A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times Volume V Part 18

Louis XIV.'s first campaign had been nothing but playing at war, almost entirely without danger or bloodshed; it had, nevertheless, been sufficient to alarm Europe. Scarcely had peace been concluded at Breda, when another negotiation was secretly entered upon between England, Holland, and Sweden.

It was in vain that King Charles II. leaned personally towards an alliance with France; his people had their eyes "opened to the dangers"

--incurred by Europe from the arms of Louis XIV. "Certain persons of the greatest influence in Parliament come sometimes to see me, without any lights and m.u.f.fled in a cloak in order not to be recognized," says a letter of September 26, 1669, from the Marquis of Ruvigny to M. de Lionne; "they give me to understand that common sense and the public security forbid them to see, without raising a finger, the whole of the Low Countries taken, and that they are bound in good policy to oppose the purposes of this conquest if his Majesty intend to take all for himself."

On the 23d of January, 1668, the celebrated treaty of the Triple Alliance was signed at the Hague. The three powers demanded of the King of France that he should grant the Low Countries a truce up to the month of May, in order to give time for treating with Spain and obtaining from her, as France demanded, the definitive cession of the conquered places or Franche-Comte in exchange. At bottom, the Triple Alliance was resolved to protect helpless Spain against France; a secret article bound the three allies to take up arms to restrain Louis XIV., and to bring him back, if possible, to the peace of the Pyrenees. At the same moment, Portugal was making peace with Spain, who recognized her independence.

The king refused the long armistice demanded of him. "I will grant it up to the 31st of March," he had said, "being unwilling to miss the first opportunity of taking the field." The Marquis of Castel-Rodriguo made merry over this proposal. "I am content," said he, "with the suspension of arms that winter imposes upon the King of France." The governor of the Low Countries made a mistake: Louis XIV. was about to prove that his soldiers, like those of Gustavus Adolphus, did not recognize winter. He had intrusted the command of his new army to the Prince of Conde, amnestied for the last nine years, but, up to that time, a stranger to the royal favor. Conde expressed his grat.i.tude with more fervor than loftiness when he wrote to the king on the 20th of December, 1667, "My birth binds me more than any other to your Majesty's service, but the kindnesses and the confidence you deign to show me after I have so little deserved them bind me still more than my birth. Do me the honor to believe, sir, that I hold neither property nor life but to cheerfully sacrifice them for your glory and for the preservation of your person, which is a thousand times dearer to me than all the things of the world."

"On pretence of being in Burgundy at the states," writes Oliver d'Ormesson, the prosecutor of Fouquet, "the prince had obtained perfect knowledge that Franche-Comte was without troops and without apprehension, because they had no doubt that the king would accord them neutrality as in the last war, the inhabitants having sent to him to ask it of him. He kept them amused. Meanwhile the king had set his army in motion without disclosing his plan, and the inhabitants of Franche-Comte found themselves attacked without having known that they were to be. Besancon and Salins surrendered at sight of the troops. The king, on arriving, went to Dole, and superintended an affair of counterscarps and some demilunes, whereat there were killed some four or five hundred men. The inhabitants, astounded, and finding themselves without troops or hope of succor, surrendered on Shrove Tuesday, February 14. The king at the same time marched to Gray. The governor made some show of defending himself, but the Marquis of Yenne, governor-general under Castel-Rodriguo, who belongs to the district and has all his property there, came and surrendered to the king, and then, having gone to Gray, persuaded the governor to surrender. Accordingly, the king entered it on Sunday, February 19, and had a Te Deum sung there, having at his right the governor-general, and at his left the special governor of the town; and, the same day, he set out on his return. And so, within twenty-two days of the month of February, he had set out from St. Germain, been in Franche-Comte, taken it entirely, and returned to St. Germain. This is a great and wonderful conquest from every point of view. Having paid a visit to the prince to make my compliments, I said that the glory he had won had cost him dear, as he had lost his shoes; he replied, laughing, that it had been said so, but the truth was, that, happening to be at the guards' attack, somebody came and told him that the king had pushed forward to M. de Gadaignes' attack, that he had ridden up full gallop to bring back the king, who had put himself in too great peril, and that, having dismounted at a very moist spot, his shoe had come off, and he had been obliged to re-shoe himself in the king's presence." [_Journal d'

Oliver d' Ormesson,_ t. ii. p. 542.]

Louis XIV. had good reason to "push forward to the attack and put himself in too great peril;" a rumor had circulated that, having run the same risk at the siege of Lille, he had let a moment's hesitation appear; the old Duke of Charost, captain of his guards, had come up to him, and, "Sir," he had whispered in the young king's ear, "the wine is drawn, and it must be drunk." Louis XIV. had finished his reconnoissance, not without a feeling of grat.i.tude towards Charost for preferring before his life that honor which ended by becoming his idol.

The king was back at St. Germain, preparing enormous armaments for the month of April. He had given the Prince of Conde the government of Franche-Comte. "I had always esteemed your father," he said to the young Duke of Enghien, "but I had never loved him; now I love him as much as I esteem him." Young Louvois, already in high favor with the king, as well as his father, Michael Le Tellier, had contributed a great deal towards getting the prince's services appreciated; they still smarted under the reproaches of M. de Turenne touching the deficiency of supplies for the troops before Lille in 1667.

