He had reckoned on a ready adhesion to this measure and a sentence from the tribunal through the influence of his son-in-law, the Seignior van Veenhuyzen, who was president of the chief court.  His attempt was foiled however by the stern opposition of two Zealand members of the court, who managed to bring up from a bed of sickness, where he had long been lying, a Holland councillor whom they knew to be likewise opposed to the fierce measure, and thus defeated it by a majority of one.

Such is the story as told by contemporaries and repeated from that day to this.  It is hardly necessary to say that Barneveld calmly denied having conceived or even heard of the scheme.  That men could go about looking each other in the face and rehearsing such gibberish would seem sufficiently dispiriting did we not know to what depths of credulity men in all ages can sink when possessed by the demon of party malice.

If it had been narrated on the Exchange at Amsterdam or Flushing during that portentous midsummer that Barneveld had not only beheaded but roasted alive, and fed the dogs and cats upon the attorney, the apothecary, and the engraver, there would have been citizens in plenty to devour the news with avidity.

But although the Advocate had never imagined such extravagances as these, it is certain that he had now resolved upon very bold measures, and that too without an instant’s delay.  He suspected the Prince of aiming at sovereignty not only over Holland but over all the provinces and to be using the Synod as a principal part of his machinery.  The gauntlet was thrown down by the Stadholder, and the Advocate lifted it at once.  The issue of the struggle would depend upon the political colour of the town magistracies.  Barneveld instinctively felt that Maurice, being now resolved that the Synod should be held, would lose no time in making a revolution in all the towns through the power he held or could plausibly usurp.  Such a course would, in his opinion, lead directly to an unconstitutional and violent subversion of the sovereign rights of each province, to the advantage of the central government.  A religious creed would be forced upon Holland and perhaps upon two other provinces which was repugnant to a considerable majority of the people.  And this would be done by a majority vote of the States-General, on a matter over which, by the 13th Article of the fundamental compact—­the Union of Utrecht—­ the States-General had no control, each province having reserved the disposition of religious affairs to itself.  For let it never be forgotten that the Union of the Netherlands was a compact, a treaty, an agreement between sovereign states.  There was no pretence that it was an incorporation, that the people had laid down a constitution, an organic law.  The people were never consulted, did not exist, had not for political purposes been invented.  It was the great primal defect of their institutions, but the Netherlanders would have been centuries before their age had they been able to remedy that defect.  Yet the Netherlanders would have been much behind even that age of bigotry had they admitted the possibility in a free commonwealth, of that most sacred and important of all subjects that concern humanity, religious creed—­the relation of man to his Maker—­to be regulated by the party vote of a political board.