WHILST ENGLAND was traversing the revolutionary period on its arduous
course towards free government, France completed, with universal
applause, the structure of absolute monarchy. Neither Henry IV nor
Richelieu had done enough to secure the country against conspiracy,
disorder, and invasion. There was a relapse into civil war during
each minority, under Lewis XIII and Lewis XIV; the nobles and the
magistrates turned against the crown, and a prince of the blood,
Conde, commanded the Spaniards in a campaign on French soil against
the royal army. With the aid of Turenne, Mazarin triumphed over every
danger, and the young king was anointed in the Cathedral of Rheims.
In 1659, by the Peace of the Pyrenees, the cardinal terminated
victoriously the long war with Spain, which began in the middle of the
Thirty Years' War, and outlasted it, and established the supremacy of
France over the Continent. The one desire of France was the
concentration of power, that there might be safety abroad and order at
home. To ensure this, more was required than the genius of even the
most vigorous and astute ministers in the world. Neither Richelieu,
who was a bishop, nor Mazarin, who was a foreigner, could be
identified with the State. What was wanted had been wanting in France
for half a century--the personality of the king, monarchy personified,
with as much splendour, as much authority, as much ascendency, as
would fill the national imagination and satisfy national pride. The
history of Charles I, the restoration of Charles II, the outbreak of
loyal sentiment, which was stronger than religion, which was itself a
religion, showed that there was something in royalty higher than the
policy of statesmen, and more fitted to inspire the enthusiasm of
sacrifice.
At the death of Mazarin there was no man capable of being his
successor. Le Tellier, Colbert, Lionne were men of very great
ability, but they were departmental ministers. The young Monarch gave
orders that, as they had reported to the cardinal, they should now
report to himself. He added that they were to assist him with their
advice whenever he asked for it; and he did not make it appear that he
would trouble them often. The initiative of government passed into
his hands. He did not say, "L'etat, c'est moi." Those words, I
believe, were invented by Voltaire, but they are profoundly true. It
was the thing which occasion demanded, and he was the man suited to
the occasion.
Lewis XIV was by far the ablest man who was born in modern times on
the steps of a throne. He was laborious, and devoted nine hours a
day to public business. He had an excellent memory and immense
fertility of resource. Few men knew how to pursue such complex
political calculations, or to see so many moves ahead. He was patient
and constant and unwearied, and there is a persistent unity in his
policy, founded, not on likes and dislikes, but on the unvarying facts
in the political stage of Europe: Every European state was included in
his system, and had its part in the game. His management of each was
so dexterous that diplomacy often made war superfluous, and made it
successful. Lewis was not a born soldier like Swedish Charles and the
great Frederic. He never exercised an actual command. He would
appear at sieges when the psychological moment came, and ride
ceremoniously under fire, with his Jesuit confessor close at hand. His
fame was so large a part of the political capital of France, that a
pretence was made of believing in his generalship, and the king took
it quite seriously. He told his son to go to the wars and prove his
warlike quality, that the change, when his father died, might not be
too deeply felt. In many places he was accepted as a benefactor and a
That was generally the case in Switzerland, in Portugal, in Denmark
and Sweden, in Poland and Hungary, in parts of Germany, and in parts
of Italy. For in small countries public men poor and easily consented
to accept his gifts. In this way he strove to prevent coalitions and
to isolate his enemies. The enemies were Austria and the Netherlands.
Two facts governed the European situation. One was the break-up of
the imperial power in Germany, after the Thirty Years' War. The
effect of it was that France was fringed by a series of small
territories which were too feeble to defend themselves, and which
Germany was too feeble and too divided to protect. There were
Belgium, Liege, Luxemburg, Lorraine, Alsace, and Franche Comte. The
other overshadowing fact was the evident decay of Spain, of the royal
family as well as of the nation. Belgium, Luxemburg, and Franche
Comte were Spanish, and were therefore helpless. The acquisition
of these provinces was an inevitable element of his policy. That was
part of a far larger scheme. Philip IV had no son. His daughter,
Maria Theresa, was heir to his boundless dominions. As early as 1646
Mazarin resolved that his master should marry the Infanta, and that
Spain and the Indies, Naples and the Milanese, and the remnant of the
possessions of Charles the Bold, should be attached to the crown of
France. When the time came, and reluctant Spain consented, at the
treaty of the Pyrenees, Lewis was discovered to be in love with
another lady. Her name was Marie Mancini, the youngest of three
sisters, and she was the cardinal's own niece.
