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 in