That convention was signed in the spring of 1609.  The ten ensuing years in Europe were comparatively tranquil, but they were scarcely to be numbered among the full and fruitful sheaves of a pacific epoch.  It was a pause, a breathing spell during which the sulphurous clouds which had made the atmosphere of Christendom poisonous for nearly half a century had sullenly rolled away, while at every point of the horizon they were seen massing themselves anew in portentous and ever accumulating strength.  At any moment the faint and sickly sunshine in which poor exhausted Humanity was essaying a feeble twitter of hope as it plumed itself for a peaceful flight might be again obscured.  To us of a remote posterity the momentary division of epochs seems hardly discernible.  So rapidly did that fight of Demons which we call the Thirty Years’ War tread on the heels of the forty years’ struggle for Dutch Independence which had just been suspended that we are accustomed to think and speak of the Eighty Years’ War as one pure, perfect, sanguinary whole.

And indeed the Tragedy which was soon to sweep solemnly across Europe was foreshadowed in the first fitful years of peace.  The throb of the elementary forces already shook the soil of Christendom.  The fantastic but most significant conflict in the territories of the dead Duke of Clove reflected the distant and gigantic war as in a mirage.  It will be necessary to direct the reader’s attention at the proper moment to that episode, for it was one in which the beneficent sagacity of Barneveld was conspicuously exerted in the cause of peace and conservation.  Meantime it is not agreeable to reflect that this brief period of nominal and armed peace which the Republic had conquered after nearly two generations of warfare was employed by her in tearing her own flesh.  The heroic sword which had achieved such triumphs in the cause of freedom could have been bitter employed than in an attempt at political suicide.

In a picture of the last decade of Barneveld’s eventful life his personality may come more distinctly forward perhaps than in previous epochs.  It will however be difficult to disentangle a single thread from the great historical tapestry of the Republic and of Europe in which his life and achievements are interwoven.  He was a public man in the fullest sense of the word, and without his presence and influence the record of Holland, France, Spain, Britain, and Germany might have been essentially modified.

The Republic was so integral a part of that system which divided Europe into two great hostile camps according to creeds rather than frontiers that the history of its foremost citizen touches at every point the general history of Christendom.