Chapter XLIV: Louis Xiv., His Wars and His Conquests. 1661-1697 (3)

At one moment, in fact, Louis XIV. raised fresh pretensions. He wished to keep the places on the Meuse, until the Swedes, almost invariably unfortunate in their hostilities with Denmark and Brandenburg, should have been enabled to win back what they had lost. This was to postpone peace indefinitely. The English Parliament and Holland were disgusted, and concluded a new alliance. The Spaniards were preparing to take up arms again. The king, who had returned to the army, all at once cut the knot. “The day I arrived at the camp,” writes Louis XIV., I received news from London apprising mee that the King of England would bind himself to join me in forcing my enemies to make peace, if I consented to add something to the conditions he had already proposed. I had a battle over this proposal, but the public good, joined to the glory of gaining a victory over myself, prevailed over the advantage I might have hoped for from war. I replied to the King of England that I was quite willing to make the treaty he proposed to me, and, at the same time, I wrote to the States General a letter, stronger than the first, being convinced that, since they were wavering, they ought not to have time given them to take counsel upon the subject of peace with their allies, who did not want it.” Beverninck went to visit the king at Ghent; and he showed so much ability that the special peace concluded by his pains received, in Holland, the name of Beverninck’s peace. “I settled more business in an hour with M. de Beverninck than the plenipotentiaries would have been able to conclude in several days,” said Louis XIV.; “the care I had taken to detach the allies one from another, overwhelmed them to such an extent, that they were constrained to submit to the conditions of which I had declared myself in favor at the commencement of my negotiations. I had resolved to make peace, but I wished to conclude one that would be glorious for me and advantageous for my kingdom. I wished to recompense myself, by means of the places that were essential, for the probable conquests I was losing, and to console myself for the conclusion of a war which I was carrying on with pleasure and success. Amidst such turmoil, then, I was quite tranquil, and saw nothing but advantage for myself, whether the war went on or peace were made.”

All difficulties were smoothed away Sweden had given up all stipulations for her advantage; the firm will of France had triumphed over the vacillations of Charles II. and the allies. “The behavior of the French in all this was admirable,” says Sir W. Temple, an experienced diplomatist, long versed in all the affairs of Europe, “whilst our own counsels and behavior resembled those floating islands which winds and tide drive from one side to the other.”

On the 10th of August, in the evening, the special peace between Holland and France was signed after twenty-four hours’ conference. The Prince of Orange had concentrated all his forces near Mons, confronting Marshal Luxembourg, who occupied the plateau of Casteau; he had no official news as yet from Nimeguen, and on the 14th he began the engagement outside the abbey of St. Denis. The affair was a very murderous one, and remained indecisive: it did more honor to the military skill of the Prince of Orange than to his loyalty. Holland had not lost an inch of her territory during this war; so long, so desperate, and notoriously undertaken in order to destroy her; she had spent much money, she had lost many men, she had shaken the confidence of her allies by treating alone and being the first to treat, but she had furnished a chief to the European coalition, and she had shown an example of indomitable resistance; the States General and the Prince of Orange alone, besides Louis XIV., came the greater out of the struggle. The King of England had lost all consideration both at home and abroad, and Spain paid all the expenses of the war.

Peace was concluded on the 17th of September, thanks to the energetic intervention of the Hollanders. The king restored Courtray, Audenarde, Ath, and Charleroi, which had been given him by the treaty of Aix-la- Chapelle, Ghent, Linmburg, and St. Ghislain; but he kept by definitive right St. Omer, Cassel, Aire, Ypres, Cambray, Bouchain, Valenciennes, and all Franche-Comte; henceforth he possessed in the north of France a line of places extending from Dunkerque to the Meuse; the Spanish monarchy was disarmed.

It still required a successful campaign under Marshal Crequi to bring the emperor and the German princes over to peace; exchanges of territory and indemnities re-established the treaty of Westphalia on all essential points. The Duke of Lorraine refused the conditions on which the king proposed to restore to him his duchy; so Louis XIV. kept Lorraine.

The King of France was at the pinnacle of his greatness and power. “Singly against all,” as Louvois said, he had maintained the struggle against Europe, and he came out of it victorious; everywhere, with good reason, was displayed his proud device, _Nec pluribus impar_. “My will alone,” says Louis XIV. in his Memoires, “concluded this peace, so much desired by those on whom it did not depend; for, as to my enemies, they feared it as much as the public good made me desire it, and that prevailed on this occasion over the gain and personal glory I was likely to find in the continuation of the war. . . . I was in full enjoyment of my good fortune and the fruits of my good conduct, which had caused me to profit by all the occasions I had met with for extending the borders of my kingdom at the expense of my enemies.”

