To the civil authority, said the magistrates, by which the churches are maintained, and the salaries of the ecclesiastics paid.  The states of Holland are as sovereign as the kings of England or Denmark, the electors of Saxony or Brandenburg, the magistrates of Zurich or Basel or other Swiss cantons.  “Cujus regio ejus religio.”

In 1590 there was a compromise under the guidance of Barneveld.  It was agreed that an appointing board should be established composed of civil functionaries and church officials in equal numbers.  Thus should the interests of religion and of education be maintained.

The compromise was successful enough during the war.  External pressure kept down theological passion, and there were as yet few symptoms of schism in the dominant church.  But there was to come a time when the struggle between church and government was to break forth with an intensity and to rage to an extent which no man at that moment could imagine.

Towards the end of the century Henry iv. made peace with Spain.  It was a trying moment for the Provinces.  Barneveld was again sent forth on an embassy to the King.  The cardinal point in his policy, as it had ever been in that of William the Silent, was to maintain close friendship with France, whoever might be its ruler.  An alliance between that kingdom and Spain would be instantaneous ruin to the Republic.  With the French and English sovereigns united with the Provinces, the cause of the Reformation might triumph, the Spanish world-empire be annihilated, national independence secured.

Henry assured the Ambassador that the treaty of Vervins was indispensable, but that he would never desert his old allies.  In proof of this, although he had just bound himself to Spain to give no assistance to the Provinces, open or secret, he would furnish them with thirteen hundred thousand crowns, payable at intervals during four years.  He was under great obligations to his good friends the States, he said, and nothing in the treaty forbade him to pay his debts.

It was at this period too that Barneveld was employed by the King to attend to certain legal and other private business for which he professed himself too poor at the moment to compensate him.  There seems to have been nothing in the usages of the time or country to make the transaction, innocent in itself, in any degree disreputable.  The King promised at some future clay, when he should be more in funds, to pay him a liberal fee.  Barneveld, who a dozen years afterwards received 20,000 florins for his labour, professed that he would much rather have had one thousand at the time.