oppression of the Duke of Savoy.  Such an affair in the beginning of his Majesty’s reign cannot but have very great and prejudicial consequences, nor can it be left to linger on in uncertainty and delay.  Let him be prompt in this.  Let him also take a most Christian—­kingly, vigorous resolution against the great affront put upon him in the failure to carry out the treaty.  Such a resolve on the part of the two kings would restore all things to tranquillity and bring the Spaniard and his adherents ’in terminos modestiae.  But so long as France is keeping a suspicious eye upon England, and England upon France, everything will run to combustion, detrimental to their Majesties and to us, and ruinous to all the good inhabitants.”

To the Treaty of Xanten faithfully executed he held as to an anchor in the tempest until it was torn away, not by violence from without, but by insidious mutiny within.  At last the government of James proposed that the pledges on leaving the territory should be made to the two allied kings as mediators and umpires.  This was better than the naked promises originally suggested, but even in this there was neither heartiness nor sincerity.  Meantime the Prince of Neuburg, negotiations being broken off, departed for Germany, a step which the Advocate considered ominous.  Soon afterwards that prince received a yearly pension of 24,000 crowns from Spain, and for this stipend his claims on the sovereignty of the duchies were supposed to be surrendered.

“If this be true,” said Barneveld, “we have been served with covered dishes.”

The King of England wrote spirited and learned letters to the Elector-Palatine, assuring him of his father-in-law’s assistance in case he should be attacked by the League.  Sir Henry Wotton, then on special mission at the Hague, showed these epistles to Barneveld.

“When I hear that Parliament has been assembled and has granted great subsidies,” was the Advocate’s comment, “I shall believe that effects may possibly follow from all these assurances.”

It was wearisome for the Advocate thus ever to be foiled; by the pettinesses and jealousies of those occupying the highest earthly places, in his efforts to stem the rising tide of Spanish and Catholic aggression, and to avert the outbreak of a devastating war to which he saw Europe doomed.  It may be wearisome to read the record.  Yet it is the chronicle of Christendom during one of the most important and fateful epochs of modern history.  No man can thoroughly understand the complication and precession of phenomena attending the disastrous dawn of the renewed war, on an even more awful scale than the original conflict in the Netherlands, without studying the correspondence of Barneveld.  The history of Europe is there.  The fate of Christendom is there.  The conflict of elements, the crash of contending forms of religion and of nationalities, is pictured there in vivid if homely colours.  The Advocate, while acting only