Mazarin, the ablest and most successful of ministers, had one damning
vice. He was shamefully avaricious. He amassed, in the service of the
State, therefore dishonestly, an income larger than that of the King
of England or the King of Spain. The necklace of pearls which he gave
to one of his nieces, and which is at Rome, is said to be still the
finest in existence. But Mazarin, though he was sordid and mean, was a
statesman of the highest rank. He sent his niece away, in spite of the
tears of Lewis, and the Spanish princess became Queen of France. The
independence of Spain, the unity of the Spanish empire, were too grand
a thing to be an item in the dowry of a bride. She was compelled to
renounce her rights, which were transferred to her sister. The
renunciation was conditional. It was to depend on the payment, in due
time, of the Infanta's fortune. As the payment was not made, the
French regarded the surrender as null and void, and the interest at
stake, the most splendid inheritance on earth, was one that could not
be given up without a conflict. From the moment of the marriage the
main object of French policy was to make the succession secure, by
negotiation or force, and to take every advantage otherwise of Spanish
weakness.
All these plans were doomed to a terrible disappointment. In 1665
Philip of Spain died; but he had married again, and left a son, who
became king, in his cradle, under the name of Charles II. The new
king was sickly and backward, and it was expected that he would die
young, unmarried, and childless. Meantime, the fulfilment of French
hopes was postponed for a generation, and the Spanish succession was
opened, not at the beginning of Lewis's reign, but at the end. He
recovered from the blow by a device to acquire part of the Spanish
empire, no longer having a hope of the whole. The device was
suggested by Turenne. His experience in the Fronde taught him the
danger of having the Spaniards so near, in the valley of the
Somme. "Whenever there is trouble in France," he said, "the enemy can
be at Paris in four days." In self-defence, for security rather than
aggrandisement, the frontier must be pushed back. He caused his
secretary to compose a treatise, showing that, by the custom of
Brabant, that province devolved on the queen, Maria Theresa. It was
the custom there that the children of a first marriage should suffer
no loss if their father married again. What would have been their
estate, remained their estate. The fee simple passed to them. The
father enjoyed a life-interest only, without the power of disposal.
The French government argued that, by the analogy of the Salic Law,
the principle which applied to property applied to sovereignty, and
that what was good for a manor was good for a crown. And they assumed
that the custom of Brabant was the law of Belgium.
This is the right of Devolution, with which the king's aggressive
career began, and his first war was the war of Devolution, or, as
they say in France, the war for the rights of the queen. Those rights
consisted of consolation claims set up after the wreck of the dream of
universal empire. They presented abundant matter for dispute, but
they were worth disputing, even by the last argument of kings.
The Power most concerned was not Spain, but the Netherlands. For
Spain, the Belgic provinces were in outlying dependency, involving
international complications. For Holland, they were a rampart. The
government of the States was in the hands of John de Witt and the
Republicans. They were held in check by the partisans of the House of
Orange, which, in the last generation, had put the republican leader,
the real predecessor of De Witt, to death. The feud was there,
faction was not appeased, and De Witt dreaded the day when the Orange
party should recover power. The Prince of Orange was only 17. When
war came in sight, the Perpetual Edict excluded him from the position
which his family had occupied, by forbidding the Stadtholder from
being at the same time Commander of the Forces. De Witt was not
afraid of a naval war. His brother was the admiral, and it was he who
sailed up the Thames. But war on land would bring the young William
forward. De Witt made every possible concession, hoping to prevent
it. Rather than fight the French, he was willing to agree to a
partition of the Belgic provinces. Already, he was at war with
England, and the sea-fights had been indecisive. Resistance to France
on land was out of the question, except by means of a Coalition, and
as no Coalition could be hoped for, Holland stood aside, while Turenne
overran Flanders. The Austrian Habsburgs did not interfere to protect
the Spanish branch, although they were its heirs. In case his son
should die, Philip IV had left his entire monarchy to his second
daughter, who was married to the Emperor Leopold. It would remain in
the family; whereas, if the French queen had not renounced, it would
be swallowed up in the dominions of a stranger--that was the point of
view of a Spaniard. The Austrian viewed things differently. He knew
perfectly well that France would not be bound by an act which belonged
not to the world of real politics, but to the waste-paper basket.
