quarrel with its great ally. It had been calculated by Duplessis-Mornay
that France had paid subsidies to the Provinces amounting from first to
last to 200 millions of livres. This was an enormous exaggeration. It
was Barneveld's estimate that before the truce the States had received
from France eleven millions of florins in cash, and during the truce up
to the year 1613, 3,600,000 in addition, besides a million still due,
making a total of about fifteen millions. During the truce France kept
two regiments of foot amounting to 4200 soldiers and two companies of
cavalry in Holland at the service of the States, for which she was bound
to pay yearly 600,000 livres. And the Queen-Regent had continued all the
treaties by which these arrangements were secured, and professed sincere
and continuous friendship for the States. While the French-Spanish
marriages gave cause for suspicion, uneasiness, and constant watchfulness
in the States, still the neutrality of France was possible in the coming
storm. So long as that existed, particularly when the relations of
England with Holland through the unfortunate character of King James were
perpetually strained to a point of imminent rupture, it was necessary to
hold as long as it vas possible to the slippery embrace of France.

But Aerssens was almost aggressive in his attitude. He rebuked the
vacillations, the shortcomings, the imbecility, of the Queen's government
in offensive terms. He consorted openly with the princes who were on the
point of making war upon the Queen-Regent. He made a boast to the
Secretary of State Villeroy that he had unravelled all his secret plots
against the Netherlands. He declared it to be understood in France,
since the King's death, by the dominant and Jesuitical party that the
crown depended temporally as well as spiritually on the good pleasure of
the Pope.

No doubt he was perfectly right in many of his opinions. No ruler or