Life and Death of John of Barneveld, Advocate of Holland : with a view of the primary causes and movements of the Thirty Years' War — Complete (1614-23)

by John Lothrop Motley

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."