ed by
the sovereign. Elizabeth had refused the sovereignty: it then rested with
the States. They only, therefore, were competent to confer the power
which Elizabeth wished her favourite to exercise simply as her
lieutenant-general.

Her wrathful and vituperative language damaged her cause and that of the
Netherlands more severely than can now be accurately estimated. The Earl
was placed at once in a false, a humiliating, almost a ridiculous
position. The authority which the States had thus a second time offered
to England was a second time and most scornfully thrust back upon them.
Elizabeth was indignant that "her own man" should clothe himself in the
supreme attributes which she had refused. The States were forced by the
violence of the Queen to take the authority into their own hands again,
and Leicester was looked upon as a disgraced man.

Then came the neglect with which the Earl was treated by her Majesty and
her ill-timed parsimony towards the cause. No letters to him in four
months, no remittances for the English troops, not a penny of salary for
him. The whole expense of the war was thrown for the time upon their
hands, and the English soldiers seemed only a few thousand starving,
naked, dying vagrants, an incumbrance instead of an aid.

The States, in their turn, drew the purse-strings. The two hundred
thousand florins monthly were paid. The four hundred thousand florins
which had been voted as an additional supply were for a time held back,
as Leicester expressly stated, because of the discredit which had been
thrown upon him from home.

[Strangely enough, Elizabeth was under the impression that the extra
grant of 400,000 florins (L40,000) for four months was four hundred
thousand pounds sterling. "The rest that was granted by the States,
as extraordinary to levy an army, which was 400,000 florins, not
pounds, as I hear your Majesty taketh it. It is forty thousand
pounds, and to be paid In March, April, May, and June last," &c.
Leicester to the Queen, 11 Oct. 1586. (S. P. Office MS.)]

The military operations were crippled for want of funds, but more fatal
than everything else were the secret negotiations for peace. Subordinate
individuals, like Grafigni and De Loo, went up and down, bringing
presents out of England for Alexander Farnese, and bragging that Parma
and themselves could have peace whenever they liked to make it, and
affirming that Leicester's opinions were of no account