was received with sincere joy at
Brussels. The archdukes had something to hope from peace, and little but
disaster and ruin to themselves from a continuance of the war. Spinola
too was unaffectedly in favour of negotiations. He took the ground that
the foreign enemies of Spain, as well as her pretended friends, agreed in
wishing her to go on with the war, and that this ought to open her eyes
as to the expediency of peace. While there was a general satisfaction in
Europe that the steady exhaustion of her strength in this eternal contest
made her daily less and less formidable to other nations, there were on
the other hand puerile complaints at court that the conditions prescribed
by impious and insolent rebels to their sovereign were derogatory to the
dignity of monarchy. The spectacle of Spain sending ambassadors to the
Hague to treat for peace, on the basis of Netherland independence, would
be a humiliation such as had never been exhibited before. That the
haughty confederation should be allowed thus to accomplish its ends, to
trample down all resistance to its dictation, and to defy the whole world
by its insults to the Church and to the sacred principle, of monarchy,
was most galling to Spanish pride. Spinola, as a son of Italy, and not
inspired by the fervent hatred to Protestantism which was indigenous to
the other peninsula, steadily resisted those arguments. None knew better
than he the sternness of the stuff out of which that republic was made,
and he felt that now or never was the time to treat, even as, five years
before, 'jam ant nunquam' had been inscribed on his banner outside
Ostend. But he protested that his friends gave him even harder work than
his enemies had ever done, and he stoutly maintained that a peace against
which all the rivals of Spain seemed to have conspired from fear of
seeing her tranquil and disembarrassed, must be advantageous to Spain.
The genial and quick-wined Genoese could not see and hear all the secret
letters and private conversations of Henry and James and their
ambassadors, and he may be pardoned for supposing that, notwithstanding
all the crooked and incomprehensible politics of Greenwich and Paris, the
serious object of both England and France was to prolong the war. In his
most private correspondence he expressed great doubts as to a favourable
issue to the pending conferences, but avowed his determination that if
they should fail it would be from no want of earnest effort on h