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power to frustrate the efforts of the French envoys and bring on the catastrophe.

After a few days the Advocate was removed from the chamber in the apartment of Maurice to a room in which the Admiral of Arragon had been confined by the command of the Prince after the battle of Nieuwport. His faithful servant, Jan Franken by name, was allowed to attend him, while a sentinel stood constantly before his door. His papers were taken away and he was deprived of all writing materials, and neither friend nor relative permitted to see him.

infallible Netherland Catechism. The conclusion of the synod was celebrated by a great festival at Dordtrecht, in which the labours of the Synod and the canons it established were eulogized in long Latin speeches and prayed for in long Latin prayers, and the main orator did not forget to render thanks" to the most magnanimous King James of Great Britain, through whose godly zeal, fiery sympathy, and truly royal labour, God had so often refreshed the weary synod in the midst of their toil."

While the magnanimous King James of Great Britain was refreshing the weary A tragic circumstance, too, still more synod with his godly zeal, his fiery symprejudiced superficial minds against Bar-pathy, and truly royal labour, the victim neveldt. Secretary Ledenberg, a citizen of Utrecht, who had been imprisoned by order of the States-General at the same time as the Advocate, through fear of torture and to escape confiscation of his property, committed suicide, leaving a paper behind him, which shows what sort of justice he anticipated from the tribunal who held his fate at their mercy.

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of his rancour and his spite had been sitting in prison for nearly seven months waiting for trial. For nearly all this time he had received no intelligence from the outward world, except such as could be conveyed to him inside of a quill concealed in a pear and by such devices. Nothing, indeed, could be more illegal or arbitrary than the proceedings against "I know that there is an indication to set an His very arrest itself was a gross violathe Advocate from beginning to end. example in my person, to confront me with my best friends, to torture me afterwards to con- tion of law; he was a great officer of the vict me of contradiction and falsehood as they States of Holland; he had been taken say, and thus to found an ignominious sentence under their especial protection; he was upon points and trifles, for this it will be neces- on his way to the High Council. The sary to do in order to justify the arrest and States-General were only guests on the imprisonment. To escape all this I am going soil of Holland and had no jurisdiction to God by the shortest road. Against a dead there. He was arrested in time of peace man there can be pronounced no sentence of by no warrant or form of law-"The confiscation of property. Done 17th Septem- greatest civil dignitary of Holland was ber, o.s., 1618." entrapped under pretence of a conference The great Advocate had been impris- by its first military officer and imprisoned on August 29, 1618; his trial did oned by force." Á tribunal had to be not begin till March 7 in the following created for judging the Advocate for year; it had been purposely delayed in the States-General had no tribunal at all order that the work of the synod, which so they appointed twenty-four comhad met at Dordtrecht, might approach | missioners, twelve from Holland and two. completion. In this synod the spirits of from each of the other six provinces. Gomar and of Calvin were triumphant ; But the tribunal was a mere packed jury, predestination to life and predestination to damnation had been preordained, according to the decree of the Assembly, from the beginning of time. A select portion of the Netherlanders and of mankind was to be eternally blessed, and all others were to be eternally damned, and especially the Arminians and the believers in the Five Points. The Arminians were declared heretics, schismatics, teachers of false doctrines. They were pronounced to be incapable of filling any clerical or academical post. No man henceforward was to teach, lecture, or preach, unless he was a subscriber to the infallible Netherland Conference and the

for though there was an affectation of concession to Holland, care was taken that the worst enemies of Barneveldt should be included in the nominations ; and some of them were ignorant men, totally unacquainted with law, or with any but their own mother-tongue. The trial lasted nearly three months, and for the whole of this time the venerable and illustrious statesman daily descended from the mean and desolate garret in which he was confined to the apartment below, where he had to confront the mean crew who were constituted his judges without appeal. The atrocities of the French Revolution present no greater

example of the perversion of the spirit and the forms of justice. The trial was carried on without any attention to or even pretence of form: there was no bill of indictment, no arraignment, no counsel, no witnesses, and no arguments. The whole process consisted of a rambling and tangled mass of interrogations reaching over forty years, presented to the prisoner by a nondescript court without order or method. The prisoner asked for a list in writing of the charges brought against him, he asked also for pen, ink, and paper; but every request was refused, and his papers and books were taken from him.

as well as the "Verhooren" of Hugo Grotius, by Professor Fruin; and from these documents Mr. Motley has made a few extracts to show the nature of the charges brought against the statesman.

