Epoch III.  Independence Recognized.  From the Twelve Years’ Truce
     to the Peace of Westphalia. 1609-1648.

My subject is a very vast one, for the struggle of the United Provinces with Spain was one in which all the leading states of Europe were more or less involved.  After the death of William the Silent, the history assumes world-wide proportions.  Thus the volume which I am just about terminating . . . is almost as much English history as Dutch.  The Earl of Leicester, very soon after the death of Orange, was appointed governor of the provinces, and the alliance between the two countries almost amounted to a political union.  I shall try to get the whole of the Leicester administration, terminating with the grand drama of the Invincible Armada, into one volume; but I doubt, my materials are so enormous.  I have been personally very hard at work, nearly two years, ransacking the British State Paper Office, the British Museum, and the Holland archives, and I have had two copyists constantly engaged in London, and two others at the Hague.  Besides this, I passed the whole of last winter at Brussels, where, by special favor of the Belgian Government, I was allowed to read what no one else has ever been permitted to see,—­the great mass of copies taken by that government from the Simancas archives, a translated epitome of which has been published by Gachard.  This correspondence reaches to the death of Philip II., and is of immense extent and importance.  Had I not obtained leave to read the invaluable and, for my purpose, indispensable documents at Brussels, I should have gone to Spain, for they will not be published these twenty years, and then only in a translated and excessively abbreviated and unsatisfactory form.  I have read the whole of this correspondence, and made very copious notes of it.  In truth, I devoted three months of last winter to that purpose alone.

The materials I have collected from the English archives are also extremely important and curious.  I have hundreds of interesting letters never published or to be published, by Queen Elizabeth, Burghley, Walsingham, Sidney, Drake, Willoughby, Leicester, and others.  For the whole of that portion of my subject in which Holland and England were combined into one whole, to resist Spain in its attempt to obtain the universal empire, I have very abundant collections.  For the history of the United Provinces is not at all a provincial history.  It is the history of European liberty.  Without the struggle of Holland and England against Spain, all Europe might have been Catholic and Spanish.  It was Holland that saved England in the sixteenth century, and, by so doing, secured the triumph of the Reformation, and placed the independence of the various states of Europe upon a sure foundation.  Of course, the materials collected by me at the Hague are of great importance.  As a single specimen, I will state that I found in the archives there an