Forth-three years had passed since the memorable April morning in which the great nobles of the, Netherlands presented their “Request” to the Regent Margaret at Brussels.

They had requested that the holy Spanish Inquisition might not be established on their soil to the suppression of all their political and religious institutions.

The war which those high-born “beggars” had then kindled, little knowing what they were doing, had now come to a close, and the successor of Philip ii., instead of planting the Inquisition in the provinces, had recognised them as an independent, sovereign, protestant republic.

In the ratification which he had just signed of the treaty of truce the most Catholic king had in his turn made a Request.  He had asked the States-General to deal kindly with their Catholic subjects.

That request was not answered with the age and faggot; with the avenging sword of mercenary legions.  On the contrary, it was destined to be granted.  The world had gained something in forty-three years.  It had at least begun to learn that the hangman is not the most appropriate teacher of religion.

During the period of apparent chaos with which this history of the great revolt has been occupied, there had in truth been a great reorganization, a perfected new birth.  The republic had once more appeared in the world.

Its main characteristics have been indicated in the course of the narrative, for it was a polity which gradually unfolded itself out of the decay and change of previous organisms.

It was, as it were, in their own despite and unwittingly that the United Provinces became a republic at all.

In vain, after originally declaring their independence of the ancient tyrant, had they attempted to annex themselves to France and to England.  The sovereignty had been spurned.  The magnificent prize which France for centuries since has so persistently coveted, and the attainment of which has been a cardinal point of her perpetual policy—­the Low Countries and the banks of the Rhine—­was deliberately laid at her feet, and as deliberately refused.

It was the secret hope of the present monarch to repair the loss which the kingdom had suffered through the imbecility of his two immediate predecessors.  But a great nation cannot with impunity permit itself to be despotically governed for thirty years by lunatics.  It was not for the Bearnese, with all his valour, his wit, and his duplicity, to obtain the prize which Charles ix. and Henry iii. had thrown away.  Yet to make himself sovereign of the Netherlands was his guiding but most secret thought during all the wearisome and tortuous negotiations which preceded the truce; nor did he abandon the great hope with the signature of the treaty of 1609.

Maurice of Nassau too was a formidable rival to Henry.  The stadholder-prince was no republican.  He was a good patriot, a noble soldier, an honest man.  But his father had been offered the sovereignty of Holland and Zeeland, and the pistol of Balthasar Gerard had alone, in all human probability, prevented the great prince from becoming constitutional monarch of all the Netherlands, Batavian and Belgic.