“With regard to the affair of the river Scheldt,” wrote Parma to Philip, “I should like to send your Majesty a drawing of the whole scheme; for the work is too vast to be explained by letters.  The more I examine it, the more astonished I am that it should have been conducted to this point; so many forts, dykes, canals, new inventions, machinery, and engines, have been necessarily required.”

He then proceeded to enlighten the King—­as he never failed to do in all his letters—­as to his own impoverished, almost helpless condition.  Money, money, men!  This was his constant cry.  All would be in vain, he said, if he were thus neglected. “’Tis necessary,” said he, “for your Majesty fully to comprehend, that henceforth the enterprise is your own.  I have done my work faithfully thus far; it is now for your Majesty to take it thoroughly to heart; and embrace it with the warmth with which an affair involving so much of your own interests deserves to be embraced.”

He avowed that without full confidence in his sovereign’s sympathy he would never have conceived the project.  “I confess that the enterprise is great,” he said, “and that by many it will be considered rash.  Certainly I should not have undertaken it, had I not felt certain of your Majesty’s full support.”

But he was already in danger of being forced to abandon the whole scheme—­although so nearly carried into effect—­for want of funds.  “The million promised,” he wrote, “has arrived in bits and morsels, and with so many ceremonies, that I haven’t ten crowns at my disposal.  How I am to maintain even this handful of soldiers—­for the army is diminished to such a mere handful that it would astonish your Majesty—­I am unable to imagine.  It would move you to witness their condition.  They have suffered as much as is humanly possible.”

Many of the troops, indeed, were deserting, and making their escape, beggared and desperate, into France, where, with natural injustice, they denounced their General, whose whole heart was occupied with their miseries, for the delinquency of his master, whose mind was full of other schemes.

“There past this way many Spanish soldiers,” wrote Stafford from Paris, “so poor and naked as I ever saw any.  There have been within this fortnight two hundred at a time in this town, who report the extremity of want of victuals in their camp, and that they have been twenty-four months without pay.  They exclaim greatly upon the Prince of Parma.  Mendoza seeks to convey them away, and to get money for them by all means he can.”

Stafford urged upon his government the propriety of being at least as negligent as Philip had showed himself to be of the Spaniards.  By prohibiting supplies to the besieging army, England might contribute, negatively, if not otherwise, to the relief of Antwerp.  “There is no place,” he wrote to Walsingham, “whence the Spaniards are so thoroughly victualled as from us.  English boats go by sixteen and seventeen into Dunkirk, well laden with provisions.”