which had been going on all his lifetime and of which he never
expected to see the end, had begun by petition for matters of religion.
"His mother and he from their cradles," he said, "had been haunted with a
Puritan devil, which he feared would not leave him to his grave. And he
would hazard his crown but he would suppress those malicious spirits." It
seemed a strange caprice of Destiny that assigned to this hater of
Netherlanders, of Puritans, and of the Reformed religion, the decision of
disputed points between Puritans and anti-Puritans in the Reformed Church
of the Netherlands.

It seemed stranger that his opinions should be hotly on the side of the
Puritans.

Barneveld, who often used the expression in later years, as we have seen
in his correspondence, was opposed to the Dutch Puritans because they had
more than once attempted subversion of the government on pretext of
religion, especially at the memorable epoch of Leicester's government.

The business of stirring up these religious conspiracies against the
magistracy he was apt to call "Flanderizing," in allusion to those
disastrous days and to the origin of the ringleaders in those tumults.
But his main object, as we have seen, was to effect compromises and
restore good feeling between members of the one church, reserving the
right of disposing over religious matters to the government of the
respective provinces.

But James had remedied his audacious inconsistency by discovering that
Puritanism in England and in the Netherlands resembled each other no more
than certain letters transposed into totally different words meant one
and the same thing. The anagrammatic argument had been neatly put by Sir
Dudley Carleton, convincing no man. Puritanism in England "denied the
right of human invention or imposition in religious matters." Puritanism
in the Netherlands denied the right of the legal government to impose its
authority in religious matters. This was the great matter of debate in
the Provinces. In England the argument had been settled very summarily
against the Puritans by sheriffs' officers, bishops' pursuivants, and
county jails.

As the political tendencies, so too the religious creed and observances
of the English Puritans were identical with that of the
Contra-Remonstrants, whom King James had helped to their great triumph.
This was not very difficult to prove. It so happened that there were some
English Puritans living at that moment in Leyden. They