John Lothrop Motley

“ The widow of Barneveld had remained, since the last scene of the fatal tragedy on the Binnenhof, in hopeless desolation. The wife of the man who during a whole generation of mankind had stood foremost among the foremost of the world, and had been one of those chief actors and directors in human affairs to whom men's eyes turned instinctively from near and from afar, had led a life of unbroken prosperity. An heiress in her own right, Maria van Utrecht had laid the foundation of her husband's wealth by her union with the rising young lawyer and statesman. ”

“ How long would that policy remain sound and united? How long would the Republic speak through the imperial voice of Barneveld? Time was to show and to teach many lessons. The united princes of Germany were walking, talking, quarrelling in their sleep; England and France distracted and bedrugged, while Maximilian of Bavaria and Ferdinand of Gratz, the cabinets of Madrid and the Vatican, were moving forward to their aims slowly, steadily, relentlessly as Fate. And Spain was more powerful than she had been since the Truce began. In five years she had become much more capable of aggression. ”

“ The aged but still vigorous statesman, ripe with half a century of political lore, and the high-born, brilliant, and scientific soldier, with the laurels of Turnhout and Nieuwpoort and of a hundred famous sieges upon his helmet, reformer of military science, and no mean proficient in the art of politics and government, were the representatives and leaders of the two great parties into which the Commonwealth had now unhappily divided itself. ”

“ Charter-books, parchments, 13th Articles, Barneveld's teeth, Arminian forts, flowery orations of Grotius, tavern talk of van Ostrum, city immunities, States' rights, provincial laws, Waartgelders and all—the martial Stadholder, with the orange plume in his hat and the sword of Nieuwpoort on his thigh, strode through them as easily as through the whirligigs and mountebanks, the wades and fritters, encumbering the streets of Utrecht on the night of his arrival. ”

“ Your dear husband and father, JOHN OF BARNEVELD.
"P.S. You will make John Franken a present in memory of me."
Certainly it would be difficult to find a more truly calm, courageous, or religious spirit than that manifested by this aged statesman at an hour when, if ever, a human soul is tried and is apt to reveal its innermost depths or shallows. Whatever Gomarus or Bogerman, or the whole Council of Dordtrecht, may have thought of his theology, it had at least taught him forgiveness of his enemies, kindness to his friends, and submission to the will of the Omnipotent. ”

“ As the martial stadholder at the head of his brilliant cavalcade rode forth across the drawbridge from the Inner Court of the old moated palace—where the ancient sovereign Dirks and Florences of Holland had so long ruled their stout little principality—along the shady and stately Kneuterdyk and so through the Voorhout, an immense crowd thronged around his path and accompanied him to the church. It was as if the great soldier were marching to siege or battle-field where fresher glories than those of Sluys or Geertruidenberg were awaiting him. ”

“ A sincere alliance of France, the very flower of whose nobility and people inclined to the Reformed religion, was impossible, even if there had been fifty infantes to espouse fifty daughters of France. Great Britain, the Netherlands, and the united princes of Germany seemed a solid and serried phalanx of Protestantism, to break through which should be hopeless. Yet at that moment, so pregnant with a monstrous future, there was hardly a sound Protestant policy anywhere but in Holland. ”

“ But the Secretary of State, thus acknowledging the peril, chose to be blind to its extent, while at the same time undervaluing the powers by which it might be resisted. "To oppose the violence of the enemy," he said, "if he does resort to violence, is entirely impossible. It would be furious madness on our part to induce him to fall upon the Elector-Palatine, for this would be attacking Great Britain and all her friends and allies. Germany is a delicate morsel, but too much for the throat of Spain to swallow all at once. Behold the evil which troubles the conscience of the Papistical League. ”

“ For party hatred was not yet glutted with the blood it had drunk.
It would be idle to paint the misery of this brokenhearted woman.
The great painters of the epoch have preserved her face to posterity; the grief-stricken face of a hard-featured but commanding and not uncomely woman, the fountains of whose tears seem exhausted; a face of austere and noble despair. A decorous veil should be thrown over the form of that aged matron, for whose long life and prosperity Fate took such merciless vengeance at last.
For the woes of Maria of Barneveld had scarcely begun. ”

