Gospel in your discourse and conferences, you may let fall how hateful
the maintenance of these erroneous opinions is to the majesty of God, how
displeasing unto us their dearest friends, and how disgraceful to the
honour and government of that state."

And faithfully did the Ambassador act up to his instructions. Most
sympathetically did he embody the hatred of the King. An able,
experienced, highly accomplished diplomatist and scholar, ready with
tongue and pen, caustic, censorious, prejudiced, and partial, he was soon
foremost among the foes of the Advocate in the little court of the Hague,
and prepared at any moment to flourish the political and theological goad
when his master gave the word.

Nothing in diplomatic history is more eccentric than the long sermons
upon abstruse points of divinity and ecclesiastical history which the
English ambassador delivered from time to time before the States-General
in accordance with elaborate instructions drawn up by his sovereign with
his own hand. Rarely has a king been more tedious, and he bestowed all
his tediousness upon My Lords the States-General. Nothing could be more
dismal than these discourses, except perhaps the contemporaneous and
interminable orations of Grotius to the states of Holland, to the
magistrates of Amsterdam, to the states of Utrecht; yet Carleton was a
man of the world, a good debater, a ready writer, while Hugo Grotius was
one of the great lights of that age and which shone for all time.

Among the diplomatic controversies of history, rarely refreshing at best,
few have been more drouthy than those once famous disquisitions, and they
shall be left to shrivel into the nothingness of the past, so far as is
consistent with the absolute necessities of this narrative.