Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/612

576 FRANCE [HISTORY. ir>GS-71. Treaty of Aix-la- Cli. ipdle. The Triple Alliance. Else of Louvois knew of Sir William Temple s Triple Alliance, which had been signed in the spring of 1668, made peace as easily as lie had made war, and on May 2, 1668, signed the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, by which he restored Tranche Comte to Spain, and secured the Netherlands. It was to all appear ance a very moderate peace, and much enhanced the king s reputation ; men did not know that it was meant to lay the basis for an entire reconstruction of the map of Europe, so soon as ever sickly young Charles II. of Spain had died ; and that, every one thought, must follow very soon. The long reign of that prince (who lived till 1700) had much to do with the great wars which followed, and with the consequent exhaustion of France. Louis now set himself to break up the Triple Alliance; it was a combination opposed to all the diplomatic ideas and plans of France. Sweden was her old ally; and her policy was to encourage the two sea powers, England and Holland, to weaken one another on the water, so as to give France a chance of constructing a navy. Therefore she was necessarily jealous of the Alliance ; nor was it hard to over throw it. Sweden, as was said, had joined it as a specula tion, and had her price ; Charles II. of England could easily be bought ; Holland thus left defenceless, having lost her barrier of the Spanish Netherlands, could expect nothing but the anger of her new neighbour. But how changed were the world s politics, when the three Protestant powers, England, Holland, and Sweden could unite, even for a short time, for the defence of their ancient foe, Catholic and cruel Spain. The king s dislike for the Dutch is one of those things which illustrate the evils of personal rule. They were dis tasteful to him as Protestants, as burghers, as tradesmen, as a sea power, as a constitutional republic ; they had given shelter to refugees who could not bear the brilliant despot ism of Francs. Of old times French policy had favoured the growth of the United Provinces, as a counterpoise to Spain ; henceforward Spain and Holland were friends, and Louis was eager to revise the old lines of his country s foreign relations. So he at once made use of his connexion with the small Rhine-princes, those unpatriotic Germans who were ever on sale, and who almost till our own days sided with France agaiast Germany. With them he arranged for a great flauk attack on the republic ; he secured England by buying over her king ; the wishes and feelings of the people could easily be disregarded in these early days after the fall of the Commonwealth. In 1670 the treaty of Dover, that standing scandal of the Stewart period, was signed ; it contained a secret clause, of which the second duke of Buckingham, who negotiated it with the fair duchess of Orleans, sister of Charles II., was ignorant. The two kings played their comedy behind the backs of the two clever negotiators, and laughed in their sleeves at them and at the English nation. Sweden had been easily detached from Holland, and the Triple Alliance entirely swept away within two years of its formation. The efforts made by Leibnitz and others to divert Louis to a Mediterranean war proved utterly unavailing ; Colbert s reluctance to furnish the costs of war was overborne ; Lionne died in 1671, and was not there to guide the foreign policy of France ; Lou- vois, the " brutal minister whom all men hated," was just rising to the height of his influence, and threw that influ ence in with the king s prejudices in favour of a Dutch war. Colbert was the man to be pitied ; the rapid rise of Louvois, who wielded all the war-power of the kingdom, and whose reorganization of the army drained the resources of the treasury, nob only lessened his influence but made great war-expenses inevitable ; and those terrible outlays were by no means undertaken in the wisest direction. In vain did the dry and common-sense minister try the way of flattery : he was too gross ; he could not catch the subtle undertones of praise and adoration which pleased the Great Monarch s 1671 love of approbation. " We are bound," he writes, " to save a sixpence in things not necessary, and to lavish thousands when thy glory is in question. A hundred pounds for a useless banquet breaks my heart; but when millions of gold are wanted for a great object, I would sell all I have, pawn wife and children, and go afoot all my life, rather than fail to provide it." Such protestations, which did protest too much, such bathos of adulation, could not please the wilful monarch ; Colbert s influence henceforward steadily declined, and Louvois climbed into his place, sit ting as an evil genius at his master s ear, to whisper war with Holland, the crushing of Genoa, the double ravaging of the Palatinate, the horror of which survives even to these days in which atrocities are popular, the dragonnades of Nantes, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The Dutch war broke out in 1672, and France had at The last a considerable fleet to send to sea. Thirty ships of war Dllt joined the English navy, which was pledged to neutralize war> the sea-power of Holland, and to find employment for Admiral Ruyter s hands. Ruyter was the stay and strength of the aristocratic or burgher party at Amsterdam the party which had now ruled for years, and had with no small glory rivalled England on the high seas. Little did Louis XIV. deem that by this war of 1672, and by this very alliance with England, he was laying the foundations of that power which would in the end frustrate his splendid plans, and hold up against him the liberties of Europe. The sea-party in the Provinces had resisted and overcome Par all the efforts of Spain. Louis was now about to overthrow in J that party, to make room for the land-party, which, led by an< William of Orange and England, was to withstand him to the end. The sea-party, the aristocratic and commercial republic, headed by the two distinguished brothers, John and Cornelius de Witt, was inevitably hostile to England, and as naturally friendly to France. The land-party, de mocratic and agricultural, and headed by the great house of Orange-Nassau, was naturally a friend to Germany, with which it had close connexions, and to England also ; for it was no rival on the sea, and lastly, William, the head of the house, was first cousin to the king of England. Louvois had raised the army to 125,000 men; the French navy could count about a hundred sail. With almost all this great force Louis began the Dutch war of 1672. Guided by Turenne he set forth for the Rhine, leaving an army to mask Maestricht. The friendly princes gave him passage ; the trembling Dutch with a raw ill-dis ciplined army of scarcely 25,000 men, under command of the prince of Orange, sheltered themselves behind the half- furnished forts of the river Yssel. By crossing the Rhine into the ancient " Betuwe," Turenne hoped to get between the Dutch and Amsterdam, and with one hand to crush the army, while with the other he coerced the seat of govern ment into submission. The plan was simple and good ; the earlier stages of it were successfully carried out ; the famous passage of the Rhine dazzled the eyes of all France, and, unopposed in fact, and perfectly easy, made Paris believe her monarch to be a complete hero of romance. Turenne at once pushed on and seized Arnheim, which gave him passage out of the Betuwe into the country behind the Yssel ; and had his voice been heard, nothing could have saved the prince of Orange. But, with overwhelming force, the king missed completely the point of the campaign. He set himself to reduce the unimportant Yssel forts, led by his own taste for siege-warfare and Louvois s advice ; he wasted time and weakened his army by garrisoning the captured places. Presently he moved on 4 and occupied Utrecht ; Naarden, half way from thence to Amsterdam, was taken. The Dutch despaired of help, and offered terms to Louis ; but he contemptuously refused them. Then the mob of