The Life and Death of John of Barneveld, Advocate of Holland, 1613-15 | Page 8

highest to lowest,
of court, state, jurisprudence, and magistracy, sold as openly and as
cynically as the commonest wares, there were few to comprehend or to
grapple with the danger. It should have seemed obvious to the meanest
capacity in the kingdom that the great house of Austria, reigning
supreme in Spain and in Germany, could not be allowed to crush the
Duke of Savoy on the one side, and Bohemia, Moravia, and the
Netherlands on the other without danger of subjection for France. Yet
the aim of the Queen-Regent was to cultivate an impossible alliance
with her inevitable foe.
And in England, ruled as it then was with no master mind to enforce
against its sovereign the great lessons of policy, internal and external,

on which its welfare and almost its imperial existence depended, the
only ambition of those who could make their opinions felt was to
pursue the same impossibility, intimate alliance with the universal foe.
Any man with slightest pretensions to statesmanship knew that the
liberty for Protestant worship in Imperial Germany, extorted by force,
had been given reluctantly, and would be valid only as long as that
force could still be exerted or should remain obviously in reserve. The
"Majesty-Letter" and the "Convention" of the two religions would
prove as flimsy as the parchment on which they were engrossed, the
Protestant churches built under that sanction would be shattered like
glass, if once the Catholic rulers could feel their hands as clear as their
consciences would be for violating their sworn faith to heretics. Men
knew, even if the easy-going and uxorious emperor, into which
character the once busy and turbulent Archduke Matthias had subsided,
might be willing to keep his pledges, that Ferdinand of Styria, who
would soon succeed him, and Maximilian of Bavaria were men who
knew their own minds, and had mentally never resigned one inch of the
ground which Protestantism imagined itself to have conquered.
These things seem plain as daylight to all who look back upon them
through the long vista of the past; but the sovereign of England did not
see them or did not choose to see them. He saw only the Infanta and her
two millions of dowry, and he knew that by calling Parliament together
to ask subsidies for an anti-Catholic war he should ruin those golden
matrimonial prospects for his son, while encouraging those
"shoemakers," his subjects, to go beyond their "last," by consulting the
representatives of his people on matters pertaining to the mysteries of
government. He was slowly digging the grave of the monarchy and
building the scaffold of his son; but he did his work with a laborious
and pedantic trifling, when really engaged in state affairs, most
amazing to contemplate. He had no penny to give to the cause in which
his nearest relatives mere so deeply involved and for which his only
possible allies were pledged; but he was ready to give advice to all
parties, and with ludicrous gravity imagined himself playing the umpire
between great contending hosts, when in reality he was only playing
the fool at the beck of masters before whom he quaked.

"You are not to vilipend my counsel," said he one day to a foreign
envoy. "I am neither a camel nor an ass to take up all this work on my
shoulders. Where would you find another king as willing to do it as I
am?"
The King had little time and no money to give to serve his own family
and allies and the cause of Protestantism, but he could squander vast
sums upon worthless favourites, and consume reams of paper on
controverted points of divinity. The appointment of Vorstius to the
chair of theology in Leyden aroused more indignation in his bosom,
and occupied more of his time, than the conquests of Spinola in the
duchies, and the menaces of Spain against Savoy and Bohemia. He
perpetually preached moderation to the States in the matter of the
debateable territory, although moderation at that moment meant
submission to the House of Austria. He chose to affect confidence in
the good faith of those who were playing a comedy by which no
statesman could be deceived, but which had secured the approbation of
the Solomon of the age.
But there was one man who was not deceived. The warnings and the
lamentations of Barneveld sound to us out of that far distant time like
the voice of an inspired prophet. It is possible that a portion of the
wrath to come might have been averted had there been many men in
high places to heed his voice. I do not wish to exaggerate the power and
wisdom of the man, nor to set him forth as one of the greatest heroes of
history. But posterity has