Having accomplished so much by a very brief visit to Gelderland, the Prince proceeded, to Overyssel, and had as little difficulty in bringing over the wavering minds of that province into orthodoxy and obedience.  Thus there remained but two provinces out of seven that were still “waartgeldered” and refused to be “synodized.”

It was rebellion against rebellion.  Maurice and his adherents accused the States’ right party of mutiny against himself and the States-General.  The States’ right party accused the Contra-Remonstrants in the cities of mutiny against the lawful sovereignty of each province.

The oath of the soldiery, since the foundation of the Republic, had been to maintain obedience and fidelity to the States-General, the Stadholder, and the province in which they were garrisoned, and at whose expense they were paid.  It was impossible to harmonize such conflicting duties and doctrines.  Theory had done its best and its worst.  The time was fast approaching, as it always must approach, when fact with its violent besom would brush away the fine-spun cobwebs which had been so long undisturbed.

“I will grind the Advocate and all his party into fine meal,” said the Prince on one occasion.

A clever caricature of the time represented a pair of scales hung up in a great hall.  In the one was a heap of parchments, gold chains, and magisterial robes; the whole bundle being marked the “holy right of each city.”  In the other lay a big square, solid, ironclasped volume, marked “Institutes of Calvin.”  Each scale was respectively watched by Gomarus and by Arminius.  The judges, gowned, furred, and ruffed, were looking decorously on, when suddenly the Stadholder, in full military attire, was seen rushing into the apartment and flinging his sword into the scale with the Institutes.

The civic and legal trumpery was of course made to kick the beam.

Maurice had organized his campaign this year against the Advocate and his party as deliberately as he had ever arranged the details of a series of battles and sieges against the Spaniard.  And he was proving himself as consummate master in political strife as in the great science of war.

He no longer made any secret of his conviction that Barneveld was a traitor to his country, bought with Spanish gold.  There was not the slightest proof for these suspicions, but he asserted them roundly.  “The Advocate is travelling straight to Spain,” he said to Count Cuylenborg.  “But we will see who has got the longest purse.”

And as if it had been a part of the campaign, a prearranged diversion to the more direct and general assault on the entrenchments of the States’ right party, a horrible personal onslaught was now made from many quarters upon the Advocate.  It was an age of pamphleteering, of venomous, virulent, unscrupulous libels.  And never even in that age had there been anything to equal the savage attacks upon this great statesman.  It moves the gall of an honest man, even after the lapse of two centuries and a half, to turn over those long forgotten pages and mark the depths to which political and theological party spirit could descend.  That human creatures can assimilate themselves so closely to the reptile, and to the subtle devil within the reptile, when a party end is to be gained is enough to make the very name of man a term of reproach.