have swallowed up such sovereignty, have annexed all the buckwheat
patches and cranberry marshes of Overyssel to his own meagre territories,
and nobody the wiser.

Zeeland, as we have seen, was disposed at a critical moment to set up
its independent sovereignty. Zeeland, far more important than Overyssel,
had a revenue of perhaps five hundred thousand dollars,--rather a slender
budget for an independent republic, wedged in as it was by the most
powerful empires of the earth, and half drowned by the ocean, from which
it had scarcely emerged.

There was therefore no popular representation, and on the other hand no
executive head. As sovereignty must be exercised in some way, however,
in all living commonwealths, and as a low degree of vitality was
certainly not the defect of those bustling provinces, the supreme
functions had now fallen into the hands of Holland.

While William the Silent lived, the management of war, foreign affairs,
and finance, for the revolted provinces, was in his control. He was
aided by two council boards, but the circumstances of history and the
character of the man had invested him with an inevitable dictatorship.

After his death, at least after Leicester's time, the powers of the
state-council, the head of which, Prince Maurice, was almost always
absent at the wars, fell into comparative disuse. The great functions
of the confederacy passed into the possession of the States-General.
That body now came to sit permanently at the Hague. The number of its
members, deputies from the seven provinces-envoys from those seven
immortal and soulless sovereigns--was not large. The extraordinary
assembly held at Bergen-op-Zoom for confirmation of the truce was