laws and State
rights.

Meantime Barneveld sat closely guarded in the apartments of the
Stadholder, while the country and very soon all Europe were ringing with
the news of his downfall, imprisonment, and disgrace. The news was a
thunder-bolt to the lovers of religious liberty, a ray of dazzling
sunlight after a storm to the orthodox.

The showers of pamphlets, villanous lampoons, and libels began afresh.
The relatives of the fallen statesman could not appear in the streets
without being exposed to insult, and without hearing scurrilous and
obscene verses against their father and themselves, in which neither sex
nor age was spared, howled in their ears by all the ballad-mongers and
broadsheet vendors of the town. The unsigned publication of the
States-General, with its dark allusions to horrible discoveries and
promised revelations which were never made, but which reduced themselves
at last to the gibberish of a pot-house bully, the ingenious libels, the
powerfully concocted and poisonous calumnies, caricatures, and lampoons,
had done their work. People stared at each other in the streets with open
mouths as they heard how the Advocate had for years and years been the
hireling of Spain, whose government had bribed him largely to bring about
the Truce and kill the West India Company; how his pockets and his
coffers were running over with Spanish ducats; how his plot to sell the
whole country to the ancient tyrant, drive the Prince of Orange into
exile, and bring every city of the Netherlands into a "blood-bath," had,
just in time, been discovered.

And the people believed it and hated the man they had so lately honoured,
and were ready to tear him to pieces in the streets. Men feared to defend
him lest they too should be accused of being stipendiaries of Spain. It
was a piteous spectacle; not for the venerable statesman sitting alone
there in his prison, but for the Republic in its lunacy, for human nature
in its meanness and shame. He whom Count Lewis, although opposed to his
politics, had so lately called one of the two columns on which the whole
fabric of the States reposed, Prince Maurice being the other, now lay
prostrate in the dust and reviled of all men.

"Many who had been promoted by him to high places," said a contemporary,
"and were wont to worship him as a god, in hope that he would lift them
up still higher, now deserted him, and ridiculed him, and joined the rest
of the world in heaping dirt upon him.