The great misfortune of the commonwealth of the United Provinces, next to the slenderness of its geographical proportions, was the fact that it was without a centre and without a head, and therefore not a nation capable of unlimited vitality.  There were seven states.  Each claimed to be sovereign.  The pretension on the part of several of them was ridiculous.  Overyssel, for example, contributed two and three-quarters per cent. of the general budget.  It was a swamp of twelve hundred square miles in extent, with some heath-spots interspered, and it numbered perhaps a hundred thousand inhabitants.  The doughty Count of Embden alone could have swallowed up such sovereignty, have annexed all the buckwheat patches and cranberry marshes of Overyssel to his own meagre territories, and nobody the wiser.

Zeeland, as we have seen, was disposed at a critical moment to set up its independent sovereignty.  Zeeland, far more important than Overyssel, had a revenue of perhaps five hundred thousand dollars,—­rather a slender budget for an independent republic, wedged in as it was by the most powerful empires of the earth, and half drowned by the ocean, from which it had scarcely emerged.

There was therefore no popular representation, and on the other hand no executive head.  As sovereignty must be exercised in some way, however, in all living commonwealths, and as a low degree of vitality was certainly not the defect of those bustling provinces, the supreme functions had now fallen into the hands of Holland.

While William the Silent lived, the management of war, foreign affairs, and finance, for the revolted provinces, was in his control.  He was aided by two council boards, but the circumstances of history and the character of the man had invested him with an inevitable dictatorship.

After his death, at least after Leicester’s time, the powers of the state-council, the head of which, Prince Maurice, was almost always absent at the wars, fell into comparative disuse.  The great functions of the confederacy passed into the possession of the States-General.  That body now came to sit permanently at the Hague.  The number of its members, deputies from the seven provinces-envoys from those seven immortal and soulless sovereigns—­was not large.  The extraordinary assembly held at Bergen-op-Zoom for confirmation of the truce was estimated by, Bentivoglio at eight hundred.  Bentivoglio, who was on the spot, being then nuncius at Brussels, ought to have been able to count them, yet it is very certain that the number was grossly exaggerated.

At any rate the usual assembly at the Hague rarely amounted to one hundred members.  The presidency was changed once a week, the envoy of each province taking his turn as chairman.

Olden-Barneveld, as member for Holland, was always present in the diet.  As Advocate-General of the leading province, and keeper of its great seal, more especially as possessor of the governing intellect of the whole commonwealth, he led the administration of Holland, and as the estates of Holland contributed more than half of the whole budget of the confederacy, it was a natural consequence of the actual supremacy of that province, and of the vast legal hand political experience of the Advocate, that Holland should, govern the confederacy, and that Barneveld should govern Holland.