Outlines of Universal History, Designed as a Text-book and for Private Reading

by George Park Fisher

CHAPTER I. THE PREPONDERANCE OF FRANCE: FIRST PART OF THE REIGN OF LOUIS XIV. (TO THE PEACE OF RYSWICK, 1697): THE RESTORATION OF THE STUARTS: THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION OF 1688.

LOUIS XIV.: MAZARIN.—The great minister Richelieu died in 1642. "Abroad, though a cardinal of the Church, he arrested the Catholic reaction, freed Northern from Southern Europe, and made toleration possible; at home, out of the broken fragments of her liberties and her national prosperity, he paved the way for the glory of France." He paved the way, also, for the despotism of her kings. He had been feared and hated by king and people, but had been obeyed by both. A few months later Louis XIII., a sovereign without either marked virtues or vices, followed him (1643). Louis XIV. (1643-1715) was then only five years old; and Mazarin, the heir of Richelieu's power, stood at the helm until his death (1661). To this Italian statesman, ambitious of power and wealth, but astute, and, like Richelieu, devoted to France, the queen, Anne of Austria, willingly left the management of the government. The rebellion of the Fronde (1648-1653) was a rising of the nobles to throw off the yoke laid on them by Richelieu. They were helped by the discontent of parliament and people with the oppressive taxation. In Paris, there was a rising of the populace, who built barricades; but the revolt was quelled. Its leaders, Conti, the Cardinal de Retz, and the great Condé, a famous soldier, were compelled to fly from the country. Mazarin, who had been obliged to fly to Cologne, returned in triumph. After that, resistance to the absolute monarch ceased,—the monarch whose theory of government was expressed in the assertion, "I am the State" (l'etat c'est moi). In the Peace of the Pyrenees (1659), Spain gave in marriage to Louis, the Infanta Maria Theresa, the daughter of Philip IV., and ceded to France important places in the Netherlands. Maria renounced all claims on her inheritance, for herself and her issue, in consideration of a dowry of five hundred thousand crowns to be paid by Spain. Shortly after, Mazarin, who had negotiated the treaty, in full possession of his exalted authority and the incalculable treasures which he had amassed, died.

LOUIS XIV. AND HIS OFFICERS.—Louis XIV. was now his own master. His appetite for power was united with a relish for pomp and splendor, which led him to make Versailles, the seat of his court, as splendid as architectural skill and lavish expenditure could render it, and to make France the model in art, literature, manners, and modes of life, for all Europe. With sensual propensities he mingled a religious or superstitious vein, so that from time to time he sought to compound for his vices by the persecution of the Huguenots. He was the central figure in the European life of his time. Taking care that his own personal authority should not be in the least impaired, he made Colbert controller-general, to whom was given charge of the finances of the kingdom. Louvois was made the minister of war. Colbert not only provided the money for the costly wars, the luxurious palaces, and the gorgeous festivities of his master, but constructed canals, fostered manufactures, and built up the French marine. Louvois, with equal success, organized the military forces in a way that was copied by other European states. Able generals—Turenne, Condé, and Luxemburg—were in command. The nobles who held the offices, military as well as civil, vied with one another in their obsequious devotion to the "great king." Vauban, the most skillful engineer of the age, erected impregnable fortifications in the border towns that were seized by conquest. In the arts of diplomacy, the French ambassadors were equally superior. The monarch was sustained by the national pride of the people, and by their ambition to dominate in Europe.

ATTACK ON THE NETHERLANDS.—Louis had already purchased of the English Dunkirk,—which was shamefully sold to him by Charles II.,—when Philip IV. of Spain died (1665). He now claimed parts of the Netherlands as being an inheritance of his queen, according to an old law of those provinces. He conquered the county of Burgundy, or Franche Comté, and various places in that country. Holland, afraid that he might push his conquests farther, formed the Triple Alliance with England and Sweden. In the Treaty of Aachen (Aix), Louis gave up to the Spaniards Franche Comté, but retained the captured cities in the Netherlands (1668), which Vauban proceeded to fortify.

