The Project Gutenberg Etext of the Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, v3
by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
#13 in our series by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

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Title: Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, v3

Author: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Edition: 10

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

Release Date: December, 2003 [Etext #4727]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on March 7, 2002]


The Project Gutenberg Etext of the Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, v3
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[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of the
file for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making an
entire meal of them.  D.W.]




JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY.

A MEMOIR

By Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.


Volume III.



XXII.

1874.  AEt.  60.

"LIFE OF JOHN OF BARNEVELD."--CRITICISMS.--GROEN VAN PRINSTERER.

The full title of Mr. Motley's next and last work is "The Life and Death
of John of Barneveld, Advocate of Holland; with a View of the Primary
Causes and Movements of the Thirty Years' War."

In point of fact this work is a history rather than a biography.  It is
an interlude, a pause between the acts which were to fill out the
complete plan of the "Eighty Years' Tragedy," and of which the last act,
the Thirty Years' War, remains unwritten.  The "Life of Barneveld" was
received as a fitting and worthy continuation of the series of
intellectual labor in which he was engaged.  I will quote but two general
expressions of approval from the two best known British critical reviews.
In connection with his previous works, it forms, says "The London
Quarterly," "a fine and continuous story, of which the writer and the
nation celebrated by him have equal reason to be proud; a narrative which
will remain a prominent ornament of American genius, while it has
permanently enriched English literature on this as well as on the other
side of the Atlantic."

"The Edinburgh Review" speaks no less warmly: "We can hardly give too
much appreciation to that subtile alchemy of the brain which has enabled
him to produce out of dull, crabbed, and often illegible state papers,
the vivid, graphic, and sparkling narrative which he has given to the
world."

In a literary point of view, M. Groen van Prinsterer, whose elaborate
work has been already referred to, speaks of it as perhaps the most
classical of Motley's productions, but it is upon this work that the
force of his own and other Dutch criticisms has been chiefly expended.

The key to this biographical history or historical biography may be found
in a few sentences from its opening chapter.

     "There have been few men at any period whose lives have been more
     closely identical than his [Barneveld's] with a national history.
     There have been few great men in any history whose names have become
     less familiar to the world, and lived less in the mouths of
     posterity.  Yet there can be no doubt that if William the Silent was
     the founder of the independence of the United Provinces, Barneveld
     was the founder of the Commonwealth itself. . . .

     "Had that country of which he was so long the first citizen
     maintained until our own day the same proportional position among
     the empires of Christendom as it held in the seventeenth century,
     the name of John of Barneveld would have perhaps been as familiar to
     all men as it is at this moment to nearly every inhabitant of the
     Netherlands.  Even now political passion is almost as ready to flame
     forth, either in ardent affection or enthusiastic hatred, as if two
     centuries and a half had not elapsed since his death.  His name is
     so typical of a party, a polity, and a faith, so indelibly
     associated with a great historical cataclysm, as to render it
     difficult even for the grave, the conscientious, the learned, the
     patriotic, of his own compatriots to speak of him with absolute
     impartiality.

     "A foreigner who loves and admires all that is great and noble in
     the history of that famous republic, and can have no hereditary bias
     as to its ecclesiastical or political theories, may at least attempt
     the task with comparative coldness, although conscious of inability
     to do thorough justice to a most complex subject."

With all Mr. Motley's efforts to be impartial, to which even his sternest
critics bear witness, he could not help becoming a partisan of the cause
which for him was that of religious liberty and progress, as against the
accepted formula of an old ecclesiastical organization.  For the quarrel
which came near being a civil war, which convulsed the state, and cost
Barneveld his head, had its origin in a difference on certain points, and
more especially on a single point, of religious doctrine.

As a great river may be traced back until its fountainhead is found in a
thread of water streaming from a cleft in the rocks, so a great national
movement may sometimes be followed until its starting-point is found in
the cell of a monk or the studies of a pair of wrangling professors.

The religious quarrel of the Dutchmen in the seventeenth century reminds
us in some points of the strife between two parties in our own New
England, sometimes arraying the "church" on one side against the
"parish," or the general body of worshippers, on the other.  The
portraits of Gomarus, the great orthodox champion, and Arminius, the head
and front of the "liberal theology" of his day, as given in the little
old quarto of Meursius, recall two ministerial types of countenance
familiar to those who remember the earlier years of our century.

Under the name of "Remonstrants" and "Contra-Remonstrants,"--Arminians
and old-fashioned Calvinists, as we should say,--the adherents of the two
Leyden professors disputed the right to the possession of the churches,
and the claim to be considered as representing the national religion.  Of
the seven United Provinces, two, Holland and Utrecht, were prevailingly
Arminian, and the other five Calvinistic.  Barneveld, who, under the
title of Advocate, represented the province of Holland, the most
important of them all, claimed for each province a right to determine its
own state religion.  Maurice the Stadholder, son of William the Silent,
the military chief of the republic, claimed the right for the States-
General.  'Cujus regio ejus religio' was then the accepted public
doctrine of Protestant nations.  Thus the provincial and the general
governments were brought into conflict by their creeds, and the question
whether the republic was a confederation or a nation, the same question
which has been practically raised, and for the time at least settled, in
our own republic, was in some way to be decided.  After various
disturbances and acts of violence by both parties, Maurice, representing
the States-General, pronounced for the Calvinists or Contra-Remonstrants,
and took possession of one of the great churches, as an assertion of his
authority.  Barneveld, representing the Arminian or Remonstrant
provinces, levied a body of mercenary soldiers in several of the cities.
These were disbanded by Maurice, and afterwards by an act of the States-
General.  Barneveld was apprehended, imprisoned, and executed, after an
examination which was in no proper sense a trial.  Grotius, who was on
the Arminian side and involved in the inculpated proceedings, was also
arrested and imprisoned.  His escape, by a stratagem successfully
repeated by a slave in our own times, may challenge comparison for its
romantic interest with any chapter of fiction.  How his wife packed him
into the chest supposed to contain the folios of the great oriental
scholar Erpenius, how the soldiers wondered at its weight and questioned
whether it did not hold an Arminian, how the servant-maid, Elsje van
Houwening, quick-witted as Morgiana of the "Forty Thieves," parried their
questions and convoyed her master safely to the friendly place of
refuge,--all this must be read in the vivid narrative of the author.

The questions involved were political, local, personal, and above all
religious.  Here is the picture which Motley draws of the religious
quarrel as it divided the people:--

     "In burghers' mansions, peasants' cottages, mechanics' back-parlors;
    