“Here is peace made,” wrote Madame de Sevigne to the Count of Bussy. “The king thought it handsomer to grant it this year to Spain and Holland than to take the rest of Flanders; he is keeping that for another time.”

The Prince of Orange thought as Madame de Seigne: he regarded the peace of Nimeguen as a truce, and a truce fraught with danger to Europe. For that reason did he soon seek to form alliances in order to secure the repose of the world against the insatiable ambition of King Louis XIV. Intoxicated by his successes and the adulation of his court, the King of France no longer brooked any objections to his will or any limits to his desires. The poison of absolute power had done its work. Louis XIV. considered the “office of king” grand, noble, delightful, “for he felt himself worthy of acquitting himself well in all matters in which he engaged.” “The ardor we feel for glory,” he used to say, “is not one of those feeble passions which grow dull by possession; its favors, which are never to be obtained without effort, never, on the other hand, cause disgust, and whoever can do without longing for fresh ones is unworthy of all he has received.”

Standing at the king’s side and exciting his pride and ambition, Louvois had little by little absorbed all the functions of prime minister without bearing the title. Colbert alone resisted him, and he, weary of the struggle, was about to succumb before long (1683), driven to desperation by the burdens that the wars and the king’s luxury caused to weigh heavily upon France. Peace had not yet led to disarmament; an army of a hundred and forty thousand men remained standing, ever ready to uphold the rights of France during the long discussions over the regulation of the frontiers. In old papers ancient titles were found, and by degrees the villages, Burghs, and even principalities, claimed by King Louis XIV. were re-united quietly to France; King Charles XI. was thus alienated, in consequence of the seizure of the countship of Deux-Ponts, to which Sweden laid claim. Strasburg was taken by a surprise. This free city had several times violated neutrality during the war; Louvois had kept up communications inside the place; suddenly he had the approaches and the passage over the Rhine occupied by thirty-five thousand men on the night between the 16th and 17th of September, 1681; the burgesses sent up to ask aid from the emperor, but the messengers were arrested; on the 30th Strasburg capitulated, and Louis XIV. made his triumphant entry there on the 24th of October. “Nobody,” says a letter of the day, “can recover from the consternation caused by the fact that the French have taken Strasburg without firing a single shot; everybody says it is one of the wheels of the chariot to be used for a drive into the empire, and that the door of Elsass is shut from this moment.”

The very day of the surrender of Strasburg (September 30, 1681), Catinat, with a corps of French troops, entered Casale, sold to Louis XIV. by the Duke of Mantua. The king thought to make sure of Piedmont by marrying his niece, Monsieur’s daughter, to the Duke of Savoy, Victor-Amadeo, quite a boy, delicate and taciturn, at loggerheads with his mother and with her favorites. Marie Louise d’Orleans, elder sister of the young Duchess of Savoy, had married the King of Spain, Charles II., a sickly creature of weak intellect. Louis XIV. felt the necessity of forming new alliances; the old supports of France had all gone over to the enemy. Sweden and Holland were already allied to the empire; the German princes joined the coalition. The Prince of Orange, with an ever-vigilant eye on the frequent infractions of the treaties which France permitted herself to commit, was quietly negotiating with his allies, and ready to take up arms to meet the common danger. “He was,” says Massillon, “a prince profound in his views, skilful in forming leagues and banding spirits together, more successful in exciting wars than on the battle-field, more to be feared in the privacy of the closet than at the head of armies, a prince and an enemy whom hatred of the French name rendered capable of conceiving great things and of executing them, one of those geniuses who seem born to move at their will both peoples and sovereigns.” French diplomacy was not in a condition to struggle with the Prince of Orange. M. de Pomponne had succeeded Lionne; he was disgraced in 1679. “I order his recall,” said the king, “because all that passes through his hands loses the grandeur and force which ought to be shown in executing the orders of a king who is no poor creature.” Colbert de Croissy, the minister’s brother, was from that time employed to manage with foreign countries all the business which Louvois did not reserve to himself.

Duquesne had bombarded Algiers in 1682; in 1684, he destroyed several districts of Genoa, which was accused of having failed in neutrality between France and Spain; and at the same time Marshals Humieres and Crequi occupied Audenarde, Courtray, and Dixmude, and made themselves masters of Luxemburg; the king reproached Spain with its delays in the regulation of the frontiers, and claimed to occupy the Low Countries pacifically; the diet of Ratisbonne intervened; the emperor, with the aid of Sobieski, King of Poland, was occupied in repelling the invasions of the Turks; a truce was concluded for twenty-four years; the empire and Spain acquiesced in the king’s new conquests. “It seemed to be established,” said the Marquis de la Fare, “that the empire of France was an evil not to be avoided by other nations.” Nobody was more convinced of this than King Louis XIV.

