The other provinces, added Lambert, would be obliged, will ye nill ye, to receive the law from Holland and Zeeland.  Maurice, without assistance from France or any other power, would give Spain and the archdukes as much exercise as they could take for the next fifty years before he would give up, and had declared that he would rather die sword in hand than basely betray his country by consenting to such a truce.  As for Barneveld, he was already discovering the blunders which he had made, and was trying to curry favour with Maurice.  Barneveld and both the Aprasens were traitors to the State, had become the objects of general hatred and contempt, and were in great danger of losing their lives, or at least of being expelled from office.

Here was altogether too much zeal on the part of Pretty Lambert; a quality which, not for the first time, was thus proved to be less useful in diplomatic conferences than in a sea-fight.  Maurice was obliged to disavow his envoy, and to declare that his secret instructions had never authorized him to hold such language.  But the mischief was done.  The combustion in the French cabinet was terrible.  The Dutch admiral had thrown hot shot into the powder-magazine of his friends, and had done no more good by such tactics than might be supposed.  Such diplomacy was denounced as a mere mixture of “indiscretion and impudence.”  Henry was very wroth, and forthwith indited an imperious letter to his cousin Maurice.

“Lambert’s talk to me by your orders,” said the king, “has not less astonished than scandalized me.  I now learn the new resolution which you have taken, and I observe that you have begun to entertain suspicions as to my will and my counsels on account of the proposition of truce.”

Henry’s standing orders to Jeannin, as we know, were to offer Maurice a pension of almost unlimited amount, together with ample rewards to all such of his adherents as could be purchased, provided they would bring about the incorporation of the United Provinces into France.  He was therefore full of indignation that the purity of his intentions and the sincerity of his wish for the independence of the republic could be called in question.

“People have dared to maliciously invent,” he continued, “that I am the enemy of the repose and the liberty of the United Provinces, and that I was afraid lest they should acquire the freedom which had been offered them by their enemies, because I derived a profit from their war, and intended in time to deprive them of their liberty.  Yet these falsehoods and jealousies have not been contradicted by you nor by anyone else, although you know that the proofs of my sincerity and good faith have been entirely without reproach or example.  You knew what was said, written, and published everywhere, and I confess that when I knew this malice, and that you had not taken offence at it, I was much amazed and very malcontent.”

Queen Elizabeth, in her most waspish moods, had not often lectured the States-General more roundly than Henry now lectured his cousin Maurice.