voy and the conflicts in which Venice was engaged as components of a
general scheme. The States had been much solicited, as we have seen, to
render assistance to the Duke of Savoy, the temporary peace of Asti being
already broken, and Barneveld had been unceasing in his efforts to arouse
France as well as England to the danger to themselves and to all
Christendom should Savoy be crushed. We shall have occasion to see the
prominent part reserved to Savoy in the fast opening debate in Germany.
Meantime the States had sent one Count of Nassau with a couple of
companies to Charles Emmanuel, while another (Ernest) had just gone to
Venice at the head of more than three thousand adventurers. With so many
powerful armies at their throats, as Barneveld had more than once
observed, it was not easy for them to despatch large forces to the other
end of Europe, but he justly reminded his allies that the States were now
rendering more effective help to the common cause by holding great
Spanish armies in check on their own frontier than if they assumed a more
aggressive line in the south. The Advocate, like every statesman worthy
of the name, was accustomed to sweep the whole horizon in his
consideration of public policy, and it will be observed that he always
regarded various and apparently distinct and isolated movements in
different parts of Europe as parts of one great whole. It is easy enough
for us, centuries after the record has been made up, to observe the
gradual and, as it were, harmonious manner in which the great Catholic
conspiracy against the liberties of Europe was unfolded in an ever
widening sphere. But to the eyes of contemporaries all was then misty and
chaotic, and it required the keen vision of a sage and a prophet to
discern the awful shape which the future might assume. Absorbed in the
contemplation of these portentous phenomena, it was not unnatural that
the Advocate should attach less significance to perturbations nearer
home. Devoted as was his life to save the great European cause of
Protestantism, in which he considered political and religious liberty
bound up, from the absolute extinction with which it was menaced, he
neglected too much the furious hatreds growing up among Protestants
within the narrow limits of his own province. He was destined one day to
be rudely awakened. Meantime he was occupied with organizing a general
defence of Italy, Germany, France, and England, as well as the
Netherlands, against