ATTACK ON HOLLAND.—The next attack of Louis was upon Holland. Holland and the Spanish Netherlands were at variance in religion, as well as in their political systems, and rivals in trade and industry. The first minister of the emperor, Leopold., was in the pay of Louis. Sweden, in the minority of Charles XI., was in the hands of the Swedish nobles. England had now joined Louis, who, in return for help in the Netherlands, was to furnish subsidies to assist Charles II. in establishing Catholicism in his realm. In Holland, there was a division between the republicans, of whom the grand pensionary, John de Witt, was the chief, and the adherents of the house of Orange.

THE WAR: THE PEACE OF NIMWEGEN.—Louis, having first seized Lorraine,—whose duke had allied himself to the United Provinces,—accompanied by his famous generals, Condé, Turenne, and Vauban, put himself at the head of an army of one hundred and twenty thousand men, which crossed the Rhine, and advanced to the neighborhood of the capital of Holland. The Orange party charged the blame of the failure to defend the land on their adversaries, whom they accused of treachery. De Witt and his brother, Cornelius, were killed in the streets of Hague. William III., the Prince of Orange (1672-1702), assumed power. Gröningen held out against the French troops. Storms on the sea and on the land aided the patriotic defenders of their country. The "Great Elector" of Brandenburg, Frederic William, lent them help. At length the German emperor was driven by the French aggressions to join actively in the war, on the side of the Dutch. The English Parliament (1674) forced Charles II. to conclude peace with them. In the battle of Sasbach, Turenne fell (1675). Sweden took the side of France, and invaded the elector's territory; but the elector's victory at Fehrbellin (1675) laid the foundation of the greatness of Prussia. William III. kept the field against the great generals of France, and married the daughter of James, the Duke of York, the brother of Charles II. In bringing the war to an end, Louis, by shrewd diplomacy, settled with the United Provinces first. By the Peace of Nimwegen (1678 and 1679), Holland received back its whole territory; France kept most of her new conquests in the Netherlands, with the county of Burgundy, the city of Besançon, and some imperial towns in Alsace not ceded in the Peace of Westphalia; the emperor lost to France Freiburg in the Breisgau. The elector, left to shift for himself, was forced to give back his profitable conquests to Sweden (1679).

EFFECT OF THE WAR.—In the war with Holland, Louis had shown his military strength, and his skill in making and breaking alliances. He had made progress towards the goal of his ambition, which was to act as dictator in the European family of states. To the end of the century, France stood on the pinnacle of power and apparent prosperity.

CONDITION OF FRANCE.—Manufactures flourished to an astonishing degree. France became a naval power with a large fleet and with all its services better organized than those of the contemporary English marine. Colbert finished the canal between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. Colonies were founded in St. Domingo, Cayenne, Madagascar. Canada was increasing in strength. A uniform, strict judicial system was established. Restless nobles were cowed, and the common people thus drawn to the monarch.

THE FRENCH COURT.—In his court, the king established elaborate forms of etiquette, and made himself almost an object of worship. The nobility swarmed about him, and sought advancement from his favor. Festivals and shows of all sorts—plays, ballets, banquets, dazzling fireworks—were the costly diversion of the gay throngs of courtiers, male and female, in that court, where sensuality was thinly veiled by ceremonious politeness and punctilious religious observances. Poets, artists, and scholars were liberally patronized, and joined in the common adulation offered to the sovereign. Stately edifices were built, great libraries gathered; academies of art and of science, an astronomical observatory, and the botanic garden for the promotion of the study of natural history, were founded. The palace at Versailles, with its statues, fountains, and gardens, furnished a pattern which all the rest of Europe aspired to copy. Every thing there wore an artificial stamp, from the trimming of the trees to the etiquette of the ballroom. But there was a splendor and a fascination which caused the French fashions, the French language and literature, with the levity and immorality which traveled in their company, to spread in the higher circles of the other European countries.

