punishes the murderers of the magistrates--Speech of
Henry's envoy to the States-General--Letter of Queen Elizabeth to
Henry--Siege of Rouen--Farnese leads an army to its relief--The king
is wounded in a skirmish--Siege of Rue by Farnese--Henry raises the
siege of Rouen--Siege of Caudebec--Critical position of Farnese and
his army--Victory of the Duke of Mercoeur in Brittany.

Again the central point towards which the complicated events to be
described in this history gravitate is found on the soil of France.
Movements apparently desultory and disconnected--as they may have seemed
to the contemporaneous observer, necessarily occupied with the local and
daily details which make up individual human life--are found to be
necessary parts of a whole, when regarded with that breadth and clearness
of vision which is permitted to human beings only when they can look
backward upon that long sequence of events which make up the life of
nations and which we call the Past. It is only by the anatomical study of
what has ceased to exist that we can come thoroughly to comprehend the
framework and the vital conditions of that which lives. It is only by
patiently lifting the shroud from the Past that we can enable ourselves
to make even wide guesses at the meaning of the dim Present and the
veiled Future. It is only thus that the continuity of human history
reveals itself to us as the most important of scientific facts.

If ever commonwealth was apparently doomed to lose that national
existence which it had maintained for a brief period at the expense of
infinite sacrifice of blood and treasure, it was the republic of the
United Netherlands in the period immediately succeeding the death of
William the Silent. Domestic treason, secession of important provinces,
religious-hatred, foreign intrigue, and foreign invasion--in such a sea
of troubles was the republic destined generations long to struggle. Who
but the fanatical, the shallow-minded, or the corrupt could doubt the
inevitable issue of the conflict? Did not great sages and statesmen whose
teachings seemed so much wiser in their generation than the untaught
impulses of the great popular heart, condemn over and over again the
hopeless struggles and the atrocious bloodshed which were thought to
disgrace the age, and by which it was held impossible that the cause of
human liberty should ever be advanced?

To us who look back from the vantage summit which humanity has
re