Thus far the States-General under the leadership of the Advocate were unanimous.  The victory remained with State against Church.  But very soon after the truce had been established, and men had liberty to devote themselves to peaceful pursuits, the ecclesiastical trumpet again sounded far and wide, and contending priests and laymen rushed madly to the fray.  The Remonstrance and Contra-Remonstrance, and the appointment of Conrad Vorstius, a more abominable heretic than Arminius, to the vacant chair of Arminius—­a step which drove Gomarus and the Gomarites to frenzy, although Gomarus and Vorstius remained private and intimate friends to the last—­are matters briefly to be mentioned on a later page.

Thus to the four chief actors in the politico-religious drama, soon to be enacted as an interlude to an eighty years’ war, were assigned parts at first sight inconsistent with their private convictions.  The King of France, who had often abjured his religion, and was now the best of Catholics, was denounced ferociously in every Catholic pulpit in Christendom as secretly an apostate again, and the open protector of heretics and rebels.  But the cheerful Henry troubled himself less than he perhaps had cause to do with these thunderblasts.  Besides, as we shall soon see, he had other objects political and personal to sway his opinions.

James the ex-Calvinist, crypto-Arminian, pseudo-Papist, and avowed Puritan hater, was girding on his armour to annihilate Arminians and to defend and protect Puritans in Holland, while swearing that in England he would pepper them and harry them and hang them and that he would even like to bury them alive.

Barneveld, who turned his eyes, as much as in such an inflammatory age it was possible, from subtle points of theology, and relied on his great-grandfather’s motto of humility, “Nil scire tutissima fides” was perhaps nearer to the dogma of the dominant Reformed Church than he knew, although always the consistent and strenuous champion of the civil authority over Church as well as State.

Maurice was no theologian.  He was a steady churchgoer, and his favorite divine, the preacher at his court chapel, was none other than Uytenbogaert.  The very man who was instantly to be the champion of the Arminians, the author of the Remonstrance, the counsellor and comrade of Barneveld and Grotius, was now sneered at by the Gomarites as the “Court Trumpeter.”  The preacher was not destined to change his opinions.  Perhaps the Prince might alter.  But Maurice then paid no heed to the great point at issue, about which all the Netherlanders were to take each other by the throat—­absolute predestination.  He knew that the Advocate had refused to listen to his stepmother’s suggestion as to his obtaining the sovereignty.  “He knew nothing of predestination,” he was wont to say, “whether it was green or whether it was blue.  He only knew that his pipe and the Advocate’s were not likely to make music together.”  This much of predestination he did know, that if the Advocate and his friends were to come to open conflict with the Prince of Orange-Nassau, the conqueror of Nieuwpoort, it was predestined to go hard with the Advocate and his friends.