After completing his very thorough legal studies, he had practised as an advocate in Holland and Zeeland.  An early defender of civil and religious freedom, he had been brought at an early day into contact with William the Silent, who recognized his ability.  He had borne a snap-hance on his shoulder as a volunteer in the memorable attempt to relieve Haarlem, and was one of the few survivors of that bloody night.  He had stood outside the walls of Leyden in company of the Prince of Orange when that magnificent destruction of the dykes had taken place by which the city had been saved from the fate impending over it.  At a still more recent period we have seen him landing from the gun-boats upon the Kowenstyn, on the fatal 26th May.  These military adventures were, however, but brief and accidental episodes in his career, which was that of a statesman and diplomatist.  As pensionary of Rotterdam, he was constantly a member of the General Assembly, and had already begun to guide the policy of the new commonwealth.  His experience was considerable, and he was now in the high noon of his vigour and his usefulness.

He was a man of noble and imposing presence, with thick hair pushed from a broad forehead rising dome-like above a square and massive face; a strong deeply-coloured physiognomy, with shaggy brow, a chill blue eye, not winning but commanding, high cheek bones, a solid, somewhat scornful nose, a firm mouth and chin, enveloped in a copious brown beard; the whole head not unfitly framed in the stiff formal ruff of the period; and the tall stately figure well draped in magisterial robes of velvet and sable—­such was John of Olden-Barneveld.

The Commissioners thus described arrived at Greenwich Stairs, and were at once ushered into the palace, a residence which had been much enlarged and decorated by Henry viii.

They were received with stately ceremony.  The presence-chamber was hung with Gobelin tapestry, its floor strewn with rushes.  Fifty-gentlemen pensioners, with gilt battle-ages, and a throng of ‘buffetiers’, or beef-eaters, in that quaint old-world garb which has survived so many centuries, were in attendance, while the counsellors of the Queen, in their robes of state, waited around the throne.

There, in close skull-cap and dark flowing gown, was the subtle, monastic-looking Walsingham, with long, grave, melancholy face and Spanish eyes.  There too, white staff in hand, was Lord High Treasurer Burghley, then sixty-five years of age, with serene blue eye, large, smooth, pale, scarce-wrinkled face and forehead; seeming, with his placid, symmetrical features, and great velvet bonnet, under which such silver hairs as remained were soberly tucked away, and with his long dark robes which swept the ground, more like a dignified gentlewoman than a statesman, but for the wintery beard which lay like a snow-drift on his ancient breast.