He was himself about to deal his own kingdom a blow more fatal than all those of foreign wars and of the European coalition. Intoxicated by so much success and so many victories, he fancied that consciences were to be bent like states, and he set about bringing all his subjects back to the Catholic faith. Himself returning to a regular life, under the influence of age and of Madame de Maintenon, he thought it a fine thing to establish in his kingdom that unity of religion which Henry IV. and Richelieu had not been able to bring about. He set at nought all the rights consecrated by edicts, and the long patience of those Protestants whom Mazarin called “the faithful flock;” in vain had persecution been tried for several years past; tyranny interfered, and the edict of Nantes was revoked on the 13th of October, 1685. Some years later, the Reformers, by hundreds of thousands, carried into foreign lands their industries, their wealth, and their bitter resentments. Protestant Europe, indignant, opened her doors to these martyrs to conscience, living witnesses of the injustice and arbitrary power of Louis XIV. All the princes felt themselves at the same time insulted and threatened in respect of their faith as well as of their puissance. In the early months of 1686, the league of Augsburg united all the German princes, Holland, and Sweden; Spain and the Duke of Savoy were not slow to join it. In 1687, the diet of Ratisbonne refused to convert the twenty years’ truce into a definitive peace. By his haughty pretensions the king gave to the coalition the support of Pope Innocent XI.; Louis XIV. was once more single-handed against all, when he invaded the electorate of Cologne in the month of August, 1686. Philipsburg, lost by France in 1676, was recovered on the 29th of October; at the end of the campaign, the king’s armies were masters of the Palatinate. In the month of January, 1689, war was officially declared against Holland, the emperor, and the empire. The commander-in-chief of the French forces was intrusted to the dauphin, then twenty-six years of age. “I give you an opportunity of making your merit known,” said Louis XIV. to his son: “exhibit it to all Europe, so that when I come to die it shall not be perceived that the king is dead.”

The dauphin was already tasting the pleasures of conquest, and the coalition had not stirred. They were awaiting their chief; William of Orange was fighting for them in the very act of taking possession of the kingdom of England. Weary of the narrow-minded and cruel tyranny of their king, James II., disquieted at his blind zeal for the Catholic religion, the English nation had summoned to their aid the champion of Protestantism; it was in the name of the political liberties and the religious creed of England that the Prince of Orange set sail on the 11th of November, 1688; on the flags of his vessels was inscribed the proud device of his house, I will maintain; below were the words, _Pro libertate et Protestante religione._ William landed without obstacle at Torbay, on the 15th of November; on the 4th of January, King James, abandoned by everybody, arrived in France, whither he had been preceded by his wife, Mary of Modena, and the little Prince of Wales; the convention of the two Houses in England proclaimed William and Mary _kings_ (rois--? king and queen); the Prince of Orange had declined the modest part of mere husband of the queen. “I will never be tied to a woman’s apron-strings,” he had said.

By his personal qualities as well as by the defects and errors of his mind Louis XIV. was a predestined acquisition to the cause of James II.; he regarded the revolution in England as an insolent attack by the people upon the kingly majesty, and William of Orange was the most dangerous enemy of the crown of France. The king gave the fallen monarch a magnificent reception. “The king acts towards these majesties of England quite divinely,” writes Madame de Sevigne, on the 10th of January, 1689: “for is it not to be the image of the Almighty to support a king out-driven, betrayed, abandoned as he is? The king’s noble soul is delighted to play such a part as this. He went to meet the Queen of England with all his household and a hundred six-horse carriages; he escorted her to St. Germain, where she found herself supplied, like the queen, with all sorts of knick-knacks, amongst which was a very rich casket with six thousand louis d’or. The next day the King of England arrived late at St. Germain; the king was there waiting for him, and went to the end of the Guards’ hall to meet him; the King of England bent down very low, as if he meant to embrace his knees; the king prevented him, and embraced him three or four times over, very cordially. At parting, his Majesty would not be escorted back, but said to the King of England, ‘This is your house; when I come hither you shall do me the honors of it, as I will do you when you come to Versailles.’ The king subsequently sent the King of England ten thousand louis. The latter looked aged and worn, the queen thin and with eyes that have wept, but beautiful black ones; a fine complexion, rather pale, a large mouth, fine teeth, a fine figure and plenty of wits; all that makes up a very pleasing person. All she says is quite just and full of good sense. Her husband is not the same; he has plenty of spirit, but a common mind which relates all that has passed in England with a want of feeling which causes the same towards him. It is so extraordinary to have this court here that it is the subject of conversation incessantly. Attempts are being made to regulate ranks and prepare for permanently living with people so far from their restoration.”

In his pride and his kingly illusions, Louis XIV. had undertaken a burden which was to weigh heavily upon him to the very end of his reign.

