In accordance with Walsingham’s urgent suggestions, Ortel wrote at once to his constituents, imploring them to remedy this matter.  Do not allow,” he said, any, more time to be wasted.  Let us not painfully, build a wall only to knock our own heads against it, to the dismay of our friends and the gratification of our enemies.”

It was at last arranged that an important blank should be left in the articles to be brought by the deputies, upon which vacant place the names of certain cautionary towns, afterwards to be agreed upon, were to be inscribed by common consent.

Meantime the English ministers were busy in preparing to receive the commissioners, and to bring the Netherland matter handsomely before the legislature.

The integrity, the caution, the thrift, the hesitation, which characterized Elizabeth’s government, were well pourtrayed in the habitual language of the Lord Treasurer, chief minister of a third-rate kingdom now called on to play a first-rate part, thoroughly acquainted with the moral and intellectual power of the nation whose policy he directed, and prophetically conscious of the great destinies which were opening upon her horizon.  Lord Burghley could hardly be censured—­least of all ridiculed—­for the patient and somewhat timid attributes of his nature:  The ineffable ponderings, which might now be ludicrous, on the part of a minister of the British Empire, with two hundred millions of subjects and near a hundred millions of revenue, were almost inevitable in a man guiding a realm of four millions of people with half a million of income.

It was, on the whole, a strange negotiation, this between England and Holland.  A commonwealth had arisen, but was unconscious of the strength which it was to find in the principle of states’ union, and of religious equality.  It sought, on the contrary, to exchange its federal sovereignty for provincial dependence, and to imitate, to a certain extent, the very intolerance by which it had been driven into revolt.  It was not unnatural that the Netherlanders should hate the Roman Catholic religion, in the name of which they had endured such infinite tortures, but it is, nevertheless, painful to observe that they requested Queen Elizabeth, whom they styled defender, not of “the faith” but of the “reformed religion,” to exclude from the Provinces, in case she accepted the sovereignty, the exercise of all religious rites except those belonging to the reformed church.  They, however, expressly provided against inquisition into conscience.  Private houses were to be sacred, the, papists free within their own walls, but the churches were to be closed to those of the ancient faith.  This was not so bad as to hang, burn, drown, and bury alive nonconformists, as had been done by Philip and the holy inquisition in the name of the church of Rome; nor is it very surprising that the horrible past should have caused that church to be regarded with sentiments of such deep-rooted hostility as to make the Hollanders