And in what way had he scandalized the government of the Republic?  He had dared to say that within its borders there was religious toleration.  He had distinctly averred that in the United Provinces heretics were not punished with death or with corporal chastisement.

“He declares openly,” said Carleton, “that contra haereticos etiam vere dictos (ne dum falso et calumniose sic traductos) there is neither sentence of death nor other corporal punishment, so that in order to attract to himself a great following of birds of the name feather he publishes to all the world that here in this country one can live and die a heretic, unpunished, without being arrested and without danger.”

In order to suppress this reproach upon the Republic at which the Ambassador stood aghast, and to prevent the Vorstian doctrines of religious toleration and impunity of heresy from spreading among “the common people, so subject by their natures to embrace new opinions,” he advised of course that “the serpent be sent back to the nest where he was born before the venom had spread through the whole body of the Republic.”

A week afterwards a long reply was delivered on part of the States-General to the Ambassador’s oration.  It is needless to say that it was the work of the Advocate, and that it was in conformity with the opinions so often exhibited in the letters to Caron and others of which the reader has seen many samples.

That religious matters were under the control of the civil government, and that supreme civil authority belonged to each one of the seven sovereign provinces, each recognizing no superior within its own sphere, were maxims of state always enforced in the Netherlands and on which the whole religious controversy turned.

“The States-General have always cherished the true Christian Apostolic religion,” they said, “and wished it to be taught under the authority and protection of the legal government of these Provinces in all purity, and in conformity with the Holy Scriptures, to the good people of these Provinces.  And My Lords the States and magistrates of the respective provinces, each within their own limits, desire the same.”

They had therefore given express orders to the preachers “to keep the peace by mutual and benign toleration of the different opinions on the one side and the other at least until with full knowledge of the subject the States might otherwise ordain.  They had been the more moved to this because his Majesty having carefully examined the opinions of the learned hereon each side had found both consistent with Christian belief and the salvation of souls.”