Should not this conviction, on the part of men who had so many means of feeling the popular pulse, have given the Queen’s government pause?  To serve his sovereign in truth, Leicester might have admitted a possibility at least of honesty on the part of men who were so ready to offer up their lives for their country.  For in a very few weeks ho was obliged to confess that the people were no longer so well disposed to acquiesce in her Majesty’s policy.  The great majority, both of the States and the people, were in favour, he agreed, of continuing the war.  The inhabitants of the little Province of Holland alone, he said, had avowed their determination to maintain their rights—­even if obliged to fight single-handed—­and to shed the last drop in their veins, rather than to submit again to Spanish tyranny.  This seemed a heroic resolution, worthy the sympathy of a brave Englishman, but the Earl’s only comment upon it was, that it proved the ringleaders “either to be traitors or else the most blindest asses in the world.”  He never scrupled, on repeated occasions, to insinuate that Barneveld, Hohenlo, Buys, Roorda, Sainte Aldegonde, and the Nassaus, had organized a plot to sell their country to Spain.  Of this there was not the faintest evidence, but it was the only way in which he chose to account for their persistent opposition to the peace-negotiations, and to their reluctance to confer absolute power on himself. “’Tis a crabbed, sullen, proud kind of people,” said he, “and bent on establishing a popular government,”—­a purpose which seemed somewhat inconsistent with the plot for selling their country to Spain, which he charged in the same breath on the same persons.

Early in August, by the Queen’s command, he had sent a formal communication respecting the private negotiations to the States, but he could tell them no secret.  The names of the commissioners, and even the supposed articles of a treaty already concluded, were flying from town to town, from mouth to mouth, so that the Earl pronounced it impossible for one, not on the spot, to imagine the excitement which existed.

He had sent a state-counsellor, one Bardesius, to the Hague, to open the matter; but that personage had only ventured to whisper a word to one or two members of the States, and was assured that the proposition, if made, would raise such a tumult of fury, that he might fear for his life.  So poor Bardesius came back to Leicester, fell on his knees, and implored him; at least to pause in these fatal proceedings.  After an interval, he sent two eminent statesmen, Valk and Menin, to lay the subject before the assembly.  They did so, and it was met by fierce denunciation.  On their return, the Earl, finding that so much violence had been excited, pretended that they had misunderstood his meaning, and that he had never meant to propose peace-negotiations.  But Valk and Menin were too old politicians to be caught in such a trap, and they produced a brief, drawn up in Italian—­the foreign language best understood by the Earl—­with his own corrections and interlineations, so that he was forced to admit that there had been no misconception.