The Life and Death of John of Barneveld, Advocate of Holland, 1609-10 | Page 5

There have been
few great men in any history whose names have become less familiar to
the world, and lived less in the mouths of posterity. Yet there can be no
doubt that if William the Silent was the founder of the independence of
the United Provinces Barneveld was the founder of the Commonwealth
itself. He had never the opportunity, perhaps he might have never had
the capacity, to make such prodigious sacrifices in the cause of country
as the great prince had done. But he had served his country strenuously
from youth to old age with an abiding sense of duty, a steadiness of
purpose, a broad vision, a firm grasp, and an opulence of resource such
as not one of his compatriots could even pretend to rival.
Had that country of which he was so long the first citizen maintained
until our own day the same proportionate position among the empires
of Christendom as it held in the seventeenth century, the name of John
of Barneveld would have perhaps been as familiar to all men as it is at
this moment to nearly every inhabitant of the Netherlands. Even now
political passion is almost as ready to flame forth either in ardent
affection or enthusiastic hatred as if two centuries and a half had not
elapsed since his death. His name is so typical of a party, a polity, and a
faith, so indelibly associated with a great historical cataclysm, as to
render it difficult even for the grave, the conscientious, the learned, the
patriotic of his own compatriots to speak of him with absolute
impartiality.
A foreigner who loves and admires all that is great and noble in the
history of that famous republic and can have no hereditary bias as to its
ecclesiastical or political theories may at least attempt the task with
comparative coldness, although conscious of inability to do thorough
justice to a most complex subject.

In former publications devoted to Netherland history I have
endeavoured to trace the course of events of which the life and works
of the Advocate were a vital ingredient down to the period when Spain
after more than forty years of hard fighting virtually acknowledged the
independence of the Republic and concluded with her a truce of twelve
years.
That convention was signed in the spring of 1609. The ten ensuing
years in Europe were comparatively tranquil, but they were scarcely to
be numbered among the full and fruitful sheaves of a pacific epoch. It
was a pause, a breathing spell during which the sulphurous clouds
which had made the atmosphere of Christendom poisonous for nearly
half a century had sullenly rolled away, while at every point of the
horizon they were seen massing themselves anew in portentous and
ever accumulating strength. At any moment the faint and sickly
sunshine in which poor exhausted Humanity was essaying a feeble
twitter of hope as it plumed itself for a peaceful flight might be again
obscured. To us of a remote posterity the momentary division of epochs
seems hardly discernible. So rapidly did that fight of Demons which we
call the Thirty Years' War tread on the heels of the forty years' struggle
for Dutch Independence which had just been suspended that we are
accustomed to think and speak of the Eighty Years' War as one pure,
perfect, sanguinary whole.
And indeed the Tragedy which was soon to sweep solemnly across
Europe was foreshadowed in the first fitful years of peace. The throb of
the elementary forces already shook the soil of Christendom. The
fantastic but most significant conflict in the territories of the dead Duke
of Clove reflected the distant and gigantic war as in a mirage. It will be
necessary to direct the reader's attention at the proper moment to that
episode, for it was one in which the beneficent sagacity of Barneveld
was conspicuously exerted in the cause of peace and conservation.
Meantime it is not agreeable to reflect that this brief period of nominal
and armed peace which the Republic had conquered after nearly two
generations of warfare was employed by her in tearing her own flesh.
The heroic sword which had achieved such triumphs in the cause of
freedom could have been bitter employed than in an attempt at political
suicide.
In a picture of the last decade of Barneveld's eventful life his

personality may come more distinctly forward perhaps than in previous
epochs. It will however be difficult to disentangle a single thread from
the great historical tapestry of the Republic and of Europe in which his
life and achievements are interwoven. He was a public man in the
fullest sense of the word, and without his presence and influence the
record of Holland, France, Spain, Britain, and Germany might have
been essentially modified.
The Republic