The truth is that the illustrious founder of the Republic of the Netherlands was a victim to a revolution which set at naught the Articles of Union of the Provinces of the Netherlands, as signed at Utrecht. These Articles were miserably defective, it is true, regarded as a political constitution; nevertheless, nothing could be more stringent than the provisions by which the right of regulation of all matters relating to religion was reserved to each province. No province was to interfere with another in such matters, and every individual in them all was to remain free in his religion, no man being molested or examined on account of his creed. declared that no provinces or cities which held to the Roman Catholic religion were to be excluded from the League

It was

moreover

He was allowed to consult neither with an advocate nor even with a single friend. Alone in his chamber of bondage he was to meditate on his defence. Out of his memory and brain, and from these alone, he was to supply himself with the array of historical facts, stretching over a longer period than the lifetime of many of his judges, and with the proper legal and historical arguments upon these facts for the justification of his course. That memory provided they conformed to its condiand brain were capacious and powerful enough tions. Nothing, indeed, can be more for the task. It was well for the judges that clear than that the framers of the Articles they had bound themselves at the onset by an of the League had excluded religious oath never to make known what passed in the affairs altogether from this act of politcourt-room, but to bury all the proceedings in profound secrecy forever. Had it been other-ical union; and now the very Assembly, wise; had that been known to the contem- which had no powers except by virtue of porary public which has only been revealed the Articles of the League, were huntmore than two centuries later; had a portioning one of its chief framers to death, for only of the calm and austere eloquence been opposing their endeavours to inflict one heard in which the Advocate set forth his de- uniform doctrine respecting the subtlest fence; had the frivolous and ignoble nature of point of theology on the whole nation. the attack been comprehended, it might have moved the very stones in the street to mutiny. Hateful as the statesman had been made by an organized system of calumny, which was continued with unabated vigour and increased venom since he had been imprisoned, there was enough of justice and of gratitude left in the hearts of Netherlanders to resent the tyranny practised against their greatest man, and the obloquy thus brought against a nation always devoted to their liberty and laws. (Vol. ii. pp. 316-7.)

The best answer of the Advocate to

the accusations of his judges was the recital of his whole life. Sufficient records remain to show that the old man, deprived as he was of all writing materials and even of a clerk to assist him, proved himself fully the master of his accusers on every point in which they assailed him. He protested from the outset against the jurisdiction of the tribunal and the manner of his arrest; Out of the confused mass of documents he denied - and the denial of course which have lately come to light respect- roused the fury of the bigots who sat ing this trial, and out of the wilderness upon him to frenzy - that the central of interrogatories and answers therein government had any right to meddle contained, it would be vain to attempt to with religious matters at all; neverthedraw a connected and interesting narra-less he condescended to enter into the tive. Mr. Motley has examined these papers, all of which were long kept secret and only a portion of which have yet been published. Among these latter are especially noteworthy the publication by the Historical Society of Utrecht, of the "Verhooren," or interrogatories of the judges, and the replies of Barneveldt —

theological question of Predestination
which had been the thorniest hedge of
division for so many creeds, and lay at
the bottom of the terrible convulsion
then raging in the Netherlands; and
after examining both sides of the ques-
tion with all the skill of a practised theo-
'gian, he concluded that a spirit of mod-

SO

eration and kindness should govern the conduct of brethren of the Reformed Church who thought differently on difficult a subject. In setting forth his defense to these and other charges, the old statesman at times surveyed nearly half a century of European history in which he had himself played so prominent a part, and expounded the ancient laws and customs of his country with unerring strength and accuracy of memory.

The patience [Mr. Motley writes] with which the venerable statesman submitted to the taunts, ignorant and insolent crossquestioning and noisy interruptions of his judges, was not less remarkable than the tenacity of memory which enabled him thus day after day, alone, unaided, by books, manuscripts, or friendly counsel to reconstruct the record of forty years, and to expound the laws of the land by an array of authorities, instances, and illustrations, in a manner which would be deemed masterly by one who had all the resources of libraries, documents, witnesses, and secretaries at command. (Vol. ii. p. 321.)

Only when insidious questions were put, tending to impute to him corruption, venality, and treacherous correspondence with the enemy for they never once dared formally to accuse him of treason -did that almost superhuman patience leave him. The popular slander against him was that he was secretly in league with Spain to restore the Provinces to the Spanish yoke; and he was questioned by his judges about a certain pay ment said to have been made by him to a certain man of business, Van der Vecken, in Spanish coin. Premising briefly that it was impossible to remember in what coin he had always paid a man with whom his business transactions had lasted twenty or thirty years, he burst forth into a storm of indignation, declaring that it seemed impossible to him that any dispassionate man of moderate intelligence could imagine him, whose whole life had been a perpetual offence to Spain, to be in suspicious relations with that power.

fence in the early days of the revolt. These were things which led directly to the Council of Blood and the gibbet. He had borne arms himself on various bloody fields, and had been He perpetually a deputy to the rebel camps. Union which was concluded between the had been the original mover of the Treaty of Provinces at Utrecht. He had been the first to draw up the declaration of Netherland independence and the abjuration of the King of Spain. He had been one of those who had drawn and passed the Act establishing the late Prince of Orange as Stadtholder. Of the sixty signers of these memorable declarations none were now living save himself and two others. When the Prince had been assassinated, he had done his best to secure for his son Maurice the sovereign position of which murder had so suddenly deprived his father. He had been member of the memorable embassies to France and England, by which invaluable support for the struggling Provinces had been obtained. (Vol. ii. p. 303.)

