The Hollanders, with more prudence and ability than distinguished Buckingham and Charles I., had done better service to the Protestant cause without ever becoming entangled in the quarrels that divided France; natural enemies as they were of Spain and the house of Austria, they readily seconded Richelieu in the struggle he maintained against them; besides, the United Provinces were as yet poor, and the cardinal always managed to find money for his allies; nearly all the treaties he concluded with Holland were treaties of alliance and subsidy; those of 1641 and 1642 secured to them twelve hundred thousand livres a year out of the coffers of France. Once only the Hollanders were faithless to their engagements: it was during the siege of Rochelle, when the national feeling would not admit of war being made on the French Huguenots. All the forces of Protestantism readily united against Spain; Richelieu had but to direct them. She, in fact, was the great enemy, and her humiliation was always the ultimate aim of the cardinal’s foreign policy; the struggle, power to power, between France and Spain, explains, during that period, nearly all the political and military complications in Europe. There was no lack of pretexts for bringing it on. The first was the question of the Valteline, a lovely and fertile valley, which, extending from the Lake of Como to the Tyrol, thus serves as a natural communication between Italy and Germany. Possessed but lately, as it was, by the Grey Leagues of the Protestant Swiss, the Valteline, a Catholic district, had revolted at the instigation of Spain in 1620; the emperor, Savoy, and Spain had wanted to divide the spoil between them; when France, the old ally of the Grisons, had interfered, and, in 1623, the forts of the Valteline had been intrusted on deposit to the pope, Urban VIII. He still retained them in 1624, when the Grison lords, seconded by a French re-enforcement under the orders of the Marquis of Ceeuvres, attacked the feeble garrison of the Valteline; in a few days they were masters of all the places in the canton; the pope sent his nephew, Cardinal Barberini, to Paris to complain of French aggression, and with a proposal to take the sovereignty of the Valteline from the Grisons; that was, to give it to Spain. “Besides,” said Cardinal Richelieu, “the precedent and consequences of it would be perilous for kings in whose dominions it hath pleased God to permit diversity of religion.” The legate could obtain nothing. The Assembly of Notables, convoked by Richelieu in 1625, approved of the king’s conduct, and war was resolved upon. The siege of La Rochelle retarded it for two years; Richelieu wanted to have his hands free; he concluded a specious peace with Spain, and the Valteline remained for the time being in the hands of the Grisons, who were one day themselves to drive the French out of it. Whilst the cardinal was holding La Rochelle besieged, the Duke of Mantua