The Life and Death of John of Barneveld, Advocate of Holland, 1609-10 | Page 8

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