It was now sufficiently obvious that either the governments in the three opposition provinces must be changed or that the National Synod must be imposed by a strict majority vote in the teeth of the constitution and of vigorous and eloquent protests drawn up by the best lawyers in the country.  The Advocate and Grotius recommended a provincial synod first and, should that not succeed in adjusting the differences of church government, then the convocation of a general or oecumenical synod.  They resisted the National Synod because, in their view, the Provinces were not a nation.  A league of seven sovereign and independent Mates was all that legally existed in the Netherlands.  It was accordingly determined that the governments should be changed, and the Stadholder set himself to prepare the way for a thorough and, if possible, a bloodless revolution.  He departed on the 27th November for a tour through the chief cities, and before leaving the Hague addressed an earnest circular letter to the various municipalities of Holland.

A more truly dignified, reasonable, right royal letter, from the Stadholder’s point of view, could not have been indited.  The Imperial “we” breathing like a morning breeze through the whole of it blew away all legal and historical mistiness.

But the clouds returned again nevertheless.  Unfortunately for Maurice it could not be argued by the pen, however it might be proved by the sword, that the Netherlands constituted a nation, and that a convocation of doctors of divinity summoned by a body of envoys had the right to dictate a creed to seven republics.

All parties were agreed on one point.  There must be unity of divine worship.  The territory of the Netherlands was not big enough to hold two systems of religion, two forms of Christianity, two sects of Protestantism.  It was big enough to hold seven independent and sovereign states, but would be split into fragments—­resolved into chaos—­should there be more than one Church or if once a schism were permitted in that Church.  Grotius was as much convinced of this as Gomarus.  And yet the 13th Article of the Union stared them all in the face, forbidding the hideous assumptions now made by the general government.  Perhaps no man living fully felt its import save Barneveld alone.  For groping however dimly and hesitatingly towards the idea of religious liberty, of general toleration, he was denounced as a Papist, an atheist, a traitor, a miscreant, by the fanatics for the sacerdotal and personal power.  Yet it was a pity that he could never contemplate the possibility of his country’s throwing off the swaddling clothes of provincialism which had wrapped its infancy.  Doubtless history, law, tradition, and usage pointed to the independent sovereignty of each province.  Yet the period of the Truce was precisely the time when a more generous constitution, a national incorporation might have been constructed to take the place of the loose confederacy