to look into the state of Netherland affairs.  Leicester having expressly urged the importance of selecting as wise a politician as could be found—­because the best man in England would hardly be found a match for the dullards and drunkards, as it was the fashion there to call the Dutch statesmen—­had selected Wilkes.  After fulfilling this important special mission, he was immediately afterwards to return to the Netherlands as English member of the state-council, at forty shillings a-day, in the place of “little Hal Killigrew,” whom Leicester pronounced a “quicker and stouter fellow” than he had at first taken him for, although he had always thought well of him.  The other English counsellor, Dr. Bartholomew Clerk, was to remain, and the Earl declared that he too, whom he had formerly undervalued, and thought to have “little stuff in him,” was now “increasing greatly in understanding.”  But notwithstanding this intellectual progress, poor Bartholomew, who was no beginner, was most anxious to retire.  He was a man of peace, a professor, a doctor of laws, fonder of the learned leisure and the trim gardens of England than of the scenes which now surrounded him.  “I beseech your good Lordship to consider,” he dismally observed to Burghley, “what a hard case it is for a man that these fifteen years hath had vitam sedentariam, unworthily in a place judicial, always in his long robe, and who, twenty-four years since, was a public reader in the University (and therefore cannot be young), to come now among guns and drums, tumbling up and down, day and night, over waters and banks, dykes and ditches, upon every occasion that falleth out; hearing many insolences with silence, bearing many hard measures with patience—­ a course most different from my nature, and most unmeet for him that hath ever professed learning.”

Wilkes was of sterner stuff.  Always ready to follow the camp and to face the guns and drums with equanimity, and endowed beside with keen political insight, he was more competent than most men to unravel the confused skein of Netherland politics.  He soon found that the Queen’s secret negotiations with Spain, and the general distrust of her intentions in regard to the Provinces, were like to have fatal consequences.  Both he and Leicester painted the anxiety of the Netherland people as to the intention of her Majesty in vivid colours.

The Queen could not make up her mind—­in the very midst of the Greenwich secret conferences, already described—­to accept the Netherland sovereignty.  “She gathereth from your letter,” wrote Walsingham, “that the only salve for this sore is to make herself proprietary of the country, and to put in such an army as may be able to make head to the enemy.  These two things being so contrary to her Majesty’s disposition—­ the one, for that it breedeth a doubt of a perpetual war, the other, for that it requireth an increase of charges—­do marvellously distract her, and make her repent that ever she entered into the action.”