The Life and Death of John of Barneveld, Advocate of Holland, 1618 | Page 2

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.
One day the loose sheets of a more than commonly libellous pamphlet
were picked up in the streets of the Hague and placed in the Advocate's
hands. It was the work of the drunken notary Danckaerts already
mentioned, then resident