“If the town of Leyden should retain Vorstius,” answered Winwood, “to brave or despight his Majesty, the King has the means, if it pleases him to use them, and that without drawing sword, to range them to reason, and to make the magistrates on their knees demand his pardon, and I say as much of Rotterdam.”

Such insolence on the part of an ambassador to the first minister of a great republic was hard to bear.  Barneveld was not the man to brook it.  He replied with great indignation.  “I was born in liberty,” he said with rising choler, “I cannot digest this kind of language.  The King of Spain himself never dared to speak in so high a style.”

“I well understand that logic,” returned the Ambassador with continued insolence.  “You hold your argument to be drawn ‘a majori ad minus;’ but I pray you to believe that the King of Great Britain is peer and companion to the King of Spain, and that his motto is, ’Nemo me impune lacessit.’”

And so they parted in a mutual rage; Winwood adding on going out of the room, “Whatsoever I propose to you in his Majesty’s name can find with you neither goust nor grace.”

He then informed Lord Rochester that “the man was extremely distempered and extremely distasted with his Majesty.

“Some say,” he added, “that on being in England when his Majesty first came to the throne he conceived some offence, which ever since hath rankled in his heart, and now doth burst forth with more violent malice.”

Nor was the matter so small as it superficially appeared.  Dependence of one nation upon the dictation of another can never be considered otherwise than grave.  The subjection of all citizens, clerical or lay, to the laws of the land, the supremacy of the State over the Church, were equally grave subjects.  And the question of sovereignty now raised for the first time, not academically merely, but practically, was the gravest one of all.  It was soon to be mooted vigorously and passionately whether the United Provinces were a confederacy or a union; a league of sovereign and independent states bound together by treaty for certain specified purposes or an incorporated whole.  The Advocate and all the principal lawyers in the country had scarcely a doubt on the subject.  Whether it were a reasonable system or an absurd one, a vigorous or an imbecile form of government, they were confident that the Union of Utrecht, made about a generation of mankind before, and the only tie by which the Provinces were bound together at all, was a compact between sovereigns.

Barneveld styled himself always the servant and officer of the States of Holland.  To them was his allegiance, for them he spoke, wrought, and thought, by them his meagre salary was paid.  At the congress of the States-General, the scene of his most important functions, he was the ambassador of Holland, acting nominally according to their instructions, and exercising the powers of minister of foreign affairs and, as it were,