The English will be asking for damages for money, spent in assisting my rebels; your commissioners will contend that damages are rather due to me.

Thus, and in other ways, time will be agent.

Your own envoys are not to know the secret any more than the English themselves.

I tell it to you only.

Thus you will proceed with the negotiations, now, yielding on one point, and now insisting on another, but directing all to the same object--to gain time while proceeding with the preparation for the invasion, according to the plan already agreed upon." Certainly the most Catholic King seemed, in this remarkable letter to have outdone himself; and Farnese--that sincere Farnese, in whose loyal, truth-telling, chivalrous character, the Queen and her counsellors placed such implicit reliance--could thenceforward no longer be embarrassed as to the course he was to adopt.