CHAPTER VII.

Proud Position of the Republic—­France obeys her—­Hatred of Carleton —­Position and Character of Aerssens—­Claim for the “Third”—­Recall of Aerssens—­Rivalry between Maurice and Barneveld, who always sustains the separate Sovereignties of the Provinces—­Conflict between Church and State added to other Elements of Discord in the Commonwealth—­Religion a necessary Element in the Life of all Classes.

Thus the Republic had placed itself in as proud a position as it was possible for commonwealth or kingdom to occupy.  It had dictated the policy and directed the combined military movements of Protestantism.  It had gathered into a solid mass the various elements out of which the great Germanic mutiny against Rome, Spain, and Austria had been compounded.  A breathing space of uncertain duration had come to interrupt and postpone the general and inevitable conflict.  Meantime the Republic was encamped upon the enemy’s soil.

France, which had hitherto commanded, now obeyed.  England, vacillating and discontented, now threatening and now cajoling, saw for the time at least its influence over the councils of the Netherlands neutralized by the genius of the great statesman who still governed the Provinces, supreme in all but name.  The hatred of the British government towards the Republic, while in reality more malignant than at any previous period, could now only find vent in tremendous, theological pamphlets, composed by the King in the form of diplomatic instructions, and hurled almost weekly at the heads of the States-General, by his ambassador, Dudley Carleton.

Few men hated Barneveld more bitterly than did Carleton.  I wish to describe as rapidly, but as faithfully, as I can the outline at least of the events by which one of the saddest and most superfluous catastrophes in modern history was brought about.  The web was a complex one, wrought apparently of many materials; but the more completely it is unravelled the more clearly we shall detect the presence of the few simple but elemental fibres which make up the tissue of most human destinies, whether illustrious or obscure, and out of which the most moving pictures of human history are composed.

The religious element, which seems at first view to be the all pervading and controlling one, is in reality rather the atmosphere which surrounds and colours than the essence which constitutes the tragedy to be delineated.

Personal, sometimes even paltry, jealousy; love of power, of money, of place; rivalry between civil and military ambition for predominance in a free state; struggles between Church and State to control and oppress each other; conflict between the cautious and healthy, but provincial and centrifugal, spirit on the one side, and the ardent centralizing, imperial, but dangerous, instinct on the other, for ascendancy in a federation; mortal combat between aristocracy disguised in the