Therefore, when France proposed an eventual partition, it seemed
important to obtain a more serious and more binding contract than the
queen's renunciation. The conditions were not unfavourable to the
imperial interest. As there were several other partition treaties,
none of which were carried out, the terms of this, the first, need not
occupy us. The treaty was not meant to govern the future, but the
present. It helped to keep the Emperor tranquil during the spoliation
of his Spanish kinsman.
Within a week of the first treaty of partition, Sir William Temple
concluded the Triple Alliance. Deserted by Austria, De Witt turned to
England. He sent his fleet to destroy the British men-of-war in the
Medway, and this catastrophe, coming so soon after the plague and the
fire of London, was too much for the feeble spirit of Charles and his
ministers. They made peace, allied themselves with Holland and with
Sweden, and the progress of the French was arrested. The Triple
Alliance was the earliest of that series of coalitions which ended by
getting the better of the power of Lewis XIV, and is therefore a
landmark in History. But there was nothing lasting in it; the rivalry
of the two commercial countries was not to be reconciled by
politicians. England was on the side of the Prince of Orange, and
desired that he should become sovereign. William had resolved, during
the very negotiations that prepared the alliance, that the way to ruin
De Witt was to exhibit him to Lewis in the light of a friend of the
English. After having been conciliatory to the edge of weakness, he
had turned suddenly into an enemy. Lewis could not continue the war
because of the maritime superiority of his united opponents. He made
peace, restoring Franche Comte, which Conde had occupied, and
contenting himself with an extended frontier in Flanders. Lille,
which had been taken by Vauban, in an otherwise inglorious campaign,
was converted into a great French stronghold. That was the result.
These events exhibit Lewis in his prime, while Colbert and Lionne were
living, and were able to balance the sinister influence of Louvois.
It was a war of ambition, undertaken after the shock of the loss of
Spain and of all that belonged to it. It was not begun from a sense
of right and duty. But the advantage was not pushed to the bitter
end; the terms agreed upon were reasonable; part of the conquests were
restored. Lewis proved himself capable of moderation, of
self-command, even of generosity. The outrageous violence and tyranny
of later years were not immediately apparent. He withdrew from the
fray, preparing for another spring. Then he would avenge himself on
John de Witt, and conquer Belgium in Holland. De Witt was the most
enlightened statesman in Europe, but he was not a war minister.
England was easily detached from him in the hope that the Prince of
Orange might be supreme; and Lewis agreed to whatever was necessary,
that the English fleet might be on his side. Thus the Triple Alliance
was dissolved, and the Dover Treaty took its place. The help afforded
by the English fleet in the Dutch war fell short of expectation, but
the effect of the agreement was to blot out England for many years.
De Witt, unable to face the storm, offered advantageous terms, which
were rejected, and then resigned office. The Prince of Orange took
the command of the army; but, at the approach of the French, eighty-
three Dutch fortresses opened their gates. At The Hague De Witt and
his brother were torn to pieces by an Orange mob, and Holland saved
itself by letting in the ocean.
William of Orange, never a very successful general, was a good
negotiator, and, excepting his own uncle Charles II, he soon had
Europe on his side. The French were driven over the Vosges by the
Imperialists. Turenne, in his last campaign, reconquered Alsace,
crossed the Rhine, and gave battle to Montecucculi. He fell, and his
army retired. Lewis XIV, to mark the greatness of the loss, at once
named six new marshals of France. Montecucculi resigned his
command. Having had the honour, he said, of fighting Turenne, and
having even defeated him, he would not risk his reputation against men
who were the small change for the great man who was dead. Lewis XIV
had 220,000 men under arms. Conde defeated William at Senef. As often
as Vauban defended a fortress, he held it; as often as he besieged a
fortress, it fell. The balance of victory inclined to France. England
gave no assistance, and the Prince of Orange came over, married the
eldest of the princesses, immensely strengthening his own position,
and hastening the conclusion of peace.
The peace of Nimeguen gave to Lewis XIV that predominant authority
over Europe which he retained undiminished, and even increased, during
at least ten years. He acquired a further portion of Belgium,
strengthening his frontier on the threatened line; he annexed Franche
Comte and he recovered Alsace. He had shown himself to be aggressive
and unscrupulous, but his military power was equal to his pretensions;
he was true to his humbler allies; his diplomatic foresight, and the
art of his combinations, were a revelation to his contemporaries.
They also knew that they would never be safe from renewed attack, as
the larger half of the coveted region, in the Low Countries,
Luxemburg, and Lorraine, was still unabsorbed. His interest was
clearly recognised. His policy had been openly declared. With so
much ambition, capacity, and power, the future was easy to foretell.
