were enormous, and the shareholders were growing rich beyond their
wildest imaginings. To no individual so much as to Holland's Advocate
was this unexampled success to be ascribed. The vast prosperity of the
East India Company had inspired others with the ambition to found a
similar enterprise in the West. But to the West India Company then
projected and especially favoured in Amsterdam, Barneveld was firmly
opposed. He considered it as bound up with the spirit of military
adventure and conquest, and as likely to bring on prematurely and
unwisely a renewed conflict with Spain. The same reasons which had
caused him to urge the Truce now influenced his position in regard
to the West India Company.

Thus the clouds were gathering every day more darkly over the head of
the Advocate. The powerful mercantile interest in the great seat of
traffic in the Republic, the personal animosity of the Stadholder,
the execrations of the orthodox party in France, England, and all the
Netherlands, the anger of the French princes and all those of the old
Huguenot party who had been foolish enough to act with the princes in
their purely selfish schemes against the, government, and the overflowing
hatred of King James, whose darling schemes of Spanish marriages and a
Spanish alliance had been foiled by the Advocate's masterly policy in
France and in the duchies, and whose resentment at having been so
completely worsted and disarmed in the predestination matter and in the
redemption of the great mortgage had deepened into as terrible wrath as
outraged bigotry and vanity could engender; all these elements made up a
stormy atmosphere in which the strongest heart might have quailed. But
Barneveld did not quail. Doubtless he loved power, and the more danger
he found on every side the less inclined he was to succumb. But he
honestly believed that the safety and prosperity of the country he had
so long and faithfully served were identified with the policy which he