the commonwealth were forgotten, in local jealousy.  Had it been otherwise, the enemy would have long since been driven over the Meuse.  “When money,” continued the Prince, “is asked for to carry on the war, men answer as if they were talking with the dead Emperor.  To say, however, that they will pay no more, is as much as to declare that they will give up their land and their religion both.  I say this, not because I have any desire to put my hands into the common purse.  You well know that I have never touched the public money, but it is important that you should feel that there is no war in the country except the one which concerns you all.”

The states, thus shamed and stimulated, set themselves in earnest to obey the mandates of the Prince, and sent a special mission to England, to arrange with the Duke of Anjou for his formal installation as sovereign.  Saint Aldegonde and other commissioners were already there.  It was the memorable epoch in the Anjou wooing, when the rings were exchanged between Elizabeth and the Duke, and when the world thought that the nuptials were on the point of being celebrated.  Saint Aldegonde wrote to the Prince of Orange on the 22nd of November, that the marriage had been finally settled upon that day.  Throughout the Netherlands, the auspicious tidings were greeted with bonfires, illuminations, and cannonading, and the measures for hailing the Prince, thus highly favored by so great a Queen, as sovereign master of the provinces, were pushed forward with great energy.

Nevertheless, the marriage ended in smoke.  There were plenty of tournays, pageants, and banquets; a profusion of nuptial festivities, in short, where nothing was omitted but the nuptials.  By the end of January, 1582, the Duke was no nearer the goal than upon his arrival three months before.  Acceding, therefore, to the wishes of the Netherland envoys, he prepared for a visit to their country, where the ceremony of his joyful entrance as Duke of Brabant and sovereign of the other provinces was to take place.  No open rupture with Elizabeth occurred.  On the contrary, the Queen accompanied the Duke, with a numerous and stately retinue, as far as Canterbury, and sent a most brilliant train of her greatest nobles and gentlemen to escort him to the Netherlands, communicating at the same time, by special letter, her wishes to the estates-general, that he should be treated with as much honor “as if he were her second self.”

On the 10th of February, fifteen large vessels cast anchor at Flushing.  The Duke of Anjou, attended by the Earl of Leicester, the Lords Hunsdon, Willoughby, Sheffield, Howard, Sir Philip Sidney, and many other personages of high rank and reputation, landed from this fleet.  He was greeted on his arrival by the Prince of Orange, who, with the Prince of Espinoy and a large deputation of the states-general, had been for some days waiting to welcome him.  The man whom the Netherlands had chosen for their new master