Catholic Ireland had not acquiesced in the elevation of William of Orange to the throne of England; she invited over King James. Personally brave, and blinded by his hopes, he set out from St. Germain on the 25th of February, 1689. “Brother,” said the king to him on taking leave, “the best I can wish you is not to see you back.” He took with him a corps of French troops commanded by M. de Rosen, and the Count of Avaux as adviser. “It will be no easy matter to keep any secret with the King of England,” wrote Avaux to Louis XIV.; “he has said before the sailors of the St. Michael what he ought to have reserved for his greatest confidants. Another thing which may cause us trouble is his indecision, for he has frequent changes of opinion, and does not always determine upon the best. He lays great stress on little things, over which he spends all his time, and passes lightly by the most essential. Besides, he listens to everybody, and as much time has to be spent in destroying the impressions which bad advice has produced upon him as in inspiring him with good. It is said here that the Protestants of the north will intrench themselves in Londonderry, which is a pretty strong town for Ireland, and that it is a business which will probably last some days.”

The siege of Londonderry lasted a hundred and five days; most of the French officers fell there; the place had to be abandoned; the English army had just landed at Carrickfergus (August 25), under the orders of Marshal Schomberg. Like their leader, a portion of Schomberg’s men were French Protestants who had left their native country after the revocation of the edict of Nantes; they fought to the bitter end against the French regiments of Rosen. The Irish Parliament was beginning to have doubts about James II. “Too English,” it was said, “to render full justice to Ireland.” There was disorder everywhere, in the government as well as in the military operations; Schomberg held the Irish and French in check; at last William III. appeared.

He landed on the 14th of June, and at once took the road to Belfast; the Protestant opposition was cantoned in the province of Ulster, peopled to a great extent by Cromwell’s Scotch colonists; three parts of Ireland were still in the hands of the Catholics and King James. “I haven’t come hither to let the grass grow under my feet,” said William to those who counselled prudence. He had brought with him his old Dutch and German regiments, and numbered under his orders thirty-five thousand men; representatives from all the Protestant churches of Europe were there in arms against the enemies of their liberties.

The forces of King James were scarcely inferior to those of his son-in-law; Louis XIV. had sent him a re-enforcement of eight thousand men under the orders of the Duke of Lauzun. On the 1st of July the two armies met on the banks of the Boyne, near the town of Drogheda. William had been slightly wounded in the shoulder the evening before during a reconnaissance. “There’s no harm done,” said he at once to his terrified friends, “but, as it was, the ball struck quite high enough.” He was on horseback at the head of his troops; at daybreak the whole army plunged into the river; Marshal Schomberg commanded a division; he saw that the Huguenot regiments were staggered by the death of their leader, M. de Caillemotte, younger brother of the Marquis of Ruvigny. He rushed his horse into the river, shouting, “Forward, gentlemen; yonder are your persecutors.” He was killed, in his turn, as he touched the bank. King William himself had just entered the Boyne; his horse had taken to swimming, and he had difficulty in guiding it with his wounded arm; a ball struck his boot, another came and hit against the butt of his pistol; the Irish infantry, ignorant and undisciplined, everywhere took flight. “We were not beaten,” said a letter to Louvois from M. de la Hoguette, a French officer, “but the enemy drove the Irish troops, like sheep, before them, without their having attempted to fire a single musket-shot.” All the burden of the contest fell upon the troops of Louis XIV. and upon the Irish gentlemen, who fought furiously; William rallied around him the Protestants of Enniskillen, and led them back to the charge; the Irish gave way on all sides; King James had prudently remained at a distance, watching the battle from afar; he turned bridle, and hastily took the road back to Dublin. On the 3d of July he embarked at Waterford, himself carrying to St. Germain the news of his defeat. “Those who love the King of England must be very glad to see him in safety,” wrote Marshal Luxembourg to Louvois; “but those who love his glory have good reason to deplore the figure he made.” “I was in trouble to know what had become of the king my father,” wrote Queen Mary to William III.; “I dared not ask anybody but Lord Nottingham, and I had the satisfaction of learning that he was safe and sound. I know that I need not beg you to spare him, but to your tenderness add this, that for my sake the world may know that you would not have any harm happen to him. You will forgive me this.” The rumor had spread at Paris that King William was dead; the populace lighted bonfires in the streets; and the governor of the Bastille fired a salute. The anger and hatred of a people are perspicacious.

