French ambassadors,
who had felt or affected disinclination for peace, but who had
subsequently, thrown the whole of their own and their master's influence
on the side of Barneveld. They had done their best--and from time to time
they had been successful--to effect at least a superficial reconciliation
between those two influential personages. They had employed all the
arguments at their disposal to bring the prince over to the peace party.
Especially they had made use of the 'argumentum ad crumenam,' which that
veteran broker in politics, Jeannin, had found so effective in times past
with the great lords of the League. But Maurice showed himself so proof
against the golden inducements suggested by the President that he and his
king both arrived at the conclusion that there were secret motives at
work, and that Maurice was not dazzled by the brilliant prospects held
out to him by Henry, only because his eyes were stedfastly fixed upon
some unknown but splendid advantage, to be gained through other
combinations. It was naturally difficult for Henry to imagine the
possibility of a man, playing a first part in the world's theatre, being
influenced by so weak a motive as conviction.

Lewis William too--that "grave and wise young man," as Lord Leicester
used to call him twenty years before--remained steadily on the side of
the prince. Both in private conversation and in long speeches to the
States-General, he maintained that the Spanish court was incapable of
sincere negotiations with the commonwealth, that to break faith with
heretics and rebels would always prove the foundation of its whole
policy, and that to deceive them by pretences of a truce or a treaty, and
to triumph afterwards over the results of its fraud, was to be expected
as a matter of course.

Sooner would the face of nature be changed than the cardinal maxim of
Catholic statesmanship be abandoned.

But the influence of the Nassaus, of the province of Zeeland, of the
clergy, and of the war-party in general, had been overbalanced by
Barneveld and the city corporations, aided by the strenuous exertions of
the French ambassadors.

The decision of the States-General was received with sincere joy at
Brussels. The archdukes had something to hope from peace, and little but
disaster and ruin to themselves from a continuance of the war. Spinola
too was unaffectedly in favour of negotiations. He took the ground that
the foreign enemies of Spain, as well as her pret