Johan van Oldenbarnevelt
Johan van Oldenbarnevelt governed the Dutch Republic for thirty-two years as the paid lawyer of the States of Holland, made it a state, made the East India Company, made the truce with Spain, and was beheaded in the courtyard of the government he had built, at seventy-one, by the prince he had raised to command it. He was born at Amersfoort in 1547, studied law at Louvain, Bourges, Heidelberg and Padua, and was a lawyer at The Hague and then pensionary of Rotterdam when the revolt made him; he was in the trenches at Haarlem and Leiden, and he was the man who drafted the terms on which the States of Holland took William the Silent as their prince. In 1586, in the chaos after William's murder and the Earl of Leicester's governorship, he became Land's Advocate of Holland, the officer who spoke for the richest province in the States-General and prepared its business, and he turned that clerkship into the government of the Union. He had Maurice made stadtholder and captain-general and found him the money for his sieges. He forced the competing East India companies into the single VOC in 1602 with a charter he wrote. He negotiated the Twelve Years' Truce of 1609, which Spain signed as with a free state, over Maurice's opposition, and after that the two men were enemies. The quarrel took the form of theology - the Remonstrants, who thought predestination could be argued with, were his party, and the Counter-Remonstrants the prince's - and of the constitution, whether Holland or the Union decided such things. In 1617 he had Holland's towns raise their own troops, which Maurice took as treason, and in August 1618 the prince had him arrested with Grotius and purged the town councils. A special court of twenty-four judges, none of them his friends, tried him for eight months and found him guilty of disturbing religion and the state, and he was executed on the Binnenhof on 13 May 1619, saying that he had acted for the country. His sons plotted to kill Maurice in 1623 and one was beheaded too. The republic he made outlasted all of them until 1795.
- Lived: 1547 CE – 1619 CE
- Nationality: Dutch
- Roles: statesman