The insensate pride of king and nation was to be put to other trials; the campaign of 1689 had been without advantage or honor to the king’s arms. Disembarrassed of the great Conde, of Turenne, and even of Marshal Luxembourg, who was compromised in some distressing law proceedings, Louvois exercised undisputed command over generals and armies; his harsh and violent genius encountered no more obstacles. He had planned a defensive war which was to tire out the allies, all the while ravaging their territories. The Palatinate underwent all its horrors. Manheim, Heidelberg, Spires, Worms, Bingen, were destroyed and burned. “I don’t think,” wrote the Count of Tesse to Louvois, “that for a week past my heart has been in its usual place. I take the liberty of speaking to you naturally, but I did not foresee that it would cost so much to personally look to the burning of a town with a population, in proportion, like that of Orleans. You may rely upon it that nothing at all remains of the superb castle of Heidelberg. There were yesterday at noon, besides the castle, four hundred and thirty-two houses burned; and the fire was still going on. I merely caused to be set apart the family pictures of the Palatine House; that is, the fathers, mothers, grandmothers, and relatives of Madame; intending, if you order me or advise me so, to make her a present of them, and have them sent to her when she is somewhat distracted from the desolation of her native country; for, except herself, who can take any interest in them? Of the whole lot there is not a single copy worth a dozen livres.” The poor Princess Palatine, Monsieur’s second wife, was not yet distracted from her native country, and she wrote in March, 1689, “Should it cost me my life, it is impossible for me not to regret, not to deplore, having been, so to speak, the pretext for the destruction of my country. I cannot look on in cold blood and see the ruin at a single blow, in poor Manheim, of all that cost so much pains and trouble to the late prince-elector, my father. When I think of all the explosions that have taken place, I am so full of horror that every night, the moment I begin to go to sleep, I fancy myself at Heidelberg or Manheim, and an eye-witness of the ravages committed. I picture to myself how it all was in my time, and to what condition it has been reduced now, and I cannot refrain from weeping hot tears. What distresses me above all is, that the king waited to reveal his orders until the very moment of my intercession in favor of Heidelberg and Manheim. And yet it is thought bad taste for me to be afflicted!”

The Elector of Bavaria, an able prince and a good soldier, had roused Germany to avenge his wrongs; France had just been placed under the ban of the empire; and the grand alliance was forming. All the German princes joined it; the United Provinces, England, and Spain combined for the restoration of the treaties of Westphalia and of the Pyrenees. Europe had mistaken hopes of forcing Louis XIV. to give up all his conquests. Twenty years of wars and reverses were not to suffice for that. Fortune, however, was tiring of being favorable to France; Marshals Duras and Humieres were unable to hamper the movements of the Duke of Lorraine, Charles V., and of the Elector of Bavaria; the French garrisons of Mayence and of Bonn were obliged to capitulate after an heroic defence their munitions failed. The king recalled Marshal Luxembourg to the head of his armies. The able courtier had managed to get reconciled with Louvois. “You know, sir,” he wrote to him on the 9th of May, 1690, “with what pleasure I shall seek after such things as will possibly find favor with the king and give you satisfaction. I am too well aware how far my small authority extends to suppose that I can withdraw any man from any place without having written to you previously. It is with some repugnance that I resolve to put before you what comes into my head, knowing well that all that is good can come only from you, and looking upon anything I conceive as merely simple ideas produced by the indolence in which we are living here.”

The wary indolence and the observations of Luxembourg were not long in giving place to activity. The marshal crossed the Sambre on the 29th of June, entered Charleroi and Namur, and on the 2d of July attacked the Prince of Waldeck near the rivulet of Fleurus. A considerable body of troops had made a forced march of seven leagues during the night, and came up to take the enemy in the rear; it was a complete success, but devoid of result, like the victory of Stafarde, gained by Catinat over the Duke of Savoy, Victor-Amadeo, who had openly joined the coalition. The triumphant naval battle delivered by Tourville to the English and Dutch fleets off Beachy Head was a great humiliation for the maritime powers. “I cannot express to you,” wrote William III. to the grand pensionary Heinsius, holding in his absence the government of the United Provinces, “how distressed I am at the disasters of the fleet; I am so much the more deeply affected as I have been informed that my ships did not properly support those of the Estates, and left them in the lurch.”

William had said, when he left Holland, “The republic must lead off the dance.” The moment had come when England was going to take her part in it.

In the month of January, 1691, William III. arrived in Holland. “I am languishing for that moment,” he wrote six months before to Heinsius. All the allies had sent their ambassadors thither. “It is no longer the time for deliberation, but for action,” said the King of England to the congress “the King of France has made himself master of all the fortresses which bordered on his kingdom; if he be not opposed, he will take all the rest. The interest of each is bound up in the general interest of all. It is with the sword that we must wrest from his grasp the liberties of Europe, which he aims at stifling, or we must submit forever to the yoke of servitude. As for me, I will spare for that purpose neither my influence, nor my forces, nor my person, and in the spring I will come, at the head of my troops, to conquer or die with my allies.”

