Had that country of which he was so long the first citizen maintained
until our own day the same proportionate position among the empires of
Christendom as it held in the seventeenth century, the name of John of
Barneveld would have perhaps been as familiar to all men as it is at this
moment to nearly every inhabitant of the Netherlands. Even now political
passion is almost as ready to flame forth either in ardent affection or
enthusiastic hatred as if two centuries and a half had not elapsed since
his death. His name is so typical of a party, a polity, and a faith, so
indelibly associated with a great historical cataclysm, as to render it
difficult even for the grave, the conscientious, the learned, the
patriotic of his own compatriots to speak of him with absolute
impartiality.

A foreigner who loves and admires all that is great and noble in the
history of that famous republic and can have no hereditary bias as to its
ecclesiastical or political theories may at least attempt the task with
comparative coldness, although conscious of inability to do thorough
justice to a most complex subject.

In former publications devoted to Netherland history I have endeavoured
to trace the course of events of which the life and works of the Advocate
were a vital ingredient down to the period when Spain after more than
forty years of hard fighting virtually acknowledged the independence of
the Republic and concluded with her a truce of twelve years.

That convention was signed in the spring of 1609. The ten ensuing years
in Europe were comparatively tranquil, but they were scarcely to be
numbered among the full and fruitful sheaves of a pacific epoch. It was a
pause, a breathing spell during which the sulphurous clouds which had
made the atmosphere of Christendom poisonous for nearly half a century