following March arrive without bringing with it an honorable peace with his Catholic Majesty, they should then feel themselves compelled to declare that the King had forfeited his right to the sovereignty of these provinces.  In this case they concluded that, as the inhabitants would be then absolved from their allegiance to the Spanish monarch, it would then be in their power to treat with his Highness of Anjou concerning the sovereignty, according to the contract already existing.

These assurances were ample, but the states, knowing the vanity of the man, offered other inducements, some of which seemed sufficiently puerile.  They promised that “his statue, in copper, should be placed in the public squares of Antwerp and Brussels, for the eternal admiration of posterity,” and that a “crown of olive-leaves should be presented to him every year.”  The Duke—­not inexorable to such courteous solicitations—­was willing to achieve both immortality and power by continuing his friendly relations with the states, and he answered accordingly in the most courteous terms.  The result of this interchange of civilities it will be soon our duty to narrate.

At the close of the year the Count of Bossu died, much to the regret of the Prince of Orange, whose party—­since his release from prison by virtue of the Ghent treaty—­he had warmly espoused.  “We are in the deepest distress in the world,” wrote the Prince to his brother, three days before the Count’s death, “for the dangerous malady of M. de Bossu.  Certainly, the country has much to lose in his death, but I hope that God will not so much afflict us.”  Yet the calumniators of the day did not scruple to circulate, nor the royalist chroniclers to perpetuate, the most senseless and infamous fables on the subject of this nobleman’s death.  He died of poison, they said, administered to him “in oysters,” by command of the Prince of Orange, who had likewise made a point of standing over him on his death-bed, for the express purpose of sneering at the Catholic ceremonies by which his dying agonies were solaced.  Such were the tales which grave historians have recorded concerning the death of Maximilian of Bossu, who owed so much to the Prince.  The command of the states’ army, a yearly pension of five thousand florins, granted at the especial request of Orange but a few months before, and the profound words of regret in the private letter jest cited, are a sufficient answer to such slanders.

The personal courage and profound military science of Parma were invaluable to the royal cause; but his subtle, unscrupulous, and subterranean combinations of policy were even more fruitful at this period.  No man ever understood the art of bribery more thoroughly or practised it more skillfully.  He bought a politician, or a general, or a grandee, or a regiment of infantry, usually at the cheapest price at which those articles could be purchased, and always with the utmost delicacy with which such traffic could