Affairs in the East—­Amboyna taken by Van der Hagen—­Contest for possession of the Clove Islands—­Commercial treaty between the States and the King of Ternate—­Hostilities between the Kings of Ternate and Tydor—­Expulsion of the Portuguese from the Moluccas—­ Du Terrail’s attempted assault on Bergen-op-Zoom—­Attack on the Dunkirk pirate fleet—­Practice of executing prisoners captured at sea.

I have invited the reader’s attention to the details of this famous siege because it was not an episode, but almost the sum total, of the great war during the period occupied by its events.  The equation between the contending forces indicated the necessity of peace.  That equation seemed for the time to have established itself over all Europe.  France had long since withdrawn from the actual strife, and kept its idle thunders in a concealed although ever threatening hand.  In the East the Pacha of Buda had become Pacha of Pest.  Even Gran was soon to fall before the Turk, whose advancing horse-tails might thus almost be descried from the walls of Vienna.  Stephen Botschkay meantime had made himself master of Transylvania, concluded peace with Ahmet, and laughed at the Emperor Rudolph for denouncing him as a rebel.

Between Spain and England a far different result had been reached than the one foreshadowed in the portentous colloquies between King James and Maximilian de Bethune.  Those conferences have been purposely described with some minuteness, in order that the difference often existing between vast projects and diametrically opposed and very insignificant conclusions might once more be exhibited.

In the summer of 1603 it had been firmly but mysteriously arranged between the monarchs of France and Great Britain that the House of Austria should be crushed, its territories parcelled out at the discretion of those two potentates, the imperial crown taken from the Habsburgs, the Spaniards driven out of the Netherlands, an alliance offensive and defensive made with the Dutch republic, while the East and West Indies were, to be wrested by main force of the allies, from Spain, whose subjects were thenceforth to be for ever excluded from those lucrative regions.  As for the Jesuits, who were to James as loathsome as were the Puritans to Elizabeth, the British sovereign had implored the ambassador of his royal brother, almost with tears, never to allow that pestilential brood to regain an entrance into his dominions.

In the summer of 1604 King James made a treaty of peace and amity with the archdukes and with the monarch of Spain, thus extending his friendly relations with the doomed house of Austria.  The republic of the Netherlands was left to fight her battles alone; her imaginary allies looking down upon her struggle with benevolent indifference.  As for the Indies, not a syllable of allusion in the treaty was permitted by Spain to that sacred subject; the ambassador informing the British Government that he gave them access to