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-