e heed to their execution, collected the
votes, summed up the proceedings, corresponded with and instructed
ambassadors, received and negotiated with foreign ministers, besides
directing and holding in his hands the various threads of the home policy
and the rapidly growing colonial system of the Republic.

All this work Barneveld had been doing for thirty years.

The Reformation was by no mans assured even in the lands where it had at
first made the most essential progress. But the existence of the new
commonwealth depended on the success of that great movement which had
called it into being. Losing ground in France, fluctuating in England,
Protestantism was apparently more triumphant in vast territories where
the ancient Church was one day to recover its mastery. Of the population
of Bohemia, there were perhaps ten Protestants to one Papist, while in
the United Netherlands at least one-third of the people were still
attached to the Catholic faith.

The great religious struggle in Bohemia and other dominions of the
Habsburg family was fast leading to a war of which no man could even
imagine the horrors or foresee the vast extent. The Catholic League and
the Protestant Union were slowly arranging Europe into two mighty
confederacies.

They were to give employment year after year to millions of mercenary
freebooters who were to practise murder, pillage, and every imaginable
and unimaginable outrage as the most legitimate industry that could
occupy mankind. The Holy Empire which so ingeniously combined the worst
characteristics of despotism and republicanism kept all Germany and half
Europe in the turmoil of a perpetual presidential election. A theatre
where trivial personages and graceless actors performed a tragi-comedy of
mingled folly, intrigue, and crime, and where earnestness and vigour were
destined to be constantly baffled, now offered the principal stage for
the entertainment and excitement of Christendom.

There was but one king in Europe, Henry the Bearnese. The men who sat on
the thrones in Madrid, Vienna, London, would have lived and died unknown
but for the crowns they wore, and while there were plenty of bustling
politicians here and there in Christendom, there were not many statesmen.

Among them there was no stronger man than John of Barneveld, and no man
had harder or more complicated work to do.

Born in Amersfoort in 1547, of the ancient and knightly house of
Oldenbarneveldt, of patrician blood