ble, to lean on
a royal word falser than water, to inhale almost daily the effluvia from
a court compared to which the harem of Henry was a temple of vestals. The
spectacle of the slobbering James among his Kars and Hays and Villiers's
and other minions is one at which history covers her eyes and is dumb;
but the republican envoys, with instructions from a Barneveld, were
obliged to face him daily, concealing their disgust, and bowing
reverentially before him as one of the arbiters of their destinies and
the Solomon of his epoch.

A special embassy was sent early in the year to England to convey the
solemn thanks of the Republic to the King for his assistance in the truce
negotiations, and to treat of the important matters then pressing on the
attention of both powers. Contemporaneously was to be despatched the
embassy for which Henry was waiting so impatiently at Paris.

Certainly the Advocate had enough with this and other, important business
already mentioned to detain him at his post. Moreover the first year of
peace had opened disastrously in the Netherlands. Tremendous tempests
such as had rarely been recorded even in that land of storms had raged
all the winter. The waters everywhere had burst their dykes and
inundations, which threatened to engulph the whole country, and which had
caused enormous loss of property and even of life, were alarming the most
courageous. It was difficult in many district to collect the taxes for
the every-day expenses of the community, and yet the Advocate knew that
the Republic would soon be forced to renew the war on a prodigious scale.

Still more to embarrass the action of the government and perplex its
statesmen, an alarming and dangerous insurrection broke out in Utrecht.

In that ancient seat of the hard-fighting, imperious, and opulent
sovereign archbishops of the ancient church an important portion of the
population had remained Catholic. Another portion complained of the
abolition of various privileges which they had formerly enjoyed; among
others that of a monopoly of beer-brewing for the province. All the
population, as is the case with all populations in all countries and all
epochs, complained of excessive taxation.

A clever politician, Dirk Kanter by name, a gentleman by birth, a scholar
and philosopher by pursuit and education, and a demagogue by profession,
saw an opportunity of taking an advantage of this state of things. More
than twenty years before he had bee