This “intimate correspondence” shows Maurice the Stadholder indifferent and lax in internal administration and as being constantly advised and urged by his relative Count William of Nassau.  This need of constant urging extends to religious as well as other matters, and is inconsistent with M. Groen van Prinsterer’s assertion that the question was for Maurice above all religious, and for Barneveld above all political.  Whether its negative evidence can be considered as neutralizing that which is adduced by Mr. Motley to show the Stadholder’s hatred of the Advocate may be left to the reader who has just risen from the account of the mock trial and the swift execution of the great and venerable statesman.  The formal entry on the record upon the day of his “judicial murder” is singularly solemn and impressive:—­

“Monday, 13th May, 1619.  To-day was executed with the sword here in the Hague, on a scaffold thereto erected in the Binnenhof before the steps of the great hall, Mr. John of Barneveld, in his life Knight, Lord of Berkel, Rodenrys, etc., Advocate of Holland and West Friesland, for reasons expressed in the sentence and otherwise, with confiscation of his property, after he had served the state thirty- three years two months and five days, since 8th March, 1586; a man of great activity, business, memory, and wisdom,—­yea, extraordinary in every respect.  He that stands let him see that he does not fall.”

Maurice gave an account of the execution of Barneveld to Count William Lewis on the same day in a note “painfully brief and dry.”

Most authors write their own biography consciously or unconsciously.  We have seen Mr. Motley portraying much of himself, his course of life and his future, as he would have had it, in his first story.  In this, his last work, it is impossible not to read much of his own external and internal personal history told under other names and with different accessories.  The parallelism often accidentally or intentionally passes into divergence.  He would not have had it too close if he could, but there are various passages in which it is plain enough that he is telling his own story.

Mr. Motley was a diplomatist, and he writes of other diplomatists, and one in particular, with most significant detail.  It need not be supposed that he intends the “arch intriguer” Aerssens to stand for himself, or that he would have endured being thought to identify himself with the man of whose “almost devilish acts” he speaks so freely.  But the sagacious reader—­and he need not be very sharp-sighted—­will very certainly see something more than a mere historical significance in some of the passages which I shall cite for him to reflect upon.  Mr. Motley’s standard of an ambassador’s accomplishments may be judged from the following passage:—­