in Germany and Lorraine.
Barneveld was constantly receiving most important intelligence of
military plans and movements from Prague, which he placed daily before
the eyes of governments wilfully blind.

"I ponder well at this crisis," he said to his friend Caron, "the
intelligence I received some months back from Ratisbon, out of the
cabinet of the Jesuits, that the design of the Catholic or Roman League
is to bring this year a great army into the field, in order to make
Neuburg, who was even then said to be of the Roman profession and League,
master of Julich and the duchies; to execute the Imperial decree against
Aachen and Mulheim, preventing any aid from being sent into Germany by
these Provinces, or by Great Britain, and placing the Archduke and
Marquis Spinola in command of the forces; to put another army on the
frontiers of Austria, in order to prevent any succour coming from
Hungary, Bohemia, Austria, Moravia, and Silesia into Germany; to keep all
these disputed territories in subjection and devotion to the Emperor, and
to place the general conduct of all these affairs in the hands of
Archduke Leopold and other princes of the House of Austria. A third army
is to be brought into the Upper Palatinate, under command of the Duke of
Bavaria and others of the League, destined to thoroughly carry out its
designs against the Elector-Palatine, and the other electors, princes,
and estates belonging to the religion."

This intelligence, plucked by Barneveld out of the cabinet of the
Jesuits, had been duly communicated by him months before to those whom it
most concerned, and as usual it seemed to deepen the lethargy of the
destined victims and their friends. Not only the whole Spanish campaign
of the present year had thus been duly mapped out by the Advocate, long
before it occurred, but this long buried and forgotten correspondence of
the statesman seems rather like a chronicle of transactions already past,
so closely did the actual record, which posterity came to know too well,
resemble that which he saw, and was destined only to see, in prophetic
vision.

Could this political seer have cast his horoscope of the Thirty Years'
War at this hour of its nativity for the instruction of such men as
Walsingham or Burleigh, Henry of Navarre or Sully, Richelieu or Gustavus
Adolphus, would the course of events have been modified? These very
idlest of questions are precisely those which inevitably occur as one
ponders the seemi