War seemed to be imminent; the last days of the armistice were at hand.

"The opinion prevailing in France as to peace is a disease which is beginning to spread very much," wrote Louvois in the middle of March, "but we shall soon find a cure for it, as here is the time approaching for taking the field. You must publish almost everywhere that it is the Spaniards who do not want peace." Louvois lied brazenfacedly; the Spaniards were without resources, but they had even less of spirit than of resources; they consented to the abandonment of all the places won in the Low Countries during 1667. A congress was opened at Aix-la-Chapelle, presided over by the nuncio of the new pope, Clement IX., as favorable to France as his predecessor, Innocent X., had been to Spain. "A phantom arbiter between phantom plenipotentiaries," says Voltaire, in the Siecle de Louis XIV. The real negotiations were going on at St. Germain.

"I did not look merely," writes Louis XIV., "to profit by the present conjuncture, but also to put myself in a position to turn to my advantage those which might probably arrive. In view of the great increments that my fortune might receive, nothing seemed to me more necessary than to establish for myself amongst my smaller neighbors such a character for moderation and probity as might a.s.suage in them those emotions of dread which everybody naturally experiences at sight of too great a power.

I was bound not to lack means of breaking with Spain when I pleased; Franche-Comte, which I gave up, might become reduced to such a condition that I should be master of it at any moment, and my new conquests, well secured, would open for me a surer entrance into the Low Countries."

Determined by these wise motives, the king gave orders to sign the peace.

"M. de Turenne appeared yesterday like a man who had received a blow from a club," writes Michael Le Tellier to his son: "when Don Juan arrives, matters will change; he says that, meanwhile, all must go on just the same, and he repeated it more than a dozen times, which made the prince laugh." Don Juan did not protest, and on the 2d of May, 1668, the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle was concluded. Before giving up Franche-Comte, the king issued orders for demolis.h.i.+ng the fortifications of Dole and Gray; he at the same time commissioned Vauban to fortify Ath, Lille, and Tournay. The Triple Alliance was triumphant, the Hollanders at the head.

"I cannot tell your Excellency all that these beer-brewers write to our traders," said a letter to M. de Lionne from one of his correspondents; "as there is just now nothing further to hope for, in respect of they Low Countries, I vent all my feelings upon the Hollanders, whom I hold at this day to be our most formidable enemies, and I exhort your Excellency, as well for your own reputation as for the public satisfaction, to omit from your policy nothing that may tend to the discovery of means to abase this great power, which exalts itself too much."

Louis XIV. held the same views as M. de Lionne's correspondent, not merely from resentment against the Hollanders, who had stopped him in his career of success, but because he quite saw that the key to the barrier between the Catholic Low Countries and himself remained in the hands of the United Provinces. He had relied upon his traditional influence in the Estates as well as on the influence of John van Witt; but the latter's position had been shaken. "I learn from a good quarter that there are great cabals forming against the authority of M. de Witt, and for the purpose of ousting him from it," writel M. de Lionne on the 30th of March, 1668; Louis XIV. resolved to have recourse to arms in order to humiliate this insolent republic which had dared to hamper his designs.

For four years, every effort of his diplomacy tended solely to make Holland isolated in Europe.

It was to England that France would naturally first turn her eyes. The sentiments of King Charles II. and of his people, as regarded Holland, were not the same. Charles had not forgiven the Estates for having driven him from their territory at the request of Cromwell; the simple and austere manners of the republican patricians did not accord with his taste for luxury and debauchery; the English people, on the contrary, despite of that rivalry in, trade and on the seas which had been the source of so much ancient and recent hostility between the two nations, esteemed the Hollanders and leaned towards an alliance with them. Louis XIV., in the eyes of the English Parliament, was the representative of Catholicism and absolute monarchy, two enemies which it had vanquished, but still feared. The king's proceedings with Charles II. had, therefore, necessarily to be kept secret; the ministers of the King of England were themselves divided; the Duke of Buckingham, as mad and as prodigal as his father, was favorable to France; the Earl of Arlington had married a Hollander, and persisted in the Triple Alliance. Louis XIV. employed in this negotiation his sister-in-law, Madame Henriette, who was much attached to her brother, the King of England, and was intelligent and adroit; she was on her return from a trip to London, which she had with great difficulty s.n.a.t.c.hed from the jealous susceptibilities of Monsieur, when she died suddenly at Versailles on the 30th of June, 1670. "It were impossible to praise sufficiently the incredible dexterity of this princess in treating the most delicate matters, in finding a remedy for those hidden suspicions which often keep them in suspense, and in terminating all difficulties in such a manner as to conciliate the most opposite interests; this was the subject of all talk, when on a sudden resounded, like a clap of thunder, that astounding news, Madame is dying! Madame is dead! And there, in spite of that great heart, is this princess, so admired and so beloved; there, as death has made her for us!" [Bossuet, _Oraison funebre d'Henriette d'Angleterre._]

Madame's work was nevertheless accomplished, and her death was not destined to interrupt it. The treaty of alliance was secretly concluded, signed by only the Catholic councillors of Charles II.; it bore that the King of England was resolved to publicly declare his return to the Catholic church; the King of France was to aid him towards the execution of this project with a.s.sistance to the amount of two millions of livres of Tours; the two princes bound themselves to remain faithful to the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle as regarded Spain, and to declare war together against the United Provinces the King of France would have to supply to his brother of England, for this war, a subsidy of three million livres of Tours every year. When the Protestant ministers were admitted to share the secret, silence was kept as to the declaration of Catholicity, which was put off till after the war in Holland; Parliament had granted the king thirteen hundred thousand pounds sterling to pay his debts, and eight hundred thousand pounds to "equip in the ensuing spring" a fleet of fifty vessels, in order that he might take the part he considered most expedient for the glory of his kingdom and the welfare of his subjects.

