The ascendancy of France, 1598-1715

by Henry Offley Wakeman

More substantial additions to the power of Louis than the precedence of an ambassador or the disgrace of a Pope soon followed. In 1662 he purchased the port of Dunkirk from England, and made it a harbour for warships. In 1663 he sent the count of Schomberg, supported by French officers and French money, secretly to the assistance of Portugal in her war against Spain, and contributed materially to the gaining of the victory of Villa Viciosa in 1665, which established the independence of the country. Assistance given by Louis to Portugal, and against the Turks, 1663–64. At the same time he proceeded to read the Grand Vizier a lesson by breaking the ancient league of friendship between France and the Sultan, in consequence of an insult offered to the French ambassador in 1661, sent French troops to assist in the defence of Candia, which was then being besieged by the Turks, and supplied the Emperor with a large sum of money and a contingent of 6000 Frenchmen under La Feuillade and Coligny to resist the incursion of the Ottoman armies into Hungary and Croatia in 1664. Chiefly owing to the irresistible valour of the French troops, the imperial general, Montecuculli, was enabled to inflict a crushing defeat upon the grand vizier himself at the battle of S. Gothard on the Raab, and hurl the invaders back behind their own frontiers.

The War of Devolution, 1667.

In 1667 broke out the first of the great wars of Louis XIV., the war of devolution. In September 1665 Philip IV. of Spain died, leaving two daughters by his first marriage, of whom the queen of France was the elder, and one son by his second marriage, who succeeded to the crown of Spain under the name of Charles II. Louis immediately laid claim to the Spanish Netherlands in virtue of what was known as the law of devolution. This law was in fact a local custom of the province of Brabant, by which private property in land passed to the female children of the first marriage in preference to the male children of the second marriage. If, therefore, Philip IV. had in his private capacity bought a farm in Brabant, Louis would by the law of devolution have become entitled to it in right of his wife; but to assert that the sovereignty of the Low Countries followed the rule of land tenure in Brabant was one of the most monstrous claims ever put forward by hypocritical ambition. Nevertheless Louis played his part well. The rights of his queen were dwelt upon with much argumentative force by writers and diplomatists, while Turenne at the head of 35,000 men produced more convincing arguments. By August 1667 Charleroi, Tournay and Lille were in his hands, and the whole of the Spanish Netherlands lay open before him. Astonished Europe awoke to see the once formidable power of Spain falling to pieces before its eyes, to find itself threatened by the overweening ambition of a prince, whose will was law from the Rhine to the ocean, and from the Scheldt to the Pyrenees.

Alarm of Europe.

It was the first time that European statesmen realised the true nature of the danger from France, the first time they understood the real bent of French policy. Hitherto the shade of Philip II. had pressed upon Europe like a nightmare. Hardly ten years had elapsed since Cromwell had declared war against Spain in the spirit of Sir Walter Raleigh, had actually allied himself with France, had called in the aid of the lion to make sure work of the dying elephant. But five years ago Clarendon had made over Dunkirk to Louis, never dreaming that France, and not Spain, was to be the commercial and naval rival of England in the years which were close at hand. The war of devolution shattered these illusions somewhat rudely. It was a war of pure ambition, of undisguised rapacity. It disclosed Louis to the world as absolutely unscrupulous and alarmingly strong. If Spain thus crumbled to dust at his feet, what power in Europe could dare to withstand him? Suddenly, from out the calm which had pervaded all Europe since the treaties of 1660, there loomed in terrific proportions the black shadow of the old world-wide tyranny, which, so far from having been crushed to death in the wars of religion, had merely shifted the centre of its power from Madrid to Paris.

Opposition of the Dutch to Louis’s schemes.

The burden of organising the opposition to France fell naturally upon the Dutch. If the French once became masters of Antwerp and the Scheldt, the pre-eminence of Amsterdam, and the prosperity, if not the independence, of the United Provinces was gone. The Spanish Netherlands formed a barrier to the advances of France which was absolutely necessary to the existence of the Dutch as a nation. It had always been an important part of their settled policy ever since they had gained their independence to keep the French frontier away from the Scheldt. De Witt, the grand pensionary of Holland, who was at that time the political chief of the republic, was fully alive to the danger. Before Louis had crossed the frontier he was deep in negotiations with the Emperor and the princes of Germany, as well as with Sweden and England, to put limits to the aggression of the French. But Louis’s diplomacy had been too much for him. By the bribe of a partition treaty for dividing the Spanish dominions between France and the Empire on the death of the weakly king of Spain, Leopold was persuaded to remain neutral while Louis was eating up his leaf of the artichoke. The German princes were secured at heavy cost in October 1667 and Sweden was terrified into inaction by threats. Negotiations with England. England alone remained dangerous. The fall of Clarendon in November 1667 had put the chief direction of foreign affairs into the hands of Arlington who was in favour of a Dutch alliance. Sir William Temple, the ablest of English diplomatists and a sturdy friend to the Dutch, was sent as English envoy to the Hague. Charles himself, though he never intended to break with Louis and lose the French subsidies, was not averse to an occasional display of independence. With an impartiality more creditable to his cleverness than his honesty, he kept on foot negotiations for an alliance with Spain, France and the Dutch at the same time, waiting to see which side would offer him most. By December 1667, however, it became abundantly clear that the English people would not tolerate an alliance with France, or permit Louis to make himself master of the Low Countries. Charles accordingly took the line of the least resistance, authorised Temple to conclude a treaty with the Dutch, and wrote to Louis to explain that he had been obliged to act against his own wishes.

Formation of the Triple Alliance, 1668.

The treaty was signed at the Hague on the 13th of January 1668, and on May 15th Sweden, angered by the threats of Louis, joined the alliance in order to secure the payment of some old-standing claims upon Spain which were guaranteed by the English and Dutch governments. The Triple Alliance, as the treaty was then called, bound the allies to help each other if attacked, and to endeavour to restore peace between France and Spain, on the terms of the surrender to Louis, either of the districts in the Low Countries which he had conquered, or of Franche-Comté and a few specified frontier towns in the Netherlands. By a secret clause they further bound themselves to compel peace on these terms, and, if France refused, they agreed to make war upon her until she was reduced to the boundaries fixed by the treaty of the Pyrenees.

Louis outwitted.