“ Men feared to defend him lest they too should be accused of being stipendiaries of Spain. It was a piteous spectacle; not for the venerable statesman sitting alone there in his prison, but for the Republic in its lunacy, for human nature in its meanness and shame. He whom Count Lewis, although opposed to his politics, had so lately called one of the two columns on which the whole fabric of the States reposed, Prince Maurice being the other, now lay prostrate in the dust and reviled of all men. ”

“ It was disheartening to the cause of freedom and progress, not only that the great kingdom on which the world, had learned to rely in all movements upward and onward should be neutralized by the sycophancy of its monarch to the general oppressor, but that the great republic which so long had taken the lead in maintaining the liberties of Europe should now be torn by religious discord within itself, and be turning against the great statesman who had so wisely guided her councils and so accurately foretold the catastrophe which was now upon the world. ”

“ Such were among the first-fruits of the fall of Barneveld and the triumph of Aerssens, for it was he in reality who had won the victory, and he had gained it over both Stadholder and Advocate. Who was to profit by the estrangement between the Republic and its powerful ally at a moment too when that great kingdom was at last beginning to emerge from the darkness and nothingness of many years, with the faint glimmering dawn of a new great policy? ”

“ With him patriotism seemed at this moment to dwindle into provincialism, the statesman to shrink into the lawyer.
Certainly there was no guilt in the proceedings. There was no crime in the heart of the Advocate. He had exhausted himself with appeals in favour of moderation, conciliation, compromise. He had worked night and day with all the energy of a pure soul and a great mind to assuage religious hatreds and avert civil dissensions. He was overpowered. ”

“ Doubtless a more convenient arrangement from a military point of view might be imagined than a system of quotas by which each province in a confederacy claimed allegiance and exacted obedience from the troops paid by itself in what was after all a general army. Still this was the logical and inevitable result of State rights pushed to the extreme and indeed had been the indisputable theory and practice in the Netherlands ever since their revolt from Spain. To pretend that the proceedings and the oath were new because they were embarrassing was absurd. ”

“ Yet it is the chronicle of Christendom during one of the most important and fateful epochs of modern history. No man can thoroughly understand the complication and precession of phenomena attending the disastrous dawn of the renewed war, on an even more awful scale than the original conflict in the Netherlands, without studying the correspondence of Barneveld. The history of Europe is there. The fate of Christendom is there. The conflict of elements, the crash of contending forms of religion and of nationalities, is pictured there in vivid if homely colours. ”

“ To effect a revolution in the government, and to bring back to power all the municipal regents whom Maurice had displaced so summarily, in order, as the son believed, to effect the downfall of the hated Advocate, this was the determination of Stoutenburg.
He did not pause to reflect whether the arm which had been strong enough to smite to nothingness the venerable statesman in the plenitude of his power would be too weak to repel the attack of an obscure and disarmed partisan. He saw only a hated tyrant, murderer, and oppressor, as he considered him, and he meant to have his life. ”

“ On the night of 5th June the prisoners were taken from their prison in the Hague and conveyed to the castle of Loevestein.
This fortress, destined thenceforth to be famous in history and—from its frequent use in after-times as a state-prison for men of similar constitutional views to those of Grotius and the Advocate—to give its name to a political party, was a place of extraordinary strength. Nature and art had made it, according to military ideas of that age, almost impregnable. As a prison it seemed the very castle of despair. ”

“ The States of Utrecht had secured themselves in the same way. But the mischiefmakers and the ill-disposed had been seeking everywhere to counteract these wholesome measures and to bring about a general disbanding of these troops. This it was necessary to resist with spirit. It was the very foundation of the provinces' sovereignty, to maintain which the public means must be employed. It was in vain to drive the foe out of the country if one could not remain in safety within one's own doors. ”

“ The man who had governed one of the most important commonwealths of the world for nearly a generation long—during the same period almost controlling the politics of Europe—had now been kept in ignorance of the most insignificant everyday events. During the long summer-heat of the dog-days immediately succeeding his arrest, and the long, foggy, snowy, icy winter of Holland which ensued, he had been confined in that dreary garret-room to which he had been brought when he left his temporary imprisonment in the apartments of Prince Maurice. ”

