There was but one king in Europe, Henry the Bearnese. The men who sat on
the thrones in Madrid, Vienna, London, would have lived and died unknown
but for the crowns they wore, and while there were plenty of bustling
politicians here and there in Christendom, there were not many statesmen.

Among them there was no stronger man than John of Barneveld, and no man
had harder or more complicated work to do.

Born in Amersfoort in 1547, of the ancient and knightly house of
Oldenbarneveldt, of patrician blood through all his ancestors both male
and female, he was not the heir to large possessions, and was a diligent
student and hardworking man from youth upward. He was not wont to boast
of his pedigree until in later life, being assailed by vilest slander,
all his kindred nearest or most remote being charged with every possible
and unmentionable crime, and himself stigmatized as sprung from the
lowest kennels of humanity--as if thereby his private character and
public services could be more legitimately blackened--he was stung into
exhibiting to the world the purity and antiquity of his escutcheon, and a
roll of respectably placed, well estated, and authentically noble, if not
at all illustrious, forefathers in his country's records of the previous
centuries.

Without an ancestor at his back he might have valued himself still more
highly on the commanding place he held in the world by right divine of
intellect, but as the father of lies seemed to have kept his creatures so
busy with the Barneveld genealogy, it was not amiss for the statesman
once for all to make the truth known.

His studies in the universities of Holland, France, Italy, and Germany