The fair young queen was much vexed and shed bitter tears at this calamity, which, as she spoke nothing but Spanish, left her isolated at the court, but she was a little consoled by the promise that thenceforth the King would share her couch. It had not yet occurred to him that he was married. The French envoys at the Hague exhausted themselves in efforts, both private and public, in favour of the prisoners, but it was a thankless task. Now that the great man and his chief pupils and adherents were out of sight, a war of shameless calumny was began upon him, such as has scarcely a parallel in political history. It was as if a whole tribe of noxious and obscene reptiles were swarming out of the earth which had suddenly swallowed him. But it was not alone the obscure or the anonymous who now triumphantly vilified him. Men in high places who had partaken of his patronage, who had caressed him and grovelled before him, who had grown great through his tuition and rich through his bounty, now rejoiced in his ruin or hastened at least to save themselves from being involved in it. Not a man of them all but fell away from him like water. Even the great soldier forgot whose respectful but powerful hand it was which, at the most tragical moment, had lifted him from the high school at Leyden into the post of greatest power and responsibility, and had guided his first faltering footsteps by the light of his genius and experience. Francis Aerssens, master of the field, had now become the political tutor of the mature Stadholder. Step by step we have been studying the inmost thoughts of the Advocate as revealed in his secret and confidential correspondence, and the reader has been enabled to judge of the wantonness of the calumny which converted the determined antagonist into the secret friend of Spain. Yet it had produced its effect upon Maurice. He told the French ambassadors a month after the arrest that Barneveld had been endeavouring, during and since the Truce negotiations, to bring back the Provinces, especially Holland, if not under the dominion of, at least under some kind of vassalage to Spain. Persons had been feeling the public pulse as to the possibility of securing permanent peace by paying tribute to Spain, and this secret plan of Barneveld had so alienated him from the Prince as to cause him to attempt every possible means of diminishing or destroying altogether his authority. He had spread through many cities that Maurice wished to make himself master of the state by using the religious dissensions to keep the people weakened and divided. There is not a particle of evidence, and no attempt was ever made to produce any, that the Advocate had such plan, but certainly, if ever, man had made himself master of a state, that man was Maurice. He continued however to place himself before the world as the servant of the States- General, which he never was, either theoretically or in fact.