For instance, when the French gained a victory he told the story faithfully and without regard for Spanish feelings in his despatches. Or if they set siege to a town, he would predict its certain fall unless help were sent. Or in another case, where an ally had expressed displeasure because the Spanish Court seemed likely not to keep faith with it, he insisted that the King should keep his word in language which was neither diplomatic nor persuasive, and all the while other Spanish negotiators in other parts of France, with better eye to their own interests, were informing the King that the French were decadent, that their armies were undisciplined and quite incapable of effective campaigning, and so on: to which the minister himself added that the King in Council could not too highly reward those who sent such good news, nor too readily forget a man like himself who never wrote anything but the unpalatable truth. [Sidenote: _Deceit in Favour in Madrid._] Thereupon Don Estevan de Gamarre, in his surprise at this picture of the Court of Spain drawn for him by his relative, replied: ‘Apparently fortune in Madrid favours the deceiver and the favour of the Court may be won by mendacity. I have no longer any qualms about my future.’ He then returned to the Low Countries, where he profited so easily by the advice of his relative, that, to employ a Spanish term, he won several _mercedes_, and he saw his own affairs prosper in the measure in which he succeeded in inventing reasons why the affairs of the enemy must come to nought. From this one may conclude that the Court of Spain wished to be deceived, and gave its ambassadors a free rein to make their own fortunes at the expense of the true interests of the monarchy. There is a moral here both for ministers at home and for ambassadors abroad, on which I need not insist. The truth requires two agents, one to tell and another to hear. [Sidenote: _On Treaties and their Ratifications._]