Prince declared that sooner than they should want a place of assembling
he would give them his own. But he meant that they should have a public
church to themselves, and that very soon. King James thoroughly approved
of all these proceedings. At that very instant such of his own subjects
as had seceded from the Established Church to hold conventicles in barns
and breweries and backshops in London were hunted by him with bishops'
pursuivants and other beagles like vilest criminals, thrown into prison
to rot, or suffered to escape from their Fatherland into the trans-
Atlantic wilderness, there to battle with wild beasts and savages, and
to die without knowing themselves the fathers of a more powerful United
States than the Dutch Republic, where they were fain to seek in passing a
temporary shelter. He none the less instructed his envoy at the Hague to
preach the selfsame doctrines for which the New England Puritans were
persecuted, and importunately and dictatorially to plead the cause of
those Hollanders who, like Bradford and Robinson, Winthrop and Cotton,
maintained the independence of the Church over the State.

Logic is rarely the quality on which kings pride themselves, and
Puritanism in the Netherlands, although under temporary disadvantage at
the Hague, was evidently the party destined to triumph throughout the
country. James could safely sympathize therefore in Holland with what he
most loathed in England, and could at the same time feed fat the grudge
he owed the Advocate. The calculations of Barneveld as to the respective
political forces of the Commonwealth seem to have been to a certain
extent defective.

He allowed probably too much weight to the Catholic party as a motive
power at that moment, and he was anxious both from that consideration and
from his honest natural instinct for general toleration; his own broad
and unbigoted views in religious matters, not to force that party into a