At about the period of the return of Aerssens from his French embassy, the suppressed fire was ready to flame forth at the first fanning by that artful hand.  It was impossible, so Aerssens thought and whispered, that two heads could remain on one body politic.  There was no room in the Netherlands for both the Advocate and the Prince.  Barneveld was in all civil affairs dictator, chief magistrate, supreme judge; but he occupied this high station by the force of intellect, will, and experience, not through any constitutional provision.  In time of war the Prince was generalissimo, commander-in-chief of all the armies of the Republic.  Yet constitutionally he was not captain-general at all.  He was only stadholder of five out of seven provinces.

Barneveld suspected him of still wishing to make himself sovereign of the country.  Perhaps his suspicions were incorrect.  Yet there was every reason why Maurice should be ambitious of that position.  It would have been in accordance with the openly expressed desire of Henry IV. and other powerful allies of the Netherlands.  His father’s assassination had alone prevented his elevation to the rank of sovereign Count of Holland.  The federal policy of the Provinces had drifted into a republican form after their renunciation of their Spanish sovereign, not because the people, or the States as representing the people, had deliberately chosen a republican system, but because they could get no powerful monarch to accept the sovereignty.  They had offered to become subjects of Protestant England and of Catholic France.  Both powers had refused the offer, and refused it with something like contumely.  However deep the subsequent regret on the part of both, there was no doubt of the fact.  But the internal policy in all the provinces, and in all the towns, was republican.  Local self-government existed everywhere.  Each city magistracy was a little republic in itself.  The death of William the Silent, before he had been invested with the sovereign power of all seven provinces, again left that sovereignty in abeyance.  Was the supreme power of the Union, created at Utrecht in 1579, vested in the States-General?

They were beginning theoretically to claim it, but Barneveld denied the existence of any such power either in law or fact.  It was a league of sovereignties, he maintained; a confederacy of seven independent states, united for certain purposes by a treaty made some thirty years before.  Nothing could be more imbecile, judging by the light of subsequent events and the experience of centuries, than such an organization.  The independent and sovereign republic of Zealand or of Groningen, for example, would have made a poor figure campaigning, or negotiating, or exhibiting itself on its own account before the world.  Yet it was difficult to show any charter, precedent, or prescription for the sovereignty of the States-General.  Necessary as such an incorporation was for the very existence of the Union, no constitutional union had