Accordingly, so soon as the deputies in France had received their definite and somewhat ignominious repulse from Henry III. and his mother, the English government lost no time in intimating to the States that they were not to be left without an ally.  Queen Elizabeth was however resolutely averse from assuming that sovereignty which she was not unwilling to see offered for her acceptance; and her accredited envoy at the Hague, besides other more secret agents, were as busily employed in the spring of 1585—­as Des Pruneaux had been the previous winter on the part of France—­to bring about an application, by solemn embassy, for her assistance.

There was, however, a difference of view, from the outset, between the leading politicians of the Netherlands and the English Queen.  The Hollanders were extremely desirous of becoming her subjects; for the United States, although they had already formed themselves into an independent republic, were quite ignorant of their latent powers.  The leading personages of the country—­those who were soon to become the foremost statesmen of the new commonwealth—­were already shrinking from the anarchy which was deemed inseparable from a non-regal form of government, and were seeking protection for and against the people under a foreign sceptre.  On the other hand, they were indisposed to mortgage large and important fortified towns, such as Flushing, Brill, and others, for the repayment of the subsidies which Elizabeth might be induced to advance.  They preferred to pay in sovereignty rather than in money.  The Queen, on the contrary, preferred money to sovereignty, and was not at all inclined to sacrifice economy to ambition.  Intending to drive a hard bargain with the States, whose cause was her own, and whose demands for aid she; had secretly prompted, she meant to grant a certain number of soldiers for as brief a period as possible, serving at her expense, and to take for such outlay a most ample security in the shape of cautionary towns.

Too intelligent a politician not to feel the absolute necessity of at last coming into the field to help the Netherlanders to fight her own battle, she was still willing, for a season longer, to wear the mask of coyness and coquetry, which she thought most adapted to irritate the Netherlanders into a full compliance with her wishes.  Her advisers in the Provinces were inclined to take the same view.  It seemed obvious, after the failure in France, that those countries must now become either English or Spanish; yet Elizabeth, knowing the risk of their falling back, from desperation, into the arms of her rival, allowed them to remain for a season on the edge of destruction—­which would probably have been her ruin also—­in the hope of bringing them to her feet on her own terms.  There was something of feminine art in this policy, and it was not without the success which often attends such insincere manoeuvres.  At the same time, as the statesmen of the republic knew that it was the Queen’s affair, when so near a neighbour’s roof was blazing, they entertained little doubt of ultimately obtaining her alliance.  It was pity—­in so grave an emergency—­that a little frankness could not have been substituted for a good deal of superfluous diplomacy.