The spring had not yet come, and already (March 15) Mons was invested by the French army. The secret had been carefully kept. On the 21st, the king arrived in person with the dauphin; William of Orange collected his troops in all haste, but he did not come up in time: Mons capitulated on the 8th of April; five days later, Nice, besieged by Catinat, surrendered like Mons; Louis XIV. returned to Versailles, according to his custom after a brilliant stroke. Louvois was pushing on the war furiously; the naturally fierce temper of the minister was soured by excess of work and by his decline in the king’s favor; he felt his position towards the king shaken by the influence of Madame de Maintenon; venting his wrath on the enemy, he was giving orders everywhere for conflagration and bombardment, when on the 17th of July, 1691, after working with the king, Louvois complained of pain; Louis XIV. sent him to his rooms; on reaching his chamber he fell down fainting; the people ran to fetch his third son, M. de Barbezieux; Madame do Louvois was not at Versailles, and his two elder sons were in the field; he arrived too late; his father was dead.

“So he is dead, this great minister, this man of such importance, whose egotism (_le moi_), as M. Nicole says, was so extensive, who was the centre of so many things! What business, what designs, what projects, what secrets, what interests to unfold, what wars begun, what intrigues, what beautiful moves-in-check to make and to superintend! Ah! my God, grant me a little while; I would fain give check to the Duke of Savoy and mate to the Prince of Orange! No, no, thou shalt not have one, one single moment!” Thus wrote Madame do Sevigne to her daughter Madame de Grignan. Louis XIV., in whose service Louvois had spent his life, was less troubled at his death. “Tell the King of England that I have lost a good minister,” was the answer he sent to the complimentary condolence of King James, “but that his affairs and mine will go on none the worse.”

In his secret heart, and beneath the veil of his majestic observance of the proprieties, the king thought that his business, as well as the agreeableness of his life, would probably gain from being no longer subject to the tempers and the roughnesses of Louvois. The Grand Monarque considered that he had trained (_instruit_) his minister, but he felt that the pupil had got away from him. He appointed Barbezieux secretary for war. “I will form you,” said he. No human hand had formed Louvois, not even that of his father, the able and prudent Michael le Tellier; he had received straight from God the strong qualities, resolution, indomitable will, ardor for work, the instinct of organization and command, which had made of him a minister without equal for the warlike and ambitious purposes of his master. Power had spoiled him, his faults had prevailed over his other qualities without destroying them; violent, fierce, without principle and without scruple in the execution of his designs, he had egged the king on to incessant wars, treating with disdain the internal miseries of the kingdom as well as any idea of pity for the vanquished; he had desired to do everything, order everything, grasp everything, and he died at fifty-three, dreaded by all, hated by a great many, and leaving in the government of the country a void which the king felt, all the time that he was angrily seeking to fill it up.

Louvois was no more; negotiations were beginning to be whispered about, but the war continued by land and sea; the campaign of 1691 had completely destroyed the hopes of James II. in Ireland; it was decided to attempt a descent upon England; a plot was being hatched to support the invasion. Tourville was commissioned to cover the landing. He received orders to fight, whatever might be the numbers of the enemy. The wind prevented his departure from Brest; the Dutch fleet had found time to join the English. Tourville wanted to wait for the squadrons of Estrees and Rochefort; Pontchartrain had been minister of finance and marine since the death of Seignelay, Colbert’s son, in 1690; he replied from Versailles to the experienced sailor, familiar with battle from the age of fourteen, “It is not for you to discuss the king’s orders; it is for you to execute them and enter the Channel; if you are not ready to do it, the king will put in your place somebody more obedient and less discreet than you.” Tourville went out and encountered the enemy’s squadrons between the headlands of La Hogue and Barfleur; he had forty-four vessels against ninety-nine, the number of English and Dutch together. Tourville assembled his council of war, and all the officers were for withdrawing; but the king’s orders were peremptory, and the admiral joined battle. After three days’ desperate resistance, backed up by the most skilful manoeuvres, Tourville was obliged to withdraw beneath the forts of La Hogue in hopes of running his ships ashore; but in this King James and Marshal Bellefonds opposed him.

Tourville remained at sea, and lost a dozen vessels. The consternation in France was profound; the nation had grown accustomed to victory; on the 20th of June the capture of Namur raised their hopes again; this time again William III. had been unable to succor his allies; he determined to--revenge himself on Luxembourg, whom he surprised on the 31st of August, between Enghaep and Steinkirk; the ground was narrow and uneven, and the King of England counted upon thus paralyzing the brilliant French cavalry. M. de Luxembourg, ill of fever as he was, would fain have dismounted to lead to the charge the brigades of the French guards and of the Swiss, but he was prevented; the Duke of Bourbon, the Prince of Conti, the Duke of Chartres, and the Duke of Vendome, placed themselves at the head of the infantry, and, sword in hand, led it against the enemy; a fortunate movement on the part of Marshal Boufflers resulted in rendering the victory decisive. Next year at Neerwinden (29th of July, 1693) the success of the day was likewise due to the infantry. On that day the French guards had exhausted their ammunition; putting the bayonet at the end of their pieces they broke the enemy’s battalions; this was the first charge of the kind in the French armies. The king’s household troops had remained motionless for four hours under the fire of the allies: William III. thought for a moment that his gunners made bad practice; he ran up to the batteries; the French squadrons did not move except to close up the ranks as the files were carried off; the King of England could not help an exclamation of anger and admiration. “Insolent nation!” he cried.

