1672-1678
William elected Stadtholder of Holland--Murder of the De Witts
--Campaign of 1672-3--Successes of the Prince--Declared
hereditary Stadtholder--Progress of the French arms--Marriage
with Mary--Negotiations of Nimeguen--Conclusion of the Peace
--Battle of St. Denis.
Louis XIV., like other military malefactors before and since, was
himself the creator of the enemy by whom his power was to be shaken to
its foundations. His invasion of the United Provinces, an enterprise
commenced with that contempt of public right in which no other potentate
has ever equalled him, and prosecuted with that barbarity in which only
Oriental conquerors have ever surpassed him, was the means of raising to
power the one European foe by whom he was destined to be successfully
withstood. The municipal party, unduly absorbed in the task of
safeguarding the liberties of their country against the supposed
ambitions of a single fellow-countryman, had wholly neglected the
protection of its very existence against the known ambitions of a
foreign aggressor. Most of their veteran troops had been disbanded; the
greatest posts in their armies were in the hands of unskilled civilians;
cities garrisoned with considerable forces of soldiery opened their
gates and surrendered without firing a gun. Popular indignation rose
high. Upon William, always a favourite among the commonalty, and the
inheritor of a name ennobled not only by civil wisdom but by military
exploits, all eyes were turned. An insurrection in his favour took place
at Dort, and the magistrates of that city, intimidated by the clamour of
the people, passed an ordinance repealing the perpetual edict, and made
him Stadtholder. Other cities followed their example, and the
States-General of the provinces confirmed their decrees. The two De
Witts, John and his brother Cornelius, now the objects of popular
suspicion and hatred, were assassinated in a street riot; and the
people, as if inspired with new courage by the restoration of a Prince
of Orange to a position from which princes of that name had so often led
them to victory, turned fiercely upon their French invaders. Five
thousand of Louis's troops were repulsed before Ardenburg by the bravery
of no more than two hundred burghers, assisted by the women and children
of the town, and one hundred garrison soldiers. The citizens of
Groningen, aided by the spirited students of its university, defended
themselves with equal vigour and good fortune against the warlike Bishop
of Munster, at the head of 30,000 soldiers, compelling him to raise the
siege. It was evident that a Dutch conquest was going to be no mere
military promenade, as had first appeared to promise, and Louis thought
it advisable to negotiate. To the chief of a state so desperately bested
as were the United Provinces at that moment, the terms offered to
William by the French monarch,--no less than the sovereignty of his
country under the protection of England and France,--might well have
appeared tempting. William rejected them with scorn. He would never, he
said, "betray the trust of his country that his ancestors had so long
defended." Solicitations addressed to him in the same sense by England
met with the same reply. To Buckingham, who had pressed them upon him,
and warned him that "if he persisted in his present humour he must
unavoidably see the final ruin of his cause," he made the Spartan answer
that he "had one way still left not to see that ruin completed, which
was to die in the last dyke."
The winter of 1672-3 had stopped the progress of the French for the
time, but William was unwilling to allow it to arrest his own action. He
laid siege to the town of Woerden, and, though forced by the Duke of
Luxembourg to retreat from it, inflicted heavy losses upon the enemy.
Then, having invested Tongres, captured Walcheren, and demolished Binch,
he himself retired reluctantly into winter quarters. In the following
spring he besieged and took Naerden, and later on in the year achieved a
still more important triumph in the capture of Bonn, which had been put
into the hands of France at the beginning of the war. New honours now
began to be contemplated by his grateful countrymen for their stout
defender. The Stadtholdership of Holland and West Friesland was not only
confirmed to him for life, but was settled upon his heirs male; and on
the same day the like dignity was conferred on him by the States of
Zealand--an example shortly afterwards followed by those of Utrecht. Nor
were his successes without effect upon his enemies. Charles, with whose
subjects the war had never been popular, concluded a peace with him
after these two summers of fighting, and offered his mediation between
the powers still at war, an offer which was accepted by France. Four
years, however, were to elapse, and many souls of brave men to be sent
to Hades, before this mediation took effect in a concluded peace. In the
summer of 1674 was fought the fiercest engagement of the whole war--the
bloody and indecisive battle of Seneff, in which William was pitted
against the renowned Prince of Condé. The young Prince had too much to
gain in reputation not to be eager to provoke a battle, and the old
soldier too much to lose to be willing to accept one if it could be
avoided; but William succeeded in his object. Condé was at first
victorious in an encounter between a portion of the two armies, but he
imprudently brought on a general battle, which, after raging furiously
for a whole day, left both parties to claim the victory--"the allies
because they were last upon the field, and the French on the strength of
the great number of prisoners and standards they had carried off." "But
whoever had the honour," adds Sir William Temple, "both had the loss."
It was on this occasion that Condé paid his famous compliment to the
Prince by describing him as having acted like an old general throughout
the action in every respect save that of having "exposed himself like a
young recruit."
