The subjection of all citizens, clerical or lay, to the laws of the land, the supremacy of the State over the Church, were equally grave subjects.

And the question of sovereignty now raised for the first time, not academically merely, but practically, was the gravest one of all.

It was soon to be mooted vigorously and passionately whether the United Provinces were a confederacy or a union; a league of sovereign and independent states bound together by treaty for certain specified purposes or an incorporated whole.

The Advocate and all the principal lawyers in the country had scarcely a doubt on the subject.

Whether it were a reasonable system or an absurd one, a vigorous or an imbecile form of government, they were confident that the Union of Utrecht, made about a generation of mankind before, and the only tie by which the Provinces were bound together at all, was a compact between sovereigns.
Barneveld styled himself always the servant and officer of the States of Holland.