The victory of Neerwinden ended in nothing but the capture of Charleroi; the successes of Catinat at Marsaglia, in Piedmont, had washed out the shame of the Duke of Savoy’s incursion into Dauphiny in 1692. Tourville had remained with the advantage in several maritime engagements off Cape St. Vincent, and burned the English vessels in the very roads of Cadiz. On every sea the corsairs of St. Malo and Dunkerque, John Bart and Duguay-Trouin, now enrolled in the king’s navy, towed at their sterns numerous prizes; the king and France, for a long time carried away by a common passion, had arrived at that point at which victories no longer suffice in the place of solid and definitive success. The nation was at last tiring of its glory. “People were dying of want to the sound of the Te Deum,” says Voltaire in the Siecle de Louis XIV.; everywhere there was weariness equal to the suffering. Madame de Maintenon and some of her friends at that time, sincerely devoted to the public good, rather Christians than warriors, Fenelon, the Dukes of Beauvilliers and Chevreuse, were laboring to bring, the king over to pacific views; he saw generals as well as ministers falling one after another; Marshal Luxembourg, exhausted by the fatigues of war and the pleasures of the court, died on the 4th of January, 1695, at sixty-seven years of age. An able general, a worthy pupil of the great Conde, a courtier of much wits and no shame, he was more corrupt than his age, and his private life was injurious to his fame; he died, however, as people did die in his time, turning to God at the last day. “I haven’t lived like M. de Luxembourg,” said Bourdaloue, “but I should like to die like him.” History has forgotten Marshal Luxembourg’s death and remembered his life.

Louis XIV. had lost Conde and Turenne, Luxembourg, Colbert, Louvois, and Seignelay; with the exception of Vauban, he had exhausted the first rank; Catinat alone remained in the second; the king was about to be reduced to the third: sad fruits of a long reign, of an incessant and devouring activity, which had speedily used up men and was beginning to tire out fortune; grievous result of mistakes long hidden by glory, but glaring out at last before the eyes most blinded by prejudice! “The whole of France is no longer anything but one vast hospital,” wrote Fenelon to the king under the veil of the anonymous. “The people who so loved you are beginning to lose affection, confidence, and even respect; the allies prefer carrying on war with loss to concluding a peace which would not be observed. Even those who have not dared to declare openly against you are nevertheless impatiently desiring your enfeeblement and your humiliation as the only resource for liberty and for the repose of all Christian nations. Everybody knows it, and none dares tell you so. Whilst you in some fierce conflict are taking the battle-field and the cannon of the enemy, whilst you are storming strong places, you do not reflect that you are fighting on ground which is sinking beneath your feet, and that you are about to have a fall in spite of your victories. It is time to humble yourself beneath the mighty hand of God; you must ask peace, and by that shame expiate all the glory of which you have made your idol; finally you must give up, the soonest possible, to your enemies, in order to save the state, conquests that you cannot retain without injustice. For a long time past God has had His arm raised over you; but He is slow to smite you because He has pity upon a prince who has all his life been beset by flatterers.” Noble and strong language, the cruel truth of which the king did not as yet comprehend, misled as he was by his pride, by the splendor of his successes, and by the concert of praises which his people as well as his court had so long made to reverberate in his ears.

Louis XIV. had led France on to the brink of a precipice, and he had in his turn been led on by her; king and people had given themselves up unreservedly to the passion for glory and to the intoxication of success; the day of awakening was at hand.

Louis XIV. was not so blind as Fenelon supposed; he saw the danger at the very moment when his kingly pride refused to admit it. The King of England had just retaken Namur, without Villeroi, who had succeeded Marshal Luxembourg, having been able to relieve the place. Louis XIV. had already let out that he “should not pretend to avail himself of any special conventions until the Prince of Orange was satisfied as regarded his person and the crown of England.” This was a great step towards that humiliation recommended by Fenelon.

The secret negotiations with the Duke of Savoy were not less significant. After William III., Victor-Amadeo was the most active and most devoted as well as the most able and most stubborn of the allied princes. In the month of June, 1696, the treaty was officially declared. Victor-Amadeo would recover Savoy, Suza, the countship of Nice and Pignerol dismantled; his eldest daughter, Princess Mary Adelaide, was to marry the Duke of Burgundy, eldest son of the dauphin, and the ambassadors of Piedmont henceforth took rank with those of crowned heads. In return for so many concessions, Victor-Amadeo guaranteed to the king the neutrality of Italy, and promised to close the entry of his dominions against the Protestants of Dauphiny who came thither for refuge. If Italy refused her neutrality, the Duke of Savoy was to unite his forces to those of the king and command the combined army.

