o the
Netherlands. The king further bound himself to carry on a sharp offensive
war in Artois and Hainault.

The States-General would have liked a condition inserted in the treaty
that no peace should be made with Spain by England or France without the
consent of the provinces; but this was peremptorily refused.

Perhaps the republic had no special reason to be grateful for the
grudging and almost contemptuous manner in which it had thus been
virtually admitted into the community of sovereigns; but the men who
directed its affairs were far too enlightened not to see how great a step
was taken when their political position, now conceded to them, had been
secured. In good faith they intended to carry out the provisions of the
new treaty, and they immediately turned their attention to the vital
matters of making new levies and of imposing new taxes, by means of which
they might render themselves useful to their new allies.

Meantime Ancel was deputed by Henry to visit the various courts of
Germany and the north in order to obtain, if possible, new members for
the league? But Germany was difficult to rouse. The dissensions among
Protestants were ever inviting the assaults of the Papists. Its multitude
of sovereigns were passing their leisure moments in wrangling among
themselves as usual on abstruse points of theology, and devoting their
serious hours to banquetting, deep drinking, and the pleasures of the
chase. The jeremiads of old John of Nassau grew louder than ever, but his
voice was of one crying in the wilderness. The wrath to come of that
horrible Thirty Years' War, which he was not to witness seemed to inspire
all his prophetic diatribes. But there were few to heed them. Two great
dangers seemed ever impending over Christendom, and it is difficult to
decide which fate would have been the more terrible, the establishment of
the universal monarchy of Philip II., or the conquest of Germany by the
Grand Turk. But when Ancel and other emissaries sought to obtain succour
against the danger from the south-west, he was answered by the clash of
arms and the shrieks of horror which came daily from the south-east. In
vain was it urged, and urged with truth, that the Alcoran was less cruel
than the Inquisition, that the soil of Europe might be overrun by Turks
and Tartars, and the crescent planted triumphantly in every village, with
less disaster to the human race, and with better hope that the germs of
civilization and the