PG Edition of Netherlands series — Complete

by John Lothrop Motley

Having accomplished so much by a very brief visit to Gelderland, the Prince proceeded, to Overyssel, and had as little difficulty in bringing over the wavering minds of that province into orthodoxy and obedience. Thus there remained but two provinces out of seven that were still "waartgeldered" and refused to be "synodized."

It was rebellion against rebellion. Maurice and his adherents accused the
States' right party of mutiny against himself and the States-General. The
States' right party accused the Contra-Remonstrants in the cities of
mutiny against the lawful sovereignty of each province.

The oath of the soldiery, since the foundation of the Republic, had been to maintain obedience and fidelity to the States-General, the Stadholder, and the province in which they were garrisoned, and at whose expense they were paid. It was impossible to harmonize such conflicting duties and doctrines. Theory had done its best and its worst. The time was fast approaching, as it always must approach, when fact with its violent besom would brush away the fine-spun cobwebs which had been so long undisturbed.

"I will grind the Advocate and all his party into fine meal," said the
Prince on one occasion.

A clever caricature of the time represented a pair of scales hung up in a great hall. In the one was a heap of parchments, gold chains, and magisterial robes; the whole bundle being marked the "holy right of each city." In the other lay a big square, solid, ironclasped volume, marked "Institutes of Calvin." Each scale was respectively watched by Gomarus and by Arminius. The judges, gowned, furred, and ruffed, were looking decorously on, when suddenly the Stadholder, in full military attire, was seen rushing into the apartment and flinging his sword into the scale with the Institutes.

The civic and legal trumpery was of course made to kick the beam.

Maurice had organized his campaign this year against the Advocate and his party as deliberately as he had ever arranged the details of a series of battles and sieges against the Spaniard. And he was proving himself as consummate master in political strife as in the great science of war.

He no longer made any secret of his conviction that Barneveld was a traitor to his country, bought with Spanish gold. There was not the slightest proof for these suspicions, but he asserted them roundly. "The Advocate is travelling straight to Spain," he said to Count Cuylenborg. "But we will see who has got the longest purse."

And as if it had been a part of the campaign, a prearranged diversion to the more direct and general assault on the entrenchments of the States' right party, a horrible personal onslaught was now made from many quarters upon the Advocate. It was an age of pamphleteering, of venomous, virulent, unscrupulous libels. And never even in that age had there been anything to equal the savage attacks upon this great statesman. It moves the gall of an honest man, even after the lapse of two centuries and a half, to turn over those long forgotten pages and mark the depths to which political and theological party spirit could descend. That human creatures can assimilate themselves so closely to the reptile, and to the subtle devil within the reptile, when a party end is to be gained is enough to make the very name of man a term of reproach.

Day by day appeared pamphlets, each one more poisonous than its predecessor. There was hardly a crime that was not laid at the door of Barneveld and all his kindred. The man who had borne a matchlock in early youth against the foreign tyrant in days when unsuccessful rebellion meant martyrdom and torture; who had successfully guided the councils of the infant commonwealth at a period when most of his accusers were in their cradles, and when mistake was ruin to the republic; he on whose strong arm the father of his country had leaned for support; the man who had organized a political system out of chaos; who had laid down the internal laws, negotiated the great indispensable alliances, directed the complicated foreign policy, established the system of national defence, presided over the successful financial administration of a state struggling out of mutiny into national existence; who had rocked the Republic in its cradle and ever borne her in his heart; who had made her name beloved at home and honoured and dreaded abroad; who had been the first, when the great Taciturn had at last fallen a victim to the murderous tyrant of Spain, to place the youthful Maurice in his father's place, and to inspire the whole country with sublime courage to persist rather than falter in purpose after so deadly a blow; who was as truly the founder of the Republic as William had been the author of its independence,—was now denounced as a traitor, a pope, a tyrant, a venal hucksterer of his country's liberties. His family name, which had long been an ancient and knightly one, was defiled and its nobility disputed; his father and mother, sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, accused of every imaginable and unimaginable crime, of murder, incest, robbery, bastardy, fraud, forgery, blasphemy. He had received waggon-loads of Spanish pistoles; he had been paid 120,000 ducats by Spain for negotiating the Truce; he was in secret treaty with Archduke Albert to bring 18,000 Spanish mercenaries across the border to defeat the machinations of Prince Maurice, destroy his life, or drive him from the country; all these foul and bitter charges and a thousand similar ones were rained almost daily upon that grey head.