Victory would not have been more advantageous for Victor-Amadeo than his constant defeats were; but, by detaching him from the coalition, Louis XIV. had struck a fatal blow at the great alliance: the campaign of 1696 in Germany and in Flanders had resolved itself into mere observations and insignificant engagements; Holland and England were exhausted, and their commerce was ruined; in vain did Parliament vote fresh and enormous supplies. “I should want ready money,” wrote William III. to Heinsius, “and my poverty is really incredible.”

There was no less cruel want in France. “I calculate that in these latter days more than a tenth part of the people,” said Vauban, “are reduced to beggary, and in fact beg.” Sweden had for a long time been proffering mediation: conferences began on the 9th of May, 1697, at Nieuburg, a castle belonging to William III., near the village of Ryswick. These great halls opened one into another; the French and the plenipotentiaries of the coalition of princes occupied the two wings, the mediators sat in the centre. Before arriving at Ryswick, the most important points of the treaty between France and William III. were already settled.

Louis XIV. had at last consented to recognize the king that England had adopted; William demanded the expulsion of James II. from France; Louis XIV. formally refused his consent. “I will engage not to support the enemies of King William directly or indirectly,” said he: “it would not comport with my honor to have the name of King James mentioned in the treaty.” William contented himself with the concession, and merely desired that it should be reciprocal. “All Europe has sufficient confidence in the obedience and submission of my people,” said Louis XIV., “and, when it is my pleasure to prevent my subjects from assisting the King of England, there are no grounds for fearing lest he should find any assistance in my kingdom. There can be no occasion for reciprocity; I have neither sedition nor faction to fear.” Language too haughty for a king who had passed his infancy in the midst of the troubles of the Fronde, but language explained by the patience and fidelity of the nation towards the sovereign who had so long lavished upon it the intoxicating pleasures of success.

France offered restitution of Strasburg, Luxembourg, Mons, Charleroi, and Dinant, restoration of the house of Lorraine, with the conditions proposed at Nimeguen, and recognition of the King of England. “We have no equivalent to claim,” said the French plenipotentiaries haughtily; “your masters have never taken anything from ours.”

On the 27th of July a preliminary deed was signed between Marshal Boufflers and Bentinck, Earl of Portland, the intimate friend of King William; the latter left the army and retired to his castle of Loo; there it was that he heard of the capture of Barcelona by the Duke of Vendime; Spain, which had hitherto refused to take part in the negotiations, lost all courage, and loudly demanded peace; but France withdrew her concessions on the subject of Strasburg, and proposed to give as equivalent Friburg in Brisgau and Brisach. William III. did not hesitate. Heinsius signed the peace in the name of the States General on the 20th of September at midnight; the English and Spanish plenipotentiaries did the same; the emperor and the empire were alone in still holding out: the Emperor Leopold made pretensions to regulate in advance the Spanish succession, and the Protestant princes refused to accept the maintenance of the Catholic worship in all the places in which Louis XIV. had restored it.

Here again the will of William III. prevailed over the irresolution of his allies. “The Prince of Orange is sole arbiter of Europe,” Pope Innocent XII. had said to Lord Perth, who had a commission to him from James II; “peoples and kings are his slaves; they will do nothing which might displease him.”

“I ask,” said William, “where anybody can see a probability of making France give up a succession for which she would maintain, at need, a twenty years’ war; and God knows if we are in a position to dictate laws to France.” The emperor yielded, despite the ill humor of the Protestant princes. For the ease of their consciences they joined England and Holland in making a move on behalf of the French Reformers. Louis XIV. refused to discuss the matter, saying, “It is my business, which concerns none but me.” Up to this day the refugees had preserved some hope, henceforth their country was lost to them; many got themselves naturalized in the countries which had given them asylum.

The revolution of 1789 alone was to re-open to their children the gates of France.

For the first time since Cardinal Richelieu, France moved back her frontiers by the signature of a treaty. She had gained the important place of Strasburg, but she lost nearly all she had won by the treaty of Nimeguen in the Low Countries and in Germany; she kept Franche-Comte, but she gave up Lothringen. Louis XIV. had wanted to aggrandize himself at any price and at any risk; he was now obliged to precipitately break up the grand alliance, for King Charles II. was slowly dying at Madrid, and the Spanish Succession was about to open. Ignorant of the supreme evils and sorrows which awaited him on this fatal path, the King of France began to forget, in this distant prospect of fresh aggrandizement and war, the checks that his glory and his policy had just met with.