n despite and unwittingly that the United
Provinces became a republic at all.

In vain, after originally declaring their independence of the ancient
tyrant, had they attempted to annex themselves to France and to England.
The sovereignty had been spurned. The magnificent prize which France for
centuries since has so persistently coveted, and the attainment of which
has been a cardinal point of her perpetual policy--the Low Countries and
the banks of the Rhine--was deliberately laid at her feet, and as
deliberately refused.

It was the secret hope of the present monarch to repair the loss which
the kingdom had suffered through the imbecility of his two immediate
predecessors. But a great nation cannot with impunity permit itself to be
despotically governed for thirty years by lunatics. It was not for the
Bearnese, with all his valour, his wit, and his duplicity, to obtain the
prize which Charles IX. and Henry III. had thrown away. Yet to make
himself sovereign of the Netherlands was his guiding but most secret
thought during all the wearisome and tortuous negotiations which preceded
the truce; nor did he abandon the great hope with the signature of the
treaty of 1609.

Maurice of Nassau too was a formidable rival to Henry. The
stadholder-prince was no republican. He was a good patriot, a noble
soldier, an honest man. But his father had been offered the sovereignty
of Holland and Zeeland, and the pistol of Balthasar Gerard had alone, in
all human probability, prevented the great prince from becoming
constitutional monarch of all the Netherlands, Batavian and Belgic.

Maurice himself asserted that not only had he been offered a million of
dollars, and large estates besides in Germany, if he would leave the
provinces to their fate, but that the archdukes had offered, would he
join his fortunes with theirs, to place him in a higher position over all
the Netherlands than he had ever enjoyed in the United Provinces, and
that they had even unequivocally offered him the sovereignty over the
whole land.

Maurice was a man of truth, and we have no right to dispute the accuracy
of the extraordinary statement. He must however have reflected upon the
offer once made by the Prince of Darkness from the mountain top, and have
asked himself by what machinery the archdukes proposed to place him in
possession of such a kingdom.

There had, however, been serious question among leading Dutch statesmen
of making him constitutional, her