"The government of our country is like a great bell which you cannot stop when it is once set going," said King Charles II., anxious to commence the war in order to handle the subsidies the sooner; he was, nevertheless, obliged to wait. Louis XIV. had succeeded in dragging him into an enterprise contrary to the real interests of his country as well as of his national policy; in order to arrive at his ends he had set at work all the evil pa.s.sions which divided the court of England; he had bought up the king, his mistresses, and his ministers; he had dangled before the fanaticism of the Duke of York the spectacle of England converted to Catholicism; but his work was not finished in Europe; he wished to a.s.sure himself of the neutrality of Germany in the great duel he was meditating with the republic of the United Provinces.

As long ago as 1667 Louis XIV. had practically paved the way towards the neutrality of the empire by a secret treaty regulating the eventual part.i.tion of the Spanish, monarchy. In case the little King of Spain died without children, France was to receive the Low Countries, Franche- Comte, Navarre, Naples, and Sicily; Austria was to keep Spain and Milaness. The Emperor Leopold therefore turned a deaf ear to the entreaties of the Hollanders who would fain have bound him down to the Triple Alliance; a new convention between France and the empire, secretly signed on the 1st of November, 1670, made it reciprocally obligatory on the two princes not to aid their enemies. The German princes were more difficult to win over; they were beginning to feel alarm at the pretensions of France. The electors of Treves and of Mayence had already collected some troops on the Rhine; the Duke of Lorraine seemed disposed to lend them a.s.sistance; Louis XIV. seized the pretext of the restoration of certain fortifications contrary to the treaty of Marsal; on the 23d of August, 1675, he ordered Marshal Crequi to enter Lorraine; at the commencement of September, the whole duchy was reduced, and the duke a fugitive. "The king had at first been disposed to give up Lorraine to some one of the princes of that house," writes Louvois; "but, just now, he no longer considers that province to be a country which he ought to quit so soon, and it appears likely that, as he sees more and more every day how useful that conquest will be for the unification of his kingdom, he will seek the means of preserving it for himself." In point of fact, the king, in answer to the emperor's protests, replied that he did not want to turn Lorraine to account for his own profit, but that he would not give it up at the solicitations of anybody. Brandenburg and Saxony alone refused point blank to observe neutrality; France had renounced Protestant alliances in Germany, and the Protestant electors comprehended the danger that threatened them. Sweden also comprehended it, but Gustavus Adolphus and Oxenstiern were no longer there; there remained nothing but the remembrance of old alliances with France; the Swedish senators gave themselves up to the buyer one after another. "When you have made some stay at Stockholm," wrote Courtin, the French amba.s.sador in Sweden, to M. do Pomponne, "and seen the vanity of the Gascons of the North, the little honesty there is in their conduct, the cabals which prevail in the Senate, and the feebleness and inertness of those who compose it, you cannot be surprised at the delays and changes which take place. If the Senate of Rome had shown as little inclination as that of Sweden at the present time for war, the Roman empire would not have been of so great an extent." The treaty, however, was signed on the 14th of April, 1672; in consideration of an annual subsidy of six hundred thousand livres Sweden engaged to oppose by arms those princes of the empire who should determine to support the United Provinces. The gap was forming round Holland.

In spite of the secrecy which enveloped the negotiations of Louis XIV., Van Witt was filled with disquietude; favorable as ever to the French alliance, he had sought to calm the irritation of France, which set down the Triple Alliance to the account of Holland. "I remarked," says a letter in 1669, from M. de Pomponne, French amba.s.sador at the Hague, "that it seemed to me a strange thing that, whereas this republic had two kings for its a.s.sociates in the triple alliance, it affected in some sort to put itself at their head so as to do all the speaking, and that it was willing to become the seat of all the manoeuvres that were going on against France, which was very likely to render it suspected of some prepossession in favor of Spain." John Van Witt defended his country with dignified modesty. "I know not whether to regard as a blessing or a curse," said he, "the incidents which have for several years past brought it about that the most important affairs of Europe have been transacted in Holland. It must no doubt be attributed to the situation and condition of this state, which, whilst putting it after all the crowned heads, cause it to be readily agreed to as a place without consequence; but, as for the prepossession of which we are suspected in favor of Spain, it cannot surely be forgotten what aversion we have as it were sucked in with our milk towards that nation, the remnants that still remain of a hatred fed by so much blood and such long wars, which make it impossible, for my part, that my inclinations should ever turn towards that crown."

