He was allowed to consult neither with an advocate nor even with a single friend.  Alone in his chamber of bondage he was to meditate on his defence.  Out of his memory and brain, and from these alone, he was to supply himself with the array of historical facts stretching over a longer period than the lifetime of many of his judges, and with the proper legal and historical arguments upon those facts for the justification of his course.  That memory and brain were capacious and powerful enough for the task.  It was well for the judges that they had bound themselves, at the outset, by an oath never to make known what passed in the courtroom, but to bury all the proceedings in profound secrecy forever.  Had it been otherwise, had that been known to the contemporary public which has only been revealed more than two centuries later, had a portion only of the calm and austere eloquence been heard in which the Advocate set forth his defence, had the frivolous and ignoble nature of the attack been comprehended, it might have moved the very stones in the streets to mutiny.  Hateful as the statesman had been made by an organized system of calumny, which was continued with unabated vigour and increased venom sine he had been imprisoned, there was enough of justice and of gratitude left in the hearts of Netherlanders to resent the tyranny practised against their greatest man, and the obloquy thus brought against a nation always devoted to their liberties and laws.

That the political system of the country was miserably defective was no fault of Barneveld.  He was bound by oath and duty to administer, not make the laws.  A handful of petty feudal sovereignties such as had once covered the soil of Europe, a multitude of thriving cities which had wrested or purchased a mass of liberties, customs, and laws from their little tyrants, all subjected afterwards, without being blended together, to a single foreign family, had at last one by one, or two by two, shaken off that supremacy, and, resuming their ancient and as it were decapitated individualities, had bound themselves by treaty in the midst of a war to stand by each other, as if they were but one province, for purposes of common defence against the common foe.

There had been no pretence of laying down a constitution, of enacting an organic law.  The day had not come for even the conception of a popular constitution.  The people had not been invented.  It was not provinces only, but cities, that had contracted with each other, according to the very first words of the first Article of Union.  Some of these cities, like Ghent, Bruges, Antwerp, were Catholic by overwhelming majority, and had subsequently either fallen away from the confederacy or been conquered.