and and infallible society created by the United
Provinces,"--[Memoir of Aerssens, ubi sup]--would be but too happy to
make use of this French intrigue in order to force the intruding Dutch
navy from its conquests.

Olden-Barneveld, too politic to offend the powerful and treacherous ally
by a flat refusal, said that the king's friendship was more precious than
the India trade. At the same time he warned the French Government that,
if they ruined the Dutch East India Company, "neither France nor any
other nation would ever put its nose into India again."

James of England, too, flattered himself that he could win for England
that sovereignty of the Netherlands which England as well as France had
so decidedly refused. The marriage of Prince Henry with the Spanish
Infanta was the bait, steadily dangled before him by the politicians of
the Spanish court, and he deluded himself with the thought that the
Catholic king, on the death of the childless archdukes, would make his
son and daughter-in-law a present of the obedient Netherlands. He already
had some of the most important places in the United Netherlands-the
famous cautionary towns in his grasp, and it should go hard but he would
twist that possession into a sovereignty over the whole land. As for
recognising the rebel provinces as an independent sovereignty, that was
most abhorrent to him. Such a tampering with the great principles of
Government was an offence against all crowned heads, a crime in which he
was unwilling to participate.

His instinct against rebellion seemed like second sight. The king might
almost be imagined to have foreseen in the dim future those memorable
months in which the proudest triumph of the Dutch commonwealth was to be
registered before the forum of Christendom at the congress of Westphalia,
and in which the solemn trial and execution of his own son and successor,
with the transformation of the monarchy of the Tudors and Stuarts into a
British republic, were simultaneously to startle the world. But it hardly
needed the gift of prophecy to inspire James with a fear of revolutions.

He was secretly desirous therefore, sustained by Salisbury and his other
advisers, of effecting the restoration of the provinces to the dominion
of his most Catholic Majesty. It was of course the interest of England
that the Netherland rebels should renounce the India trade. So would
James be spared the expense and trouble of war; so would the great
doctrines of