but Servant to the States-
General--The Union of Utrecht maintained--Barneveld makes a
Compromise between Civil Functionaries and Church Officials--
Embassies to France, England, and to Venice--the Appointment of
Arminius to be Professor of Theology at Leyden creates Dissension--
The Catholic League opposed by the Great Protestant Union--Death of
the Duke of Cleve and Struggle for his Succession--The Elector of
Brandenburg and Palatine of Neuburg hold the Duchies at Barneveld's
Advice against the Emperor, though having Rival Claims themselves--
Negotiations with the King of France--He becomes the Ally of the
States-General to Protect the Possessory Princes, and prepares for
war.
I propose to retrace the history of a great statesman's career. That
statesman's name, but for the dark and tragic scenes with which it was
ultimately associated, might after the lapse of two centuries and a half
have faded into comparative oblivion, so impersonal and shadowy his
presence would have seemed upon the great European theatre where he was
so long a chief actor, and where his efforts and his achievements were
foremost among those productive of long enduring and widespread results.
There is no doubt whatever that John of Barneveld, Advocate and Seal
Keeper of the little province of Holland during forty years of as
troubled and fertile an epoch as any in human history, was second to none
of his contemporary statesmen. Yet the singular constitution and
historical position of the republic whose destinies he guided and the
peculiar and abnormal office which he held combined to cast a veil over
his individuality. The ever-teeming brain, the restless almost
omnipresent hand, the fertile pen, the eloquent and ready tongue, were
seen, heard, and obeyed by the great European public, by the monarchs,
statesmen, and warriors of the time, at many critical moments of history,
but it was not John of Barneveld that spoke to the world. Those "high
and puissant Lords my masters the States-General" personified the young
but already majestic republic. Dignified, draped, and concealed by that
overshadowing title the informing and master spirit performed its never
ending task.
Those who study the enormous masses of original papers in the archives of
the country will be amazed to find how the penmanship, most difficult to
decipher, of the Advocate meets them at every turn. Letters to monarchs,
generals, ambassadors, resolutions of councils, of sovereign assemblies,
of trading corporations, of great Indian companies, legal and historical
disquisitions of great depth and length on questions agitating Europe,
constitutional arguments, drafts of treaties among the leading powers of
the world, instructions to great commissions, plans for European
campaigns, vast combinations covering the world, alliances of empire,
scientific expeditions and discoveries--papers such as these covered now
with the satirical dust of centuries, written in the small, crabbed,
exasperating characters which make Barneveld's handwriting almost
cryptographic, were once, when fairly engrossed and sealed with the great
seal of the haughty burgher-aristocracy, the documents which occupied the
close attention of the cabinets of Christendom.
It is not unfrequent to find four or five important despatches compressed
almost in miniature upon one sheet of gigantic foolscap. It is also
curious to find each one of these rough drafts conscientiously beginning
in the statesman's own hand with the elaborate phrases of compliment
belonging to the epoch such as "Noble, strenuous, severe, highly
honourable, very learned, very discreet, and very wise masters," and
ending with "May the Lord God Almighty eternally preserve you and hold
you in His holy keeping in this world and for ever"--decorations which
one might have thought it safe to leave to be filled in by the secretary
or copying clerk.
Thus there have been few men at any period whose lives have been more
closely identical than his with a national history. There have been few
great men in any history whose names have become less familiar to the
world, and lived less in the mouths of posterity. Yet there can be no
doubt that if William the Silent was the founder of the independence of
the United Provinces Barneveld was the founder of the Commonwealth
itself. He had never the opportunity, perhaps he might have never had
the capacity, to make such prodigious sacrifices in the cause of country
as the great prince had done. But he had served his country strenuously
from youth to old age with an abiding sense of duty, a steadiness of
purpose, a broad vision, a firm grasp, and an opulence of resource such
as not one of his compatriots could even pretend to rival.
Had that country of which he was so long the first citizen maintained
until our own day the same proportionate position among the empires of
Christendom as it held in the seventeenth century, the name of John of
Barneveld would have perhaps been as familiar to all men as it is at this
moment to nearly every inhabitant of the Netherlands. Even now political
passion is almost as ready to flame forth either in ardent affection or
enthusiastic hatred as if two centuries and a half had not elapsed since
his death. His name is so typical of a party, a polity, and a faith, so
indelibly associated with a great historical cataclysm, as to render it
difficult even for the grave, the conscientious, the learned, the
patriotic of his own compatriots to speak of him with absolute
impartiality.
