enounced the rights of the
queen to the succession in Spain. King Philip IV. had not paid his
daughter's dowry, he said; the French ambassador at Madrid, the
Archbishop of Embrun, was secretly negotiating to obtain a revocation of
Maria Theresa's renunciation, or, at the very least, a recognition of the
right of devolution over the Catholic Low Countries. This strange
custom of Hainault secured to the children of the first marriage
succession to the paternal property, to the exclusion of the offspring of
the second marriage. Louis XIV. claimed the application of it to the
advantage of the queen his wife, daughter of Elizabeth of France. "It is
absolutely necessary that justice should sooner or later be done the
queen, as regards the rights that may belong to her, or that I should try
to exact it myself," wrote Louis XIV. to the Archbishop of Embrun. This
justice and these rights were, sooth to say, the pivot of all the
negotiations and all the wars of King Louis XIV. "I cannot, all in a
moment, change from white to black all the ancient maxims of this crown,"
said the king. He obtained no encouragement from Spain, and he began to
make preparations, in anticipation, for war.

In this view and with these prospects, he needed the alliance of the
Hollanders. Shattered as it had been by the behavior of the United
Provinces at the Congress of Munster and by their separate peace with
Spain, the friendship between the States General and France had been
re-soldered by the far-sighted policy of John Van Witt, grand pensionary
of Holland, and preponderant, with good right, in the policy of his
country. Bold and prudent, courageous and wise, he had known better than
anybody how to estimate the true interests of Holland, and how to
maintain them everywhere, against Cromwell as well as Mazarin, with
high-spirited moderation. His great and cool judgment had inclined him
towards France, the most useful ally Holland could have. In spite of the
difficulties put in the way of their friendly relations by Colbert's
commercial measures, a new treaty was concluded between Louis XIV. and
the United Provinces. "I am informed from a good quarter," says a letter
to John van Witt from his ambassador at Paris, Boreel, June 8, 1662,
"that his Majesty makes quite a special case of the new alliance between
him and their High Mightinesses, which he regards as his own particular
work. He expects great advantages from it as regards the securi