Prince Maurice had told the Princess-Dowager the winter before (8th December 1616) that those dissensions would never be decided except by use of weapons; and he now mentioned to her that he had received information from Brussels, which he in part believed, that the Advocate was a stipendiary of Spain.  Yet he had once said, to the same Princess Louise, of this stipendiary that “the services which the Advocate had rendered to the House of Nassau were so great that all the members of that house might well look upon him not as their friend but their father.”  Councillor van Maldere, President of the States of Zealand, and a confidential friend of Maurice, was going about the Hague saying that “one must string up seven or eight Remonstrants on the gallows; then there might be some improvement.”

As for Arminius and Uytenbogaert, people had long told each other and firmly believed it, and were amazed when any incredulity was expressed in regard to it, that they were in regular and intimate correspondence with the Jesuits, that they had received large sums from Rome, and that both had been promised cardinals’ hats.  That Barneveld and his friend Uytenbogaert were regular pensioners of Spain admitted of no dispute whatever.  “It was as true as the Holy Evangel.”  The ludicrous chatter had been passed over with absolute disdain by the persons attacked, but calumny is often a stronger and more lasting power than disdain.  It proved to be in these cases.

“You have the plague mark on your flesh, oh pope, oh pensioner,” said one libeller.  “There are letters safely preserved to make your process for you.  Look out for your head.  Many have sworn your death, for it is more than time that you were out of the world.  We shall prove, oh great bribed one, that you had the 120,000 little ducats.”  The preacher Uytenbogaert was also said to have had 80,000 ducats for his share.  “Go to Brussels,” said the pamphleteer; “it all stands clearly written out on the register with the names and surnames of all you great bribe-takers.”

These were choice morsels from the lampoon of the notary Danckaerts.

“We are tortured more and more with religious differences,” wrote Barneveld; “with acts of popular violence growing out of them the more continuously as they remain unpunished, and with ever increasing jealousies and suspicions.  The factious libels become daily more numerous and more impudent, and no man comes undamaged from the field.  I, as a reward for all my troubles, labours, and sorrows, have three double portions of them.  I hope however to overcome all by God’s grace and to defend my actions with all honourable men so long as right and reason have place in the world, as to which many begin to doubt.  If his Majesty had been pleased to stick to the letters of 1613, we should never have got into these difficulties . . . .  It were better in my opinion that Carleton should be instructed to negotiate in the spirit of those epistles rather than to torment us with the National Synod, which will do more harm than good.”