y, against the
Ottoman, rather than against his natural sovereign. Such were the
sagacity, the insight, the power of forecasting the future possessed in
those days by monarchs, statesmen, and diplomatists who were imagining
that they held the world's destiny in their hands.

There was this summer a solemn embassy from the emperor to the
States-General proposing mediation referring in the usual conventional
phraseology to the right of kings to command, and to the duty of the
people to submit, and urging the gentle-mindedness and readiness to
forgive which characterised the sovereign of the Netherlands and of
Spain.

And the statesmen of the republic had answered as they always did,
showing with courteous language, irresistible logic, and at, unmerciful
length, that there never had been kings in the Netherlands at all, and
that the gentle-mindedness of Philip had been exhibited in the massacre
of a hundred thousand Netherlanders in various sieges and battles, and in
the murder, under the Duke of Alva alone, of twenty thousand human beings
by the hangman.

They liked not such divine right nor such gentle-mindedness. They
recognised no duty on their part to consent to such a system. Even the
friendly King of Denmark sent a legation for a similar purpose, which was
respectfully but very decidedly allowed to return as it came; but the
most persistent in schemes of interference for the purpose of putting an
end to the effusion of blood in the Netherlands was Sigismund of Poland.
This monarch, who occupied two very incompatible positions, being
sovereign at once of fanatically Protestant Sweden and of orthodox
Poland, and who was, moreover, son-in-law of Archduke Charles of Styria
whose other daughter was soon to be espoused by the Prince of Spain--was
personally and geographically interested in liberating Philip from the
inconvenience of his Netherland war. Only thus could he hope to bring the
Spanish power to the rescue of Christendom against the Turk. Troubles
enough were in store for Sigismund in his hereditary northern realms, and
he was to learn that his intermarriage with the great Catholic and
Imperial house did not enable him to trample out Protestantism in those
hardy Scandinavian and Flemish regions where it had taken secure root.
Meantime he despatched, in solemn mission to the republic and to the
heretic queen, a diplomatist whose name and whose oratorical efforts have
by a caprice of history been allowed to end