A foreigner who loves and admires all that is great and noble in the
history of that famous republic and can have no hereditary bias as to its
ecclesiastical or political theories may at least attempt the task with
comparative coldness, although conscious of inability to do thorough
justice to a most complex subject.
In former publications devoted to Netherland history I have endeavoured
to trace the course of events of which the life and works of the Advocate
were a vital ingredient down to the period when Spain after more than
forty years of hard fighting virtually acknowledged the independence of
the Republic and concluded with her a truce of twelve years.
That convention was signed in the spring of 1609. The ten ensuing years
in Europe were comparatively tranquil, but they were scarcely to be
numbered among the full and fruitful sheaves of a pacific epoch. It was
a pause, a breathing spell during which the sulphurous clouds which had
made the atmosphere of Christendom poisonous for nearly half a century
had sullenly rolled away, while at every point of the horizon they were
seen massing themselves anew in portentous and ever accumulating
strength. At any moment the faint and sickly sunshine in which poor
exhausted Humanity was essaying a feeble twitter of hope as it plumed
itself for a peaceful flight might be again obscured. To us of a remote
posterity the momentary division of epochs seems hardly discernible. So
rapidly did that fight of Demons which we call the Thirty Years' War
tread on the heels of the forty years' struggle for Dutch Independence
which had just been suspended that we are accustomed to think and speak
of the Eighty Years' War as one pure, perfect, sanguinary whole.
And indeed the Tragedy which was soon to sweep solemnly across Europe was
foreshadowed in the first fitful years of peace. The throb of the
elementary forces already shook the soil of Christendom. The fantastic
but most significant conflict in the territories of the dead Duke of
Clove reflected the distant and gigantic war as in a mirage. It will be
necessary to direct the reader's attention at the proper moment to that
episode, for it was one in which the beneficent sagacity of Barneveld was
conspicuously exerted in the cause of peace and conservation. Meantime
it is not agreeable to reflect that this brief period of nominal and
armed peace which the Republic had conquered after nearly two generations
of warfare was employed by her in tearing her own flesh. The heroic
sword which had achieved such triumphs in the cause of freedom could have
been bitter employed than in an attempt at political suicide.
In a picture of the last decade of Barneveld's eventful life his
personality may come more distinctly forward perhaps than in previous
epochs. It will however be difficult to disentangle a single thread from
the great historical tapestry of the Republic and of Europe in which his
life and achievements are interwoven. He was a public man in the fullest
sense of the word, and without his presence and influence the record of
Holland, France, Spain, Britain, and Germany might have been essentially
modified.
The Republic was so integral a part of that system which divided Europe
into two great hostile camps according to creeds rather than frontiers
that the history of its foremost citizen touches at every point the
general history of Christendom.
The great peculiarity of the Dutch constitution at this epoch was that no
principle was absolutely settled. In throwing off a foreign tyranny and
successfully vindicating national independence the burghers and nobles
had not had leisure to lay down any organic law. Nor had the day for
profound investigation of the political or social contract arrived.
Men dealt almost exclusively with facts, and when the facts arranged
themselves illogically and incoherently the mischief was grave and
difficult to remedy. It is not a trifling inconvenience for an organized
commonwealth to be in doubt as to where, in whom, and of what nature is
its sovereignty. Yet this was precisely the condition of the United
Netherlands. To the eternal world so dazzling were the reputation and
the achievements of their great captain that he was looked upon by many
as the legitimate chief of the state and doubtless friendly monarchs
would have cordially welcomed him into their brotherhood.
During the war he had been surrounded by almost royal state. Two hundred
officers lived daily at his table. Great nobles and scions of sovereign
houses were his pupils or satellites. The splendour of military
despotism and the awe inspired by his unquestioned supremacy in what was
deemed the greatest of all sciences invested the person of Maurice of
Nassau with a grandeur which many a crowned potentate might envy. His
ample appointments united with the spoils of war provided him with almost
royal revenues, even before the death of his elder brother Philip William
had placed in his hands the principality and wealthy possessions of
Orange. Hating contradiction, arbitrary by instinct and by military
habit, impatient of criticism, and having long acknowledged no master in
the chief business of state, he found himself at the conclusion of the
truce with his great occupation gone, and, although generously provided
for by the treasury of the Republic, yet with an income proportionately
limited.
Politics and theology were fields in which he had hardly served an
apprenticeship, and it was possible that when he should step forward as
a master in those complicated and difficult pursuits, soon to absorb the
attention of the Commonwealth and the world, it might appear that war
was not the only science that required serious preliminary studies.
