In short it would be impossible to exaggerate the rancour felt between the different politico-religious parties.  All heed for the great war now raging in the outside world between the hostile elements of Catholicism and Protestantism, embattled over an enormous space, was lost in the din of conflict among the respective supporters of conditional and unconditional damnation within the pale of the Reformed Church.  The earthquake shaking Europe rolled unheeded, as it was of old said to have done at Cannae, amid the fierce shock of mortal foes in that narrow field.

The respect for authority which had so long been the distinguishing characteristic of the Netherlanders seemed to have disappeared.  It was difficult—­now that the time-honoured laws and privileges in defence of which, and of liberty of worship included in them, the Provinces had made war forty years long had been trampled upon by military force—­for those not warmed by the fire of Gomarus to feel their ancient respect for the magistracy.  The magistracy at that moment seemed to mean the sword.

The Spanish government was inevitably encouraged by the spectacle thus presented.  We have seen the strong hopes entertained by the council at Madrid, two years before the crisis now existing had occurred.  We have witnessed the eagerness with which the King indulged the dream of recovering the sovereignty which his father had lost, and the vast schemes which he nourished towards that purpose, founded on the internal divisions which were reducing the Republic to impotence.  Subsequent events had naturally made him more sanguine than ever.  There was now a web of intrigue stretching through the Provinces to bring them all back under the sceptre of Spain.  The imprisonment of the great stipendiary, the great conspirator, the man who had sold himself and was on the point of selling his country, had not terminated those plots.  Where was the supposed centre of that intrigue?  In the council of state of the Netherlands, ever fiercely opposed to Barneveld and stuffed full of his mortal enemies.  Whose name was most familiar on the lips of the Spanish partisans engaged in these secret schemes?  That of Adrian Manmaker, President of the Council, representative of Prince Maurice as first noble of Zealand in the States-General, chairman of the committee sent by that body to Utrecht to frustrate the designs of the Advocate, and one of the twenty-four commissioners soon to be appointed to sit in judgment upon him.

The tale seems too monstrous for belief, nor is it to be admitted with certainty, that Manmaker and the other councillors implicated had actually given their adhesion to the plot, because the Spanish emissaries in their correspondence with the King assured him of the fact.  But if such a foundation for suspicion could have been found against Barneveld and his friends, the world would not have heard the last of it from that hour to this.

It is superfluous to say that the Prince was entirely foreign to these plans.  He had never been mentioned as privy to the little arrangements of Councillor du Agean and others, although he was to benefit by them.  In the Spanish schemes he seems to have been considered as an impediment, although indirectly they might tend to advance him.