from the Simancas archives, a translated epitome of which has been
published by Gachard. This correspondence reaches to the death of
Philip II., and is of immense extent and importance. Had I not
obtained leave to read the invaluable and, for my purpose,
indispensable documents at Brussels, I should have gone to Spain,
for they will not be published these twenty years, and then only in
a translated and excessively abbreviated and unsatisfactory form.
I have read the whole of this correspondence, and made very copious
notes of it. In truth, I devoted three months of last winter to
that purpose alone.

The materials I have collected from the English archives are also
extremely important and curious. I have hundreds of interesting
letters never published or to be published, by Queen Elizabeth,
Burghley, Walsingham, Sidney, Drake, Willoughby, Leicester, and
others. For the whole of that portion of my subject in which
Holland and England were combined into one whole, to resist Spain in
its attempt to obtain the universal empire, I have very abundant
collections. For the history of the United Provinces is not at all
a provincial history. It is the history of European liberty.
Without the struggle of Holland and England against Spain, all
Europe might have been Catholic and Spanish. It was Holland that
saved England in the sixteenth century, and, by so doing, secured
the triumph of the Reformation, and placed the independence of the
various states of Europe upon a sure foundation. Of course, the
materials collected by me at the Hague are of great importance. As
a single specimen, I will state that I found in the archives there
an immense and confused mass of papers, which turned out to be the
autograph letters of Olden Barneveld during the last few years of
his life; during, in short, the whole of that most important period