Regent had continued all the treaties by
which these arrangements were secured, and professed sincere and
continuous friendship for the States. While the French-Spanish marriages
gave cause for suspicion, uneasiness, and constant watchfulness in the
States, still the neutrality of France was possible in the coming storm.
So long as that existed, particularly when the relations of England with
Holland through the unfortunate character of King James were perpetually
strained to a point of imminent rupture, it was necessary to hold as long
as it was possible to the slippery embrace of France.

But Aerssens was almost aggressive in his attitude. He rebuked the
vacillations, the shortcomings, the imbecility, of the Queen's government
in offensive terms. He consorted openly with the princes who were on the
point of making war upon the Queen-Regent. He made a boast to the
Secretary of State Villeroy that he had unravelled all his secret plots
against the Netherlands. He declared it to be understood in France, since
the King's death, by the dominant and Jesuitical party that the crown
depended temporally as well as spiritually on the good pleasure of the
Pope.

No doubt he was perfectly right in many of his opinions. No ruler or
statesman in France worthy of the name would hesitate, in the impending
religious conflict throughout Europe and especially in Germany, to
maintain for the kingdom that all controlling position which was its
splendid privilege. But to preach this to Mary de' Medici was waste of
breath. She was governed by the Concini's, and the Concini's were
governed by Spain. The woman who was believed to have known beforehand of
the plot to murder her great husband, who had driven the one powerful
statesman on whom the King relied, Maximilian de Bethune, into
retirement, and whose foreign affairs were now completely in the hands of
the ancient Leaguer Villeroy--who had served every government in the
kingdom for forty years--was not likely to be accessible to high views of
public policy.

Two years had now elapsed since the first private complaints against the
Ambassador, and the French government were becoming impatient at his
presence. Aerssens had been supported by Prince Maurice, to whom he had
long paid his court. He was likewise loyally protected by Barneveld, whom
he publicly flattered and secretly maligned. But it was now necessary
that he should be gone if peaceful relations with France were to be
preserve