Meantime he found himself not a king, not the master of a nominal
republic, but the servant of the States-General, and the limited
stadholder of five out of seven separate provinces.
And the States-General were virtually John of Barneveld. Could
antagonism be more sharply defined? Jealousy, that potent principle
which controls the regular movements and accounts for the aberrations of
humanity in widest spheres as well as narrowest circles far more
generally and conclusively than philosophers or historians have been
willing to admit, began forthwith to manifest its subtle and irresistible
influence.
And there were not to be wanting acute and dangerous schemers who saw
their profit in augmenting its intensity.
The Seven Provinces, when the truce of twelve years had been signed, were
neither exhausted nor impoverished. Yet they had just emerged from a
forty years' conflict such as no people in human history had ever waged
against a foreign tyranny. They had need to repose and recruit, but they
stood among the foremost great powers of the day. It is not easy in
imagination to thrust back the present leading empires of the earth into
the contracted spheres of their not remote past. But to feel how a
little confederacy of seven provinces loosely tied together by an ill-
defined treaty could hold so prominent and often so controlling a place
in the European system of the seventeenth century, we must remember that
there was then no Germany, no Russia, no Italy, no United States of
America, scarcely even a Great Britain in the sense which belongs to that
mighty empire now.
France, Spain, England, the Pope, and the Emperor were the leading powers
with which the Netherlands were daily called on to solve great problems
and try conclusions; the study of political international equilibrium,
now rapidly and perhaps fortunately becoming one of the lost arts, being
then the most indispensable duty of kings and statesmen.
Spain and France, which had long since achieved for themselves the
political union of many independent kingdoms and states into which they
had been divided were the most considerable powers and of necessity
rivals. Spain, or rather the House of Austria divided into its two great
branches, still pursued its persistent and by no means fantastic dream of
universal monarchy. Both Spain and France could dispose of somewhat
larger resources absolutely, although not relatively, than the Seven
Provinces, while at least trebling them in population. The yearly
revenue of Spain after deduction of its pledged resources was perhaps
equal to a million sterling, and that of France with the same reservation
was about as much. England had hardly been able to levy and make up a
yearly income of more than L600,000 or L700,000 at the end of Elizabeth's
reign or in the first years of James, while the Netherlands had often
proved themselves capable of furnishing annually ten or twelve millions
of florins, which would be the equivalent of nearly a million sterling.
The yearly revenues of the whole monarchy of the Imperial house of
Habsburg can scarcely be stated at a higher figure than L350,000.
Thus the political game--for it was a game--was by no means a desperate
one for the Netherlands, nor the resources of the various players so
unequally distributed as at first sight it might appear.
The emancipation of the Provinces from the grasp of Spain and the
establishment by them of a commonwealth, for that epoch a very free one,
and which contained within itself the germs of a larger liberty,
religious, political, and commercial, than had yet been known, was
already one of the most considerable results of the Reformation. The
probability of its continued and independent existence was hardly
believed in by potentate or statesman outside its own borders, and had
not been very long a decided article of faith even within them. The
knotty problem of an acknowledgment of that existence, the admission of
the new-born state into the family of nations, and a temporary peace
guaranteed by two great powers, had at last been solved mainly by the
genius of Barneveld working amid many disadvantages and against great
obstructions. The truce had been made, and it now needed all the skill,
coolness, and courage of a practical and original statesman to conduct
the affairs of the Confederacy. The troubled epoch of peace was even now
heaving with warlike emotions, and was hardly less stormy than the war
which had just been suspended.
The Republic was like a raft loosely strung together, floating almost on
a level of the ocean, and often half submerged, but freighted with
inestimable treasures for itself and the world. It needed an unsleeping
eye and a powerful brain to conduct her over the quicksands and through
the whirlpools of an unmapped and intricate course.
The sovereignty of the country so far as its nature could be
satisfactorily analysed seemed to be scattered through, and inherent in
each one of, the multitudinous boards of magistracy--close corporations,
self-elected--by which every city was governed. Nothing could be more
preposterous. Practically, however, these boards were represented by
deputies in each of the seven provincial assemblies, and these again sent
councillors from among their number to the general assembly which was
that of their High Mightinesses the Lords States-General.
The Province of Holland, being richer and more powerful than all its six
sisters combined, was not unwilling to impose a supremacy which on the
whole was practically conceded by the rest. Thus the Union of Utrecht
established in 1579 was maintained for want of anything better as the
foundation of the Commonwealth.
