embrace blindly whatever counsel he chose to give them, even if they saw
in it their inevitable ruin; and this not so much from remembrance of
assistance rendered by him, but from the necessity in which they should
always feel of depending totally upon him.

"You may judge, therefore," concluded Aerssens, "as to how much we can
build on such foundations as these. I have been amazed at these frank
communications, for in those letters he spares neither My Lords the
States, nor his Excellency Prince Maurice, nor yourself; giving his
judgment of each of you with far too much freedom and without sufficient
knowledge."

Thus the alliance between the Netherlands and France, notwithstanding
occasional traces of caprice and flaws of personal jealousy, was on
the whole sincere, for it was founded on the surest foundation of
international friendship, the self-interest of each. Henry, although
boasting of having bought Paris with a mass, knew as well as his worst
enemy that in that bargain he had never purchased the confidence of the
ancient church, on whose bosom he had flung himself with so much dramatic
pomp. His noble position, as champion of religious toleration, was not
only unappreciated in an age in which each church and every sect
arrogated to itself a monopoly of the truth, but it was one in which
he did not himself sincerely believe.

After all, he was still the chieftain of the Protestant Union, and,
although Eldest Son of the Church, was the bitter antagonist of the
League and the sworn foe to the House of Austria. He was walking through
pitfalls with a crowd of invisible but relentless foes dogging his every
footstep. In his household or without were daily visions of dagger and
bowl, and he felt himself marching to his doom. How could the man on