understanding." But notwithstanding
this intellectual progress, poor Bartholomew, who was no beginner, was
most anxious to retire. He was a man of peace, a professor, a doctor of
laws, fonder of the learned leisure and the trim gardens of England than
of the scenes which now surrounded him. "I beseech your good Lordship to
consider," he dismally observed to Burghley, "what a hard case it is for
a man that these fifteen years hath had vitam sedentariam, unworthily in
a place judicial, always in his long robe, and who, twenty-four years
since, was a public reader in the University (and therefore cannot be
young), to come now among guns and drums, tumbling up and down, day and
night, over waters and banks, dykes and ditches, upon every occasion that
falleth out; hearing many insolences with silence, bearing many hard
measures with patience--a course most different from my nature, and most
unmeet for him that hath ever professed learning."

Wilkes was of sterner stuff. Always ready to follow the camp and to face
the guns and drums with equanimity, and endowed beside with keen
political insight, he was more competent than most men to unravel the
confused skein of Netherland politics. He soon found that the Queen's
secret negotiations with Spain, and the general distrust of her
intentions in regard to the Provinces, were like to have fatal
consequences. Both he and Leicester painted the anxiety of the Netherland
people as to the intention of her Majesty in vivid colours.

The Queen could not make up her mind--in the very midst of the Greenwich
secret conferences, already described--to accept the Netherland
sovereignty. "She gathereth from your letter," wrote Walsingham, "that
the only salve for this sore is to make herself proprietary of the
country, and to put in such an army as may be able to make head to the
enemy. These two things being so contrary to her Majesty's
disposition--the one, for that it breedeth a doubt of a perpetual war,
the other, for that it requireth an increase of charges--do marvellously
distract her, and make her repent that ever she entered into the action."

Upon the great subject of the sovereignty, therefore, she was unable to
adopt the resolution so much desired by Leicester and by the people of
the Provinces; but she answered the Earl's communications concerning
Maurice and Hohenlo, Sir John Norris and the treasurer, in characteristic
but affectionate language. And thus she wrote:

"Rob, I am