, public or
private, with all the envoys of the States.

Aerssens had, it will be remembered, been authorized to stay one year
longer in France if he thought he could be useful there. He stayed two
years, and on the whole was not useful. He had too many eyes and too many
ears. He had become mischievous by the very activity of his intelligence.
He was too zealous. There were occasions in France at that moment in
which it was as well to be blind and deaf. It was impossible for the
Republic, unless driven to it by dire necessity, to quarrel with its
great ally. It had been calculated by Duplessis-Mornay that France had
paid subsidies to the Provinces amounting from first to last to 200
millions of livres. This was an enormous exaggeration. It was Barneveld's
estimate that before the truce the States had received from France eleven
millions of florins in cash, and during the truce up to the year 1613,
3,600,000 in addition, besides a million still due, making a total of
about fifteen millions. During the truce France kept two regiments of
foot amounting to 4200 soldiers and two companies of cavalry in Holland
at the service of the States, for which she was bound to pay yearly
600,000 livres. And the Queen-Regent had continued all the treaties by
which these arrangements were secured, and professed sincere and
continuous friendship for the States. While the French-Spanish marriages
gave cause for suspicion, uneasiness, and constant watchfulness in the
States, still the neutrality of France was possible in the coming storm.
So long as that existed, particularly when the relations of England with
Holland through the unfortunate character of King James were perpetually
strained to a point of imminent rupture, it was necessary to hold as long
as it was possible to the slippery embrace of France.

But Aerssens was almost aggressive in his attitude. He rebuked the
vacillations, the shortcomings, the imbecility, of the Queen's government
in offensive terms. He consorted openly with the princes who were on the
point of making war upon the Queen-Regent. He made a boast to the
Secretary of State Villeroy that he had unravelled all his secret plots
against the Netherlands. He declared it to be understood in France, since
the King's death, by the dominant and Jesuitical party that the crown
depended temporally as well as spiritually on the good pleasure of the
Pope.

No doubt he was perfectly right in many of his opinions. No ruler or