entered into public and diplomatic relations and conventions with them,
and their agents at foreign courts were now dignified with the rank and
title of ambassadors.

The Spanish king had likewise refused to them the concession of the right
of navigation and commerce in the East Indies, but it was a matter of
notoriety that the absence of the word India, suppressed as it was in the
treaty, implied an immense triumph on the part of the States, and that
their flourishing and daily increasing commerce in the farthest East and
the imperial establishments already rising there were cause of envy and
jealousy not to Spain alone, but to friendly powers.

Yet the government of Great Britain affected to regard them as
something less than a sovereign state. Although Elizabeth had refused
the sovereignty once proffered to her, although James had united with
Henry IV. in guaranteeing the treaty just concluded between the States
and Spain, that monarch had the wonderful conception that the Republic
was in some sort a province of his own, because he still held the
cautionary towns in pledge for the loans granted by his predecessor.
His agents at Constantinople were instructed to represent the new state
as unworthy to accredit its envoys as those of an independent power.
The Provinces were represented as a collection of audacious rebels,
a piratical scum of the sea. But the Sultan knew his interests better
than to incur the enmity of this rising maritime power. The Dutch envoy
declaring that he would sooner throw himself into the Bosphorus than
remain to be treated with less consideration than that accorded to the
ministers of all great powers, the remonstrances of envious colleagues
were hushed, and Haga was received with all due honours.

Even at the court of the best friend of the Republic, the French king,