usefulness by his formal installation as ambassador, received private
intimation from Henry, with whom he was on terms of great confidence and
intimacy, that he should have private access to the King as frequently
and as in formally as before. The theory that the ambassador,
representing the personality of his sovereign, may visit the monarch
to whom he is accredited, without ceremony and at his own convenience,
was as rarely carried into practice in the sixteenth century as in the
nineteenth, while on the other hand Aerssens, as the private and
confidential agent of a friendly but not publicly recognized
commonwealth, had been for many years in almost daily personal
communication with the King.

It is also important to note that the modern fallacy according to which
republics being impersonal should not be represented by ambassadors had
not appeared in that important epoch in diplomatic history. On the
contrary, the two great republics of the age, Holland and Venice,
vindicated for themselves, with as much dignity and reason as success,
their right to the highest diplomatic honours.

The distinction was substantial not shadowy; those haughty commonwealths
not considering it advantageous or decorous that their representatives
should for want of proper official designations be ranked on great
ceremonial occasions with the ministers of petty Italian principalities
or of the three hundred infinitesimal sovereignties of Germany.

It was the advice of the French king especially, who knew politics and
the world as well as any man, that the envoys of the Republic which he
befriended and which stood now on the threshold of its official and
national existence, should assert themselves at every court with the
self-reliance and courtesy becoming the functionaries of a great power.