Preliminaries for a negotiation which should terminate this mighty war were now accordingly to be laid down at the Hague.  Yet it would seem rather difficult to effect a compromise.  Besides the powers less interested, but which nevertheless sent representatives to watch the proceedings—­such as Sweden, Denmark, Brandenburg, the Elector Palatine—­there were Spain, France, England, the republic, and the archdukes.

Spain knew very well that she could not continue the war; but she hoped by some quibbling recognition of an impossible independence to recover that authority over her ancient vassals which the sword had for the time struck down.  Distraction in councils, personal rivalries, the well-known incapacity of a people to govern itself, commercial greediness, provincial hatreds, envies and jealousies, would soon reduce that jumble of cities and villages, which aped the airs of sovereignty, into insignificance and confusion.  Adroit management would easily re-assert afterwards the sovereignty of the Lord’s anointed.  That a republic of freemen, a federation of independent states, could take its place among the nations did not deserve a serious thought.

Spain in her heart preferred therefore to treat.  It was however indispensable that the Netherlands should reestablish the Catholic religion throughout the land, should abstain then and for ever from all insolent pretences to trade with India or America, and should punish such of their citizens as attempted to make voyages to the one or the other.  With these trifling exceptions, the court of Madrid would look with favour on propositions made in behalf of the rebels.

France, as we have seen, secretly aspired to the sovereignty of all the Netherlands, if it could be had.  She was also extremely in favour of excluding the Hollanders from the Indies, East and West.  The king, fired with the achievements of the republic at sea, and admiring their great schemes for founding empires at the antipodes by means of commercial corporations, was very desirous of appropriating to his own benefit the experience, the audacity, the perseverance, the skill and the capital of their merchants and mariners.  He secretly instructed his commissioners, therefore, and repeatedly urged it upon them, to do their best to procure the renunciation, on the part of the republic, of the Indian trade, and to contrive the transplantation into France of the mighty trading companies, so successfully established in Holland and Zeeland.

The plot thus to deprive the provinces of their India trade was supposed by the statesmen of the republic to have been formed in connivance with Spain.  That power, finding itself half pushed from its seat of power in the East by the “grand and infallible society created by the United Provinces,”—­[Memoir of Aerssens, ubi sup]—­would be but too happy to make use of this French intrigue in order to force the intruding Dutch navy from its conquests.