With regard, then, to the three points, he rejected the first.  Reconciliation with the King of Spain was impossible.  For his own part, he would much prefer the third course.  He had always been in favor of their maintaining independence by their own means and the assistance of the Almighty.  He was obliged, however, in sadness; to confess that the narrow feeling of individual state rights, the general tendency to disunion, and the constant wrangling, had made this course a hopeless one.  There remained, therefore, only the second, and they must effect an honorable reconciliation with Anjou.  Whatever might be their decision, however, it was meet that it should be a speedy one.  Not an hour was to be lost.  Many fair churches of God, in Anjou’s power, were trembling on the issue, and religious and political liberty was more at stake than ever.  In conclusion, the Prince again expressed his determination, whatever might be their decision, to devote the rest of his days to the services of his country.

The result of these representations by the Prince—­of frequent letters from Queen Elizabeth, urging a reconciliation—­and of the professions made by the Duke and the French envoys, was a provisional arrangement, signed on the 26th and 28th of March.  According to the terms of this accord, the Duke was to receive thirty thousand florins for his troops, and to surrender the cities still in his power.  The French prisoners were to be liberated, the Duke’s property at Antwerp was to be restored, and the Duke himself was to await at Dunkirk the arrival of plenipotentiaries to treat with him as to a new and perpetual arrangement.

The negotiations, however, were languid.  The quarrel was healed on the surface, but confidence so recently and violently uprooted was slow to revive.  On the 28th of June, the Duke of Anjou left Dunkirk for Paris, never to return to the Netherlands, but he exchanged on his departure affectionate letters with the Prince and the estates.  M. des Pruneaux remained as his representative, and it was understood that the arrangements for re-installing him as soon as possible in the sovereignty which he had so basely forfeited, were to be pushed forward with earnestness.

In the spring of the same year, Gerard Truchses, Archbishop of Cologne, who had lost his see for the love of Agnes Mansfeld, whom he had espoused in defiance of the Pope; took refuge with the Prince of Orange at Delft.  A civil war in Germany broke forth, the Protestant princes undertaking to support the Archbishop, in opposition to Ernest of Bavaria, who had been appointed in his place.  The Palatine, John Casimir, thought it necessary to mount and ride as usual.  Making his appearance at the head of a hastily collected force, and prepared for another plunge into chaos, he suddenly heard, however, of his elder brother’s death at Heidelberg.  Leaving his men, as was his habit, to shift for themselves, and Baron Truchses, the Archbishop’s brother, to fall into the hands of the enemy, he disappeared from the scene with great rapidity, in order that his own interests in the palatinate and in the guardianship of the young palatines might not suffer by his absence.