n-op-Zoom--Attack on the
Dunkirk pirate fleet--Practice of executing prisoners captured at
sea.

I have invited the reader's attention to the details of this famous siege
because it was not an episode, but almost the sum total, of the great war
during the period occupied by its events. The equation between the
contending forces indicated the necessity of peace. That equation seemed
for the time to have established itself over all Europe. France had long
since withdrawn from the actual strife, and kept its idle thunders in a
concealed although ever threatening hand. In the East the Pacha of Buda
had become Pacha of Pest. Even Gran was soon to fall before the Turk,
whose advancing horse-tails might thus almost be descried from the walls
of Vienna. Stephen Botschkay meantime had made himself master of
Transylvania, concluded peace with Ahmet, and laughed at the Emperor
Rudolph for denouncing him as a rebel.

Between Spain and England a far different result had been reached than
the one foreshadowed in the portentous colloquies between King James and
Maximilian de Bethune. Those conferences have been purposely described
with some minuteness, in order that the difference often existing between
vast projects and diametrically opposed and very insignificant
conclusions might once more be exhibited.

In the summer of 1603 it had been firmly but mysteriously arranged
between the monarchs of France and Great Britain that the House of
Austria should be crushed, its territories parcelled out at the
discretion of those two potentates, the imperial crown taken from the
Habsburgs, the Spaniards driven out of the Netherlands, an alliance
offensive and defensive made with the Dutch republic, while the East and
West Indies were, to be wrested by main force of the allies, from Spain,
whose subjects were thenceforth to be for ever excluded from those
lucrative regions. As for the Jesuits, who were to James as loathsome as
were the Puritans to Elizabeth, the British sovereign had implored the
ambassador of his royal brother, almost with tears, never to allow that
pestilential brood to regain an entrance into his dominions.

In the summer of 1604 King James made a treaty of peace and amity with
the archdukes and with the monarch of Spain, thus extending his friendly
relations with the doomed house of Austria. The republic of the
Netherlands was left to fight her battles alone; her imaginary allies
looking down upon her struggle wit