ore significant movement was made at
Leyden. That heroic city, ever since the famous siege of 1574, in which
the Spaniard had been so signally foiled, had distinguished itself by
great liberality of sentiment in religious matters. The burghers were
inspired by a love of country, and a hatred of oppression, both civil
and, ecclesiastical; and Papists and Protestants, who had fought side by
side against the common foe, were not disposed to tear each other to
pieces, now that he had been excluded from their gates. Meanwhile,
however, refugee Flemings and Brabantines had sought an asylum in the
city, and being, as usual, of the strictest sect of the Calvinists were
shocked at the latitudinarianism which prevailed. To the honour of the
city--as it seems to us now--but, to their horror, it was even found that
one or two Papists had seats in the magistracy. More than all this, there
was a school in the town kept by a Catholic, and Adrian van der Werff
himself--the renowned burgomaster, who had sustained the city during the
dreadful leaguer of 1574, and who had told the famishing burghers that
they might eat him if they liked, but that they should never surrender to
the Spaniards while he remained alive--even Adrian van der Werff had sent
his son to this very school? To the clamour made by the refugees against
this spirit of toleration, one of the favourite preachers in the town, of
Arminian tendencies, had declared in the pulpit, that he would as lieve
see the Spanish as the Calvinistic inquisition established over his
country; using an expression, in regard to the church of Geneva, more
energetic than decorous.

It was from Leyden that the chief opposition came to a synod, by which a
great attempt was to be made towards subjecting the new commonwealth to a
masked theocracy; a scheme which the States of Holland had resisted with
might and main. The Calvinistic party, waxing stronger in Leyden,
although still in a minority, at last resolved upon a strong effort to
place the city in the hands of that great representative of Calvinism,
the Earl of Leicester. Jacques Volmar, a deacon of the church, Cosmo de
Pescarengis, a Genoese captain of much experience in the service of the
republic, Adolphus de Meetkerke, former president of Flanders, who had
been, by the States, deprived of the seat in the great council to which
the Earl had appointed him; Doctor Saravia, professor of theology in the
university, with other deacons, preachers,