It might be a question whether, on the whole, Elizabeth made a mistake in declining the sovereignty.  She was certainly wrong, however, in wishing the lieutenant-general of her six thousand auxiliary troops to be clothed, as such, with vice-regal powers.  The States-General, in a moment of enthusiasm, appointed him governor absolute, and placed in his hands, not only the command of the forces, but the entire control of their revenues, imposts, and customs, together with the appointment of civil and military officers.  Such an amount of power could only be delegated by the sovereign.  Elizabeth had refused the sovereignty:  it then rested with the States.  They only, therefore, were competent to confer the power which Elizabeth wished her favourite to exercise simply as her lieutenant-general.

Her wrathful and vituperative language damaged her cause and that of the Netherlands more severely than can now be accurately estimated.  The Earl was placed at once in a false, a humiliating, almost a ridiculous position.  The authority which the States had thus a second time offered to England was a second time and most scornfully thrust back upon them.  Elizabeth was indignant that “her own man” should clothe himself in the supreme attributes which she had refused.  The States were forced by the violence of the Queen to take the authority into their own hands again, and Leicester was looked upon as a disgraced man.

Then came the neglect with which the Earl was treated by her Majesty and her ill-timed parsimony towards the cause.  No letters to him in four months, no remittances for the English troops, not a penny of salary for him.  The whole expense of the war was thrown for the time upon their hands, and the English soldiers seemed only a few thousand starving, naked, dying vagrants, an incumbrance instead of an aid.

The States, in their turn, drew the purse-strings.  The two hundred thousand florins monthly were paid.  The four hundred thousand florins which had been voted as an additional supply were for a time held back, as Leicester expressly stated, because of the discredit which had been thrown upon him from home.

[Strangely enough, Elizabeth was under the impression that the extra grant of 400,000 florins (L40,000) for four months was four hundred thousand pounds sterling.  “The rest that was granted by the States, as extraordinary to levy an army, which was 400,000 florins, not pounds, as I hear your Majesty taketh it.  It is forty thousand pounds, and to be paid In March, April, May, and June last,” &c.  Leicester to the Queen, 11 Oct. 1586. (S.  P. Office Ms.)]

The military operations were crippled for want of funds, but more fatal than everything else were the secret negotiations for peace.  Subordinate individuals, like Grafigni and De Loo, went up and down, bringing presents out of England for Alexander Farnese, and bragging that Parma and themselves could have peace