to adopt a system of ignorance upon matters beyond the flaming walls of the world; to do the work before him manfully and faithfully while he walked the earth, and to trust that a benevolent Creator would devote neither him nor any other man to eternal hellfire.  For this most offensive doctrine he was howled at by the strictly pious, while he earned still deeper opprobrium by daring to advocate religious toleration:  In face of the endless horrors inflicted by the Spanish Inquisition upon his native land, he had the hardihood—­although a determined Protestant himself—­to claim for Roman Catholics the right to exercise their religion in the free States on equal terms with those of the reformed faith.  “Anyone,” said his enemies, “could smell what that meant who had not a wooden nose.”  In brief, he was a liberal Christian, both in theory and practice, and he nobly confronted in consequence the wrath of bigots on both sides.  At a later period the most zealous Calvinists called him Pope John, and the opinions to which he was to owe such appellations had already been formed in his mind.

After completing his very thorough legal studies, he had practised as an advocate in Holland and Zeeland.  An early defender of civil and religious freedom, he had been brought at an early day into contact with William the Silent, who recognized his ability.  He had borne a snap-hance on his shoulder as a volunteer in the memorable attempt to relieve Haarlem, and was one of the few survivors of that bloody night.  He had stood outside the walls of Leyden in company of the Prince of Orange when that magnificent destruction of the dykes had taken place by which the city had been saved from the fate impending over it.  At a still more recent period we have seen him landing from the gun-boats upon the Kowenstyn, on the fatal 26th May.  These military adventures were, however, but brief and accidental episodes in his career, which was that of a statesman and diplomatist.  As pensionary of Rotterdam, he was constantly a member of the General Assembly, and had already begun to guide the policy of the new commonwealth.  His experience was considerable, and he was now in the high noon of his vigour and his usefulness.

He was a man of noble and imposing presence, with thick hair pushed from a broad forehead rising dome-like above a square and massive face; a strong deeply-coloured physiognomy, with shaggy brow, a chill blue eye, not winning but commanding, high cheek bones, a solid, somewhat scornful nose, a firm mouth and chin, enveloped in a copious brown beard; the whole head not unfitly framed in the stiff formal ruff of the period; and the tall stately figure well draped in magisterial robes of velvet and sable—­such was John of Olden-Barneveld.

The Commissioners thus described arrived at Greenwich Stairs, and were at once ushered into the palace, a residence which had been much enlarged and decorated by Henry VIII.

They were received with stately ceremony.  The presence-chamber was hung with Gobelin tapestry, its floor strewn with rushes.  Fifty-gentlemen pensioners, with gilt battle-ages, and a throng of ‘buffetiers’, or beef-eaters, in that quaint old-world garb which has survived so many centuries, were in attendance, while the counsellors of the Queen, in their robes of state, waited around the throne.