Hatred to Spain was not so general in Holland as Van Witt represented; and internal dissensions amongst the Estates, sedulously fanned by France, were slowly ruining the authority of the aristocratic and republican party, only to increase the influence of those who favored the house of Na.s.sau. In his far-sighted and sagacious patriotism, John van Witt had for a long time past foreseen the defeat of his cause, and he had carefully trained up the heir of the stadtholders, William of Na.s.sau, the natural head of his adversaries. It was this young prince whom the policy of Louis XIV. at that time opposed to Van Witt in the councils of the United Provinces, thus strengthening in advance the indomitable foe who was to triumph over all his greatness and vanquish him by dint of defeats. The despatch of an amba.s.sador to Spain, to form there an alliance offensive and defensive, was decided upon. "M. de Beverninck, who has charge of this mission, is without doubt a man of strength and ability," said M. de Pomponne, "and there are many who put him on a par with M. de Witt; it is true that he is not on a par with the other the whole day long, and that with the sobriety of morning he often loses the desert and capacity that were his up to dinner-time." The Spaniards at first gave but a cool reception to the overtures of the Hollanders.

"They look at their monarchy through the spectacles of Philip II.," said Beverninck, "and they take a pleasure in deceiving themselves whilst they flatter their vanity." Fear of the encroachments of France carried the day, however. "They consider," wrote M. de Lionne, "that, if they left the United Provinces to ruin, they would themselves have but the favor granted by the Cyclops, to be eaten last;" a defensive league was concluded between Spain and Holland, and all the efforts of France could not succeed in breaking it.

John van Witt was negotiating in every direction. The treaty of Charles II. with France had remained a profound secret, and the Hollanders believed that they might calculate upon the good-will of the English nation. The arms of England were effaced from the Royal Charles, a vessel taken by Van Tromp in 1667, and a curtain was put over a picture, in the town-hall of Dordrecht, of the victory at Chatham, representing the ruart [inspector of dikes] Cornelius van Witt leaning on a cannon.

These concessions to the pride of England were not made without a struggle. "Some," says M. de Pomponne, "thought it a piece of baseness to despoil themselves during peace, of tokens of the glory they had won in the war; others, less sensitive on this point of delicacy, and more affected by the danger of disobliging a crown which formed the first and at this date the most necessary of their connections, preferred the less spirited but safer to the honorable but more dangerous counsels."

Charles II. played with Boreel, amba.s.sador of the United Provinces at the court of London; taking advantage of the Estates' necessity in order to serve his nephew the Prince of Orange, he demanded for him the office of captain-general, which had been filled by his ancestors. Already the prince had been recognized as premier n.o.ble of Zealand, and he had obtained entrance to the council; John van Witt raised against him the vote of the Estates of Holland, still preponderant in the republic.

"The grand pensionary soon appeased the murmurs and complaints that were being raised against him," writes M. de Pomponne. "He prefers the greatest dangers to the re-estab lishment of the Prince of Orange, and to his re-establishment on the recommendation of the King of England; he would consider that the republic accepted a double yoke, both in the person of a chief who, from the post of captain general, might rise to all those which his fathers had filled, and in accepting him at the instance of a suspected crown." The grand pensionary did not err. In the spring of 1672, in spite of the loss of M. de Lionne, who died September 1, 1671, all the negotiations of Louis XIV. had succeeded; his armaments were completed; he was at last about to crush that little power which had for so long a time past presented an obstacle to his designs.

"The true way of arriving at the conquest of the Spanish Low Countries is to abase the Hollanders and annihilate them if it be possible," said Louvois to the Prince of Conde on the 1st of November, 1671; and the king wrote in an unpublished memorandum, "In the midst of all my successes during my campaign of 1667, neither England nor the empire, convinced as they were of the justice of my cause, whatever interest they may have had in checking the rapidity of my conquests, offered any opposition. I found in my path only my good, faithful, and old friends the Hollanders, who, instead of interesting themselves in my fortune as the foundation of their dominion, wanted to impose laws upon me and oblige me to make peace, and even dared to use threats in case I refused to accept their mediation. I confess that their insolence touched me to the quick, and that, at the risk of whatever might happen to my conquests in the Spanish Low Countries, I was very near turning all my forces against this proud and ungrateful nation; but, having summoned prudence to my aid, and considered that I had neither number of troops nor quality of allies requisite for such an enterptise, I dissimulated, I concluded peace on honorable conditions, resolved to put off the punishment of such perfidy to another time." The time had come; to the last attempt towards conciliation, made by Van Groot, son of the celebrated Grotius, in the name of the States General, the king replied with threatening haughtiness. "When I discovered that the United Provinces were trying to debauch my allies, and were soliciting kings, my relatives, to enter into offensive leagues against me, I made up my mind to put myself in a position to defend myself, and I levied some troops; but I intend to have more by the spring, and I shall make use of them at that time in the manner I shall consider most proper for the welfare of my dominions and for my own glory."

"The king starts to-morrow, my dear daughter," writes Madame de Sevigne to Madame de Grignan on the 27th of April "there will be a hundred thousand men out of Paris; the two armies will form a junction; the king will command Monsieur, Monsieur the prince, the prince M. de Turenne, and M. de Turenne the two marshals and even the army of Marshal Crequi. The king spoke to M. de Bellefonds and told him that his desire was that he should obey M. de Turenne without any fuss. The marshal, without asking for time (that was his mistake), said that he should not be worthy of the honor his Majesty had done him if he dishonored himself by an obedience without precedent. Marshal d'Humieres and Marshal Crequi said much the same. M. de la Rochefoucauld says that Bellefonds has spoilt everything because he has no joints in his mind. Marshal Crequi said to the king, 'Sir, take from me my baton, for are you not master? Let me serve this campaign as Marquis of Crequi; perhaps I may deserve that your Majesty give me back the baton at the end of the war.' The king was touched; but the result is, that they have all three been at their houses in the country planting cabbages (have ceased to serve)."

