He was a man of peace, a professor, a doctor of laws, fonder of the learned leisure and the trim gardens of England than of the scenes which now surrounded him.

"I beseech your good Lordship to consider," he dismally observed to Burghley, "what a hard case it is for a man that these fifteen years hath had vitam sedentariam, unworthily in a place judicial, always in his long robe, and who, twenty-four years since, was a public reader in the University (and therefore cannot be young), to come now among guns and drums, tumbling up and down, day and night, over waters and banks, dykes and ditches, upon every occasion that falleth out; hearing many insolences with silence, bearing many hard measures with patience--a course most different from my nature, and most unmeet for him that hath ever professed learning." Wilkes was of sterner stuff.

Always ready to follow the camp and to face the guns and drums with equanimity, and endowed beside with keen political insight, he was more competent than most men to unravel the confused skein of Netherland politics.

He soon found that the Queen's secret negotiations with Spain, and the general distrust of her intentions in regard to the Provinces, were like to have fatal consequences.

Both he and Leicester painted the anxiety of the Netherland people as to the intention of her Majesty in vivid colours.
The Queen could not make up her mind--in the very midst of the Greenwich secret conferences, already described--to accept the Netherland sovereignty.