For yet another four years, as has been said, this struggle continued to
rage, and, as it raged, to store up in his heart that exhaustless fund
of resentment against Louis which underwent hardly any depletion till
the day of his death. Several times were attempts made to detach William
from his Spanish allies and to induce him to conclude a separate peace,
but he remained firm against all such solicitations of betrayal. In vain
did Arlington, specially commissioned for that purpose, endeavour to
tempt him to the desertion of his allies by the offer of an English
matrimonial alliance. William simply replied that his fortunes were not
in a condition for him to think of a wife. Louis, however, was extremely
desirous of peace on any honourable terms, and William, to meet him
half-way, put forward a counter-proposal of a marriage between the King
of Spain and the eldest daughter of the Duke of Orleans, to whom France
should give in dowry the late conquered places in Flanders. This
ingenious proposal for reconciling the vindication of Spanish and Dutch
interests on the Flemish frontier with the maintenance of French
military honour, can scarcely have been made with any other purpose than
that of putting France in the wrong. William knew probably that it would
not square with Louis's existing hopes and pretensions, and that whether
Charles pressed it upon his cousin or not, it was pretty certain that no
more would be heard of it. For the present, moreover, he was under no
pressure to make a peace at all. The United Provinces had recovered
their confidence and hopefulness, and were full of admiration for and
attachment to their young leader. He had been actually offered the
sovereignty of Guelderland, and though his politic moderation induced
him to refuse it, opinion among the other provinces was divided as to
the propriety of his rejecting the offer. Nothing, however, could have
more strikingly illustrated the commanding position which he had
attained among his countrymen than the complete paralysis which
overcame them in 1675, during the fortunately brief period of the
Prince's suffering from a dangerous attack of smallpox. From this
disease, so fatal to his race, he recovered with apparent promptitude,
but it is only too probable that it left deep traces behind it on his
congenitally feeble frame.
After much dispute the scene of the peace negotiations had been fixed at
Nimeguen, and the Congress met there in the month of July 1676. But the
diplomatists there were still to deliberate for two years while armies
were fighting; and if William could have prevented it, the peace would
not have been made even as soon as it was. The next two years, however,
were on the whole years of success for France and of defeat for the
allies; and early in 1677 William, of his own accord, revived a project
to which, when previously broached to him, he had refused to listen. The
terms submitted to him during the deliberations at Nimeguen were
intolerable, and yet, though he obstinately refused to accept them, town
after town was falling before the French arms, and his country was at
last beginning to weary of the struggle. If he must at last be forced to
assent to distasteful conditions, why not, as the price of his assent,
obtain for himself a matrimonial alliance which, besides bringing him a
step nearer to the English throne, would immensely strengthen his
position as a representative of the Protestant cause in Europe. A year
before he had sounded Temple as to a proposal for the hand of his cousin
Mary, the Duke of York's eldest daughter; and had been encouraged by
that ambassador to hope for success in his suit. He now more formally
pressed it, selecting the moment with considerable astuteness. Neither
Charles nor James had any liking for the match, but the King was in the
midst of a struggle with his Parliament; his subserviency to Louis was
inflaming popular resentment against him, and a marriage of his niece to
William, more especially if it could be made the means of bringing about
a peace, appeared to promise the only means of extricating himself from
his difficulties. Danby, his minister, moreover, was just at that moment
trembling for his head, and was prepared to exert himself to the utmost
to save it by the only means available--the detachment of his master
from the French alliance. William was reluctantly invited to England,
and it is clear, in the whole history of the affair, that he felt
himself from the moment of his arrival to be _dominus contractûs_. With
respect to the question whether the business of the marriage should be
arranged before that of the peace or _vice versâ_, William insisted upon
his own order of procedure, and procured its adoption. Charles consented
to the marriage, and compelled the assent of his brother. The
States-General, communicated with by express, immediately signified
their approval; and William, who had fortunately found the person and
manners of his cousin highly attractive to him, was married hurriedly
and privately at eleven o'clock on the night of the 4th of November
1677, the anniversary of his birth. The King of England did his best to
reconcile his brother of France to a match, the news of which, our
ambassador at the French Court told Danby, he received "as he would have
done the loss of an army," by representing it as an important step
towards a peace; but William returned home with his bride, pledged only
to his uncle to accept a basis of peace which was to a large extent, if
not entirely, of his own formulation, and far more liberal to the allies
than anything which France had proposed. Louis, however, was to get his
own way after all. The United Provinces were now heartily sick of the
war, and were, moreover, not uninfluenced by a party hostile to William,
who felt or feigned apprehension of his designs upon the liberties of
the Republic. The States-General accepted the articles of France, and
having by their constitution the absolute power of peace and war, they
were able, on the 11th of August, to conclude a treaty over William's
head. Three days after the Prince, unaware, officially at least, that
the signatures had been actually affixed to the treaty, made a dash upon
the army of Luxembourg, then besieging Mons, and after a desperate
encounter secured one of the most brilliant successes of the war. The
next morning, however, advices arrived from the Hague of the conclusion
of the peace, and William had the mortification of feeling that the
fruits of a victory which had opened a way for the allies into the
country of their enemy were to remain ungathered.