ch a pitch of audacity, said
the Ambassador, as not only to inveigh against the eternal power of God
but to indulge in irony against the honour of his Majesty King James.

And in what way had he scandalized the government of the Republic? He had
dared to say that within its borders there was religious toleration. He
had distinctly averred that in the United Provinces heretics were not
punished with death or with corporal chastisement.

"He declares openly," said Carleton, "that contra haereticos etiam vere
dictos (ne dum falso et calumniose sic traductos) there is neither
sentence of death nor other corporal punishment, so that in order to
attract to himself a great following of birds of the name feather he
publishes to all the world that here in this country one can live and die
a heretic, unpunished, without being arrested and without danger."

In order to suppress this reproach upon the Republic at which the
Ambassador stood aghast, and to prevent the Vorstian doctrines of
religious toleration and impunity of heresy from spreading among "the
common people, so subject by their natures to embrace new opinions," he
advised of course that "the serpent be sent back to the nest where he was
born before the venom had spread through the whole body of the Republic."

A week afterwards a long reply was delivered on part of the
States-General to the Ambassador's oration. It is needless to say that it
was the work of the Advocate, and that it was in conformity with the
opinions so often exhibited in the letters to Caron and others of which
the reader has seen many samples.

That religious matters were under the control of the civil government,
and that supreme civil authority belonged to each one of the seven
sovereign provinces, each recognizing no superior within its own sphere,
were maxims of state always enforced in the Netherlands and on which the
whole religious controversy turned.

"The States-General have always cherished the true Christian Apostolic
religion," they said, "and wished it to be taught under the authority and
protection of the legal government of these Provinces in all purity, and
in conformity with the Holy Scriptures, to the good people of these
Provinces. And My Lords the States and magistrates of the respective
provinces, each within their own limits, desire the same."

They had therefore given express orders to the preachers "to keep the
peace by mutual and benign toleration of the different opin