The Advocate and Keeper of the Great Seal of that province was therefore
virtually prime minister, president, attorney-general, finance minister,
and minister of foreign affairs of the whole republic. This was
Barneveld's position. He took the lead in the deliberations both of the
States of Holland and the States-General, moved resolutions, advocated
great measures of state, gave heed to their execution, collected the
votes, summed up the proceedings, corresponded with and instructed
ambassadors, received and negotiated with foreign ministers, besides
directing and holding in his hands the various threads of the home
policy and the rapidly growing colonial system of the Republic.
All this work Barneveld had been doing for thirty years.
The Reformation was by no mans assured even in the lands where it had
at first made the most essential progress. But the existence of the new
commonwealth depended on the success of that great movement which had
called it into being. Losing ground in France, fluctuating in England,
Protestantism was apparently more triumphant in vast territories where
the ancient Church was one day to recover its mastery. Of the population
of Bohemia, there were perhaps ten Protestants to one Papist, while in
the United Netherlands at least one-third of the people were still
attached to the Catholic faith.
The great religious struggle in Bohemia and other dominions of the
Habsburg family was fast leading to a war of which no man could even
imagine the horrors or foresee the vast extent. The Catholic League and
the Protestant Union were slowly arranging Europe into two mighty
confederacies.
They were to give employment year after year to millions of mercenary
freebooters who were to practise murder, pillage, and every imaginable
and unimaginable outrage as the most legitimate industry that could
occupy mankind. The Holy Empire which so ingeniously combined the worst
characteristics of despotism and republicanism kept all Germany and half
Europe in the turmoil of a perpetual presidential election. A theatre
where trivial personages and graceless actors performed a tragi-comedy of
mingled folly, intrigue, and crime, and where earnestness and vigour were
destined to be constantly baffled, now offered the principal stage for
the entertainment and excitement of Christendom.
There was but one king in Europe, Henry the Bearnese. The men who sat on
the thrones in Madrid, Vienna, London, would have lived and died unknown
but for the crowns they wore, and while there were plenty of bustling
politicians here and there in Christendom, there were not many statesmen.
Among them there was no stronger man than John of Barneveld, and no man
had harder or more complicated work to do.
Born in Amersfoort in 1547, of the ancient and knightly house of
Oldenbarneveldt, of patrician blood through all his ancestors both male
and female, he was not the heir to large possessions, and was a diligent
student and hardworking man from youth upward. He was not wont to boast
of his pedigree until in later life, being assailed by vilest slander,
all his kindred nearest or most remote being charged with every possible
and unmentionable crime, and himself stigmatized as sprung from the
lowest kennels of humanity--as if thereby his private character and
public services could be more legitimately blackened--he was stung into
exhibiting to the world the purity and antiquity of his escutcheon, and a
roll of respectably placed, well estated, and authentically noble, if not
at all illustrious, forefathers in his country's records of the previous
centuries.
Without an ancestor at his back he might have valued himself still more
highly on the commanding place he held in the world by right divine of
intellect, but as the father of lies seemed to have kept his creatures so
busy with the Barneveld genealogy, it was not amiss for the statesman
once for all to make the truth known.
His studies in the universities of Holland, France, Italy, and Germany
had been profound. At an early age he was one of the first civilians of
the time. His manhood being almost contemporary with the great war of
freedom, he had served as a volunteer and at his own expense through
several campaigns, having nearly lost his life in the disastrous attempt
to relieve the siege of Haarlem, and having been so disabled by sickness
and exposure at the heroic leaguer of Leyden as to have been deprived of
the joy of witnessing its triumphant conclusion.
Successfully practising his profession afterwards before the tribunals of
Holland, he had been called at the comparatively early age of twenty-nine
to the important post of Chief Pensionary of Rotterdam. So long as
William the Silent lived, that great prince was all in all to his
country, and Barneveld was proud and happy to be among the most
trusted and assiduous of his counsellors.
When the assassination of William seemed for an instant to strike the
Republic with paralysis, Barneveld was foremost among the statesmen of
Holland to spring forward and help to inspire it with renewed energy.
The almost completed negotiations for conferring the sovereignty, not of
the Confederacy, but of the Province of Holland, upon the Prince had been
abruptly brought to an end by his death. To confer that sovereign
countship on his son Maurice, then a lad of eighteen and a student at
Leyden, would have seemed to many at so terrible a crisis an act of
madness, although Barneveld had been willing to suggest and promote the
scheme. The confederates under his guidance soon hastened however to lay
the sovereignty, and if not the sovereignty, the protectorship, of all
the provinces at the feet first of England and then of France.
