Exasperated by a firmness for which he was unprepared, and satisfied that the support of the Spanish Cabinet could alone have induced the Archduke thus to drive him to extremities, Henry at once resolved no longer to delay the hostilities which he had long meditated against Spain, and to which he was now urged as much by private feeling as by state policy. A sufficient pretext offered itself, moreover, in the efforts which had been made by several of the German Princes to possess themselves of the duchies of Clèves and Juliers; the death of Jean Guillaume, Duc de Clèves, Juliers, and Bergh, Comte de la Mark, and Lord of Ravenstein, which had occurred on the 25th of March, and the numerous claims made upon his succession, having rendered the ultimate disposition of his duchy a matter of extreme importance to Henry, who was reluctant to strengthen the power of Austria by permitting this increase of territory to pass definitely into her hands,[417] as it had already partially done, the Emperor having hastened to place the duchy under sequestration. The petty sovereigns thus despoiled protested energetically against such an usurpation, and several among them had even entreated the protection of France, to the great gratification of Henri IV, who thus found himself doubly armed, as his interference on behalf of the aggrieved Princes assured their cooperation in his own project of recovering from the Emperor the provinces of Franche-Comté and Flanders, which had been in the possession of Spain since the time of Charles V, and which had formed, as we have elsewhere stated, the dowry of the Infanta on her marriage with the Archduke Albert. Thus in the eyes of Europe the French King was about to engage in this new war simply to enforce justice to himself and his allies; but it was so evident to all who considered the subject that these pretensions might have been put down at once by the slightest show of resistance on his own part, and that so comparatively unimportant a campaign might prudently have been entrusted to one of his many able generals, that when it became known that an army of forty thousand infantry, six thousand Swiss, the bodyguard, and a corps of four thousand mounted nobles, together with a strong park of artillery, were about to take the field under the command of the King in person, there were few individuals acquainted with the circumstances which we have just narrated who did not feel convinced that the monarch was rather about to undertake a crusade for the deliverance of the Princesse de Condé than a war for the preservation of his territories.