Upon the questions and answers as already set forth the sentence soon followed, and it may be as well that the reader should be aware, at this point in the narrative, of the substance of that sentence so soon to be pronounced.  There had been no indictment, no specification of crime.  There had been no testimony or evidence.  There had been no argument for the prosecution or the defence.  There had been no trial whatever.  The prisoner was convicted on a set of questions to which he had put in satisfactory replies.  He was sentenced on a preamble.  The sentence was a string of vague generalities, intolerably long, and as tangled as the interrogatories.  His proceedings during a long career had on the whole tended to something called a “blood bath”—­but the blood bath had never occurred.

With an effrontery which did not lack ingenuity, Barneveld’s defence was called by the commissioners his confession, and was formally registered as such in the process and the sentence; while the fact that he had not been stretched upon the rack during his trial, nor kept in chains for the eight months of his imprisonment, were complacently mentioned as proofs of exceptionable indulgence.

“Whereas the prisoner John of Barneveld,” said the sentence, “without being put to the torture and without fetters of iron, has confessed . . . to having perturbed religion, greatly afflicted the Church of God, and carried into practice exorbitant and pernicious maxims of State . . . inculcating by himself and accomplices that each province had the right to regulate religious affairs within its own territory, and that other provinces were not to concern themselves therewith”—­therefore and for many other reasons he merited punishment.

He had instigated a protest by vote of three provinces against the National Synod.  He had despised the salutary advice of many princes and notable personages.  He had obtained from the King of Great Britain certain letters furthering his own opinions, the drafts of which he had himself suggested, and corrected and sent over to the States’ ambassador in London, and when written out, signed, and addressed by the King to the States-General, had delivered them without stating how they had been procured.

Afterwards he had attempted to get other letters of a similar nature from the King, and not succeeding had defamed his Majesty as being a cause of the troubles in the Provinces.  He had permitted unsound theologians to be appointed to church offices, and had employed such functionaries in political affairs as were most likely to be the instruments of his own purposes.  He had not prevented vigorous decrees from being enforced in several places against those of the true religion.  He had made them odious by calling them Puritans, foreigners, and “Flanderizers,” although the United Provinces had solemnly pledged to each other their lives, fortunes, and blood by various conventions, to some of which the prisoner was himself a party, to maintain the Reformed, Evangelical, religion only, and to, suffer no change in it to be made for evermore.