The Ambassador was often at the Advocate's bed-side during his illness that summer, enforcing, instructing, denouncing, contradicting. He was never weary of fulfilling his duties of tuition, but the patient Barneveld; haughty and overbearing as he was often described to be, rarely used a harsh or vindictive word regarding him in his letters.
"The ambassador of France," he said, "has been heard before the Assembly of the States-General, and has made warm appeals in favour of union and mutual toleration as his Majesty of Great Britain so wisely did in his letters of 1613 . . . . If his Majesty could only be induced to write fresh letters in similar tone, I should venture to hope better fruits from them than from this attempt to thrust a national synod upon our necks, which many of us hold to be contrary to law, reason, and the Act of Union."
So long as it was possible to hope that the action of the States of Holland would prevent such a catastrophe, he worked hard to direct them in what he deemed the right course.
"Our political and religious differences," he said, "stand between hope and fear."
The hope was in the acceptance of the Provincial Synod—the fear lest the National Synod should be carried by a minority of the cities of Holland combining with a majority of the other Provincial States.
"This would be in violation," he said, "of the so-called Religious Peace, the Act of Union, the treaty with the Duke of Anjou, the negotiations of the States of Utrecht, and with Prince Maurice in 1590 with cognizance of the States-General and those of Holland for, the governorship of that province, the custom of the Generality for the last thirty years according to which religious matters have always been left to the disposition of the States of each province . . . . Carleton is strenuously urging this course in his Majesty's name, and I fear that in the present state of our humours great troubles will be the result."
The expulsion by an armed mob, in the past year, of a Remonstrant preacher at Oudewater, the overpowering of the magistracy and the forcing on of illegal elections in that and other cities, had given him and all earnest patriots grave cause for apprehension. They were dreading, said Barneveld, a course of crimes similar to those which under the Earl of Leicester's government had afflicted Leyden and Utrecht.
"Efforts are incessant to make the Remonstrants hateful," he said to Caron, "but go forward resolutely and firmly in the conviction that our friends here are as animated in their opposition to the Spanish dominion now and by God's grace will so remain as they have ever proved themselves to be, not only by words, but works. I fear that Mr. Carleton gives too much belief to the enviers of our peace and tranquillity under pretext of religion, but it is more from ignorance than malice."
Those who have followed the course of the Advocate's correspondence, conversation, and actions, as thus far detailed, can judge of the gigantic nature of the calumny by which he was now assailed. That this man, into every fibre of whose nature was woven undying hostility to Spain, as the great foe to national independence and religious liberty throughout the continent of Europe, whose every effort, as we have seen, during all these years of nominal peace had been to organize a system of general European defence against the war now actually begun upon Protestantism, should be accused of being a partisan of Spain, a creature of Spain, a pensioner of Spain, was enough to make honest men pray that the earth might be swallowed up. If such idiotic calumnies could be believed, what patriot in the world could not be doubted? Yet they were believed. Barneveld was bought by Spanish gold. He had received whole boxes full of Spanish pistoles, straight from Brussels! For his part in the truce negotiations he had received 120,000 ducats in one lump.
"It was plain," said the greatest man in the country to another great man, "that Barneveld and his party are on the road to Spain."