"You will permit me to tell you that there is nothing for it but to obey a master who says that he means to be obeyed," wrote Louvois to M. de Crequi. The king wanted to have order and one sole command in his army: and he was right.

The Prince of Orange, who had at last been appointed captain-general for a single campaign, possessed neither the same forces nor the same authority; the violence of party-struggles had blinded patriotic sentiment and was hampering the preparations for defence. Out of sixty-four thousand troops inscribed on the registers of the Dutch army, a great number neglected the summons; in the towns, the burgesses rose up against the magistrates, refusing to allow the faubourgs to be pulled down, and the peasants threatened to defend the dikes and close the sluices." When word was sent yesterday to the peasants to come and work on the Rhine at the redoubts and at piercing the dikes, not a man presented himself," says a letter of June 28, from John van Witt to his brother Cornelius; "all is disorder and confusion here." "I hope that, for the moment, we shall not lack gunpowder," said Beverninck; "but as for guncarriages there is no help for it; a fortnight hence we shall not have more than seven." Louvois had conceived the audacious idea of purchasing in Holland itself the supplies of powder and ball necessary for the French army and the commercial instincts of the Hollanders had prevailed over patriotic sentiment. Ruyter was short of munitions in the contest already commenced against the French and English fleet.

"Out of thirty-two battles I have been in I never saw any like it," said the Dutch admiral after the battle of Soultbay (Solebay) on the 7th of June. "Ruyter is admiral, captain, pilot, sailor, and soldier all in one," exclaimed the English. Cornelius van Witt in the capacity of commissioner of the Estates had remained seated on the deck of the admiral's vessel during the fight, indifferent to the bullets that rained around him. The issue of the battle was indecisive; Count d'Estrees, at the head of the French flotilla, had taken little part in the action.

It was not at sea and by the agency of his lieutenants that Louis XIV.

aspired to gain the victory; he had already arrived at the banks of the Rhine, marching straight into the very heart of Holland. "I thought it more advantageous for my designs, and less common on the score of glory,"

he wrote to Colbert on the 31st of May, "to attack four places at once on the Rhine, and to take the actual command in person at all four sieges...

. I chose, for that purpose, Rheinberg, Wesel, Burick, and Orsoy, and I hope that there will be no complaint of my having deceived public expectation." The four places did not hold out four days. On the 12th of June, the king and the Prince of Conde appeared unexpectedly on the right bank of the intermediary branch of the Rhine, between the Wahal and the Yssel. The Hollanders were expecting the enemy at the ford of, the Yssel, being more easy to pa.s.s; they were taken by surprise; the king's cuira.s.sier regiment dashed into the river, and crossed it partly by fording and partly by swimming; the resistance was brief; meanwhile the Duke of Longueville was killed, and the Prince of Conde was wounded for the first time in his life. "I was present at the pa.s.sage, which was bold, vigorous, full of brilliancy, and glorious for the nation," writes Louis XIV. Arnheim and Deventer had just surrendered to Turenne and Luxembourg; Duisbourg resisted the king for a few days; Monsieur was besieging Zutphen. John van Witt was for evacuating the Hague and removing to Amsterdam the centre of government and resistance; the Prince of Orange had just abandoned the province of Utrecht, which was immediately occupied by the French; the defensive efforts were concentrated upon the province of Holland; already Naarden, three leagues from Amsterdam, was in the king's hands. "We learn the surrender of towns before we have heard of their investment," wrote Van Witt. A deputation from the States was sent on the 22d of June to the king's headquarters to demand peace. Louis XIV. had just entered Utrecht, which, finding itself abandoned, opened its gates to him. On the same day, John van Witt received in a street of the Hague four stabs with a dagger from the hand of an a.s.sa.s.sin, whilst the city of Amsterdam, but lately resolved to surrender and prepared to send its magistrates as delegates to Louis XIV., suddenly decided upon resistance to the bitter end. " If we must perish, let us at any rate be the last to fall,"

exclaimed the town-councillor Walkernier, "and let us not submit to the yoke it is desired to impose upon us until there remain no means of securing ourselves against it." All the sluices were opened and the dikes cut. Amsterdam floated amidst the waters. "I thus found myself under the necessity of limiting my conquests, as regarded the province of Holland, to Naarden, Utrecht, and Werden," writes Louis XIV. in his unpublished Memoire touching the campaign of 1672, and he adds, with rare impartiality, "the resolution to place the whole country under water was somewhat violent; but what would not one do to save one's self from foreign domination? I cannot help admiring and commending the zeal and stout-heartedness of those who broke off the negotiation of Amsterdam, though their decision, salutary as it was for their country, was very prejudicial to my service; the proposals made to me by the deputies from the States General were very advantageous, but I could never prevail upon myself to accept them."

