, who had caressed him and
grovelled before him, who had grown great through his tuition and rich
through his bounty, now rejoiced in his ruin or hastened at least to save
themselves from being involved in it. Not a man of them all but fell away
from him like water. Even the great soldier forgot whose respectful but
powerful hand it was which, at the most tragical moment, had lifted him
from the high school at Leyden into the post of greatest power and
responsibility, and had guided his first faltering footsteps by the light
of his genius and experience. Francis Aerssens, master of the field, had
now become the political tutor of the mature Stadholder. Step by step we
have been studying the inmost thoughts of the Advocate as revealed in his
secret and confidential correspondence, and the reader has been enabled
to judge of the wantonness of the calumny which converted the determined
antagonist into the secret friend of Spain. Yet it had produced its
effect upon Maurice.

He told the French ambassadors a month after the arrest that Barneveld
had been endeavouring, during and since the Truce negotiations, to bring
back the Provinces, especially Holland, if not under the dominion of, at
least under some kind of vassalage to Spain. Persons had been feeling the
public pulse as to the possibility of securing permanent peace by paying
tribute to Spain, and this secret plan of Barneveld had so alienated him
from the Prince as to cause him to attempt every possible means of
diminishing or destroying altogether his authority. He had spread through
many cities that Maurice wished to make himself master of the state by
using the religious dissensions to keep the people weakened and divided.

There is not a particle of evidence, and no attempt was ever made to
produce any, that the Advocate had such plan, but certainly, if ever, man
had made himself master of a state, that man was Maurice. He continued
however to place himself before the world as the servant of the
States-General, which he never was, either theoretically or in fact.

The French ambassadors became every day more indignant and more
discouraged. It was obvious that Aerssens, their avowed enemy, was
controlling the public policy of the government. Not only was there no
satisfaction to be had for the offensive manner in which he had filled
the country with his ancient grievances and his nearly forgotten charges
against the Queen-Dowager and those who had assisted her in