The vast prosperity of the East India Company had inspired others with the ambition to found a similar enterprise in the West.

But to the West India Company then projected and especially favoured in Amsterdam, Barneveld was firmly opposed.

He considered it as bound up with the spirit of military adventure and conquest, and as likely to bring on prematurely and unwisely a renewed conflict with Spain.

The same reasons which had caused him to urge the Truce now influenced his position in regard to the West India Company.
Thus the clouds were gathering every day more darkly over the head of the Advocate.

The powerful mercantile interest in the great seat of traffic in the Republic, the personal animosity of the Stadholder, the execrations of the orthodox party in France, England, and all the Netherlands, the anger of the French princes and all those of the old Huguenot party who had been foolish enough to act with the princes in their purely selfish schemes against the government, and the overflowing hatred of King James, whose darling schemes of Spanish marriages and a Spanish alliance had been foiled by the Advocate's masterly policy in France and in the duchies, and whose resentment at having been so completely worsted and disarmed in the predestination matter and in the redemption of the great mortgage had deepened into as terrible wrath as outraged bigotry and vanity could engender; all these elements made up a stormy atmosphere in which the strongest heart might have quailed.