THE GALLICAN CHURCH.—Louis XIV. desired, without any rupture with Rome, to take to himself a power in ecclesiastical affairs like that assumed in England by Henry VIII. Under the pontificate of Innocent XI., the assembly of the French clergy passed four propositions asserting the rights of the national Gallican Church, and limiting the Pope's prerogative (1682). The king had for his ecclesiastical champion the able and eloquent Bossuet, the Bishop of Meaux. Subsequently, under Innocent XII., Louis, afraid of a schism and anxious to procure other advantages, yielded up the four obnoxious propositions.

JANSENISM.—The controversy raised by the Jansenists was an important event in the history of France. They took their name from Jansenius, who had been Bishop of Ypres, an ardent disciple of St. Augustine's theology. They strenuously opposed the theology and moral maxims of the powerful Jesuit order. Their leaders, St. Cyran, Pascal, Arnauld, Nicole, and others, were called Port Royalists, from their relation to a cloister at Port Royal, where some of them resided. They were men of literary and philosophical genius, as well as theologians and devotees. Blaise Pascal wrote the "Provincial Letters," a satirical and polemical work against the Jesuit doctrines. This has always been deemed in style a masterpiece of French prose. His posthumous Thoughts is a profound and suggestive fragment on the evidences of religion. In the heated controversy that arose, the Jansenist leaders were for a more limited definition of the Pope's authority in deciding questions of doctrine. The French court at length took the side of the Jesuits. In 1713 the Pope's bull against the Moral Reflections of Quesnel, a Jansenist author, was a heavy blow at his party. Finally, the Jansenists were proscribed by the king, and the cloister at Port Royal leveled to the ground. The Jansenist influence made a part of the tendencies to liberalism that led to the Revolution at the close of the century.

THE HUGUENOTS.—After Mazarin's death, the king fell under the influence of a party hostile to the Huguenots. Louvois fostered this feeling in him, as did Madame de Maintenon, whom he had secretly married, and by whom he was influenced through life. As he grew older, he sought to appease a guilty conscience by inflicting tortures on religious dissenters. He issued edicts of the most cruel character. He adopted the atrocious scheme of the dragonade, or the billeting of soldiers, over whom there was no restraint, in Huguenot families. In the course of three years, fifty thousand families, industrious and virtuous people, had fled the country. In 1685 the Edict of Nantes, the charter of Protestant rights, was revoked. Emigration was forbidden; yet not far from a quarter of a million of refugees escaped, to enrich by their skill and labor the Protestant countries where they found an asylum. Many of the refugees were received by the Elector Frederick, and helped to build up Berlin, then a small city of twelve thousand inhabitants. France was not only in a degree impoverished by those who fled, but, also, by the much larger number who remained to be harassed and ruined by the foolish and brutal bigotry of their ruler.

The loss to France by the exile of the Huguenots was incalculable. "Here were the thriftiest, the bravest, the most intelligent of Frenchmen, the very flower of the race; some of their best and purest blood, some of their fairest and most virtuous women, all their picked artisans. In war, in diplomacy, in literature, in production of wealth, these refugees gave what they took from France to her enemies; for they carried with them that bitter sense of wrong which made them henceforth foremost among those enemies, the forlorn hope of every attack on their ancient fatherland. Large numbers of officers, and those among the ablest, emigrated; among them pre-eminent Marshal Schomberg, 'the best general in Europe.' The fleet especially suffered: the best of the sailors emigrated; the ships were almost unmanned. The seamen carried tidings of their country's madness to the ends of the earth: as Voltaire says, 'the French were as widely dispersed as the Jews.' Not only in industry, but in thought and mental activity, there was a terrible loss. From this time literature in France loses all spring and power."

In England, the Huguenot exiles quickened manufactures; in Holland, commerce; in Brandenburg, they made a new era in agriculture. Moreover, from this time the policy of Brandenburg was changed: the hostility to the emperor and the house of Austria gave way. An antagonism to France arose: "a process begun by the Great Elector, carried on by Frederick the Great, and brought to a triumphant close in our own days, dates from the revocation of the Edict of Nantes."

