, where the subordinate
furnishes the intellect, the industry, the experience, while the bland
superior, gratifying the world with his sign-manual, appropriates the
applause. So long as he lived and worked, the States-General and the
States of Holland were like a cunningly contrived machine, which seemed
to be alive because one invisible but mighty mind vitalized the whole.

And there had been enough to do. It was not until midsummer of 1609 that
the ratifications of the Treaty of Truce, one of the great triumphs in
the history of diplomacy, had been exchanged, and scarcely had this
period been put to the eternal clang of arms when the death of a lunatic
threw the world once more into confusion. It was obvious to Barneveld
that the issue of the Cleve-Julich affair, and of the tremendous
religious fermentation in Bohemia, Moravia, and Austria, must sooner or
later lead to an immense war. It was inevitable that it would devolve
upon the States to sustain their great though vacillating, their generous
though encroaching, their sincere though most irritating, ally. And yet,
thoroughly as Barneveld had mastered all the complications and
perplexities of the religious and political question, carefully as he had
calculated the value of the opposing forces which were shaking
Christendom, deeply as he had studied the characters of Matthias and
Rudolph, of Charles of Denmark and Ferdinand of Graz, of Anhalt and
Maximilian, of Brandenburg and Neuburg, of James and Philip, of Paul V.
and Charles Emmanuel, of Sully and Yilleroy, of Salisbury and Bacon, of
Lerma and Infantado; adroitly as he could measure, weigh, and analyse all
these elements in the great problem which was forcing itself on the
attention of Europe--there was one factor with which it was difficult for
this austere republican, this cold, unsusceptible statesman, to deal: the
intense and imperious passion of a greybeard for a woman of sixteen.

For out of the cauldron where the miscellaneous elements of universal war
were bubbling rose perpetually the fantastic image of Margaret
Montmorency: the fatal beauty at whose caprice the heroic sword of Ivry
and Cahors was now uplifted and now sheathed.

Aerssens was baffled, and reported the humours of the court where he
resided as changing from hour to hour. To the last he reported that all
the mighty preparations then nearly completed "might evaporate in smoke"
if the Princess of Conde should come back. Every ambassador in P