Never had the Advocate seemed so much discouraged.  Ostend had fallen, and the defection of the British sovereign was an off-set for the conquest of Sluys.  He was more urgent with the French Government for assistance than he had ever been before.  “A million florins a year from France,” he said “joined to two millions raised in the provinces, would enable them to carry on the war.  The ship was in good condition,” he added, “and fit for a long navigation without danger of shipwreck if there were only biscuit enough on board.”  Otherwise she was lost.  Before that time came he should quit the helm which he had been holding the more resolutely since the peace of Vervins because the king had told him, when concluding it, that if three years’ respite should be given him he would enter into the game afresh, and take again upon his shoulders the burthen which inevitable necessity had made him throw down.  “But,” added Olden-Barneveld, bitterly, “there is little hope of it now, after his neglect of the many admirable occasions during the siege of Ostend.”

So soon as the Spanish ambassador learned that Caron was to be accepted into the same diplomatic rank as his own, he made an infinite disturbance, protested moat loudly and passionately to the king at the indignity done to his master by this concession to the representative of a crew of traitors and rebels, and demanded in the name of the treaty just concluded that Caron should be excluded in such capacity from all access to court.

As James was nearly forty years of age, as the Hollanders had been rebels ever since he was born, and as the King of Spain had exercised no sovereignty over them within his memory, this was naturally asking too much of him in the name of his new-born alliance with Spain.  So he assumed a position of great dignity, notwithstanding the Constable’s clamour, and declared his purpose to give audience to the agents of the States by whatever title they presented themselves before him.  In so doing he followed the example, he said, of others who (a strange admission on his part) were as wise as himself.  It was not for him to censure the crimes and faults of the States, if such they had committed.  He had not been the cause of their revolt from Spanish authority, and it was quite sufficient that he had stipulated to maintain neutrality between the two belligerents’s.  And with this the ambassador of his Catholic Majesty, having obtained the substance of a very advantageous treaty, was fain to abandon opposition to the shadowy title by which James sought to indemnify the republic for his perfidy.