In all former times, and centuries before the labour of Napoleon had
added so immensely to its importance, the Scheldt had been the centre
of the most important preparations for the invasion of England, and the
spot on which military genius always fixed from whence to prepare a
descent on this island. An immense expedition, rendered futile by the
weakness and vacillation of the French monarch, was assembled in it in
the fourteenth century; and sixty thousand men on the shore of the
Scheldt awaited only the signal of Charles VI. to set sail for the shore
of Kent. The greatest naval victory ever gained by the English arms was
that at Sluys, 1340, when Philip of France lost 30,000 men and 230
ships of war in an engagement off the Flemish coast with Edward III.,
a triumph greater, though less noticed in history, than either that
of Cressy or Poictiers. When the great Duke of Parma was commissioned
by Philip II. of Spain to take steps for the invasion of England, he
assembled the forces of the Low Countries at Antwerp; and the Spanish
armada, had it proved successful, was to have wafted over that great
commander from the banks of the Scheldt to the opposite shore of Essex,
at the head of the veterans who had been trained in the Dutch war. In
an evil hour, Charles II., bought by French gold and seduced by French
mistresses, entered into alliance with Louis XIV. for the coercion of
Holland; the Lillies and the Leopards, the navies of France and England,
assembled together at Spithead, and made sail for the French coast,
while the armies of the Grande Monarque advanced across the Rhine into
the heart of the United Provinces; and the consequence was, such a
prodigious addition to the power of France, as it took all the blood and
treasure expended in the war of the Succession and all the victories of
Marlborough, to reduce to a scale at all commensurate with the
independence of the other European states.
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