These and other arguments addressed to his judges during the two months of the trial were of no avail; of as little avail was an energetic address delivered by Du Maurier, the French envoy, to the States-General in presence of the Prince of Orange. It seems, however, almost certain that if the friends or relatives of the Advocate had been willing to implore pardon for him his sentence would have been commuted or cancelled; but although Count William of Nassau and the Princess Dowager Louise, the mother-inlaw of the Princess of Orange, interested themselves to get the children of the Advocate to apply to the States for pardon, they steadfastly refused to do so.

They would not move one step in itno, not if it cost him his head;" they, like the Advocate himself, considered such a step would be an admission of his guilt; they possessed moreover, like the Advocate himself, all the stoicism and the pride of the Hollanders, and they knew that his enemies would prefer the loss of his honour even to the loss of his head.

The terms of the voluminous senFrom his youth, he said, he had made him- tence passed upon him were as unique self, by his honourable and patriotic deeds, as the whole proceedings of the trial. He hopelessly irreconcilable with the Spaniards. was condemned on his own defence, which He was one of the advocates practising in the was styled his confession - for no testiSupreme Court of Holland, who in the very mony or evidence of any kind had been teeth of the Duke of Alva had proclaimed him brought against him. "Whereas the a tyrant, and had sworn obedience to the Prince of Orange as the lawful governor of prisoner John of Barneveldt," said the the land. He was one of those who in the sentence, "without being put to the torsame year had promoted and attended private ture, and without fetters of iron, has congatherings for the advancement of the Re- fessed to having perturbed religion, formed religion. He had helped to levy, and greatly afflicted the Church of God, and had contributed to, funds for the national de-carried into practice exorbitant and per

nicious maxims of State . . . inculca- French psalm-book. At five o'clock he ting by himself and accomplices that got up and dressed for the final scene. each province had the right to regulate To the last the treatment to which he religious affairs within its own territory, was subjected was harsh and cruel. His and that other provinces were not to wife and children had continued to hope concern themselves therewith,” - there- for his acquittal, and had sent in three fore, and for a score of other reasons elaborate petitions prepared by counsel communicated in a series of vague, tan-in his favour. Of these no notice had gled generalities, "the judges, in the been taken. Late in the evening of May name of the Lords States-General, con- 12 they heard that he was to die on the demned the prisoner to be taken to the morning of the 13th, and they at once Binnenhof, there to be executed with the addressed a last appeal to the judges. sword, that death may follow, and they" The afflicted wife and children of M. declared all his property confiscated."

clined on the plea that it would cause him too great emotion. The French envoy made too a third and last appeal to save the life of the great statesman, at five o'clock in the morning. It may be imagined, indeed, that few of either Barneveldt's friends or enemies, after hearing of the sentence, slept much on this eventful night, but like himself passed those hours in watchfulness.

The execution was fully equal in its want of form and solemnity to the trial. The scaffold was a shapeless mass of

van Barneveldt humbly show that having The last day on which Barneveldt had heard the sorrowful tidings of his coming appeared before his judges was May 1. execution, they humbly beg that it may His sentence was not communicated to be granted them to see and to speak to him till about half-past five on Sunday him for the last time." Barneveldt was afternoon, May 12. The Advocate was never informed of this petition of his busy drawing up notes which he had in-wife and children, but was asked if he tended to make use of in the future prog-desired to see them; this he now deress of his trial. Although taken thus unprepared, and told he was to die, the next morning he behaved with his usual stoicism, and kept the same undaunted air. To a clergyman who came to offer him consolation he said, "I am a man, have come to my present age, and I know how to console myself. I must write, and have now other things to do." Sitting down, he wrote a short pathetic letter to his wife and children, whom he had not been allowed to see since the beginning of his trial, and whom he was not even now allowed to see. The con-rough unhewn planks nailed together in demned statesman was executed at halfpast nine the next morning, about sixteen hours elapsing from the time at which the sentence was communicated to him to that at which it was carried into effect. He supped as usual, and even invited the provost marshal and the clergyman who had been sent to see him to join him at supper, and pledged the health of each of them in a glass of beer. After this two soldiers were added to his watch, who kept him always under their eyes. Other preachers visited him after supper, and he held much talk with them on political and religious matters. At eleven o'clock he went to bed as usual, but was unable to sleep, so he asked his servant to read to him from a prayer-book. This was not allowed, nor was John Franken permitted even to speak to him except in a loud voice, so that all their conversation might be overheard. A clergyman was sent for, who read to him the "Consolations of the Sick." After some talk he tried again to sleep; but he passed the whole night in wakefulness, reading from time to time in a

one night. A heap of sand was piled on the spot where he was to be beheaded, beside which lay his coffin, a coarse dirty box of rough boards originally prepared for a murderer, who had been lately condemned but pardoned on the eve of execution" Not this man, but Barabbas!"