In the position he had acquired, and with the qualities he had shown,
he would be as dangerous in peace as in war. Coalitions alone could
resist him, and a coalition could only be a work of time and patience.
When the alliance which had opposed him with unequal fortune was
dissolved, a season of peril would ensue, for which no defensive
provision could be made.
The keystone of the situation was the assured inaction of England.
Whilst that lasted, at least while Charles II lived, Lewis would defy
the rest of Europe. He had nothing to fear except the Stadtholder.
Whilst De Witt governed, the French attack was irresistible. But the
Perpetual Edict was repealed, and William of Orange was captain-general
for life. He had saved his country, driven out the French, raised
Europe against them. The merchants of Amsterdam, who, in 1672,
were preparing to sail for Batavia, as the Puritans sailed for New
England, were now the second Power in Europe politically, and
commercially by far the first. William of Orange, to whose
international genius the change was due, stood very near the
succession to the English throne. In the course of nature it would be
his some day, by right of his wife, or by his own. And there was hope
for European independence and the existence of free communities, if
the resources of England passed to William earlier than the resources
of Spain fell into the hands of Lewis. After the peace, that was the
problem of general politics.
The treaties of Nimeguen were far from satisfying the aspirations of
Lewis. He dismissed his foreign minister. Pomponne was the most
honourable man in his service, and had conducted with eminent
dexterity and success the negotiations for the numerous treaties with
every country. Lewis says that he was deficient in the energy and the
greatness requisite in executing the orders of a king of France who
had not been without good fortune. Pomponne came into office in 1671
and left it in 1679, so that he was not compromised by the derisive
claim of devolution, or by the yet more hollow sophistry of reunion,
by which Lewis now proceeded to push his advantage. His dismissal
announced to the nations what they had to look for. It meant that the
profit of Nimeguen was not enough, that the greatness of the French
monarch exacted further sacrifices.
After the peace Lewis kept up his army. There were 112,000 men under
arms, and there were cadres for twice as many more. With that force
in hand, he proceeded to raise new claims, consequential, he said, on
the late favourable treaties. He said that the territories ceded to
France ought to be ceded with their dependencies, with such portions
as had formerly belonged to them, and had been detached in the course
of ages. And the parliaments of Lorraine, Alsace, and Franche Comte
were directed to ascertain what places there were, what fragments
under feudal tenure, to which that retrospective principle applied.
They were called chambers, or courts, of reunion, and they enumerated
certain small districts, which the French troops accordingly occupied.
All this was futile skirmishing. The real object was Strasburg.
Alsace was French, but Strasburg, the capital, that is, the capital of
Lower Alsace, was imperial. It was the most important place on the
road between Paris and Vienna, for it commanded the passage of the
only river which crossed and barred the way. Situated on the left
bank, it was the gate of France; and twice in the late war it had
admitted the Imperialists, and opened the way to Paris. The bishop,
Furstenberg, belonged to a great German family that was devoted to
the French interest; but the town was Protestant.
Up to that moment, 1681, religious antagonism had not added much to
the acerbity of the conflict. Spain and Austria were the enemies of
Lewis; Sweden and Denmark were his allies. Brandenburg accepted his
gifts, in money, in jewels, in arras. England was his humble friend.
But a change was approaching; and it began when Furstenberg first said
mass in Strasburg minster, and preached from the text "Nunc Dimittis."
Vauban at once arrived, and erected an impregnable barrier, and a
medal was struck bearing the inscription: "Clausa Germanis Gallia."
On the same day as Strasburg, the French occupied Casale. This was a
fortress closing the road between the duchy of Savoy and the duchy of
Milan, and commanding the line of the Po. It belonged to Montferrat,
which was a dependency of Mantua; but the duke had his price, and he
sold the right of occupation to the French. The agreement had been
concluded three years before, but it had been betrayed by the duke's
minister, and it had become necessary to await a more convenient
occasion. The French government did not scruple to have an
obstructive adversary put out of the way. Louvois gave orders that
Lisola, the Austrian statesman who exposed the scheme of devolution,
should be seized, and added that it would be no harm if he was killed.
His son commissioned Grandval to murder William III.
