Nevertheless, violently to subvert the constitution of a Province, and to
place in posts of high responsibility men who were ineligible--some whose
characters were suspicious, and some who were known to be dangerous, and
to banish large numbers of respectable burghers--was the act of a despot.

Besides their democratic doctrines, the Leicestrians proclaimed and
encouraged an exclusive and rigid Calvinism.

It would certainly be unjust and futile to detract from the vast debt
which the republic owed to the Geneva Church. The reformation had
entered the Netherlands by the Walloon gate. The earliest and most
eloquent preachers, the most impassioned converts, the sublimest martyrs,
had lived, preached, fought, suffered, and died with the precepts of
Calvin in their hearts. The fire which had consumed the last vestige of
royal and sacerdotal despotism throughout the independent republic, had
been lighted by the hands of Calvinists.

Throughout the blood-stained soil of France, too, the men who were
fighting the same great battle as were the Netherlanders against Philip
II. and the Inquisition, the valiant cavaliers of Dauphiny and Provence,
knelt on the ground, before the battle, smote their iron breasts with
their mailed hands, uttered a Calvinistic prayer, sang a psalm of Marot,
and then charged upon Guise, or upon Joyeuse, under the white plume of
the Bearnese. And it was on the Calvinist weavers and clothiers of
Rochelle that the great Prince relied in the hour of danger as much as on
his mountain chivalry. In England too, the seeds of liberty, wrapped up
in Calvinism and hoarded through many trying years, were at last destined
to float over land and sea, and to bear large harvests of temperate
freedom for great commonwealths, which were still unborn. Nevertheless
there was a growing aversion in many parts of the States for the rigid