, both lewd and
audacious;"--"a very knave, a traitor to his country;"--"the most
ungrateful wretch alive, a hater of the Queen and of all the English; a
most unthankful man to her Majesty; a practiser to make himself rich and
great, and nobody else;"--"among all villains the greatest;"--"a
bolsterer of all papists and ill men, a dissembler, a devil, an atheist,"
a "most naughty man, and a most notorious drunkard in the worst degree."

Where the Earl hated, his hatred was apt to be deadly, and he was
determined, if possible, to have the life of the detested Paul. "You
shall see I will do well enough with him, and that shortly," he said. "I
will course him as he was not so this twenty year. I will warrant him
hanged and one or two of his fellows, but you must not tell your shirt of
this yet;" and when he was congratulating the government on his having at
length procured the execution of Captain Hemart, the surrenderer of
Grave, he added, pithily, "and you shall hear that Mr. P. B. shall
follow."

Yet the Earl's real griefs against Buys may be easily summed up. The lewd
sinner, nursled in revolutions, had detected the secret policy of the
Queen's government, and was therefore perpetually denouncing the
intrigues going on with Spain. He complained that her Majesty was tired
of having engaged in the Netherland enterprise; he declared that she
would be glad to get fairly out of it; that her reluctance to spend a
farthing more in the cause than she was obliged to do was hourly
increasing upon her; that she was deceiving and misleading the
States-General; and that she was hankering after a peace. He said that
the Earl had a secret intention to possess himself of certain towns in
Holland, in which case the whole question of peace and war would be in
the hands of the Queen, who would also have it thus in her power to
reimburse herself at once for all expenses that she had incurred.

It would be difficult to show that there was anything very calumnious in
these charges, which, no doubt, Paul was in the habit of making. As to
the economical tendencies of her Majesty, sufficient evidence has been
given already from Leicester's private letters. "Rather than spend one
hundred pounds," said Walsingham, "she can be content to be deceived of
five thousand." That she had been concealing from the Staten, from
Walsingham, from Leicester, during the whole summer, her secret
negotiations with Spain, has also been made apparent. That she wa