The traitor of Casale met with a more terrible fate than a pistol shot
or the stroke of a dagger. He suddenly disappeared, and no man ever
looked upon his face again. His existence was forgotten, and when he
died, long after, nobody knew who he was. In the dismal register of
the dead who died in the Bastille he is entered under the name of
Marchiali. Fifty years later he began to fix the attention of the
world, and became a fascinating enigma. For Marchiali means Mattioli,
who was the man in the Iron Mask. That is, of course, there was no man
in the Iron Mask; the material was more merciful than that; and the
name which has become so famous is as false as the one in which the
victim of tyranny was buried.
Whilst Lewis pursued his career of annexation, the empire was disabled
by war with the Turks and by troubles in Hungary. In 1683 the grand
vizier besieged Vienna, and would have taken it but for the imperial
allies, the Elector of Saxony, the Duke of Lorraine, and the King of
Poland. After the relief of the capital they carried the war down the
Danube, and Leopold was once more the head of a powerful military
empire. It was too late to interfere with French conquests.
Luxemburg was added to the series in 1684, and an armistice of twenty
years practically, though not finally, sanctioned what had been done
since Nimeguen. When the four great fortresses had become
French--Lille, Besancon, Strasburg, and Luxemburg--and when the empire
succumbed, recognising all these acts of entirely unprovoked
aggression, Lewis attained the highest level of his reign. He owed it
to his army, but also to his diplomacy, which was pre-eminent. He
owed it, too, to the intellectual superiority of France at the time,
and to the perfection which the language reached just then. The
thinking of Europe was done for it by Frenchmen, and French
literature, penetrating and predominant everywhere, was a serious
element of influence.
In all the work of these brilliant years there was increase of power
and territorial agglomeration; there was no internal growth or
political development. The one thing wanted was that the king should
be great and the country powerful. The object of interest was the
State, not the nation, and prosperity did not keep pace with
power. The people were oppressed and impoverished for the greater
glory of France. Colbert trebled the public revenue, but he did not
make it depend on the growth of private incomes or the execution of
useful public works. In 1683 Colbert died, and Louvois, the son of Le
Tellier, became supreme minister.
The queen's death, about the same time, caused a greater change. The
king married Madame de Maintenon. He had been unfaithful to his first
wife, but now he was a model husband. The second wife, who never
became a queen, and was never acknowledged, ruled over his later
years. She was the most cultivated, thoughtful, and observant of
women. She had been a Protestant, and retained, for a long time, the
zeal of a convert. She was strongly opposed to the Jansenists, and
was much in the confidence of the best men among the clergy. It was
universally believed that she promoted persecution, and urged the king
to revoke the Edict of Nantes. Her letters are produced in evidence.
But her letters have been tampered with by an editor, who was a forger
and a falsifier.
The Revocation required no such specific agency, but proceeded by
consistent logic, from the tenor of the reign. The theory of
government, which is that which Bossuet borrowed from Hobbes, and
clothed in the language of Scripture, does not admit that a subject
should have a will, a conviction, a conscience of his own, but expects
that the spiritual side of him shall be sacrificed to the sovereign,
like his blood and treasure. Protestant liberties, respected by
Richelieu and still more entirely by Mazarin, who acknowledged the
loyalty of Huguenots in the Fronde, became an exotic, an anachronism,
a contradiction, and a reproach, as absolute monarchy rose to the
zenith. The self-government of the Gallican Church, the administration
of the clergy by the clergy, was reduced to the narrowest limits, and
the division of power between Church and State was repressed in favour
of the State. It could not be borne, in the long-run, that
Protestants should govern themselves, while Catholics could not.
The clergy, zealous for the extinction of Jansenism, naturally
extended their zeal against those who were more hostile to their
Church than Jansenists. Everything else was required to give way to
the governing will, and to do honour to the sovereign. The
Protestants, under their protecting immunity, were a belated and
contumelious remnant of quite another epoch. Exceptions which were
tolerable under the undeveloped monarchy were revolting when it had
grown to its radiant perfection. The one thing wanting was the
Revocation, to abolish the memory of an age in which a king whose
throne was insecure conceded to turbulent and disloyal subjects that
which the sovereign of a loyal and submissive people would do well to
revoke. To fulfil the ideal of royalty, the monument of the weakness
of royalty and the strength of revolution must be ingeniously hidden
away. The ardour of rising absolutism is the true cause of the
Revocation.
