f slander without a study of the career of the Advocate
of Holland.

"I thank you for your advices," he wrote to Carom' "and I wish from my
heart that his Majesty, according to his royal wisdom and clemency
towards the condition of this country, would listen only to My Lords the
States or their ministers, and not to his own or other passionate persons
who, through misunderstanding or malice, furnish him with information and
so frequently flatter him. I have tried these twenty years to deserve his
Majesty's confidence, and have many letters from him reaching through
twelve or fifteen years, in which he does me honour and promises his
royal favour. I am the more chagrined that through false and passionate
reports and information--because I am resolved to remain good and true to
My Lords the States, to the fatherland, and to the true Christian
religion--I and mine should now be so traduced. I hope that God Almighty
will second my upright conscience, and cause his Majesty soon to see the
injustice done to me and mine. To defend the resolutions of My Lords the
States of Holland is my office, duty, and oath, and I assure you that
those resolutions are taken with wider vision and scope than his Majesty
can believe. Let this serve for My Lords' defence and my own against
indecent calumny, for my duty allows me to pursue no other course."

He again alluded to the dreary affair of Vorstius, and told the Envoy
that the venation caused by it was incredible. "That men unjustly defame
our cities and their regents is nothing new," he said; "but I assure you
that it is far more damaging to the common weal than the defamers
imagine."

Some of the private admirers of Arminius who were deeply grieved at so
often hearing him "publicly decried as the enemy of God" had been
defending the great heretic to James, and by so doing had excited the
royal wrath not only against the deceased doctor and themselves, but
against the States of Holland who had given them no commission.

On the other hand the advanced orthodox party, most bitter haters of
Barneveld, and whom in his correspondence with England he uniformly and
perhaps designedly called the Puritans, knowing that the very word was a
scarlet rag to James, were growing louder and louder in their demands.
"Some thirty of these Puritans," said he, "of whom at least twenty are
Flemings or other foreigners equally violent, proclaim that they and the
like of them mean alone to govern the Church