e great Constable of Castile,
ambassador from his Catholic Majesty, had arrived in London, and was
wroth at all that he saw and all that he suspected. He, too, began to
scatter golden arguments with a lavish hand among the great lords and
statesmen of Britain, but found that the financier of France had, on the
whole; got before him in the business, and was skilfully maintaining his
precedence from the other side of the channel.

But the end of these great diplomatic manoeuvres had not yet come.

CHAPTER XLII.

Siege of Ostend--The Marquis Spinola made commander-in-chief of the
besieging army--Discontent of the troops--General aspect of the
operations--Gradual encroachment of the enemy.

The scene again shifts to Ostend. The Spanish cabinet, wearied of the
slow progress of the siege, and not entirely satisfied with the generals,
now concluded almost without consent of the archdukes, one of the most
extraordinary jobs ever made, even in those jobbing days. The Marquis
Spinola, elder brother of the ill-fated Frederic, and head of the
illustrious Genoese family of that name, undertook to furnish a large sum
of money which the wealth of his house and its connection with the great
money-lenders of Genoa enabled him to raise, on condition that he should
have supreme command of the operations against Ostend and of the foreign
armies in the Netherlands. He was not a soldier, but he entered into a
contract, by his own personal exertions both on the exchange and in the
field, to reduce the city which had now resisted all the efforts of the
archduke for more than two years. Certainly this was an experiment not
often hazarded in warfare. The defence of Ostend was in the hands of the
best and moat seasoned fighting-men in Europe. The operations were under
the constant supervision of the foremost captain of the age; for Maurice,
in consultation with the States-General, received almost daily reports
from the garrison, and regularly furnished advice and instructions as to
their proceedings. He was moreover ever ready to take the field for a
relieving campaign. Nothing was known of Spinola save that he was a
high-born and very wealthy patrician who had reached his thirty-fourth
year without achieving personal distinction of any kind, and who, during
the previous summer, like so many other nobles from all parts of Europe,
had thought it worth his while to drawl through a campaign or two in the
Low Countries. It was the m