te saw that the key to the barrier
between the Catholic Low Countries and himself remained in the hands of
the United Provinces. He had relied upon his traditional influence in
the Estates as well as on the influence of John van Witt; but the
latter's position had been shaken. "I learn from a good quarter that
there are great cabals forming against the authority of M. de Witt, and
for the purpose of ousting him from it," writel M. de Lionne on the 30th
of March, 1668; Louis XIV. resolved to have recourse to arms in order to
humiliate this insolent republic which had dared to hamper his designs.
For four years, every effort of his diplomacy tended solely to make
Holland isolated in Europe.

It was to England that France would naturally first turn her eyes. The
sentiments of King Charles II. and of his people, as regarded Holland,
were not the same. Charles had not forgiven the Estates for having
driven him from their territory at the request of Cromwell; the simple
and austere manners of the republican patricians did not accord with his
taste for luxury and debauchery; the English people, on the contrary,
despite of that rivalry in, trade and on the seas which had been the
source of so much ancient and recent hostility between the two nations,
esteemed the Hollanders and leaned towards an alliance with them. Louis
XIV., in the eyes of the English Parliament, was the representative of
Catholicism and absolute monarchy, two enemies which it had vanquished,
but still feared. The king's proceedings with Charles II. had,
therefore, necessarily to be kept secret; the ministers of the King of
England were themselves divided; the Duke of Buckingham, as mad and as
prodigal as his father, was favorable to France; the Earl of Arlington
had married a Hollander, and persisted in the Triple Alliance. Louis
XIV. employed in this negotiation his sister-in-law, Madame Henriette,
who was much attached to her brother, the King of England, and was
intelligent and adroit; she was on her return from a trip to London,
which she had with great difficulty snatched from the jealous
susceptibilities of Monsieur, when she died suddenly at Versailles on the
30th of June, 1670. "It were impossible to praise sufficiently the
incredible dexterity of this princess in treating the most delicate
matters, in finding a remedy for those hidden suspicions which often keep
them in suspense, and in terminating all difficulties in such a manner as
to