At one moment, in fact, Louis XIV. raised fresh pretensions. He wished to keep the places on the Meuse, until the Swedes, almost invariably unfortunate in their hostilities with Denmark and Brandenburg, should have been enabled to win back what they had lost. This was to postpone peace indefinitely. The English Parliament and Holland were disgusted, and concluded a new alliance. The Spaniards were preparing to take up arms again. The king, who had returned to the army, all at once cut the knot. “The day I arrived at the camp,” writes Louis XIV., “I received news from London apprising me that the King of England would bind himself to join me in forcing my enemies to make peace, if I consented to add something to the conditions he had already proposed. I had a battle over this proposal, but the public good, joined to the glory of gaining a victory over myself, prevailed over the advantage I might have hoped for from war. I replied to the King of England that I was quite willing to make the treaty he proposed to me, and, at the same time, I wrote to the States General a letter, stronger than the first, being convinced that, since they were wavering, they ought not to have time given them to take counsel upon the subject of peace with their allies, who did not want it.” Beverninck went to visit the king at Ghent; and he showed so much ability that the special peace concluded by his pains received, in Holland, the name of Beverninck’s peace. “I settled more business in an hour with M. de Beverninck than the plenipotentiaries would have been able to conclude in several days,” said Louis XIV.; “the care I had taken to detach the allies one from another, overwhelmed them to such an extent, that they were constrained to submit to the conditions of which I had declared myself in favor at the commencement of my negotiations. I had resolved to make peace, but I wished to conclude one that would be glorious for me and advantageous for my kingdom. I wished to recompense myself, by means of the places that were essential, for the probable conquests I was losing, and to console myself for the conclusion of a war which I was carrying on with pleasure and success. Amidst such turmoil, then, I was quite tranquil, and saw nothing but advantage for myself, whether the war went on or peace were made.”
All difficulties were smoothed away Sweden had given up all stipulations for her advantage; the firm will of France had triumphed over the vacillations of Charles II. and the allies. “The behavior of the French in all this was admirable,” says Sir W. Temple, an experienced diplomatist, long versed in all the affairs of Europe, “whilst our own counsels and behavior resembled those floating islands which winds and tide drive from one side to the other.”
On the 10th of August, in the evening, the special peace between Holland and France was signed after twenty-four hours’ conference. The Prince of Orange had concentrated all his forces near Mons, confronting Marshal Luxembourg, who occupied the plateau of Casteau; he had no official news as yet from Nimeguen, and on the 14th he began the engagement outside the abbey of St. Denis. The affair was a very murderous one, and remained indecisive: it did more honor to the military skill of the Prince of Orange than to his loyalty. Holland had not lost an inch of her territory during this war; so long, so desperate, and notoriously undertaken in order to destroy her; she had spent much money, she had lost many men, she had shaken the confidence of her allies by treating alone and being the first to treat, but she had furnished a chief to the European coalition, and she had shown an example of indomitable resistance; the States General and the Prince of Orange alone, besides Louis XIV., came the greater out of the struggle. The King of England had lost all consideration both at home and abroad, and Spain paid all the expenses of the war.
Peace was concluded on the 17th of September, thanks to the energetic intervention of the Hollanders. The king restored Courtray, Audenarde, Ath, and Charleroi, which had been given him by the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, Ghent, Limburg, and St. Ghislain; but he kept by definitive right St. Omer, Cassel, Aire, Ypres, Cambray, Bouchain, Valenciennes, and all Franche-Comte; henceforth he possessed in the north of France a line of places extending from Dunkerque to the Meuse; the Spanish monarchy was disarmed.
It still required a successful campaign under Marshal Crequi to bring the emperor and the German princes over to peace; exchanges of territory and indemnities re-established the treaty of Westphalia on all essential points. The Duke of Lorraine refused the conditions on which the king proposed to restore to him his duchy; so Louis XIV. kept Lorraine.
The King of France was at the pinnacle of his greatness and power. “Singly against all,” as Louvois said, he had maintained the struggle against Europe, and he came out of it victorious; everywhere, with good reason, was displayed his proud device, Nec pluribus impar. “My will alone,” says Louis XIV. in his Memoires, “concluded this peace, so much desired by those on whom it did not depend; for, as to my enemies, they feared it as much as the public good made me desire it, and that prevailed on this occasion over the gain and personal glory I was likely to find in the continuation of the war. . . . I was in full enjoyment of my good fortune and the fruits of my good conduct, which had caused me to profit by all the occasions I had met with for extending the borders of my kingdom at the expense of my enemies.”
