ign affairs of the Commonwealth had been by their very nature as
secret as they were perpetual and enormous.

Moreover, there was little of what we now understand as the democratic
sentiment in the Netherlands. There was deep and sturdy attachment to
ancient traditions, privileges, special constitutions extorted from a
power acknowledged to be superior to the people. When partly to save
those chartered rights, and partly to overthrow the horrible
ecclesiastical tyranny of the sixteenth century, the people had
accomplished a successful revolt, they never dreamt of popular
sovereignty, but allowed the municipal corporations, by which their local
affairs had been for centuries transacted, to unite in offering to
foreign princes, one after another, the crown which they had torn from
the head of the Spanish king. When none was found to accept the dangerous
honour, they had acquiesced in the practical sovereignty of the States;
but whether the States-General or the States-Provincial were the supreme
authority had certainly not been definitely and categorically settled. So
long as the States of Holland, led by the Advocate, had controlled in
great matters the political action of the States-General, while the
Stadholder stood without a rival at the head of their military affairs,
and so long as there were no fierce disputes as to government and dogma
within the bosom of the Reformed Church, the questions which were now
inflaming the whole population had been allowed to slumber.

The termination of the war and the rise of Arminianism were almost
contemporaneous. The Stadholder, who so unwillingly had seen the
occupation in which he had won so much glory taken from him by the Truce,
might perhaps find less congenial but sufficiently engrossing business as
champion of the Church and of the Union.

The new church--not freedom of worship for different denominations of
Christians, but supremacy of the Church of Heidelberg and Geneva--seemed
likely to be the result of the overthrow of the ancient church. It is the
essence of the Catholic Church to claim supremacy over and immunity from
the civil authority, and to this claim for the Reformed Church, by which
that of Rome had been supplanted, Barneveld was strenuously opposed.

The Stadholder was backed, therefore, by the Church in its purity, by the
majority of the humbler classes--who found in membership of the oligarchy
of Heaven a substitute for those democratic aspirations on ear