forget the friendship my ancestors always felt for your country, I could not but see with pain that, though you have taken no share in Philip’s acts of injustice, on you will fall the first blows of a war so terrible, and I thought it my duty to warn you of my purpose before I proceed to execute it.  If you can prevail upon the King of Spain to withdraw the army which he is having levied on the frontier, and to give no protection for the future to rebels of my kingdom, I will not declare war against him, provided that I have certain proof of your good intentions, and that you give me reasonable securities for them before the 1st of January in the approaching year.” [Lettres missives de Henri IV, p. 280—­De Thou, Histoire universelle, t. xii. pp. 328- 342.]

These letters, conveyed to Arras by one of the king’s trumpeters, received no answer.  The estates of Flanders, in assembly at Brussels, somewhat more bold than those of Artois and Hainault, in vain represented to their Spanish governor their plaints and their desires for peace; for two months Henry IV. heard not a word on the subject.  Philip II. persisted in his active hostility, and continued to give the King of France no title but that of Prince of Bearn.  On the 17th of January, 1595, Henry, in performance of what he had proclaimed, formally declared war against the King of Spain, forbade his subjects to have any com merce with him or his allies, and ordered them to make war on him for the future just as he persisted in making it on France.  This able and worthy resolve was not approved of by Rosny, by this time the foremost of Henry’s IV.’s councillors, although he had not yet risen in the government, or, probably, in the king’s private confidence, to the superior rank that he did attain by the eminence of his services and the courageous sincerity of his devotion.  In his OEconomies royales it is to interested influence, on the part of England and Holland, that he attributes this declaration of war against Philip II., “into which,” he says, “the king allowed himself to be hurried against his own feelings.”  It was assuredly in accordance with his own feelings and of his own free will that Henry acted in this important decision; he had a political order of mind greater, more inventive, and more sagacious than Rosny’s administrative order of mind, strong common sense and painstaking financial abilities.  To spontaneously declare war against Philip after the capitulation of Paris and the conquest of three quarters of France was to proclaim that the League was at death’s door, that there was no longer any civil war in France, and that her king had no more now than foreign war to occupy him.  To make alliance, in view of that foreign war, with the Protestant sovereigns of England, Holland, and Germany, against the exclusive and absolutist patron of Catholicism, was on the part of a king but lately Protestant, and now become resolutely Catholic, to separate openly politics from religion, and to subserve