of more than L600,000 or L700,000 at the end of Elizabeth's reign or in
the first years of James, while the Netherlands had often proved
themselves capable of furnishing annually ten or twelve millions of
florins, which would be the equivalent of nearly a million sterling.

The yearly revenues of the whole monarchy of the Imperial house of
Habsburg can scarcely be stated at a higher figure than L350,000.

Thus the political game--for it was a game--was by no means a desperate
one for the Netherlands, nor the resources of the various players so
unequally distributed as at first sight it might appear.

The emancipation of the Provinces from the grasp of Spain and the
establishment by them of a commonwealth, for that epoch a very free one,
and which contained within itself the germs of a larger liberty,
religious, political, and commercial, than had yet been known, was
already one of the most considerable results of the Reformation. The
probability of its continued and independent existence was hardly
believed in by potentate or statesman outside its own borders, and had
not been very long a decided article of faith even within them. The
knotty problem of an acknowledgment of that existence, the admission of
the new-born state into the family of nations, and a temporary peace
guaranteed by two great powers, had at last been solved mainly by the
genius of Barneveld working amid many disadvantages and against great
obstructions. The truce had been made, and it now needed all the skill,
coolness, and courage of a practical and original statesman to conduct
the affairs of the Confederacy. The troubled epoch of peace was even now
heaving with warlike emotions, and was hardly less stormy than the war
which had just been suspended.