Louis XIV. was as yet ignorant what can be done amongst a proud people by patriotism driven to despair; the States General offered him Maestricht, the places on the Rhine, Brabant and Dutch Flanders, with a war-indemnity of ten millions; it was an open door to the Spanish Low Countries, which became a patch enclosed by French possessions; but the king wanted to annihilate the Hollanders; he demanded Southern Gueldres, the Island of Bonmel, twenty-four millions, the restoration of Catholic wors.h.i.+p, and, every year, an emba.s.sy commissioned to thank the king for having a second time given peace to the United Provinces. This was rather too much; and, whilst the deputies were negotiating with heavy hearts, the people of Holland had risen in wrath.

From the commencement of the war, the party of the house of Na.s.sau had never ceased to gain ground. John van Witt was accused of all the misfortunes of the state; the people demanded with loud outcries the restoration of the stadtholderate, but lately abolished by a law voted by the States under the presumptuous t.i.tle of perpetual edict. Dordrecht, the native place of the Van Witts, gave the signal of insurrection.

Cornelius van Witt, who was confined to his house by illness, yielded to the prayers of his wife and children, and signed the munic.i.p.al act which destroyed his brother's work; the contagion spread from town to town, from province to province; on the 4th of July the States General appointed William of Orange stadtholder, captain-general, and admiral of the Union; the national instinct had divined the savior of the country, and with tumultuous acclamations placed in his hands the reins of the state.

[Ill.u.s.tration: William III., Prince of Orange----434]

William of Orange was barely two and twenty when the fate of revolutions suddenly put him at the head of a country invaded, devastated, half conquered; but his mind as well as his spirit were up to the level of his task. He loftily rejected at the a.s.sembly of the Estates the proposals brought forward in the king's name by Peter van Groot. "To subscribe them would be suicide," he said: "even to discuss them is dangerous; but, if the majority of this a.s.sembly decide otherwise, there remains but one course for the friends of Protestantism and liberty, and that is, to retire to the colonies in the West Indies, and there found a new country, where their consciences and their persons will be beyond the reach of tyranny and despotism." The States General decided to "reject the hard and intolerable conditions proposed by their lords.h.i.+ps the Kings of France and Great Britain, and to defend this state and its inhabitants with all their might." The province of Holland in its entirety followed the example of Amsterdam; the dikes were everywhere broken down, at the same time that the troops of the electors of Brandenburg and Saxony were advancing to the aid of the United Provinces, and that the emperor was signing with those two princes a defensive alliance for the maintenance of the treaties of Westphalia, the Pyrenees, and Aix-la-Chapelle.

Louis XIV. could no longer fly from conquest to conquest; henceforth his troops had to remain on observation; care for his pleasures recalled him to France; he left the command-in-chief of his army to M. de Turenne, and set out for St. Germain, where he arrived on the 1st of August. Before leaving Holland, he had sent home almost without ransom twenty thousand prisoners of war, who before long entered the service of the States again. "It was an excess of clemency of which I had reason afterwards to repent," says the king himself. His mistake was, that he did not understand either Holland or the new chief she had chosen.

Dispirited and beaten, like his country, John van Witt had just given in his resignation as councillor pensionary of Holland. He wrote to Ruyter on the 5th of August, as follows: "The capture of the towns on the Rhine in so short a time, the irruption of the enemy as far as the banks of the Yssel, and the total loss of the provinces of Gueldres, Utrecht, and Over-Yssel, almost without resistance and through unheard-of poltroonery, if not treason, on the part of certain people, have more and more convinced me of the truth of what was in olden times applied to the Roman republic: _Successes are claimed by everybody, reverses are put down to one (Prospera omnes sibi vindicant, adversa uni imputantur)_. That is my own experience. The people of Holland have not only laid at my door all the disasters and calamities that have befallen our republic; they have not been content to see me fall unarmed and defenceless into the hands of four individuals whose design was to murder me; but when, by the agency of Divine Providence, I escaped the a.s.sa.s.sins' blows and had recovered from my wounds, they conceived a violent hatred against such of their magistrates as they believed to have most to do with the direction of public affairs; it is against me chiefly that this hatred has manifested itself, although I was nothing but a servant of the state; it is this that has obliged me to demand my discharge from the office of councillor-pensionary." He was at once succeeded by Gaspard van f.a.gel, pa.s.sionately devoted to the Prince of Orange.

Popular pa.s.sion is as unjust as it is violent in its excesses. Cornelius van Witt, but lately sharing with his brother the public confidence, had just been dragged, as a criminal, to the Hague, accused by a wretched barber of having planned the a.s.sa.s.sination of the Prince of Orange. In vain did the magistrates of the town of Dordrecht claim their right of jurisdiction over their fellow-citizen. Cornelius van Witt was put to the torture to make him confess his crime. 'You will not force me to confess a thing I never even thought of," he said, whilst the pulleys were dislocating his limbs. His baffled judges heard him repeating Horace's ode: _Just um et tenacem propositi virum_. . . . At the end of three hours he was carried back to his cell, broken but indomitable.

The court condemned him to banishment; his accuser, Tichelaer, was not satisfied.

