mly resolved never
to relinquish that navigation which in truth was one of their most
practical and valuable possessions, and as the royal commissioners were
as solemnly determined that it should never be conceded, it may be
imagined how much breath, how much foolscap paper, was wasted.

In truth, the negotiation for peace had been a vile mockery from the
beginning. Spain had no real intention of abdicating her claim to the
United Provinces.

At the very moment when the commissioners were categorically making that
concession in Brussels, and claiming such a price for it, Hoboken, the
archduke's diplomatic representative in London, was earnestly assuring
King James that neither his master nor Philip had the remotest notion of
renouncing their sovereignty over all the Netherlands. What had been said
and written to that effect was merely a device, he asserted, to bring
about a temporary truce. During the interval of imaginary freedom it was
certain that the provinces would fall into such dire confusion that it
would be easier for Spain to effect their re-conquest, after a brief
delay for repairing her own strength, than it would be by continuing the
present war without any cessation.

The Spanish ambassador at Vienna too on his part assured the Emperor
Rudolph that his master was resolved never to abdicate the sovereignty of
the provinces. The negotiations then going on, he said, were simply
intended to extort from the States a renunciation of the India trade and
their consent to the re-introduction of the Catholic religion throughout
their territories.

Something of all this was known and much more suspected at the Hague; the
conviction therefore that no faith would be kept with rebels and
heretics, whatever might be said or written, gained strength every day.
That these delusive negotiations with the Hollanders were not likely to
be so successful as the comedy enacted twenty years before at Bourbourg,
for the amusement of Queen Elizabeth and her diplomatists while the
tragedy of the Armada was preparing, might be safely prophesied.
Richardot was as effective as ever in the part which he had so often
played, but Spinola laboured under the disadvantage of being a far
honester man than Alexander Farnese. Far from equal to that famous
chieftain in the management of a great military campaign, it is certain
that he was infinitely inferior to him in genteel comedy. Whether Maurice
and Lewis William, Barneveld and Brederode,