struck down. Distraction in councils, personal rivalries, the well-known
incapacity of a people to govern itself, commercial greediness,
provincial hatreds, envies and jealousies, would soon reduce that jumble
of cities and villages, which aped the airs of sovereignty, into
insignificance and confusion. Adroit management would easily re-assert
afterwards the sovereignty of the Lord's anointed. That a republic of
freemen, a federation of independent states, could take its place among
the nations did not deserve a serious thought.

Spain in her heart preferred therefore to treat. It was however
indispensable that the Netherlands should reestablish the Catholic
religion throughout the land, should abstain then and for ever from all
insolent pretences to trade with India or America, and should punish such
of their citizens as attempted to make voyages to the one or the other.
With these trifling exceptions, the court of Madrid would look with
favour on propositions made in behalf of the rebels.

France, as we have seen, secretly aspired to the sovereignty of all the
Netherlands, if it could be had. She was also extremely in favour of
excluding the Hollanders from the Indies, East and West. The king, fired
with the achievements of the republic at sea, and admiring their great
schemes for founding empires at the antipodes by means of commercial
corporations, was very desirous of appropriating to his own benefit the
experience, the audacity, the perseverance, the skill and the capital of
their merchants and mariners. He secretly instructed his commissioners,
therefore, and repeatedly urged it upon them, to do their best to procure
the renunciation, on the part of the republic, of the Indian trade, and
to contrive the transplantation into France of the mighty trading
companies, so successfully established in Holland and Zeeland.

The plot thus to deprive the provinces of their India trade was supposed
by the statesmen of the republic to have been formed in connivance with
Spain. That power, finding itself half pushed from its seat of power in
the East by the "grand and infallible society created by the United
Provinces,"--[Memoir of Aerssens, ubi sup]--would be but too happy to
make use of this French intrigue in order to force the intruding Dutch
navy from its conquests.

Olden-Barneveld, too politic to offend the powerful and treacherous ally
by a flat refusal, said that the king's friendship was more precious than
the I