m, had conquered his capital
at a blow. For while thus comfortably established as temporary governor
of the duchies he designed through the fears or folly of Rudolph to
become their sovereign lord. Strengthened by such an acquisition and
reckoning on continued assistance in men and money from Spain and the
Catholic League, he meant to sweep back to the rescue of the perishing
Rudolph, smite the Protestants of Bohemia, and achieve his appointment to
the crown of that kingdom.

The Spanish ambassador at Prague had furnished him with a handsome sum of
money for the expenses of his journey and preliminary enterprise. It
should go hard but funds should be forthcoming to support him throughout
this audacious scheme. The champion of the Church, the sovereign prince
of important provinces, the possession of which ensured conclusive
triumph to the House of Austria and to Rome--who should oppose him in his
path to Empire? Certainly not the moody Rudolph, the slippery and
unstable Matthias, the fanatic and Jesuit-ridden Ferdinand.

"Leopold in Julich," said Henry's agent in Germany, "is a ferret in a
rabbit warren."

But early in the spring and before the arrival of Leopold, the two
pretenders, John Sigismund, Elector of Brandenburg, and Philip Lewis,
Palatine of Neuburg, had made an arrangement. By the earnest advice of
Barneveld in the name of the States-General and as the result of a
general council of many Protestant princes of Germany, it had been
settled that those two should together provisionally hold and administer
the duchies until the principal affair could be amicably settled.

The possessory princes were accordingly established in Dusseldorf with
the consent of the provincial estates, in which place those bodies were
wont to assemble.

Here then was Spain in the person of Leopold quietly perched in the chief
citadel of the country, while Protestantism in the shape of the
possessory princes stood menacingly in the capital.

Hardly was the ink dry on the treaty which had suspended for twelve years
the great religious war of forty years, not yet had the ratifications
been exchanged, but the trumpet was again sounding, and the hostile
forces were once more face to face.

Leopold, knowing where his great danger lay, sent a friendly message to
the States-General, expressing the hope that they would submit to his
arrangements until the Imperial decision should be made.

The States, through the pen and brain of Barne