ivate and intimate friends to
the last--are matters briefly to be mentioned on a later page.

Thus to the four chief actors in the politico-religious drama, soon to be
enacted as an interlude to an eighty years' war, were assigned parts at
first sight inconsistent with their private convictions. The King of
France, who had often abjured his religion, and was now the best of
Catholics, was denounced ferociously in every Catholic pulpit in
Christendom as secretly an apostate again, and the open protector of
heretics and rebels. But the cheerful Henry troubled himself less than he
perhaps had cause to do with these thunderblasts. Besides, as we shall
soon see, he had other objects political and personal to sway his
opinions.

James the ex-Calvinist, crypto-Arminian, pseudo-Papist, and avowed
Puritan hater, was girding on his armour to annihilate Arminians and to
defend and protect Puritans in Holland, while swearing that in England he
would pepper them and harry them and hang them and that he would even
like to bury them alive.

Barneveld, who turned his eyes, as much as in such an inflammatory age it
was possible, from subtle points of theology, and relied on his
great-grandfather's motto of humility, "Nil scire tutissima fides" was
perhaps nearer to the dogma of the dominant Reformed Church than he knew,
although always the consistent and strenuous champion of the civil
authority over Church as well as State.

Maurice was no theologian. He was a steady churchgoer, and his favorite
divine, the preacher at his court chapel, was none other than
Uytenbogaert. The very man who was instantly to be the champion of the
Arminians, the author of the Remonstrance, the counsellor and comrade of
Barneveld and Grotius, was now sneered at by the Gomarites as the "Court
Trumpeter." The preacher was not destined to change his opinions. Perhaps
the Prince might alter. But Maurice then paid no heed to the great point
at issue, about which all the Netherlanders were to take each other by
the throat--absolute predestination. He knew that the Advocate had
refused to listen to his stepmother's suggestion as to his obtaining the
sovereignty. "He knew nothing of predestination," he was wont to say,
"whether it was green or whether it was blue. He only knew that his pipe
and the Advocate's were not likely to make music together." This much of
predestination he did know, that if the Advocate and his friends were to
come to open conflict with t