He had at first been supported in his position by the French ambassadors, who had felt or affected disinclination for peace, but who had subsequently, thrown the whole of their own and their master’s influence on the side of Barneveld.  They had done their best—­and from time to time they had been successful—­to effect at least a superficial reconciliation between those two influential personages.  They had employed all the arguments at their disposal to bring the prince over to the peace party.  Especially they had made use of the ‘argumentum ad crumenam,’ which that veteran broker in politics, Jeannin, had found so effective in times past with the great lords of the League.  But Maurice showed himself so proof against the golden inducements suggested by the President that he and his king both arrived at the conclusion that there were secret motives at work, and that Maurice was not dazzled by the brilliant prospects held out to him by Henry, only because his eyes were stedfastly fixed upon some unknown but splendid advantage, to be gained through other combinations.  It was naturally difficult for Henry to imagine the possibility of a man, playing a first part in the world’s theatre, being influenced by so weak a motive as conviction.

Lewis William too—­that “grave and wise young man,” as Lord Leicester used to call him twenty years before—­remained steadily on the side of the prince.  Both in private conversation and in long speeches to the States-General, he maintained that the Spanish court was incapable of sincere negotiations with the commonwealth, that to break faith with heretics and rebels would always prove the foundation of its whole policy, and that to deceive them by pretences of a truce or a treaty, and to triumph afterwards over the results of its fraud, was to be expected as a matter of course.

Sooner would the face of nature be changed than the cardinal maxim of Catholic statesmanship be abandoned.

But the influence of the Nassaus, of the province of Zeeland, of the clergy, and of the war-party in general, had been overbalanced by Barneveld and the city corporations, aided by the strenuous exertions of the French ambassadors.

The decision of the States-General was received with sincere joy at Brussels.  The archdukes had something to hope from peace, and little but disaster and ruin to themselves from a continuance of the war.  Spinola too was unaffectedly in favour of negotiations.  He took the ground that the foreign enemies of Spain, as well as her pretended friends, agreed in wishing her to go on with the war, and that this ought to open her eyes as to the expediency of peace.  While there was a general satisfaction in Europe that the steady exhaustion of her strength in this eternal contest made her daily less and less formidable to other nations, there were on the other hand puerile complaints at court that the conditions prescribed by impious and insolent rebels to their sovereign were derogatory