peace.

Should not this conviction, on the part of men who had so many means of
feeling the popular pulse, have given the Queen's government pause? To
serve his sovereign in truth, Leicester might have admitted a possibility
at least of honesty on the part of men who were so ready to offer up
their lives for their country. For in a very few weeks he was obliged to
confess that the people were no longer so well disposed to acquiesce in
her Majesty's policy. The great majority, both of the States and the
people, were in favour, he agreed, of continuing the war. The inhabitants
of the little Province of Holland alone, he said, had avowed their
determination to maintain their rights--even if obliged to fight
single-handed--and to shed the last drop in their veins, rather than to
submit again to Spanish tyranny. This seemed a heroic resolution, worthy
the sympathy of a brave Englishman, but the Earl's only comment upon it
was, that it proved the ringleaders "either to be traitors or else the
most blindest asses in the world." He never scrupled, on repeated
occasions, to insinuate that Barneveld, Hohenlo, Buys, Roorda, Sainte
Aldegonde, and the Nassaus, had organized a plot to sell their country to
Spain. Of this there was not the faintest evidence, but it was the only
way in which he chose to account for their persistent opposition to the
peace-negotiations, and to their reluctance to confer absolute power on
himself. "'Tis a crabbed, sullen, proud kind of people," said he, "and
bent on establishing a popular government,"--a purpose which seemed
somewhat inconsistent with the plot for selling their country to Spain,
which he charged in the same breath on the same persons.

Early in August, by the Queen's command, he had sent a formal
communication respecting the private negotiations to the States, but he
could tell them no secret. The names of the commissioners, and even the
supposed articles of a treaty already concluded, were flying from town to
town, from mouth to mouth, so that the Earl pronounced it impossible for
one, not on the spot, to imagine the excitement which existed.

He had sent a state-counsellor, one Bardesius, to the Hague, to open the
matter; but that personage had only ventured to whisper a word to one or
two members of the States, and was assured that the proposition, if made,
would raise such a tumult of fury, that he might fear for his life. So
poor Bardesius came back to Leicester, fell on his knees,