grant his request, he will be the very first to prevent us from taking any steps, in order that his repose may not be disturbed.  I know that France does not wish to go to war with Spain.  Let us then pretend that we wish to be under the dominion of France, and that we will lead our people to that point if the king desires it, but that it cannot be done secretly.  Believe me, he will not wish it on such conditions, while we shall gain much by this course.  Would to God that we could engage France in war with Spain.  All the utility would be ours; and the accidents of arms would so press them to Spain, Italy, and other places, that they would have little leisure to think of us.  Consider all this and conceal it from Buzanval.”

Buzanval, it is well known, was the French envoy at the Hague, and it must be confessed that these schemes and paltry falsehoods on the part of the Dutch agent were as contemptible as any of the plots contrived every day in Paris or Madrid.  Such base coin as this was still circulating in diplomacy as if fresh from the Machiavellian mint; but the republican agent ought to have known that his Government had long ago refused to pass it current.

Soon afterwards this grave matter was discussed at the Hague between Henry’s envoy and Barneveld.  It was a very delicate negotiation.  The Advocate wished to secure the assistance of a powerful but most unscrupulous ally, and at the same time to conceal his real intention to frustrate the French design upon the independence of the republic.

Disingenuous and artful as his conduct unquestionably was, it may at least be questioned whether in that age of deceit any other great statesman would have been more frank.  If the comparatively weak commonwealth, by openly and scornfully refusing all the insidious and selfish propositions of the French king, had incurred that monarch’s wrath, it would have taken a noble position no doubt, but it would have perhaps been utterly destroyed.  The Advocate considered himself justified in using the artifices of war against a subtle and dangerous enemy who wore the mask of a friend.  When the price demanded for military protection was the voluntary abandonment of national independence in favour of the protector, the man who guided the affairs of the Netherlands did not hesitate to humour and to outwit the king who strove to subjugate the republic.  At the same time—­however one may be disposed to censure the dissimulation from the standing-ground of a lofty morality—­it should not be forgotten that Barneveld never hinted at any possible connivance on his part with an infraction of the laws.  Whatever might be the result of time, of persuasion, of policy, he never led Henry or his ministers to believe that the people of the Netherlands could be deprived of their liberty by force or fraud.  He was willing to play a political game, in which he felt himself inferior to no man, trusting to his own skill and coolness for success.  If the tyrant were defeated, and at the same time made to serve the cause of the free commonwealth, the Advocate believed this to be fair play.