Thus the clouds were gathering every day more darkly over the head of the Advocate.  The powerful mercantile interest in the great seat of traffic in the Republic, the personal animosity of the Stadholder, the execrations of the orthodox party in France, England, and all the Netherlands, the anger of the French princes and all those of the old Huguenot party who had been foolish enough to act with the princes in their purely selfish schemes against the, government, and the overflowing hatred of King James, whose darling schemes of Spanish marriages and a Spanish alliance had been foiled by the Advocate’s masterly policy in France and in the duchies, and whose resentment at having been so completely worsted and disarmed in the predestination matter and in the redemption of the great mortgage had deepened into as terrible wrath as outraged bigotry and vanity could engender; all these elements made up a stormy atmosphere in which the strongest heart might have quailed.  But Barneveld did not quail.  Doubtless he loved power, and the more danger he found on every side the less inclined he was to succumb.  But he honestly believed that the safety and prosperity of the country he had so long and faithfully served were identified with the policy which he was pursuing.  Arrogant, overbearing, self-concentrated, accustomed to lead senates and to guide the councils and share the secrets of kings, familiar with and almost an actor in every event in the political history not only of his own country but of every important state in Christendom during nearly two generations of mankind, of unmatched industry, full of years and experience, yet feeling within him the youthful strength of a thousand intellects compared to most of those by which he was calumniated, confronted, and harassed; he accepted the great fight which was forced upon him.  Irascible, courageous, austere, contemptuous, he looked around and saw the Republic whose cradle he had rocked grown to be one of the most powerful and prosperous among the states of the world, and could with difficulty imagine that in this supreme hour of her strength and her felicity she was ready to turn and rend the man whom she was bound by every tie of duty to cherish and to revere.

Sir Dudley Carleton, the new English ambassador to the States, had arrived during the past year red-hot from Venice.  There he had perhaps not learned especially to love the new republic which had arisen among the northern lagunes, and whose admission among the nations had been at last accorded by the proud Queen of the Adriatic, notwithstanding the objections and the intrigues both of French and English representatives.  He had come charged to the brim with the political spite of James against the Advocate, and provided too with more than seven vials of theological wrath.  Such was the King’s revenge for Barneveld’s recent successes.  The supporters in the Netherlands of the civil authority over the Church were moreover to be instructed by the political head of the English Church that such supremacy, although highly proper for a king, was “thoroughly unsuitable for a many-headed republic.”  So much for church government.  As for doctrine, Arminianism and Vorstianism were to be blasted with one thunderstroke from the British throne.