In religious matters, the States-party, to their honour, already leaned to a wide toleration.  Not only Catholics were not burned, but they were not banished, and very large numbers remained in the territory, and were quite undisturbed in religious matters, within their own doors.  There were even men employed in public affairs who were suspected of papistical tendencies, although their hostility, to Spain and their attachment to their native land could not fairly be disputed.  The leaders of the States-party had a rooted aversion to any political influence on the part of the clergy of any denomination whatever.  Disposed to be lenient to all forms of worship, they were disinclined to an established church, but still more opposed to allowing church-influence in secular affairs.  As a matter of course, political men with such bold views in religious matters were bitterly assailed by their rigid opponents.  Barneveld, with his “nil scire tutissima fides,” was denounced as a disguised Catholic or an infidel, and as for Paul Buys, he was a “bolsterer of Papists, an atheist, a devil,” as it has long since been made manifest.

Nevertheless these men believed that they understood the spirit of their country and of the age.  In encouragement to an expanding commerce, the elevation and education of the masses, the toleration of all creeds, and a wide distribution of political functions and rights, they looked for the salvation of their nascent republic from destruction, and the maintenance of the true interests of the people.  They were still loyal to Queen Elizabeth, and desirous that she should accept the sovereignty of the Provinces.  But they were determined that the sovereignty should be a constitutional one, founded upon and limited by the time-honoured laws and traditions of their commonwealth; for they recognised the value of a free republic with an hereditary chief, however anomalous it might in theory appear.  They knew that in Utrecht the Leicestrian party were about to offer the Queen the sovereignty of their Province, without conditions, but they were determined that neither Queen Elizabeth nor any other monarch should ever reign in the Netherlands, except under conditions to be very accurately defined and well secured.

Thus, contrasted, then, were the two great parties in the Netherlands, at the conclusion of Leicester’s first year of administration.  It may easily be understood that it was not an auspicious moment to leave the country without a chief.

The strength of the States-party lay in Holland, Zeeland, Friesland.  The main stay of the democratic or Leicester faction was in the city of Utrecht, but the Earl had many partizans in Gelderland, Friesland, and in Overyssel, the capital of which Province, the wealthy and thriving Deventer, second only in the republic to Amsterdam for commercial and political importance, had been but recently secured for the Provinces by the vigorous measures of Sir William Pelham.