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The danger of such an alliance was evident to the penetrating Barneveldt, who saw in perspective the probability of the wily Spaniards obtaining from the English monarch possession of the strong places in question.
In the privy council at Brussels he was the servant of tyranny; in the parliament in London, or in the senate at Amsterdam, he would have died, perhaps, like Thomas More or Olden Barneveldt. In the Count Barlaimont, the president of the council of finance, the opposition had a no less formidable antagonist than in Viglius.
The philosophy of jurisprudence has been especially promoted by his great work on natural and national law, which laid the foundation of a new science. He attempted to soften the Calvinistic doctrines of predestination, in which he was violently opposed by Gomarus. He counted among his adherents Grotius, Barneveldt, and many of the eminent men of Holland.
Amongst other things there is the sword of that Ruyter who began life as a rope-maker at Vlissingen, and became the greatest admiral of Holland; Admiral Tromp's cuirass perforated by bullets; a chair from the prison of the venerated Barneveldt; a box containing a lock of hair from the head of that Van Speyk who in 1831, on the Schelde, blew up his vessel to preserve the honor of the Dutch flag.
I had scarcely entered before I saw the splendid mausoleum of William the Silent, but the sexton stopped me before the very simple tomb of Hugh Grotius, the prodigium Europæ, as the epitaph calls him, the great jurisconsult of the seventeenth century that Grotius who wrote Latin verses at the age of nine, who composed Greek odes at eleven, who at fourteen indited philosophical theses, who three years later accompanied the illustrious Barneveldt in his embassy to Paris, where Henry IV. presented him to his court, saying, "Behold the miracle of Holland!" that Grotius who at eighteen years of age was illustrious as a poet, as a theologian, as a commentator, as an astronomer, who had written a poem on the town of Ostend which Casaubon translated into Greek measures and Malesherbes into French verse; that Grotius who when hardly twenty-four years old occupied the post of advocate-general of Holland and Zealand, and composed a celebrated treatise on the Freedom of the Seas; who at thirty years of age was an honorary councillor of Rotterdam.
Barneveldt, who foresaw the embarrassments which the country would have to contend with on the expiration of that truce, had strongly opposed its meddling in the quarrel; but his ruin and death left no restraint on the policy which prompted the republic to aid the Protestant cause.
It is, however, certain that his discontent at this transaction, either with himself or Barneveldt, laid the foundation of that bitter enmity which proved fatal to the life of the latter, and covered his own name, otherwise glorious, with undying reproach.
Grotius and Hoogerbeets were confined in the castle of Louvestein. Moersbergen, a leading patriot of Utrecht, De Haan, pensionary of Haarlem, and Uitenbogaard, the chosen confidant of Maurice, but the friend of Barneveldt, were next accused and sentenced to imprisonment or banishment. And thus Arminianism, deprived of its chiefs, was for the time completely stifled.
This dignified vindication only produced new outrages; Maurice, now become Prince of Orange by the death of his elder brother without children, employed his whole authority to carry his object, and crush Barneveldt.
Van Baerle was sufficiently versed in the history of his country to know that the celebrated Grotius was confined in that castle after the death of Barneveldt; and that the States, in their generosity to the illustrious publicist, jurist, historian, poet, and divine, had granted to him for his daily maintenance the sum of twenty-four stivers.
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