was
difficult--now that the time-honoured laws and privileges in defence of
which, and of liberty of worship included in them, the Provinces had made
war forty years long had been trampled upon by military force--for those
not warmed by the fire of Gomarus to feel their ancient respect for the
magistracy. The magistracy at that moment seemed to mean the sword.

The Spanish government was inevitably encouraged by the spectacle thus
presented. We have seen the strong hopes entertained by the council at
Madrid, two years before the crisis now existing had occurred. We have
witnessed the eagerness with which the King indulged the dream of
recovering the sovereignty which his father had lost, and the vast
schemes which he nourished towards that purpose, founded on the internal
divisions which were reducing the Republic to impotence. Subsequent
events had naturally made him more sanguine than ever. There was now a
web of intrigue stretching through the Provinces to bring them all back
under the sceptre of Spain. The imprisonment of the great stipendiary,
the great conspirator, the man who had sold himself and was on the point
of selling his country, had not terminated those plots. Where was the
supposed centre of that intrigue? In the council of state of the
Netherlands, ever fiercely opposed to Barneveld and stuffed full of his
mortal enemies. Whose name was most familiar on the lips of the Spanish
partisans engaged in these secret schemes? That of Adrian Manmaker,
President of the Council, representative of Prince Maurice as first noble
of Zealand in the States-General, chairman of the committee sent by that
body to Utrecht to frustrate the designs of the Advocate, and one of the
twenty-four commissioners soon to be appointed to sit in judgment upon
him.

The tale seems too monstrous for belief, nor is it to be admitted with
certainty, that Manmaker and the other councillors implicated had
actually given their adhesion to the plot, because the Spanish emissaries
in their correspondence with the King assured him of the fact. But if
such a foundation for suspicion could have been found against Barneveld
and his friends, the world would not have heard the last of it from that
hour to this.

It is superfluous to say that the Prince was entirely foreign to these
plans. He had never been mentioned as privy to the little arrangements of
Councillor du Agean and others, although he was to benefit by them. In
the Spanish schemes