re was never a more intensely aristocratic influence in
the world than the governing and directing spirit of the England of that
age.

It was impossible that the courtiers of Elizabeth and the
burgher-statesmen of Holland and Friesland should sympathize with each
other in sentiment or in manner. The republicans in their exuberant
consciousness of having at last got rid of kings and kingly paraphernalia
in their own, land--for since the rejection of the sovereignty offered to
France and England in 1585 this feeling had become so predominant as to
make it difficult to believe that those offers had been in reality so
recent--were insensibly adopting a frankness, perhaps a roughness, of
political and social demeanour which was far from palatable to the
euphuistic formalists of other, countries.

Especially the English statesmen, trained to approach their sovereign
with almost Oriental humility, and accustomed to exact for themselves a
large amount of deference, could ill brook the free and easy tone
occasionally adopted in diplomatic and official intercourse by these
upstart republicans.

[The Venetian ambassador Contarin relates that in the reign of James
I. the great nobles of England were served at table by lackeys on
they knees.]

A queen, who to loose morals, imperious disposition, and violent temper
united as inordinate a personal vanity as was ever vouchsafed to woman,
and who up to the verge of decrepitude was addressed by her courtiers in
the language of love-torn swain to blooming shepherdess, could naturally
find but little to her taste in the hierarchy of Hans Brewer and Hans
Baker. Thus her Majesty and her courtiers, accustomed to the faded
gallantries with which the serious affairs of State were so grotesquely
intermingled, took it ill when they were bluntly informed, for instance,
that the State council of the Netherlands, negotiating on Netherland
affairs, could not permit a veto to the representatives of the queen, and
that this same body of Dutchmen discussing their own business insisted
upon talking Dutch and not Latin.

It was impossible to deny that the young Stadholder was a gentleman of a
good house, but how could the insolence of a common citizen like John of
Olden-Barneveld be digested? It was certain that behind those shaggy,
overhanging brows there was a powerful brain stored with legal and
historic lore, which supplied eloquence to an ever-ready tongue and pen.
Yet these facts, dif