Before long, at his instigation, the mob collected about the prison, uttering imprecations against the judges and their clemency. "They are traitors!" cried Tichelaer, "but let us first take vengeance on those whom we have." John van Witt had been brought to the prison by a message supposed to have come from the ruart. In vain had his daughter conjured him not to respond to it. "What are you come here for?" exclaimed Cornelius, on seeing his brother enter. "Did you not send for me?"

"No, certainly not." Then we are lost," said John van Witt, calmly. The shouts of the crowd redoubled; a body of cavalry still preserved order; a rumor suddenly spread that the peasants from the environs were marching on the Hague to plunder it; the States of Holland sent orders to the Count of Tilly to move against them; the brave soldier demanded a written order. "I will obey," he said, "but the two brothers are lost."

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Brothers Witt----436]

The troops had scarcely withdrawn, and already the doors of the prison were forced; the ruart, exhausted by the torture, was stretched upon his bed, whilst his brother sat by his side reading the Bible aloud; the madmen rushed into the chamber, crying, "Traitors, prepare yourselves; you are going to die." Cornelius van Witt started up, joining his hands in prayer; the blows aimed at him did not reach him. John was wounded.

They were both dragged forth; they embraced one another; Cornelius, struck from behind, rolled to the bottom of the staircase; his brother would have defended him; as he went out into the street, he received a pike-thrust in the face; the ruart was dead already; the murderers vented their fury on John van Witt; he had lost nothing of his courage or his coolness, and, lifting his arms towards heaven, he was opening his mouth in prayer to G.o.d, when a last pistol-shot stretched him upon his back.

"There's the perpetual edict floored!" shouted the a.s.sa.s.sins, lavis.h.i.+ng upon the two corpses insults and imprecations. It was only at night, and after having with difficulty recognized them, so disfigured had they been, that poor Jacob van Witt was able to have his sons' bodies removed; he was before long to rejoin them in everlasting rest.

William of Orange arrived next day at the Hague, too late for his fame, and for the punishment of the obscure a.s.sa.s.sins, whom he allowed to escape. The compa.s.sers of the plot obtained before long appointments and rewards. "He one day a.s.sured me," says Gourville, "that it was quite true he had not given any orders to have the Witts killed, but that, having heard of their death without having contributed to it, he had certainly felt a little relieved." History and the human heart have mysteries which it is not well to probe to the bottom.

For twenty years John van Witt had, been the most n.o.ble exponent of his country's traditional policy. Long faithful to the French alliance, he had desired to arrest Louis XIV. in his dangerous career of triumph; foreseeing the peril to come, he had forgotten the peril at hand; he had believed too much and too long in the influence of negotiations and the possibility of regaining the friends.h.i.+p of France. He died unhappy, in spite of his pious submission to the will of G.o.d; what he had desired for his country was slipping from him abroad as well as at home; Holland was crushed by France, and the aristocratic republic was vanquished by monarchical democracy. With the weakness characteristic of human views, he could not open his eyes to a vision of const.i.tutional monarchy freely chosen, preserving to his country the independence, prosperity, and order which he had labored to secure for her. A politician as, bold as and more far-sighted than Admiral Coligny, twice struck down, like him, by a.s.sa.s.sins, John van Witt remained in history the unique model of a great republican chief, virtuous and able, proud and modest, up to the day at which other United Provinces, fighting like Holland for their liberty, presented a rival to the purity of his fame, when they chose for their governor General Was.h.i.+ngton.

For all their brutal ingrat.i.tude, the instinct of the people of Holland saw clearly into the situation. John van Witt would have failed in the struggle against France; William of Orange, prince, politician, and soldier, saved his country and Europe from the yoke of Louis XIV.

On quitting his army, the king had inscribed in his notebook, "My departure.--I do not mean to have anything more done." The temperature favored his designs; it did not freeze, the country remained inundated and the towns unapproachable; the troops of the Elector of Brandenburg, together with a corps sent by the emperor, had put themselves in motion towards the Rhine; Turenne kept them in check in Germany. Conde covered Alsace; the Duke of Luxembourg, remaining in Holland, confined himself to burning two large villages--Bodegrave and Saammerdam. "There was a grill of all the Hollanders who were in those burghs," wrote the marshal to the Prince of Conde, "not one of whom was let out of the houses. This morning we were visited by two of the enemy's drummers, who came to claim a colonel of great note amongst them (I have him in cinders at this moment), as well as several officers that we have not, and that are demanded of us, who, I suppose, were killed at the approaches to the villages, where I saw some rather pretty little heaps." The attempts of the Prince of Orange on Charleroi had failed, as well as those of Luxembourg on the Hague; the Swedes had offered their mediation, and negotiations were beginning at Cologne; on the 10th of June, 1673, Louis XIV. laid siege to Maestricht; Conde was commanding in Holland, with Luxembourg under his orders; Turenne was observing Germany. The king was alone with Vauban. Maestricht held out three weeks. "M. de Vauban, in this siege as in many others, saved a number of lives by his ingenuity,"

