“We are here,” said Barneveld, “between grief and joy.  We have lost her whose benefits to us we can never describe in words, but we have found a successor who is heir not only to her kingdom but to all her virtues.”  And with this exordium the great Advocate plunged at once into the depths of his subject, so far as was possible in an address of ceremony.  He besought the king not to permit Spain, standing on the neck of the provinces, to grasp from that elevation at other empires.  He reminded James of his duty to save those of his own religion from the clutch of a sanguinary superstition, to drive away those lurking satellites of the Roman pontiff who considered Britain their lawful prey.  He implored him to complete the work so worthily begun by Elizabeth.  If all those bound by one interest should now, he urged, unite their efforts, the Spaniard, deprived not only of the Netherlands, but, if he were not wise in time, banished from the ocean and stripped of all his transmarine possessions, would be obliged to consent to a peace founded on the only secure basis, equality of strength.  The envoy concluded by beseeching the king for assistance to Ostend, now besieged for two years long.

But James manifested small disposition to melt in the fervour of the Advocate’s eloquence.  He answered with a few cold commonplaces.  Benignant but extremely cautious, he professed goodwill enough to the States but quite as much for Spain, a power with which, he observed, he had never quarrelled, and from which he had received the most friendly offices.  The archdukes, too, he asserted, had never been hostile to the realm, but only to the Queen of England.  In brief, he was new to English affairs, required time to look about him, but would not disguise that his genius was literary, studious, and tranquil, and much more inclined to peace than to war.

In truth, James had cause to look very sharply about him.  It required an acute brain and steady nerves to understand and to control the whirl of parties and the conflict of interests and intrigues, the chameleon shiftings of character and colour, at this memorable epoch of transition in the realm which he had just inherited.  There was a Scotch party, favourable on the whole to France; there was a Spanish party, there was an English party, and, more busy than all, there was a party—­not Scotch, nor French, nor English, nor Spanish—­that un-dying party in all commonwealths or kingdoms which ever fights for itself and for the spoils.

France and Spain had made peace with each other at Vervins five years before, and had been at war ever since.

Nothing could be plainer nor more cynical than the language exchanged between the French monarch and the representative of Spain.  That Philip III.—­as the Spanish Government by a convenient fiction was always called—­was the head and front of the great Savoy-Biron conspiracy to take Henry’s life and dismember his kingdom, was hardly a stage secret.  Yet diplomatic relations were still preserved between the two countries, and wonderful diplomatic interviews had certainly been taking place in Paris.