He bought a carriage lined with velvet for the commissioners, and another lined with broadcloth for the principal persons of their suite, and with his own coach as a third he proposed to go to Amiens to meet them.  They could not get on with fewer than these, he said, and the new carriages would serve their purpose in Paris.  He had paid 500 crowns for the two, and they could be sold, when done with, at a slight loss.  He bought likewise four dapple-grey horses, which would be enough, as nobody had more than two horses to a carriage in town, and for which he paid 312 crowns—­a very low price, he thought, at a season when every one was purchasing.  He engaged good and experienced coachmen at two crowns a month, and; in short, made all necessary arrangements for their comfort and the honour of the state.

The King had been growing more and more displeased at the tardiness of the commission, petulantly ascribing it to a design on the part of the States to “excuse themselves from sharing in his bold conceptions,” but said that “he could resolve on nothing without My Lords the States, who were the only power with which he could contract confidently, as mighty enough and experienced enough to execute the designs to be proposed to them; so that his army was lying useless on his hands until the commissioners arrived,” and lamented more loudly than ever that Barneveld was not coming with them.  He was now rejoiced, however, to hear that they would soon arrive, and went in person to the Hotel Gondy to see that everything was prepared in a manner befitting their dignity and comfort.

His anxiety had moreover been increased, as already stated, by the alarming reports from Utrecht and by his other private accounts from the Netherlands.

De Russy expressed in his despatches grave doubts whether the States would join the king in a war against the King of Spain, because they feared the disapprobation of the King of Great Britain, “who had already manifested but too much jealousy of the power and grandeur of the Republic.”  Pecquius asserted that the Archdukes had received assurances from the States that they would do nothing to violate the truce.  The Prince of Anhalt, who, as chief of the army of the confederated princes, was warm in his demonstrations for a general war by taking advantage of the Cleve expedition, was entirely at cross purposes with the States’ ambassador in Paris, Aerssens maintaining that the forty-three years’ experience in their war justified the States in placing no dependence on German princes except with express conventions.  They had no such conventions now, and if they should be attacked by Spain in consequence of their assistance in the Cleve business, what guarantee of aid had they from those whom Anhalt represented?  Anhalt was loud in expressions of sympathy with Henry’s designs against Spain, but said that he and the States meant a war of thirty or forty years, while the princes would finish what they meant to do in one.