precaution is wise; but the report of their preparations will long
outrun their hostilities. Why incur a heavy expense to engage
foreigners who will not care for a country which they must leave
to-morrow? Hast thou not still at thy command the same brave
Netherlanders to whom thy father entrusted the republic in far more
troubled times? Why shouldest thou now doubt their loyalty, which, to
thy ancestors, they have preserved for so many centuries inviolate?
Will not they be sufficient to sustain the war long enough to give time
to thy confederates to join their banners, or to thyself to send succor
from the neighboring country?" This language was too new to the king,
and its truth too obvious for him to be able at once to reply to it.
"I, also, am a foreigner," he at length exclaimed, "and they would like,
I suppose, to expel me from the country!" At the same time he descended
from the throne, and left the assembly; but the speaker was pardoned for
his boldness. Two days afterwards he sent a message to the states that
if he had been apprised earlier that these troops were a burden to them
he would have immediately made preparation to remove them with himself
to Spain. Now it was too late, for they would not depart unpaid; but he
pledged them his most sacred promise that they should not be oppressed
with this burden more than four months. Nevertheless, the troops
remained in this country eighteen months instead of four; and would not,
perhaps, even then have left it so soon if the exigencies of the state
had not made their presence indispensable in another part of the world.

The illegal appointment of foreigners to the most important offices of
the country afforded further occasion of complaint against the
government. Of all the privileges of the provinces none was so
obnoxious to the Spaniards as that which excluded strangers from office,
and none they had so zealously sought to abrogate. Italy, the two
Indies, and all the provinces of this vast Empire, were indeed open to
their rapacity and ambition; but from the richest of them all an
inexorable fundamental law excluded them. They artfully persuaded their
sovereign that his power in these countries would never be firmly
established so long as he could not employ foreigners as his
instruments. The Bishop of Arras, a Burgundian by birth, had already
been illegally forced upon the Flemings; and now the Count of Feria, a
Castilian, was to receive a seat and voice in the c