“Here is peace made,” wrote Madame de Sevigne to the Count of Bussy. “The king thought it handsomer to grant it this year to Spain and Holland than to take the rest of Flanders; he is keeping that for another time.”
The Prince of Orange thought as Madame de Seigne: he regarded the peace of Nimeguen as a truce, and a truce fraught with danger to Europe. For that reason did he soon seek to form alliances in order to secure the repose of the world against the insatiable ambition of King Louis XIV. Intoxicated by his successes and the adulation of his court, the King of France no longer brooked any objections to his will or any limits to his desires. The poison of absolute power had done its work. Louis XIV. considered the “office of king” grand, noble, delightful, “for he felt himself worthy of acquitting himself well in all matters in which he engaged.” “The ardor we feel for glory,” he used to say, “is not one of those feeble passions which grow dull by possession; its favors, which are never to be obtained without effort, never, on the other hand, cause disgust, and whoever can do without longing for fresh ones is unworthy of all he has received.”
Standing at the king’s side and exciting his pride and ambition, Louvois had little by little absorbed all the functions of prime minister without bearing the title. Colbert alone resisted him, and he, weary of the struggle, was about to succumb before long (1683), driven to desperation by the burdens that the wars and the king’s luxury caused to weigh heavily upon France. Peace had not yet led to disarmament; an army of a hundred and forty thousand men remained standing, ever ready to uphold the rights of France during the long discussions over the regulation of the frontiers. In old papers ancient titles were found, and by degrees the villages, Burghs, and even principalities, claimed by King Louis XIV. were re-united quietly to France; King Charles XI. was thus alienated, in consequence of the seizure of the countship of Deux-Ponts, to which Sweden laid claim. Strasburg was taken by a surprise. This free city had several times violated neutrality during the war; Louvois had kept up communications inside the place; suddenly he had the approaches and the passage over the Rhine occupied by thirty-five thousand men on the night between the 16th and 17th of September, 1681; the burgesses sent up to ask aid from the emperor, but the messengers were arrested; on the 30th Strasburg capitulated, and Louis XIV. made his triumphant entry there on the 24th of October. “Nobody,” says a letter of the day, “can recover from the consternation caused by the fact that the French have taken Strasburg without firing a single shot; everybody says it is one of the wheels of the chariot to be used for a drive into the empire, and that the door of Elsass is shut from this moment.”
The very day of the surrender of Strasburg (September 30, 1681), Catinat, with a corps of French troops, entered Casale, sold to Louis XIV. by the Duke of Mantua. The king thought to make sure of Piedmont by marrying his niece, Monsieur’s daughter, to the Duke of Savoy, Victor-Amadeo, quite a boy, delicate and taciturn, at loggerheads with his mother and with her favorites. Marie Louise d’Orleans, elder sister of the young Duchess of Savoy, had married the King of Spain, Charles II., a sickly creature of weak intellect. Louis XIV. felt the necessity of forming new alliances; the old supports of France had all gone over to the enemy. Sweden and Holland were already allied to the empire; the German princes joined the coalition. The Prince of Orange, with an ever-vigilant eye on the frequent infractions of the treaties which France permitted herself to commit, was quietly negotiating with his allies, and ready to take up arms to meet the common danger. “He was,” says Massillon, “a prince profound in his views, skilful in forming leagues and banding spirits together, more successful in exciting wars than on the battle-field, more to be feared in the privacy of the closet than at the head of armies, a prince and an enemy whom hatred of the French name rendered capable of conceiving great things and of executing them, one of those geniuses who seem born to move at their will both peoples and sovereigns.” French diplomacy was not in a condition to struggle with the Prince of Orange. M. de Pomponne had succeeded Lionne; he was disgraced in 1679. “I order his recall,” said the king, “because all that passes through his hands loses the grandeur and force which ought to be shown in executing the orders of a king who is no poor creature.” Colbert de Croissy, the minister’s brother, was from that time employed to manage with foreign countries all the business which Louvois did not reserve to himself.