Barneveld was at the head of the embassy, and indeed was the
indispensable head of all important, embassies to each of those two
countries throughout all this portion of his career. Both monarchs
refused, almost spurned, the offered crown in which was involved a war
with the greatest power in the world, with no compensating dignity or
benefit, as it was thought, beside.
Then Elizabeth, although declining the sovereignty, promised assistance
and sent the Earl of Leicester as governor-general at the head of a
contingent of English troops. Precisely to prevent the consolidation
thus threatened of the Provinces into one union, a measure which had been
attempted more than once in the Burgundian epoch, and always successfully
resisted by the spirit of provincial separatism, Barneveld now proposed
and carried the appointment of Maurice of Nassau to the stadholdership of
Holland. This was done against great opposition and amid fierce debate.
Soon afterwards Barneveld was vehemently urged by the nobles and regents
of the cities of Holland to accept the post of Advocate of that province.
After repeatedly declining the arduous and most responsible office, he
was at last induced to accept it. He did it under the remarkable
condition that in case any negotiation should be undertaken for the
purpose of bringing back the Province of Holland under the dominion of
the King of Spain, he should be considered as from that moment relieved
from the service.
His brother Elias Barneveld succeeded him as Pensionary of Rotterdam, and
thenceforth the career of the Advocate is identical with the history of
the Netherlands. Although a native of Utrecht, he was competent to
exercise such functions in Holland, a special and ancient convention
between those two provinces allowing the citizens of either to enjoy
legal and civic rights in both. Gradually, without intrigue or
inordinate ambition, but from force of circumstances and the commanding
power of the man, the native authority stamped upon his forehead, he
became the political head of the Confederacy. He created and maintained
a system of public credit absolutely marvellous in the circumstances, by
means of which an otherwise impossible struggle was carried to a
victorious end.
When the stadholderate of the provinces of Gelderland, Utrecht, and
Overyssel became vacant, it was again Barneveld's potent influence and
sincere attachment to the House of Nassau that procured the election of
Maurice to those posts. Thus within six years after his father's death
the youthful soldier who had already given proof of his surpassing
military genius had become governor, commander-in-chief, and high
admiral, of five of the seven provinces constituting the Confederacy.
At about the same period the great question of Church and State, which
Barneveld had always felt to be among the vital problems of the age, and
on which his opinions were most decided, came up for partial solution.
It would have been too much to expect the opinion of any statesman to
be so much in advance of his time as to favor religious equality.
Toleration of various creeds, including the Roman Catholic, so far as
abstinence from inquisition into consciences and private parlours could
be called toleration, was secured, and that was a considerable step in
advance of the practice of the sixteenth century. Burning, hanging, and
burying alive of culprits guilty of another creed than the dominant one
had become obsolete. But there was an established creed--the Reformed
religion, founded on the Netherland Confession and the Heidelberg
Catechism. And there was one established principle then considered
throughout Europe the grand result of the Reformation; "Cujus regio ejus
religio;" which was in reality as impudent an invasion of human right as
any heaven-born dogma of Infallibility. The sovereign of a country,
having appropriated the revenues of the ancient church, prescribed his
own creed to his subjects. In the royal conscience were included the
million consciences of his subjects. The inevitable result in a country
like the Netherlands, without a personal sovereign, was a struggle
between the new church and the civil government for mastery. And at this
period, and always in Barneveld's opinion, the question of dogma was
subordinate to that of church government. That there should be no
authority over the King had been settled in England.
Henry VIII., Elizabeth, and afterwards James, having become popes in
their own realm, had no great hostility to, but rather an affection for,
ancient dogma and splendid ceremonial. But in the Seven Provinces, even
as in France, Germany, and Switzerland, the reform where it had been
effected at all had been more thorough, and there was little left of
Popish pomp or aristocratic hierarchy. Nothing could be severer than the
simplicity of the Reformed Church, nothing more imperious than its dogma,
nothing more infallible than its creed. It was the true religion, and
there was none other. But to whom belonged the ecclesiastical edifices,
the splendid old minsters in the cities--raised by the people's confiding
piety and the purchased remission of their sins in a bygone age--and the
humbler but beautiful parish churches in every town and village? To the
State; said Barneveld, speaking for government; to the community
represented by the states of the provinces, the magistracies of the
cities and municipalities. To the Church itself, the one true church
represented by its elders, and deacons, and preachers, was the reply.