THE COST OF NATIONAL UNITY IN FRANCE.—From the beginning of the Reformation, the problem for the nations to solve was, how to combine religious freedom with national unity. The intolerance of the Spanish branch of the Hapsburgs deprived them of Holland, and broke down their power. This effort to secure uniformity of belief was shattered. A like effort in Germany resulted in the Thirty Years' War, and the utter loss of the national unity which it aimed to restore. The civil wars in France, aiming at the same result, uniformity of belief, ended in an accommodation between the parties, secured by Henry IV. in the Edict of Nantes. There was a partial sacrifice of national unity. This was reestablished by the policy of Richelieu and the acts of Louis XIV., but at a fearful cost. The loss of the Huguenot emigrants; the loss of character, with the loss of the spirit of independence, in the nobles of France; the full sway of a monarchical despotism,—this was the price paid for national unity.

AGGRESSIONS OF LOUIS.—The readiness of the European states to accept the provisions of the Nimwegen Treaty emboldened Louis to further outrages and aggressions. Germany, split into a multitude of sovereignties, and for the most part inactive as if a paralysis lay upon her, was a tempting prey to the spoiler. He claimed that all the places which had stood in a feudal relation to the places acquired by France in the Westphalian and Nimwegen treaties, should become dependencies of France. He constituted Reunions, or courts of his own, to decide what these places were, and enforced their decrees with his troops (1679). He went so far, in a time of peace, as to seize and wrest from the German Empire the city of Strasburg, to establish his domination there, and to introduce the Catholic worship, in the room of the Protestant, in the minster (1681). Instead of heeding the warning of the Prince of Orange, the empire concluded with Louis the truce of Regensburg, by which he was suffered to retain these conquests. He evinced his arrogance in making a quarrel with Genoa, in bombarding the city, and in forcing the doge to come to Versailles and beg for peace (1684).

HUNGARY AND AUSTRIA.—The Emperor Leopold was busy in the eastern part of his dominions. The success of the Turks, who gained possession of Lower Hungary, called out a more energetic resistance; but a victory gained by the imperial general, Montecuculi, at St. Gothard, on the Raab (1664), only resulted in a truce. The Austrian government, guided by the minister, Lobkowitz, used the opportunity to rob the Hungarians of their liberties and rights. Political tyranny and religious persecution went hand in hand. Protestant preachers were sold as galley-slaves. Tököly, an Hungarian nobleman, led in a revolt, and invoked the help of the Turks. In 1683 the Turks laid siege to Vienna, which was saved by a great victory gained under its walls by a united German and Polish army; the hero in the conflict being John Sobieski, king of Poland. The German princes and Venice now united in the prosecution of the war. The conquest of Hungary from the Turks enabled Leopold to destroy Hungarian independence. After their defeat by Charles of Lorraine at Mohacs (1687), the Diet of Pressburg conferred on the male Austrian line the crown of Hungary, and abandoned its old privilege of resisting unconstitutional ordinances (1687). A great victory gained over the Turks by Prince Eugene at Zenta was followed by the Peace of Carlowitz, which gave Hungary and Transylvania to Austria, Morea to Venice, and Azof to Russia. Tököly died in exile.

THE RESTORATION IN ENGLAND (1660).—Richard Cromwell quietly succeeded to the Protectorate. But the officers of the army recalled the "Rump" Parliament, the survivors of the Long Parliament. After eight months Richard gave up his office. The "Rump" was soon in a quarrel again with the army, and was expelled by its chief, Lambert. Monk, the commander of the English troops in Scotland, refused to recognize the government set up by the officers in London. The fleet declared itself on the side of Parliament. Lambert was forsaken, and Monk entered London (1660). A new Parliament or Convention was convoked, which included the Upper House. The restoration of Charles II. was now effected by means of the combined influence of the Episcopalians and Presbyterians, and through the agency of Monk. Charles, in his Declaration from Breda, prior to his return, promised "liberty to tender consciences." This and subsequent pledges were falsified: he had the Stuart infirmity of breaking his engagements. With an easy good-nature and complaisant manners, he was void of moral principle, and in his conduct an open profligate. At heart he was a Roman Catholic, and simply from motives of expediency deferred the avowal of his belief to his death-bed. The army was disbanded. Vengeance was taken on such of the "regicides," the judges of Charles I., as could be caught, and on the bodies of Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw. The Cavalier party had now every thing their own way. The Episcopal system was reestablished, and a stringent Act of Uniformity was passed. Two thousand Presbyterian ministers were turned out of their parishes. If there was at any time indulgence to the nonconformists, it was only for the sake of the Roman Catholics. John Bunyan, the author of "Pilgrim's Progress," was kept in prison for more than twelve years. The sale of Dunkirk to France (1662) awakened general indignation.

