The Dutch and English Against France.
When William of Orange, Stadtholder of Holland, the most uncompromising enemy of Louis XIV, accepted the crown of England there came not only a complete revolution in the English constitutional system, but also, and far more important for the history of the American colonies, a complete revolution in England’s foreign policy. War between England and France, in spite of the traditional rivalry handed down from Plantagenet times, had been extremely rare; Englishmen and Frenchmen had lived peacefully side by side for half a century or more in the northeastern part of North America, while Englishmen and Dutchmen were struggling for the possession of the territory between Long Island Sound and Delaware Bay. Henceforth, the English and the Dutch were to fight side by side in the effort to break the power of Louis the Magnificent both in Europe and in America. Just as between 1651 and 1689 it was the first interest of the English that the maritime power of the Dutch should be broken, so now, “it was a first interest of England that the encroachments of France should be arrested, and that the Dutch should be saved from destruction. The rivalry between the English and Dutch must cease; the two sea powers must combine in opposition to France” (Seeley, “Growth of British Policy,” II, p. 207).
How efficiently William III set this policy in motion is attested by the history of Europe and America in the eighteenth century. Though he personally never realized the magnitude of the issue, though from first to last he was primarily interested in the preservation of Holland, though had he realized that his work was to result in the aggrandizement of England at the expense both of Holland and France, he would probably never have accepted the English throne, the far-reaching effects of this policy are to be seen not only in America but in Asia and in Africa as well. The accession of William III is thus the turning point in American colonial history. Almost at once, he set in motion that series of wars which ended in America only when the last vestige of French colonial empire had disappeared from the continent. What he began, Marlborough and Pitt, in later generations, completed.