This report was far from agreeable to the Governor, and it became the object of a fresh correspondence between his confidential agent, Champagny, and the learned and astute Junius de Jonge, representative of the Prince of Orange and Governor of Yeere.  The communication of De Jonge consisted of a brief note and a long discourse.  The note was sharp and stinging, the discourse elaborate and somewhat pedantic.  Unnecessarily historical and unmercifully extended, it was yet bold, bitter, and eloquent:  The presence of foreigners was proved to have been, from the beginning of Philip’s reign, the curse of the country.  Doctor Sonnius, with his batch of bishops, had sowed the seed of the first disorder.  A prince, ruling in the Netherlands, had no right to turn a deaf ear to the petitions of his subjects.  If he did so, the Hollanders would tell him, as the old woman had told the Emperor Adrian, that the potentate who had no time to attend to the interests of his subjects, had not leisure enough to be a sovereign.  While Holland refused to bow its neck to the Inquisition, the King of Spain dreaded the thunder and lightning of the Pope.  The Hollanders would, with pleasure, emancipate Philip from his own thraldom, but it was absurd that he, who was himself a slave to another potentate, should affect unlimited control over a free people.  It was Philip’s councillors, not the Hollanders, who were his real enemies; for it was they who held him in the subjection by which his power was neutralized and his crown degraded.

It may be supposed that many long pages, conceived in this spirit and expressed with great vigor, would hardly smooth the way for the more official negotiations which were soon to take place, yet Doctor Junius fairly and faithfully represented the sentiment of his nation.

Towards the close of the year, Doctor Elbertus Leoninus, professor of Louvain, together with Hugo Bonte, ex-pensionary of Middelburg, was commissioned by the Grand Commander to treat secretly with the Prince.  He was, however, not found very tractable when the commissioners opened the subject of his own pardon and reconciliation with the King, and he absolutely refused to treat at all except with the cooperation of the estates.  He, moreover, objected to the use of the word “pardon” on the ground that he had never done anything requiring his Majesty’s forgiveness.  If adversity should visit him, he cared but little for it; he had lived long enough, he said, and should die with some glory, regretting the disorders and oppressions which had taken place, but conscious that it had not been in his power to remedy them.  When reminded by the commissioners of the King’s power, he replied that he knew his Majesty to be very mighty, but that there was a King more powerful still—­even God the Creator, who, as he humbly hoped, was upon his Side.