THE "YEAR OF WONDERS:" THE CONDUCT OF CHARLES.—The year 1665 was marked as the year of the Great Plague in London, where the narrow and dirty streets admitted little fresh air. It was estimated that not less than one hundred thousand people perished. In less than a year after the plague ceased, there occurred the Great Fire in London (Sept., 1666), which burned for three days, and laid London in ashes from the Tower to the Temple, and from the Thames to Smithfield. St. Paul's, the largest cathedral in England, was consumed, and was replaced by the present church of the same name, planned by Sir Christopher Wren. The king showed an unexpected energy in trying to stay the progress of the flames. But neither public calamities, nor the sorrow and indignation of all good men, including his most loyal and attached adherents, could check the shameless profligacy of his palace-life. The diaries of Evelyn and of Pepys, both of whom were familiar with the court, picture the disgraceful depravation of morals, which was stimulated by the king's example. But the nation was even more aggrieved by his conduct in respect to foreign nations. In a war with Holland, arising out of commercial rivalry, the English had the mortification of seeing the Thames blockaded by the Dutch fleet (1667). Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, Charles's principal adviser, whose daughter married the Duke of York, was driven from office, and went into exile to escape a trial. The Triple Alliance against Louis (p. 453) was gratifying to the people; but in the Treaty of Dover (1670), Charles engaged to declare himself a Roman Catholic as soon as he could do so with prudence, and promised to join his cousin, Louis XIV., against Holland, and to aid him in his schemes; in return for which he was to receive a large subsidy from Louis, a pension during the war, and armed help in case of an insurrection in England.

THE "CABAL" MINISTRY.—A cabinet, as we now term it,—a small number of persons,—had, before this reign, begun to exercise the functions which belonged of old to the King's Council. At this time, the cabal ministry—so called from the first letters of the names, which together made the word—was in power. In 1672 war with Holland was declared, and was kept up for two years.

DECLARATION OF INDULGENCE.—When Charles began this second Dutch war, he issued orders for the suspension of the laws against the Catholics and Dissenters. His design was to weaken the Church of England. The anger of Parliament and of the people at this usurpation obliged him to recall the declaration.

THE TEST ACT.—Parliament, in 1673, passed an act which shut out all
Dissenters from office. This act the king did not venture to reject;
although the effect of it was to oblige his brother James, the
Duke of York, to resign his office of lord high admiral.

DANBY'S MINISTRY.—The cabal ministry was gradually broken up; and Shaftesbury, an able minister, went over to the other side. The Earl of Danby became the chief minister. He was in agreement with the House of Commons. He favored the marriage which united Mary, the daughter of the Duke of York, to William, Prince of Orange.

THE "POPISH PLOT" (1678).—The already exasperated nation was infuriated by an alleged "Popish Plot" for the subverting of the government, and for the murder of the king and of all Protestants. Titus Oates, a perjurer, was the main witness. Many innocent Roman Catholics were put to death. This pretended plot led to stringent measures shutting out papists from office. Halifax, an able man who called himself "a trimmer," because he did not always stay on one side or with one party, opposed a bill that would have excluded the king's brother from the succession, and it failed.

HABEAS CORPUS ACT.—In 1679 the Habeas Corpus Act was passed, providing effectually against the arbitrary imprisonment of subjects. Persons arrested must be brought to trial, or proved in open court to be legally confined.

