History of the United Netherlands, 1603-04 | Page 8

anything
better than gunpowder for the arbitrament of international disputes.
Instead of war being an occasional method of obtaining peace, it pained
him to think that peace seemed only a process for arriving at war.
Surely it was no epigram in those days, but the simplest statement of
commonplace fact, that war was the normal condition of Christians.
Alas will it be maintained that in the two and a half centuries which
have since elapsed the world has made much progress in a higher
direction? Is there yet any appeal among the most civilized nations
except to the logic of the largest battalions and the eloquence of the
biggest guns?
De Rosny came to be the harbinger of a political millennium, and he
heartily despised war. The schemes, nevertheless, which were as much
his own as his master's, and which he was instructed to lay before the
English monarch as exclusively his own, would have required thirty
years of successful and tremendous warfare before they could have a
beginning of development.
It is not surprising that so philosophical a mind as his, while still
inclining to pacific designs, should have been led by what met his eyes
and ears to some rather severe generalizations.
"It is certain that the English hate us," he said, "and with a hatred so
strong and so general that one is tempted to place it among the natural
dispositions of this people. Yet it is rather the effect of their pride and
their presumption; since there is no nation in Europe more haughty,
more disdainful, more besotted with the idea of its own excellence. If
you were to take their word for it, mind and reason are only found with
them; they adore all their opinions and despise those of all other nations;
and it never occurs to them to listen to others, or to doubt
themselves . . . . . Examine what are called with them maxims of state;
you will find nothing but the laws of pride itself, adopted through
arrogance or through indolence."
"Placed by nature amidst the tempestuous and variable ocean," he
wrote to his sovereign, "they are as shifting, as impetuous, as
changeable as its waves. So self-contradictory and so inconsistent are
their actions almost in the same instant as to make it impossible that
they should proceed from the same persons and the same mind.
Agitated and urged by their pride and arrogance alone, they take all

their imaginations and extravagances for truths and realities; the objects
of their desires and affections for inevitable events; not balancing and
measuring those desires with the actual condition of things, nor with
the character of the people with whom they have to deal."
When the ambassador arrived in London he was lodged at Arundel
palace. He at once became the cynosure of all indigenous parties and of
adventurous politicians from every part of Europe; few knowing how to
shape their course since the great familiar lustre had disappeared from
the English sky.
Rosny found the Scotch lords sufficiently favourable to France; the
English Catholic grandees, with all the Howards and the lord high
admiral at their head, excessively inclined to Spain, and a great English
party detesting both Spain and France with equal fervour and well
enough disposed to the United Provinces, not as hating that
commonwealth less but the two great powers more.
The ambassador had arrived with the five points, not in his portfolio
but in his heart, and they might after all be concentrated in one phrase--
Down with Austria, up with the Dutch republic. On his first interview
with Cecil, who came to arrange for his audience with the king, he
found the secretary much disposed to conciliate both Spain and the
empire, and to leave the provinces to shift for themselves.
He spoke of Ostend as of a town not worth the pains taken to preserve
it, and of the India trade as an advantage of which a true policy required
that the United Provinces should be deprived. Already the fine
commercial instinct of England had scented a most formidable rival on
the ocean.
As for the king, he had as yet declared himself for no party, while all
parties were disputing among each other for mastery over him. James
found himself, in truth, as much, astray in English politics as he was a
foreigner upon English earth. Suspecting every one, afraid of every one,
he was in mortal awe, most of all, of his wife, who being the daughter
of one Protestant sovereign and wife of another, and queen of a united
realm dependent for its very existence on antagonism to Spain and
Rome, was naturally inclined to Spanish politics and the Catholic faith.
The turbulent and intriguing Anne of Denmark was not at the moment