But what was the design of the new confederacy?  It was not a Protestant league.  Henry of Navarre could no longer be the chief of such an association, although it was to Protestant powers only that he could turn for assistance.  It was to the commonwealth of the Netherlands, to the northern potentates and to the Calvinist and Lutheran princes of Germany, that the king and queen could alone appeal in their designs against Philip of Spain.

The position of Henry was essentially a false one from the beginning.  He felt it to be so, and the ink was scarce dry with which he signed the new treaty before he was secretly casting about him to, make peace with that power with which he was apparently summoning all the nations of the earth to do battle.  Even the cautious Elizabeth was deceived by the crafty Bearnese, while both united to hoodwink the other states and princes.

On the 31st October, accordingly, the States-General agreed to go into the league with England and France; “in order to resist the enterprises and ambitious designs of the King of Spain against all the princes and potentates of Christendom.”  As the queen had engaged—­according to the public treaty or decoy—­to furnish four thousand infantry to the league, the States now agreed to raise and pay for another four thousand to be maintained in the king’s service at a cost of four hundred and fifty thousand florins annually, to be paid by the month.  The king promised, in case the Netherlands should be invaded by the enemy with the greater part of his force, that these four thousand soldiers should return to the Netherlands.  The king further bound himself to carry on a sharp offensive war in Artois and Hainault.

The States-General would have liked a condition inserted in the treaty that no peace should be made with Spain by England or France without the consent of the provinces; but this was peremptorily refused.

Perhaps the republic had no special reason to be grateful for the grudging and almost contemptuous manner in which it had thus been virtually admitted into the community of sovereigns; but the men who directed its affairs were far too enlightened not to see how great a step was taken when their political position, now conceded to them, had been secured.  In good faith they intended to carry out the provisions of the new treaty, and they immediately turned their attention to the vital matters of making new levies and of imposing new taxes, by means of which they might render themselves useful to their new allies.

Meantime Ancel was deputed by Henry to visit the various courts of Germany and the north in order to obtain, if possible, new members for the league?  But Germany was difficult to rouse.  The dissensions among Protestants were ever inviting the assaults of the Papists.  Its multitude of sovereigns were passing their leisure moments in wrangling among themselves as usual on abstruse points of theology,