Testy, choleric, and quarrelsome, with a high sense of honour, and a keen perception of insult, very modest and very proud, he was not likely to feed with wholesome appetite upon the unsavoury annoyances which were the daily bread of a chief commander in the Netherlands.

"I ambitiously affect not high titles, but round dealing," he said; "desiring rather to be a private lance with indifferent reputation, than a colonel-general spotted or defamed with wants." He was not the politician to be matched against the unscrupulous and all-accomplished Farnese; and indeed no man better than Willoughby could illustrate the enormous disadvantage under which Englishmen laboured at that epoch in their dealings with Italians and Spaniards.

The profuse indulgence in falsehood which characterized southern statesmanship, was more than a match for English love of truth.

English soldiers and negotiators went naked into a contest with enemies armed in a panoply of lies.

It was an unequal match, as we have already seen, and as we are soon more clearly to see.