ength.

He united with the French king in negotiations for Netherland
independence, while denouncing the Provinces as guilty of criminal
rebellion against their lawful sovereign.

"He pretends," said Jeannin, "to assist in bringing about the peace, and
nevertheless does his best openly to prevent it."

Richardot declared that the firmness of the King of Spain proceeded
entirely from reliance on the promise of James that there should be no
acknowledgment in the treaty of the liberty of the States. Henry wrote to
Jeannin that he knew very well "what that was capable of, but that he
should not be kept awake by anything he could do."

As a king he spent his reign--so much of it as could be spared from
gourmandizing, drunkenness, dalliance with handsome minions of his own
sex, and theological pursuits--in rescuing the Crown from dependence on
Parliament; in straining to the utmost the royal prerogative; in
substituting proclamations for statutes; in doing everything in his
power, in short, to smooth the path for his successor to the scaffold. As
father of a family he consecrated many years of his life to the wondrous
delusion of the Spanish marriages.

The Gunpowder Plot seemed to have inspired him with an insane desire for
that alliance, and few things in history are more amazing than the
persistency with which he pursued the scheme, until the pursuit became
not only ridiculous, but impossible.

With such a man, frivolous, pedantic, conceited, and licentious, the
earnest statesmen of Holland were forced into close alliance. It is
pathetic to see men like Barneveld and Hugo Grotius obliged, on great
occasions of state, to use the language of respect and affection to one
by whom they were hated, and whom they thoroughly despised.

But turning away from France, it was in vain for them to look for kings
or men either among friends or foes. In Germany religious dissensions
were gradually ripening into open war, and it would be difficult to
imagine a more hopelessly incompetent ruler than the man who was
nominally chief of the Holy Roman Realm. Yet the distracted Rudolph was
quite as much an emperor as the chaos over which he was supposed to
preside was an empire. Perhaps the very worst polity ever devised by
human perverseness was the system under which the great German race was
then writhing and groaning. A mad world with a lunatic to govern it; a
democracy of many princes, little and big, fighting amongst each other,
a