could.

So soon as her refusal was made certain, Henry dropped the mask.
Buzanval, the regular French envoy at the Hague--even while amazing the
States by rebukes for their short-comings in the field and by demands for
immediate co-operation in the king's campaign, when the king was doing
nothing but besiege Amiens--astonished the republican statesmen still
further by telling them--that his master was listening seriously to the
pope's secret offers.

His Holiness had assured the king, through the legate at Paris, that he
could easily bring about a peace between him and Philip, if Henry would
agree to make it alone, and he would so manage it that the king's name
should not be mixed up with the negotiations, and that he should not
appear as seeking for peace. It was to be considered however--so Henry's
envoy intimated both at Greenwich and the Hague--that if the king should
accept the pope's intervention he would be obliged to exclude from a
share in it the queen and all others not of the Catholic religion, and it
was feared that the same necessity which had compelled him to listen to
these overtures would force him still further in the same path. He
dreaded lest, between peace and war, he might fall into a position in
which the law would be dictated to him either by the enemy or by those
who had undertaken to help him out of danger.

Much more information to this effect did Buzanval communicate to the
States on the authority of a private letter from the king, telling him of
the ill-success of the mission of Fonquerolles. That diplomatist had
brought back nothing from England, it appeared, save excuses, general
phrases, and many references to the troubles in Ireland and to the danger
of a new Spanish Armada.

It was now for the first time, moreover, that the States learned how they
had been duped both by England and France in the matter of the League. To
their surprise they were informed that while they were themselves
furnishing four thousand men, according to the contract signed by the
three powers, the queen had in reality only agreed to contribute two
thousand soldiers, and these only for four months' service, within a very
strict territorial limit, and under promise of immediate reimbursement of
the expenses thus incurred.

These facts, together with the avowal that their magnanimous ally had all
along been secretly treating for peace with the common enemy, did not
make a cheerful impression upon those plain-spo