PARTIES: RUSSELL AND SIDNEY.—At this time the party names of Whig and Tory came into vogue. Insurgent Presbyterians in Scotland had been called "Whigs," a Scotch word meaning whey, or sour milk. The nickname was now applied to Shaftesbury's adherents, opponents of the court, who wished to exclude the Duke of York from the throne on account of his being a Catholic. Tories, also a nickname, the designation of the supporters of the court, meant originally Romanist outlaws, or robbers, in the bogs of Ireland. Many of the Whigs began to devise plans of insurrection, from hatred of Charles's arbitrary system of government. Some of them were disposed to put forward Monmouth, the eldest of Charles's illegitimate sons, and a favorite of the common people. The "Rye-House Plot" for the assassination of the king and his brother was the occasion of the trial and execution of two eminent patriots,—William, Lord Russell, and Algernon Sidney, a warm advocate of republican government. Both, it is believed, were unjustly condemned. The Duke of York assumed once more the office of admiral. Charles, before his death, received the sacrament from a priest of the Church of Rome (1685).

JAMES II. (1685-1688): MONMOUTH'S REBELLION.—A few months after James's accession, the Duke of Monmouth landed in England; but his effort to get the crown failed. His forces, mostly made up of peasants, were defeated at Sedgemoor; and he perished on the scaffold. Vengeance was taken upon all concerned in the revolt; and Chief Justice Jeffreys, for his brutal conduct in the "Bloody Assizes," in which, savage as he was, he nevertheless became rich by the sale of pardons, was rewarded with the office of lord chancelor.

JAMES'S ARBITRARY GOVERNMENT.—James paid no heed to his promise to defend the Church of England. Of a slow and obstinate mind, he could not yield to the advice of moderate Roman Catholics, and of the Pope, Innocent XI.; but set out, by such means as dispensing with the laws, to restore the old religion, and at the same time to extinguish civil liberty. He turned out the judges who did not please him. He created a new Ecclesiastical Commission, for the coercion of the clergy, with the notorious Jeffreys at its head. After having treated with great cruelty the Protestant dissenters, he unlawfully issued a Declaration of Indulgence (1687) in their favor, in order to get their support for his schemes in behalf of his own religion. He turned out the fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford, for refusing to appoint a Catholic for their president. He sent seven bishops to the Tower in 1688, who had signed a petition against the order requiring a second Declaration of Indulgence to be read in the churches. Popular sympathy was strongly with the accused, and the news of their acquittal was received in the streets of London with shouts of joy.

REVOLUTION OF 1688: WILLIAM AND MARY (1689-1694).—The birth of a Prince of Wales by his second wife, Mary of Modena, increased the disaffection of the English people. His two daughters by his first wife—Mary and Anne—were married to Protestants; Mary, to William, Prince of Orange and stadtholder of Holland, and Anne to George, Prince of Denmark. By a combination of parties hostile to the king, William was invited to take the English throne. James was blind to the signs of the approaching danger, and to the warnings of Louis XIV. of France. When it was too late, he attempted in vain to disarm the conspiracy by concessions. William landed in safety at Torbay. He was joined by persons of rank. Lord Churchill, afterwards the celebrated Duke of Marlborough, left the royal force of which he had the command, and went over to him. The king's daughter, Anne, fled to the insurgents in the North. William was quite willing that James should leave the kingdom, and purposely caused him to be negligently guarded by Dutch soldiers. He fled to France, never to return. Parliament declared the throne to be, on divers grounds, vacant, and promulgated a Declaration of Right affirming the ancient rights and liberties of England. It offered the crown to William and Mary, who accepted it (1689). A few months later, the estates of Scotland bestowed upon them the crown of that country. Presbyterianism was made the established form of religion there. The union of the kingdoms was consummated under their successor, Anne, when Scotland began to be represented in the English Parliament.

THE MASSACRE OF GLENCOE.—A Highland chief, MacIan of Glencoe, with many of his followers, was treacherously slaughtered by order of Dalrymple, the Master of Stair, who governed Scotland, and had obtained by misrepresentation from William leave to extirpate that "set of thieves," as he had called them.

