of about fifteen millions.  During the truce France kept two regiments of foot amounting to 4200 soldiers and two companies of cavalry in Holland at the service of the States, for which she was bound to pay yearly 600,000 livres.  And the Queen-Regent had continued all the treaties by which these arrangements were secured, and professed sincere and continuous friendship for the States.  While the French-Spanish marriages gave cause for suspicion, uneasiness, and constant watchfulness in the States, still the neutrality of France was possible in the coming storm.  So long as that existed, particularly when the relations of England with Holland through the unfortunate character of King James were perpetually strained to a point of imminent rupture, it was necessary to hold as long as it was possible to the slippery embrace of France.

But Aerssens was almost aggressive in his attitude.  He rebuked the vacillations, the shortcomings, the imbecility, of the Queen’s government in offensive terms.  He consorted openly with the princes who were on the point of making war upon the Queen-Regent.  He made a boast to the Secretary of State Villeroy that he had unravelled all his secret plots against the Netherlands.  He declared it to be understood in France, since the King’s death, by the dominant and Jesuitical party that the crown depended temporally as well as spiritually on the good pleasure of the Pope.

No doubt he was perfectly right in many of his opinions.  No ruler or statesman in France worthy of the name would hesitate, in the impending religious conflict throughout Europe and especially in Germany, to maintain for the kingdom that all controlling position which was its splendid privilege.  But to preach this to Mary de’ Medici was waste of breath.  She was governed by the Concini’s, and the Concini’s were governed by Spain.  The woman who was believed to have known beforehand of the plot to murder her great husband, who had driven the one powerful statesman on whom the King relied, Maximilian de Bethune, into retirement, and whose foreign affairs were now completely in the hands of the ancient Leaguer Villeroy—­who had served every government in the kingdom for forty years—­was not likely to be accessible to high views of public policy.

Two years had now elapsed since the first private complaints against the Ambassador, and the French government were becoming impatient at his presence.  Aerssens had been supported by Prince Maurice, to whom he had long paid his court.  He was likewise loyally protected by Barneveld, whom he publicly flattered and secretly maligned.  But it was now necessary that he should be gone if peaceful relations with France were to be preserved.