“The Count Maurice, who is a wise and understanding prince,” said Winwood, “and withal most affectionate to his Majesty’s service, doth foresee the miseries into which these countries are likely to fall, and with grief doth pine away.”

It is probable that the great stadholder had never been more robust, or indeed inclining to obesity, than precisely at this epoch; but Sir Ralph was of an imaginative turn.  He had discovered, too, that the Advocate’s design was “of no other nature than so to stem the course of the State that insensibly the Provinces shall fall by relapse into the hands of Spain.”

A more despicable idea never entered a human brain.  Every action, word, and thought, of Barneveld’s life was a refutation of it.  But he was unwilling, at the bidding of a king, to treat a professor with contumely who had just been solemnly and unanimously invited by the great university, by the States of Holland, and by the Stadholder to an important chair; and that was enough for the diplomatist and courtier.  “He, and only he,” said Winwood passionately, “hath opposed his Majesty’s purposes with might and main.”  Formerly the Ambassador had been full of complaints of “the craving humour of Count Maurice,” and had censured him bitterly in his correspondence for having almost by his inordinate pretensions for money and other property brought the Treaty of Truce to a standstill.  And in these charges he was as unjust and as reckless as he was now in regard to Barneveld.

The course of James and his agents seemed cunningly devised to sow discord in the Provinces, to inflame the growing animosity of the Stadholder to the Advocate, and to paralyse the action of the Republic in the duchies.  If the King had received direct instructions from the Spanish cabinet how to play the Spanish game, he could hardly have done it with more docility.  But was not Gondemar ever at his elbow, and the Infanta always in the perspective?

And it is strange enough that, at the same moment, Spanish marriages were in France as well as England the turning-point of policy.

Henry had been willing enough that the Dauphin should espouse a Spanish infanta, and that one of the Spanish princes should be affianced to one of his daughters.  But the proposition from Spain had been coupled with a condition that the friendship between France and the Netherlands should be at once broken off, and the rebellious heretics left to their fate.  And this condition had been placed before him with such arrogance that he had rejected the whole scheme.  Henry was not the man to do anything dishonourable at the dictation of another sovereign.  He was also not the man to be ignorant that the friendship of the Provinces was necessary to him, that cordial friendship between France and Spain was impossible, and that to allow Spain to reoccupy that splendid possession between his own realms and Germany, from which she had been driven by the Hollanders in close alliance with himself, would be unworthy of the veriest schoolboy in politics.  But Henry was dead, and a Medici reigned in his place, whose whole thought was to make herself agreeable to Spain.