ld the House of Austria in
check. The Bavarian Elector indeed, who had charge of the Spanish
Netherlands and on whom William had counted, openly joined the French
side from the first and proclaimed the Duke of Anjou as king in
Brussels. In England a new Parliament, which had been called by way of
testing public opinion, was crowded with Tories who were resolute
against war. The Tory Ministry pressed him to acknowledge the new king
of Spain; and as even Holland did this, William was forced to submit. He
could only count on the greed of Lewis to help him, and he did not count
in vain. The general approval of the French king's action had sprung
from a belief that he intended honestly to leave Spain to the Spaniards
under their new boy-king. Bitter too as the strife of Whig and Tory
might be in England, there were two things on which Whig and Tory were
agreed. Neither would suffer France to occupy the Spanish Netherlands.
Neither would endure a French attack on the Protestant succession which
the Revolution of 1688 had established. But the arrogance of Lewis
blinded him to the need of moderation in his hour of good-luck. The
wretched defence made by the strong places of the Netherlands in the
former war had brought about an agreement between Spain and Holland at
its close, by which seven fortresses, including Luxemburg, Mons, and
Charleroi, were garrisoned with Dutch in the place of Spanish troops.
The seven were named the Dutch barrier, and the first anxiety both of
Holland and of William was to maintain this arrangement under the new
state of things. William laid down the maintenance of the barrier in his
negotiations at Madrid as a matter of peace or war. But Lewis was too
eager to wait even for the refusal of William's demand which the pride
of the Spanish Court prompted. In February 1701 his troops appeared at
the gates of the seven fortresses; and a secret convention with the
Elector, who remained in charge of the Netherlands, delivered them into
his hands to hold in trust for his grandson. Other French garrisons took
possession at the same time of Ostend and the coast towns of Flanders.

[Sidenote: The Act of Settlement.]

The Parliament of 1701, a Parliament mainly of Tories, and in which the
leader of the moderate Tories, Robert Harley, came for the first time to
the front, met amidst the general panic and suspension of trade which
followed this seizure of the barrier fortresses. Peace-Parliament as it
was and bit