Boufflers burnt fire signals every night on his watch-towers, which urged haste to Villeroy, who still lay beyond the mighty ring of the confederate army who incessantly stormed the citadel.
On the nineteenth the King rose at dawn, got his forces under arms, and rode from post to post surveying his troops and watching the enemy; he was in the saddle from four in the morning till nightfall, and tired out three horses. When he returned to his tent that had been pitched in the encampment on the west of the town near the Abbey of Salsines, there was no portion of his vast army that he had not personally inspected.
He dined alone; the Elector of Bavaria and the other German princes being in immediate command of the troops that were actually storming Namur.
He expected that Villeroy would attack him as soon as it was light, and his preparations were complete.
He had an interview with M. Dyckfelt, who was with the army as representative of the States General, and was then alone, it being about ten of the clock and a hot summer night.
All the light in the tent came from a silver lamp suspended from the cross-poles, which gave an uncertain and wavering illumination. The King sat in the shadows; on the little table beside him was his sword, his pistols, and a map of Namur.
He was thinking of twenty-three years ago when, in his early youth, he had first led an army against France; his entire force then had numbered little more than the servants, footmen, and attendants in his retinue now. All Europe had been against him, half his country in the hands of the enemy, the home government in the control of the opposing factions. The man of forty-four looked back at the achievements of the youth of twenty-one with an extraordinary sense—almost of wonder.
He recalled with painful vividness how Buckingham and Arlington had come to offer him the shameful terms of France and England, their scorn at his rejection of the bitter bargain, and how even William Bentinck, gay and thoughtless then, had despaired. Hopeless, indeed, it had seemed; there had not been one to believe in him; but he had never doubted his own destiny.
And now he was justified in what he had undertaken, at least that, whatever sorrows, humiliations, and disappointments had darkened his way the outward semblance was of great and steady success.
The Prince, who had been little better than a State prisoner and a pawn in the politics of Europe, heir to a ruined family and leader of a despairing nation, was now a King, directing half Europe, with one of the mightiest armies the world had seen behind him. Of the monarchs who had offered to silence his despised defiance with dishonourable terms one was now dead, and he held his kingdoms; and the other, who then had threatened to overrun the world, was now with difficulty holding his own against a coalition that included all the principal countries of Europe.