WILLIAM IN IRELAND.—The sovereignty of Ireland passed, with that of England, to William and Mary. There James II., supported by France, made a stout resistance. It was a conflict of the Irish Catholics, together with the descendants of the Norman-English settlers, comprising together about a million of people, against the English and Scottish colonists, not far from two hundred thousand in number. The latter, with steadfast courage, sustained a siege in Londonderry until the city was relieved by ships from England. Many of the inhabitants had perished from hunger. The victory of William at Boyne (1690), where Schomberg, his brave general, a Huguenot French marshal, fell, decided the contest. William led his troops in person through the Boyne River, with his sword in his left hand, since his right arm was disabled by a wound. James was a spectator of the fight at a safe distance.

ENGLISH LIBERTY.—In William's reign, liberty in England was fortified by the Bill of Rights, containing a series of safeguards against regal usurpation. Papists were made ineligible to the throne. The Toleration Act afforded to Protestant dissenters a large measure of protection and freedom. The press was made free from censorship (1695), and newspapers began to be published. Provision was made for the fair trial of persons indicted for treason. The Act of Settlement (1701) settled the crown, if there should be no heirs of Anne or of William, upon the Princess Sophia, Electress of Hanover, the daughter of Elizabeth of Bohemia, and granddaughter of James I., and on her heirs, being Protestants.

THE GRAND ALLIANCE: TO THE PEACE OF RYSWICK.—The next war which Louis XIV. began was that of the succession in the territory of the Palatinate, which he claimed, on the extinction of the male line of electors, for Elizabeth Charlotte, the gifted and excellent sister of the deceased Elector Charles, and the wife of the Duke of Orleans, the king's brother.

The table which follows will show the nature of this claim:—

FREDERIC, V, 1610-1632, Elector and King of Bohemia, m.
Elizabeth, daughter of James I. of England.
|
+—CHARLES LEWIS, 1649-1680.
| |
| +—CHARLES, 1680-1685.
| |
| +—Elizabeth, m. Philip, Duke of Orleans, d. 1701.
|
+—Sophia, m. Ernest Augustus, Elector of Hanover.
|
+—George I of England.

Philip, Duke of Orleans, was the only brother of Louis XIV. From him descended King Louis Philippe (1830-1848).

Another reason that Louis had for war was his determination to secure the archbishopric of Cologne for the bishop of Strasburg, a candidate of his own. In 1686 the League of Augsburg had been formed by the emperor with Sweden, Spain, Bavaria, Saxony, and the Palatinate, for defense against France. The Grand Alliance, in which England and Holland were included, was now made (1689). In the year before, by the advice of Louvois, the French had deliberately devastated the Palatinate, demolishing buildings, and burning cities and villages without mercy. The ruins of the Castle of Heidelberg are a monument of this worse than vandal incursion, the pretext for which was a desire to prevent the invasion of France. In the war the English and Dutch fleets, under Admiral Russell, defeated the French, and burned their ships, at the battle of La Hogue (1692). This battle was a turning-point in naval history: "as at Lepanto," says Ranke, where the Turks were defeated (1571), "so at La Hogue, the mastery of the sea passed from one side to the other." But in the Netherlands, where William III., the soul of the League, steadfastly kept the field, after being defeated by Luxemburg; in Italy, where the Duke of Savoy was opposed by the Marshal Catinat; and in a naval battle between the English and French at Lagos Bay,—the French commanders were successful. In 1695 William's troops besieged and captured the town of Namur. At length Louis was moved by the exhaustion of his treasury, and the stagnation of industry in France, to conclude the Peace of Ryswick with England, Spain, and Holland (1697). The Duke of Savoy had been detached from the alliance. Most of the conquests on both sides were restored. William III. was acknowledged to be king of England. In the treaty with the emperor, France retained Strasburg. William was a man of sterling worth, but he was a Dutchman, and was cold in his manners. The plots of the Jacobites, as the adherents of James were called, did more than any thing else to make him popular with his subjects.