Prince Maurice had no opportunity of reaping the expected advantages from these treaties.  Baffled in all his efforts for relieving Breda, and being unsuccessful in a new attempt upon Antwerp, he returned to The Hague, where a lingering illness, that had for some time exhausted him, terminated in his death on the 23d of April, 1625, in his fifty-ninth year.  Most writers attribute this event to agitation at being unable to relieve Breda from the attack of Spinola.  It is in any case absurd to suppose that the loss of a single town could have produced so fatal an effect on one whose life had been an almost continual game of the chances of war.  But cause enough for Maurice’s death may be found in the wearing effects of thirty years of active military service, and the more wasting ravages of half as many of domestic despotism.

CHAPTER XVIII

TO THE TREATY OF MUNSTER

A.D. 1625—­1648

Frederick Henry succeeded to almost all his brother’s titles and employments, and found his new dignities clogged with an accumulation of difficulties sufficient to appall the most determined spirit.  Everything seemed to justify alarm and despondency.  If the affairs of the republic in India wore an aspect of prosperity, those in Europe presented a picture of past disaster and approaching peril.  Disunion and discontent, an almost insupportable weight of taxation, and the disputes of which it was the fruitful source, formed the subjects of internal ill.  Abroad was to be seen navigation harassed and trammelled by the pirates of Dunkirk; and the almost defenceless frontiers of the republic exposed to the irruptions of the enemy.  The king of Denmark, who endeavored to make head against the imperialist and Spanish forces, was beaten by Tilly, and made to tremble for the safety of his own States.  England did nothing toward the common cause of Protestantism, in consequence of the weakness of the monarch; and civil dissensions for a while disabled France from resuming the system of Henry IV. for humbling the House of Austria.

Frederick Henry was at this period in his forty-second year.  His military reputation was well established; he soon proved his political talents.  He commenced his career by a total change in the tone of government on the subject of sectarian differences.  He exercised several acts of clemency in favor of the imprisoned and exiled Arminians, at the same time that he upheld the dominant religion.  By these measures he conciliated all parties; and by degrees the fierce spirit of intolerance became subdued.  The foreign relations of the United Provinces now presented the anomalous policy of a fleet furnished by the French king, manned by rigid Calvinists, and commanded by a grandson of Admiral Coligny, for the purpose of combating the remainder of the French Huguenots, whom they considered as brothers