re incessant to make the Remonstrants hateful," he said to
Caron, "but go forward resolutely and firmly in the conviction that our
friends here are as animated in their opposition to the Spanish dominion
now and by God's grace will so remain as they have ever proved themselves
to be, not only by words, but works. I fear that Mr. Carleton gives too
much belief to the enviers of our peace and tranquillity under pretext of
religion, but it is more from ignorance than malice."

Those who have followed the course of the Advocate's correspondence,
conversation, and actions, as thus far detailed, can judge of the
gigantic nature of the calumny by which he was now assailed. That this
man, into every fibre of whose nature was woven undying hostility to
Spain, as the great foe to national independence and religious liberty
throughout the continent of Europe, whose every effort, as we have seen,
during all these years of nominal peace had been to organize a system of
general European defence against the war now actually begun upon
Protestantism, should be accused of being a partisan of Spain, a creature
of Spain, a pensioner of Spain, was enough to make honest men pray that
the earth might be swallowed up. If such idiotic calumnies could be
believed, what patriot in the world could not be doubted? Yet they were
believed. Barneveld was bought by Spanish gold. He had received whole
boxes full of Spanish pistoles, straight from Brussels! For his part in
the truce negotiations he had received 120,000 ducats in one lump.

"It was plain," said the greatest man in the country to another great
man, "that Barneveld and his party are on the road to Spain."

"Then it were well to have proof of it," said the great man.

"Not yet time," was the reply. "We must flatten out a few of them first."

Prince Maurice had told the Princess-Dowager the winter before (8th
December 1616) that those dissensions would never be decided except by
use of weapons; and he now mentioned to her that he had received
information from Brussels, which he in part believed, that the Advocate
was a stipendiary of Spain. Yet he had once said, to the same Princess
Louise, of this stipendiary that "the services which the Advocate had
rendered to the House of Nassau were so great that all the members of
that house might well look upon him not as their friend but their
father." Councillor van Maldere, President of the States of Zealand, and
a confidential friend of Maurice