The negotiations had been protracted. By this time a month had elapsed since the ambassadors arrived, and St John, now conscious that his mission for coalescence would fail, and irritated by the indignities to which he had been subjected, obtained an order from the Parliament for his recall. At the urgent entreaty of the States of Holland the Parliament allowed their ambassadors to stay for other forty days, and also gave them authority to treat on the basis of the old Intercursus Magnus of 1496, which the Dutch had suddenly proposed. The States, in truth, had totally different aims from the Commonwealth. They were thinking about their commerce, their navigation, and their fisheries, rather than about the repression of “rebels”; and they desired that their alliance with England should confirm and extend the benefits conferred upon them in these respects by the old treaty. The Intercursus Magnus had for generations been the sheet-anchor of Dutch policy towards England. It gave them the utmost freedom of commercial intercourse, and complete liberty of fishing on the English coasts. But it contained other clauses appropriate in spirit to the political conditions of 1651. The treaty had been concluded by Henry VII. in the year in which apprehensions were entertained that Perkin Warbeck would effect a landing in England; it provided for mutual military aid against the enemies of either country, and the expulsion of rebels and fugitives from the territories of the other. St John naturally took the clauses embodying these stipulations as the basis of his new draft articles, which he submitted to the Dutch commissioners on 10th May. They were seven in number. The first required that the proposition made on 17th April for mutual defence of the freedom and liberty of each people should be an article of the treaty. The second provided that neither party should afford any aid or favour to any one whomsoever to the injury or prejudice of the other, but should expressly oppose “and really hinder all whomsoever,” abiding in either commonwealth or under its power, that should do or attempt anything against the other; and the remaining articles were of similar tenour, relating to “rebels” and enemies. They were, in short, political articles of the most comprehensive scope, aimed against the royalists; so comprehensive and thorough that the English Commonwealth might, by declaring the Prince of Orange himself its enemy, demand his expulsion from the Provinces.[695] St John’s articles were by no means to the liking of the Dutch; and though he pointed out that they were “but a translation of the old treaty, only enlarged for the better assurance of performance,”--the treaty which they themselves had proposed as the basis for the new one,--they insisted on sending the articles to the various Provinces for their opinion. For a full month the English ambassadors waited without an answer to their articles--a delay which