and that the scene might be complete, two common ruffians of soldiers - fit subjects for the pencil of Ostade or Callot sat on this coffin playing dice and betting whether God or the devil should have the soul of the doomed man.

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When the august and venerable statesman, leaning on his staff, stepped out on the scaffold from a window in the house in which he had been confined, and saw the preparations and the thousands of wolfish eyes of the crowd waiting to see him die, he lifted his eyes to heaven and murmured, "O God, what does man come to !" and then uttered in bitterness of heart, "This then is the reward of forty years' service to the States!" After kneeling on the bare planks and praying for a quarter of an hour with a clergyman named Lamotte beside him,

he was undressed by his valet; then he turned to the crowd and declared that he died a true patriot, and a minute or two later his head was cut off by the executioner with a double-handed sword, and body and head were immediately huddled into the box beside him. He was then seventy-one years seven months and eighteen days of age.

Grotius, as is well known, effected his escape from prison two years afterwards with the help of a brave wife and a brave servant-girl, Elsie, in a manner not unbefitting the great publicist, by taking the place of the heavy books of the Professor Erpenius, which he was in the habit of having conveyed to him in a big chest; and the story of his escape furnishes the subject of one of Mr. Motley's most entertaining chapters.

As for the family of Barneveldt, the desolation of his wife was rendered not yet complete even by the execution of her husband. The property of the statesman having been confiscated, and his two sons reduced, both to obscurity and one to beggary, although Maurice had promised to take care of them, they were frenzied by the spirit of revenge, and conspired against the life of the Stadtholder, were discovered, the one executed and the other escaped into exile. The guilt of the sons naturally recoiled on the stainless fame of the great Advocate, and has doubtless had something to do with the tardy justice which has been rendered to his memory, while the power, popularity, and influence of the Stadtholder were rendered thereby still more triumphant.

We cannot do better than conclude our review of this tragic story by quoting the final phrase of Mr. Motley, in which he characterizes its effect on the States of the Netherlands:

there expressions which seemed to us to be somewhat extravagant or out of place, and a want of method and skill in marshalling the facts of the narrative; but these are slight blemishes in the work considered as a whole. One consideration has proved itself especially attractive to us in perusing the volumes, and that is the earnest love of political and religious liberty which animates every page, and which has made the citizen of the great Republic of the West the ardent admirer and the fitting historian of that Republic of the Netherlands to which the liberties of Europe remain so deeply indebted. We trust that Mr. Motley will not fail to present us in due time with that completion of his labours to which we are informed the present volumes form so brilliant an introduction the History of the Thirty Years' War.

From Blackwood's Magazine. THE STORY OF VALENTINE; AND HIS BROTHER.

CHAPTER XXII.

VAL'S letter was of a character sufficiently exciting to have made Dick forget anything less important than the crisis which had thus happened. Its object was to invite him to Oxford, to a place somewhat similar to that which he had held at Eton, in one of the great boating establishments on the river. The master was old, and wanted somebody of trust to superintend and manage his business, with a reasonable hope of succeeding to him. “You had better come up and talk it over," wrote Val, ever peremptory. "I have always said you must rise in the world, and here is the opportunity for you. They have too much regard for The Republic-that magnificent commonwealth which in its infancy had confronted, you at Eton to keep you from doing what single-handed, the greatest empire of the would be so very advantageous; thereearth, and had wrested its independence from fore come up at once and look after it." the ancient despot after a forty years' struggle Dick's heart, which had been beating -had now been rent in twain, although in very low in his honest breast, oververy unequal portions, by the feud of polemi-whelmed with fear and forebodings, gave cal and political hatred. Thus crippled, she was to go forth to take her share in that awful conflict now in full blaze, and of which after ages were to speak with a shudder as the Thirty Years' War.

The volumes which we have just reviewed contain so much that is new and interesting that we have abstained from criticising the conduct and character of the work. We have noticed here and

one leap of returning confidence; but then he reflected that his mother must be made the final judge, and with a sickening pang of suspense he "knocked off" his work, and rowed himself across to the little house at the corner. mother was wearied and languid with her long walk on the day before. She had paused in the midst of her morning occupations, and Dick found her seated in

His

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