From early times Calvinism in the northern Netherlands had been divided into two schools.  The strict Calvinists or “Reformed,” known by their opponents as “Precisians,” and the liberal Calvinists, “the Evangelicals,” otherwise “the Libertines.”  To this Libertine party belonged William the Silent, Oldenbarneveldt and the majority of the burgher-regents of Holland.  These men regarded the religious question from the statesman’s point of view.  Having risen in rebellion against the tyranny of the Spanish Inquisition, they were anxious to preserve their countrymen (only a minority of whom were Protestants) from being placed under the heel of a religious intolerance as narrow and bigoted as that from which they had escaped.  The “Reformed” congregations on the other hand, led by the preachers, were anxious to summon a National Synod for the purpose of creating a State Church to whose tenets, rigidly defined by the Heidelberg catechism and the Netherland confession, all would be required to conform on pain of being deprived of their rights as citizens.  The Libertines were opposed to such a scheme, as an interference with the rights of each province to regulate its own religious affairs, and as an attempt to assert the supremacy of Church over State.

The struggle between the two parties, which had continued intermittently for a number of years, suddenly became acute through the appointment by Maurice of Jacob Harmensz, better known as Arminius, to the Chair of Theology at Leyden, vacated by the death of Junius in 1602.  The leader of the strict Calvinist school, the learned Franciscus Gomarus, had at the time of the appointment of Arminius already been a professor at Leyden for eight years.  Each teacher gathered round him a following of devoted disciples, and a violent collision was inevitable.  Prolonged and heated controversy on the high doctrines of Predestination and Freewill led to many appeals being made to the States-General and to the Estates of Holland to convene a Synod to settle the disputed questions, but neither of these bodies in the midst of the negotiations for the truce was willing to complicate matters by taking a step that could not fail to accentuate existing discords.  Six months after the truce was signed Arminius died.  The quarrel, however, was only to grow more embittered.  Johannes Uyttenbogaert took the leadership of the Arminians, and finally, after consultation with Oldenbarneveldt, he called together a convention of Arminian preachers and laymen at Gouda (June, 1610).  They drew up for presentation to the Estates a petition, known as the Remonstratie, consisting of five articles, in which they defined the points wherein they differed from the orthodox Calvinist doctrines on the subjects of predestination, election and grace.  The Gomarists on their part drew up a Contra-Remonstratie containing seven articles, and they declined to submit to any decision on matters of doctrine, save from a purely Church