“ The modest and practical son of an illustrious but anonymous father, then coming to the point, said it would be the easiest thing in the world to direct the course of the Scheldt into an entirely new channel through Spanish Flanders to the sea. Thus the Dutch ports and forts which had been constructed with such magnificence and at such vast expense would be left high and dry; the Spaniards would build new ones in Flanders, and thus control the whole navigation and deprive the Hollanders of that empire of the sea which they now so proudly arrogated. ”

“ When the King of Spain in 1567, and afterwards, set up an extraordinary tribunal and a course of extraordinary trials, it was an undeniable fact, he said, that on the solemn complaint of the States all princes, nobles, and citizens not only in the Netherlands but in foreign countries, and all foreign kings and sovereigns, held those outrages to be the foremost and fundamental reason for taking up arms against that king, and declaring him to have forfeited his right of sovereignty. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The shooting of Concini seemed almost to convert the little king into a hero. Everyone in the Netherlands, without distinction of party, was delighted with the achievement. "I cannot represent to the King," wrote du Maurier to Villeroy, "one thousandth part of the joy of all these people who are exalting him to heaven for having delivered the earth from this miserable burthen. I can't tell you in what execration this public pest was held. His Majesty has not less won the hearts of this state than if he had gained a great victory over the Spaniards. ”

“ Especially from my heart I grieve for the arrest of the Seignior Barneveld, who with his discretion and wise administration for the past thirty years has so drawn the hearts of all neighbouring princes to himself, especially that of the King my master, that on taking up my pen to apprize him of these events I am gravely embarrassed, fearing to infringe on the great respect due to your Mightinesses or against the honour and merits of the Seignior Barneveld. . . . My Lords, take heed to your situation, for a great discontent is smouldering among your citizens. ”

“ If there were any impeachment at all, it was an impeachment of the form of government itself. If language could mean anything whatever, a mere perusal of the Articles of Union proved that the prisoner had never violated that fundamental pact. How could the general government prescribe an especial formulary for the Reformed Church, and declare opposition to its decrees treasonable, when it did not prohibit, but absolutely admitted and invited, provinces and cities exclusively Catholic to enter the Union, guaranteeing to them entire liberty of religion? ”

“ All central Europe was now in arms. The deepest and gravest questions about which men can fight: the right to worship God according to their conscience and to maintain civil franchises which have been earned by the people with the blood and treasure of centuries, were now to be solved by the sword, and the pupil of Buchanan and the friend of Buckingham was to step between hundreds of thousands of men in arms with a classical oration. But James was very proud of the proposal and accepted it with alacrity. ”

“ The States had gone as far as possible in concession. To go farther would be to wreck the great cause upon the very quicksands which he had so ceaselessly pointed out. "We hope that nothing further will be asked of us, no scruples be felt as to our good intentions," he said, "and that if Spain and the Archdukes are not ready now to fulfil the treaty, their Majesties will know how to resent this trifling with their authority and dignity, and how to set matters to rights with their own hands in the duchies. A new treaty, still less a sequestration, is not to be thought of for a moment." ”

“ It seemed to Anspach and Anhalt that it was as well that Frederic should reign in Hungary as in Bohemia, and the Elector was docile. All had relied however on the powerful assistance of the great defender of the Protestant faith, the father-in-law of the Elector, the King of Great Britain. But James had nothing but cold water and Virgilian quotations for his son's ardour. He was more under the influence of Gondemar than ever before, more eagerly hankering for the Infanta, more completely the slave of Spain. ”

“ A compromise between the two religious parties had existed for half a dozen years in Germany, a feeble compromise by which men had hardly been kept from each others' throats. That compromise had now been thrown to the winds. The vast conspiracy of Spain, Rome, the House of Austria, against human liberty had found a chief in the docile, gloomy pupil of the Jesuits now enthroned in Bohemia, and soon perhaps to wield the sceptre of the Holy Roman Empire. There was no state in Europe that had not cause to put hand on sword-hilt. ”

“ It is melancholy to see the Republic thus perversely occupying its energies. It is melancholy to see the great soldier becoming gradually more ardent for battle with Barneveld and Uytenbogaert than with Spinola and Bucquoy, against whom he had won so many imperishable laurels. ”