And to whom belonged the right of prescribing laws and ordinances of
public worship, of appointing preachers, church servants, schoolmasters,
sextons? To the Holy Ghost inspiring the Class and the Synod, said the
Church.
To the civil authority, said the magistrates, by which the churches are
maintained, and the salaries of the ecclesiastics paid. The states of
Holland are as sovereign as the kings of England or Denmark, the electors
of Saxony or Brandenburg, the magistrates of Zurich or Basel or other
Swiss cantons. "Cujus regio ejus religio."
In 1590 there was a compromise under the guidance of Barneveld. It was
agreed that an appointing board should be established composed of civil
functionaries and church officials in equal numbers. Thus should the
interests of religion and of education be maintained.
The compromise was successful enough during the war. External pressure
kept down theological passion, and there were as yet few symptoms of
schism in the dominant church. But there was to come a time when the
struggle between church and government was to break forth with an
intensity and to rage to an extent which no man at that moment could
imagine.
Towards the end of the century Henry IV. made peace with Spain. It was a
trying moment for the Provinces. Barneveld was again sent forth on an
embassy to the King. The cardinal point in his policy, as it had ever
been in that of William the Silent, was to maintain close friendship with
France, whoever might be its ruler. An alliance between that kingdom
and Spain would be instantaneous ruin to the Republic. With the French
and English sovereigns united with the Provinces, the cause of the
Reformation might triumph, the Spanish world-empire be annihilated,
national independence secured.
Henry assured the Ambassador that the treaty of Vervins was
indispensable, but that he would never desert his old allies.
In proof of this, although he had just bound himself to Spain to give no
assistance to the Provinces, open or secret, he would furnish them with
thirteen hundred thousand crowns, payable at intervals during four years.
He was under great obligations to his good friends the States, he said,
and nothing in the treaty forbade him to pay his debts.
It was at this period too that Barneveld was employed by the King to
attend to certain legal and other private business for which he professed
himself too poor at the moment to compensate him. There seems to
have been nothing in the usages of the time or country to make the
transaction, innocent in itself, in any degree disreputable. The King
promised at some future clay, when he should be more in funds, to pay him
a liberal fee. Barneveld, who a dozen years afterwards received 20,000
florins for his labour, professed that he would much rather have had one
thousand at the time.
Thence the Advocate, accompanied by his colleague, Justinus de Nassau,
proceeded to England, where they had many stormy interviews with
Elizabeth. The Queen swore with many an oath that she too would make
peace with Philip, recommended the Provinces to do the same thing with
submission to their ancient tyrant, and claimed from the States immediate
payment of one million sterling in satisfaction of their old debts to
her. It would have been as easy for them at that moment to pay a
thousand million. It was at last agreed that the sum of the debt should
be fixed at L800,000, and that the cautionary towns should be held in
Elizabeth's hands by English troops until all the debt should be
discharged. Thus England for a long time afterwards continued to regard
itself, as in a measure the sovereign and proprietor of the Confederacy,
and Barneveld then and there formed the resolve to relieve the country of
the incubus, and to recover those cautionary towns and fortresses at the
earliest possible moment. So long as foreign soldiers commanded by
military governors existed on the soil of the Netherlands, they could
hardly account themselves independent. Besides, there was the perpetual
and horrid nightmare, that by a sudden pacification between Spain and
England those important cities, keys to the country's defence, might be
handed over to their ancient tyrant.
Elizabeth had been pacified at last, however, by the eloquence of the
Ambassador. "I will assist you even if you were up to the neck in
water," she said. "Jusque la," she added, pointing to her chin.
Five years later Barneveld, for the fifth time at the head of a great
embassy, was sent to England to congratulate James on his accession.
It was then and there that he took measure of the monarch with whom he
was destined to have many dealings, and who was to exert so baleful an
influence on his career. At last came the time when it was felt that
peace between Spain and her revolted provinces might be made. The
conservation of their ancient laws, privileges, and charters, the
independence of the States, and included therein the freedom to establish
the Reformed religion, had been secured by forty years of fighting.
The honour of Spain was saved by a conjunction. She agreed to treat
with her old dependencies "as" with states over which she had no
pretensions. Through virtue of an "as," a truce after two years'
negotiation, perpetually traversed and secretly countermined by the
military party under the influence of Maurice, was carried by the
determination of Barneveld. The great objects of the war had been
secured. The country was weary of nearly half a century of bloodshed.
It was time to remember that there could be such a condition as Peace.