importance. But there were perhaps deeper reasons for the Advocate's
unpopularity in the great commercial metropolis than theological
pretexts. Barneveld's name and interests were identified with the great
East India Company, which was now powerful and prosperous beyond anything
ever dreamt of before in the annals of commerce. That trading company had
already founded an empire in the East. Fifty ships of war, fortresses
guarded by 4000 pieces of artillery and 10,000 soldiers and sailors,
obeyed the orders of a dozen private gentlemen at home seated in a back
parlour around a green table. The profits of each trading voyage 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