The Dutch ambassador at Paris was instructed accordingly to maintain. good relations with Villeroy, who in Barneveld’s opinion had been a constant and sincere friend to the Netherlands.  “Don’t forget to caress the old gentleman you wot of,” said the Advocate frequently, but suppressing his name, “without troubling yourself with the reasons mentioned in your letter.  I am firmly convinced that he will overcome all difficulties.  Don’t believe either that France will let the Duke of Savoy be ruined.  It is against every reason of State.”  Yet there were few to help Charles Emmanuel in this Montferrat war, which was destined to drag feebly on, with certain interludes of negotiations, for two years longer.  The already notorious condottiere Ernest Mansfeld, natural son of old prince Peter Ernest, who played so long and so high a part in command of the Spanish armies in the Netherlands, had, to be sure, taken service under the Duke.  Thenceforth he was to be a leader and a master in that wild business of plunder, burning, blackmailing, and murder, which was opening upon Europe, and was to afford occupation for many thousands of adventurers of high and low degree.

Mansfeld, reckless and profligate, had already changed his banner more than once.  Commanding a company under Leopold in the duchies, he had been captured by the forces of the Union, and, after waiting in vain to be ransomed by the Archduke, had gone secretly over to the enemy.  Thus recovering his liberty, he had enlisted a regiment under Leopold’s name to fight the Union, and had then, according to contract, transferred himself and most of his adventurers to the flag of the Union.  The military operations fading away in the duchies without being succeeded by permanent peace, the Count, as he was called, with no particular claim to such title, had accepted a thousand florins a year as retainer from the Union and had found occupation under Charles Emmanuel.  Here the Spanish soldier of a year or two before found much satisfaction and some profit in fighting Spanish soldiers.  He was destined to reappear in the Netherlands, in France, in Bohemia, in many places where there were villages to be burned, churches to be plundered, cities to be sacked, nuns and other women to be outraged, dangerous political intrigues to be managed.  A man in the prime of his age, fair-haired, prematurely wrinkled, battered, and hideous of visage, with a hare-lip and a humpback; slovenly of dress, and always wearing an old grey hat without a band to it; audacious, cruel, crafty, and licentious—­such was Ernest Mansfeld, whom some of his contemporaries spoke of as Ulysses Germanicus, others as the new Attila, all as a scourge to the human race.  The cockneys of Paris called him “Machefer,” and nurses long kept children quiet by threatening them with that word.  He was now enrolled on the Protestant side, although at the moment serving Savoy against Spain in a question purely personal.  His armies, whether in Italy or in Germany, were a miscellaneous collection of adventurers of high and low degree, of all religions, of all countries, unfrocked priests and students, ruined nobles, bankrupt citizens, street vagabonds—­earliest type perhaps of the horrible military vermin which were destined to feed so many years long on the unfortunate dismembered carcass of Germany.