William III explained it in another way. He said that the purpose was
to sow suspicion and dissension between Protestant and Catholic
Powers, by showing that the Catholics at heart, desired to extinguish
the Protestant religion. Such a suspicion, properly fanned, would
make alliances and coalitions impossible between them. The Waldenses
then survived in one or two valleys of Piedmont, much assimilated to
the Swiss Calvinists. Lewis required that they should be put down by
force, and, when the Duke of Savoy hesitated, offered to supply the
necessary troops. This extraordinary zeal, indicating that the spirit
of persecution was common to all, and was not stimulated by causes
peculiar to France, supplies the only evidence we have to sustain
William's interpretation.
It is well to be rational when we can, and never, without compulsion,
to attribute motives of passion, or prejudice, or ignorance as a
factor in politics. But it is necessary to remember that the Plot was
only six years old. The French government knew all about it, and was
in the secret of the papers destroyed by Coleman. To them it must
have appeared that the English were turned into ferocious assassins by
the mere force of their religious belief. There was no visible reason
why such things should be in England and not in France, why a majority
should be more easily carried away than a minority, or why High Church
Anglicans should be more prone to murder a priest or a friar than
extreme Calvinists, with whom it was a dogmatic certainty that
Catholics were governed by Antichrist.
The Gallican clergy were divided. Several bishops condemned the
action of the government, then or afterwards. The great majority
promoted or encouraged it, not all by a revival of the persecuting
spirit, but partly in the belief that the barriers were falling, and
that the Churches were no longer irreconcilable. They were impressed
by the fact that Protestantism had outgrown and discarded Luther, that
Arminians in Holland, the Lutherans of the University of Helmstedt,
the French schools of Sedan and Saumur, the Caroline divines in
England, and even Puritans like Leighton and Baxter, were as much
opposed as themselves to the doctrine of justification, which was the
origin of the Protestant movement. At the same time, the abuses which
roused Luther's opposition had disappeared, if not everywhere, at
least in France. Between Protestants in that later variation and
Gallicans, the difference was not that which subsisted with
Ultramontanes. Bossuet and two Englishmen, Holden and Cocker, drew up
statements of what they acknowledged to be essentials in religion,
which were very unlike the red-hot teaching of Salamanca and Coimbra.
As the Protestants were no longer the Protestants who had seceded, the
Catholics were no longer the Catholics who had cast them out. The
best men of the Sorbonne were as unlike Tetzel and Prierias as Leibniz
was unlike John Knox. It was unscientific, it was insincere, to
regard the present controversy as a continuation of the old.
These sentiments were very heartily reciprocated among the Lutherans,
and people spoke much of a misunderstanding, and represented the
Reformation as the result of the unfinished theology, the defective
knowledge of Church history, in the sixteenth century. Thus it was
that nobody went further than Bossuet at one time in the direction of
union, and nobody was more strongly in favour of the harsh measures of
Louvois. If the policy of the Revocation had been to divide the
European Powers, it proved a failure; for it helped to make them
coalesce.
In the following year, 1686, a league was concluded at Augsburg
between the emperor, part of the empire, Spain, Sweden, and the
Netherlands. This was the old story. Against nearly the same
combination of discordant forces Lewis had held his own in the Dutch
war and the negotiations of Nimeguen. England was wanting. William
attempted to bring over his father-in-law, and, having failed by
friendly arts, undertook to compel him. The Revolution threw the
weight of England into the scales, and the war that ensued became the
war of the Grand Alliance.
This was the turn in the fortunes of Lewis. He ravaged twenty miles
of the Palatinate for the sake of a claim on the part of the Duchess
of Orleans, who was a Princess Palatine. His armies were victorious,
as usual, at Steenkerk and at Landen. The English were driven to the
north-eastern extremity of Ireland; and Trouville had better reason
than Van Tromp to fix a broom at his masthead. And then Ireland was
lost. The French fleet was destroyed, by very superior numbers, at La
Hogue, and the Grand Alliance, aided at last by the ships, and the
men, and the money of England, bore down the resistance of exhausted
France. William was acknowledged King of England at the close of a
struggle which had begun twenty-five years before. Lewis, having
formally offered to support James's election to the throne of Poland,
when Sobieski died, gave him up. Vauban complained that the war had
been too prosperous on the Continent to justify so disastrous a
termination.
From the peace of Ryswick the lengthening shadow of the Spanish
succession falls upon the scene, and occupies the last years alike of
William, of Leopold, and of Lewis. It was known that the King of
Spain could not live long; and as the prize came near, Europe, for
four years, was hushed in expectation.