There can be no question of Aerssen’s consummate abilities.  Whether his heart were as sound as his head, whether his protestations of devotion had the ring of true gold or not, time would show.  Hitherto Barneveld had not doubted him, nor had he found cause to murmur at Barneveld.

But the France of Henry iv., where the Dutch envoy was so all-powerful, had ceased to exist.  A duller eye than that of Aerssens could have seen at a glance that the potent kingdom and firm ally of the Republic had been converted, for a long time to come at least, into a Spanish province.  The double Spanish marriages (that of the young Louis XIII. with the Infanta Anna, and of his sister with the Infante, one day to be Philip iv.), were now certain, for it was to make them certain that the knife of Ravaillac had been employed.  The condition precedent to those marriages had long been known.  It was the renunciation of the alliance between France and Holland.  It was the condemnation to death, so far as France had the power to condemn her to death, of the young Republic.  Had not Don Pedro de Toledo pompously announced this condition a year and a half before?  Had not Henry spurned the bribe with scorn?  And now had not Francis Aerssens been the first to communicate to his masters the fruit which had already ripened upon Henry’s grave?  As we have seen, he had revealed these intrigues long before they were known to the world, and the French court knew that he had revealed them.  His position had become untenable.  His friendship for Henry could not be of use to him with the delicate-featured, double-chinned, smooth and sluggish Florentine, who had passively authorized and actively profited by her husband’s murder.

It was time for the Envoy to be gone.  The Queen-Regent and Concini thought so.  And so did Villeroy and Sillery and the rest of the old servants of the King, now become pensionaries of Spain.  But Aerssens did not think so.  He liked his position, changed as it was.  He was deep in the plottings of Bouillon and Conde and the other malcontents against the Queen-Regent.  These schemes, being entirely personal, the rank growth of the corruption and apparent disintegration of France, were perpetually changing, and could be reduced to no principle.  It was a mere struggle of the great lords of France to wrest places, money, governments, military commands from the Queen-Regent, and frantic attempts on her part to save as much as possible of the general wreck for her lord and master Concini.

It was ridiculous to ascribe any intense desire on the part of the Duc de Bouillon to aid the Protestant cause against Spain at that moment, acting as he was in combination with Conde, whom we have just seen employed by Spain as the chief instrument to effect the destruction of France and the bastardy of the Queen’s children.  Nor did the sincere and devout Protestants who had clung to the cause through good and bad report, men like Duplessis-Mornay, for example, and those who usually acted with him, believe in any of these schemes for partitioning France on pretence of saving Protestantism.  But Bouillon, greatest of all French fishermen in troubled waters, was brother-in-law of Prince Maurice of Nassau, and Aerssens instinctively felt that the time had come when he should anchor himself to firm holding ground at home.