l to
learn what they had to say. Thus she should make manifest to all the
world that she was not averse to a treaty such as might prove a secure
peace for herself and for Christendom; otherwise not.

It subsequently appeared that what they had to say was that if the queen
would give up to the Spanish Government the cautionary towns which she
held as a pledge for her advances to the republic, forbid all traffic and
intercourse between her subjects and the Netherlanders, and thenceforth
never allow an Englishman to serve in or with the armies of the States, a
peace might be made.

Surely it needed no great magnanimity on the queen's part to spurn such
insulting proposals, the offer of which showed her capable, in the
opinion of Verreycken, the man who made them, of sinking into the very
depths of dishonour. And she did spurn them. Surely, for the ally, the
protrectress, the grateful friend of the republic, to give its chief
seaports to its arch-enemy, to shut the narrow seas against its ships, so
that they never more could sail westward, and to abandon its whole
population to their fate, would be a deed of treachery such as history,
full of human baseness as it is, has rarely been obliged to record.

Before these propositions had been made by Verreycken Elizabeth protested
that, should he offer them, she would send him home with such an answer
that people should talk of it for some time to come. "Before I consent to
a single one of those points," said the queen, "I wish myself taken from
this world. Until now I have been a princess of my word, who would rather
die than so falsely deceive such good people as the States." And she made
those protestations with such expression and attitude that the Dutch
envoy believed her incapable at that moment of dissimulation.

Nevertheless her indignation did not carry her so far as to induce her to
break off the negotiations. The answer of which mankind was to talk in
time to come was simply that she would not send her commissioners to
treat for peace unless the Spanish Government should recede from the
three points thus offered by Verreycken. This certainly was not a very
blasting reply, and the Spanish agents were so far from losing heart in
consequence that the informal conferences continued for a long time, much
to the discomfort of the Netherlanders.

For more than an hour and a half on one occasion of an uncommonly hot
afternoon in April did Noel de Caron argue with her Majes