niard and his adherents 'in
terminos modestiae. But so long as France is keeping a suspicious eye
upon England, and England upon France, everything will run to combustion,
detrimental to their Majesties and to us, and ruinous to all the good
inhabitants."

To the Treaty of Xanten faithfully executed he held as to an anchor in
the tempest until it was torn away, not by violence from without, but by
insidious mutiny within. At last the government of James proposed that
the pledges on leaving the territory should be made to the two allied
kings as mediators and umpires. This was better than the naked promises
originally suggested, but even in this there was neither heartiness nor
sincerity. Meantime the Prince of Neuburg, negotiations being broken off,
departed for Germany, a step which the Advocate considered ominous. Soon
afterwards that prince received a yearly pension of 24,000 crowns from
Spain, and for this stipend his claims on the sovereignty of the duchies
were supposed to be surrendered.

"If this be true," said Barneveld, "we have been served with covered
dishes."

The King of England wrote spirited and learned letters to the
Elector-Palatine, assuring him of his father-in-law's assistance in case
he should be attacked by the League. Sir Henry Wotton, then on special
mission at the Hague, showed these epistles to Barneveld.

"When I hear that Parliament has been assembled and has granted great
subsidies," was the Advocate's comment, "I shall believe that effects may
possibly follow from all these assurances."

It was wearisome for the Advocate thus ever to be foiled; by the
pettinesses and jealousies of those occupying the highest earthly places,
in his efforts to stem the rising tide of Spanish and Catholic
aggression, and to avert the outbreak of a devastating war to which he
saw Europe doomed. It may be wearisome to read the record. Yet it is the
chronicle of Christendom during one of the most important and fateful
epochs of modern history. No man can thoroughly understand the
complication and precession of phenomena attending the disastrous dawn of
the renewed war, on an even more awful scale than the original conflict
in the Netherlands, without studying the correspondence of Barneveld. The
history of Europe is there. The fate of Christendom is there. The
conflict of elements, the crash of contending forms of religion and of
nationalities, is pictured there in vivid if homely colours. The
Advocate, wh