Towards the end of the century Henry IV. made peace with Spain.  It was a trying moment for the Provinces.  Barneveld was again sent forth on an embassy to the King.  The cardinal point in his policy, as it had ever been in that of William the Silent, was to maintain close friendship with France, whoever might be its ruler.  An alliance between that kingdom and Spain would be instantaneous ruin to the Republic.  With the French and English sovereigns united with the Provinces, the cause of the Reformation might triumph, the Spanish world-empire be annihilated, national independence secured.

Henry assured the Ambassador that the treaty of Vervins was indispensable, but that he would never desert his old allies.  In proof of this, although he had just bound himself to Spain to give no assistance to the Provinces, open or secret, he would furnish them with thirteen hundred thousand crowns, payable at intervals during four years.  He was under great obligations to his good friends the States, he said, and nothing in the treaty forbade him to pay his debts.

It was at this period too that Barneveld was employed by the King to attend to certain legal and other private business for which he professed himself too poor at the moment to compensate him.  There seems to have been nothing in the usages of the time or country to make the transaction, innocent in itself, in any degree disreputable.  The King promised at some future clay, when he should be more in funds, to pay him a liberal fee.  Barneveld, who a dozen years afterwards received 20,000 florins for his labour, professed that he would much rather have had one thousand at the time.

Thence the Advocate, accompanied by his colleague, Justinus de Nassau, proceeded to England, where they had many stormy interviews with Elizabeth.  The Queen swore with many an oath that she too would make peace with Philip, recommended the Provinces to do the same thing with submission to their ancient tyrant, and claimed from the States immediate payment of one million sterling in satisfaction of their old debts to her.  It would have been as easy for them at that moment to pay a thousand million.  It was at last agreed that the sum of the debt should be fixed at L800,000, and that the cautionary towns should be held in Elizabeth’s hands by English troops until all the debt should be discharged.  Thus England for a long time afterwards continued to regard itself, as in a measure the sovereign and proprietor of the Confederacy, and Barneveld then and there formed the resolve to relieve the country of the incubus, and to recover those cautionary towns and fortresses at the earliest possible moment.  So long as foreign soldiers commanded by military governors existed on the soil of the Netherlands, they could hardly account themselves independent.  Besides, there was the perpetual and horrid nightmare, that by a sudden pacification between Spain and England those important cities, keys to the country’s defence, might be handed over to their ancient tyrant.