wrote a young subaltern, the Count of Alligny. "In times past it was sheer butchery in the trenches, now he makes them in such a manner that one is as safe as if one were at home." "I don't know whether it ought to be called swagger, vanity, or carelessness, the way we have of showing ourselves unadvisedly and without cover," Vauban used to say; " but it is an original sin of which the French will never purge themselves, if G.o.d, who is all-powerful, do not reform the whole race." Maestricht taken, the king repaired to Elsa.s.s, where skilful negotiations delivered into his hands the towns that had remained independent: it was time to consolidate past conquests; the coalition of Europe was forming against France; the Hollanders held the sea against the hostile fleets; after three desperate fights, Ruyter had prevented all landing in Holland; the States no longer entertained the proposals they had but lately submitted to the king at Utrecht; the Prince of Orange had recovered Naarden, and just carried Bonn, with the aid of the Imperialists, commanded by Montecuculli; Luxembourg had already received orders to evacuate the province of Utrecht; at the end of the campaign of 1673, Gueldres and Over-Yssel were likewise delivered from the enemies who had oppressed and plundered them; Spain had come forth from her lethargy; and the emperor, resuming the political direction of Germany, had drawn nearly all the princes after him into the league against France. The Protestant qualms of the English Parliament had not yielded to the influence of the Marquis of Ruvigny, a man of note amongst the French Reformers, and at this time amba.s.sador of France in London; the nation desired peace with the Hollanders; and Charles II. yielded, in appearance at least, to the wishes of his people.

On the 21st of February, 1674, he repaired to Parliament to announce to the two Houses that he had concluded with the United Provinces "a prompt peace, as they had prayed, honorable, and, as he hoped, durable." He at the same time wrote to Louis XIV., to beg to be condoled with, rather than upbraided, for a consent which had been wrung from him. The regiments of English and Irish auxiliaries remained quietly in the service of France; and the king did not withdraw his subsidies from his royal pensioner.

Thus was being undone, link by link, the chain of alliances which Louis XIV. had but lately twisted round Holland. France, in her turn, was finding herself alone, with all Europe against her; scared, and, consequently, active and resolute; the congress of Cologne had broken up; not one of the belligerents desired peace; the Hollanders had just settled the heredity of the stadtholderate in the house of Orange. Louis XIV. saw the danger. "So many enemies," says he in his Memoires, "obliged me to take care of myself, and think what I must do to maintain the reputation of my arms, the advantage of my dominions, and my personal glory." It was in Franche-Comte that Louis XIV. went to seek these advantages. The whole province was reduced to submission in the month of June, 1674. Turenne had kept the Rhine against the Imperialists; the marshal alone escaped the tyranny of the king and Louvois, and presumed to conduct the campaign in his own way; when Louis XIV. sent him instructions, he was by this time careful to add, "You will not bind yourself down to what I send you hereby as to my intentions, save when you think that the good of my service will permit you, and you will give me of your news the oftenest you find it possible." (30th of March, 1674.) Turenne did not always write, and it sometimes happened that he did not obey.

This redounded to his honor in the campaign of 1674. Conde had gained, on the 11th of August, the b.l.o.o.d.y victory of Seneffe over the Prince of Orange and the allied generals; the four squadrons of the king's household, posted within range of the fire, had remained for eight hours in order of battle, without any movement but that of closing up as the men fell. Madame de Sdvigne, to whom her son, standard-bearer in the dauphin's gendarmes, had told the story, wrote to M. de BussyRabutin, "But for the Te Deum, and some flags brought to Notre-Dame, we should have thought we had lost the battle." The Prince 6f Orange, ever indomitable in his cold courage, had attacked Audenarde on the 15th of September; but he was not in force, and the, approach of Conde had obliged him to raise the siege; to make up, he had taken Grave, spite of the heroic resistance made by the Marquis of Chemilly, who had held out ninety-three days. Advantages remained balanced in Flanders; the result of the campaign depended on Turenne, who commanded on the Rhine. "If the king had taken the most important place in Flanders," he wrote to Louvois, "and the emperor were master of Alsace, even without Philipsburg or Brisach, I think the king's affairs would be in the worst plight in the world; we should see what armies we should have in Lorraine, in the Bishoprics, and in Champagne. I do a.s.sure you that, if I had the honor of commanding in Flanders, I would speak as I do." On the 16th of June he engaged in battle, at Sinzheim, with the Duke of Lorraine, who was coming up with the advance-guard. "I never saw a more obstinate fight,"

said Turenne: "those old regiments of the emperor's did mighty well."

He subsequently entered the Palatinate, quartering his troops upon it, whilst the superintendents sent by Louvois were burning and plundering the country, crushed as it was under war-contributions. The king and Louvois were disquieted by the movement of the enemy's troops, and wanted to get Turenne back into Lothringen. "An army like that of the enemy,"

wrote the marshal to Louvois, on the 13th of Septem ber, "and at the season it is now, cannot have any idea but that of driving the king's army from Alsace, having neither provisions nor means of getting into Lorraine, unless I be driven from the country." On the 20th of September, the burgesses of the free city of Strasburg delivered up the bridge over the Rhine to the Imperialists who were in the heart of Elsa.s.s. The victory of Ensheim, the fights of Mulhausen and Turckheim, sufficed to drive them back; but it was only on the 22d of January, 1675, that Turenne was at last enabled to leave Elsa.s.s reconquered. "There is no longer in France an enemy that is not a prisoner," he wrote to the king, whose thanks embarra.s.sed him.

"Everybody has remarked that M. de Turenne is a little more bashful than he was wont to be," said Pellisson.