History of the United Netherlands, 1607b | Page 8

as attempted to make voyages to the one or the
other. With these trifling exceptions, the court of Madrid would look
with favour on propositions made in behalf of the rebels.
France, as we have seen, secretly aspired to the sovereignty of all the
Netherlands, if it could be had. She was also extremely in favour of

excluding the Hollanders from the Indies, East and West. The king,
fired with the achievements of the republic at sea, and admiring their
great schemes for founding empires at the antipodes by means of
commercial corporations, was very desirous of appropriating to his own
benefit the experience, the audacity, the perseverance, the skill and the
capital of their merchants and mariners. He secretly instructed his
commissioners, therefore, and repeatedly urged it upon them, to do
their best to procure the renunciation, on the part of the republic, of the
Indian trade, and to contrive the transplantation into France of the
mighty trading companies, so successfully established in Holland and
Zeeland.
The plot thus to deprive the provinces of their India trade was supposed
by the statesmen of the republic to have been formed in connivance
with Spain. That power, finding itself half pushed from its seat of
power in the East by the "grand and infallible society created by the
United Provinces,"--[Memoir of Aerssens, ubi sup]--would be but too
happy to make use of this French intrigue in order to force the intruding
Dutch navy from its conquests.
Olden-Barneveld, too politic to offend the powerful and treacherous
ally by a flat refusal, said that the king's friendship was more precious
than the India trade. At the same time he warned the French
Government that, if they ruined the Dutch East India Company,
"neither France nor any other nation would ever put its nose into India
again."
James of England, too, flattered himself that he could win for England
that sovereignty of the Netherlands which England as well as France
had so decidedly refused. The marriage of Prince Henry with the
Spanish Infanta was the bait, steadily dangled before him by the
politicians of the Spanish court, and he deluded himself with the
thought that the Catholic king, on the death of the childless archdukes,
would make his son and daughter-in-law a present of the obedient
Netherlands. He already had some of the most important places in the
United Netherlands- the famous cautionary towns in his grasp, and it
should go hard but he would twist that possession into a sovereignty
over the whole land. As for recognising the rebel provinces as an
independent sovereignty, that was most abhorrent to him. Such a
tampering with the great principles of Government was an offence

against all crowned heads, a crime in which he was unwilling to
participate.
His instinct against rebellion seemed like second sight. The king might
almost be imagined to have foreseen in the dim future those memorable
months in which the proudest triumph of the Dutch commonwealth was
to be registered before the forum of Christendom at the congress of
Westphalia, and in which the solemn trial and execution of his own son
and successor, with the transformation of the monarchy of the Tudors
and Stuarts into a British republic, were simultaneously to startle the
world. But it hardly needed the gift of prophecy to inspire James with a
fear of revolutions.
He was secretly desirous therefore, sustained by Salisbury and his other
advisers, of effecting the restoration of the provinces to the dominion of
his most Catholic Majesty. It was of course the interest of England that
the Netherland rebels should renounce the India trade. So would James
be spared the expense and trouble of war; so would the great doctrines
of divine right be upheld; so would the way be paved towards the
ultimate absorption of the Netherlands by England. Whether his
theological expositions would find as attentive pupils when the pope's
authority had been reestablished over all his neighbours; whether the
Catholic rebels in Ireland would become more tranquil by the
subjugation of the Protestant rebels in Holland; whether the principles
of Guy Fawkes might not find more effective application, with no
bulwark beyond the seas against the incursion of such practitioners--all
this he did not perhaps sufficiently ponder.
Thus far had the discursive mind of James wandered from the position
which it occupied at the epoch of Maximilian de Bethune's memorable
embassy to England.
The archdukes were disposed to quiet. On them fell the burthen of the
war. Their little sovereignty, where--if they could only be allowed to
expend the money squeezed from the obedient provinces in court
diversions, stately architecture, splendid encouragement of the fine arts,
and luxurious living, surrounded by a train of great nobles, fit to
command regiments in the field or assist in the counsels of