The States, or the leading members of that assembly, factious fellows, pestilent and seditious knaves, were doing their utmost, and were singing sirens’ songs’ to enchant and delude the people, but they were fast losing their influence—­so warmly did the country desire to conform to her Majesty’s pleasure.  He expatiated, however, upon the difficulties in his path.  The knowledge possessed by the pestilent fellows as to the actual position of affairs, was very mischievous.  It was honey to Maurice and Hohenlo, he said, that the Queen’s secret practices with Farnese had thus been discovered.  Nothing could be more marked than the jollity with which the ringleaders hailed these preparations for peace-making, for they now felt certain that the government of their country had been fixed securely in their own hands.  They were canonized, said the Earl, for their hostility to peace.

Should not this conviction, on the part of men who had so many means of feeling the popular pulse, have given the Queen’s government pause?  To serve his sovereign in truth, Leicester might have admitted a possibility at least of honesty on the part of men who were so ready to offer up their lives for their country.  For in a very few weeks he was obliged to confess that the people were no longer so well disposed to acquiesce in her Majesty’s policy.  The great majority, both of the States and the people, were in favour, he agreed, of continuing the war.  The inhabitants of the little Province of Holland alone, he said, had avowed their determination to maintain their rights—­even if obliged to fight single-handed—­and to shed the last drop in their veins, rather than to submit again to Spanish tyranny.  This seemed a heroic resolution, worthy the sympathy of a brave Englishman, but the Earl’s only comment upon it was, that it proved the ringleaders “either to be traitors or else the most blindest asses in the world.”  He never scrupled, on repeated occasions, to insinuate that Barneveld, Hohenlo, Buys, Roorda, Sainte Aldegonde, and the Nassaus, had organized a plot to sell their country to Spain.  Of this there was not the faintest evidence, but it was the only way in which he chose to account for their persistent opposition to the peace-negotiations, and to their reluctance to confer absolute power on himself. “’Tis a crabbed, sullen, proud kind of people,” said he, “and bent on establishing a popular government,”—­a purpose which seemed somewhat inconsistent with the plot for selling their country to Spain, which he charged in the same breath on the same persons.

Early in August, by the Queen’s command, he had sent a formal communication respecting the private negotiations to the States, but he could tell them no secret.  The names of the commissioners, and even the supposed articles of a treaty already concluded, were flying from town to town, from mouth to mouth, so that the Earl pronounced it impossible for one, not on the spot, to imagine the excitement which existed.