struggle against the Grand
Alliance there was a time when it counted nearly half-a-million of men
in arms. Nor was France content with these enormous land forces. Since
the ruin of Spain the fleets of Holland and of England had alone
disputed the empire of the seas. Under Richelieu and Mazarin France
could hardly be looked upon as a naval power. But the early years of
Lewis saw the creation of a navy of a hundred men-of-war, and the fleets
of France soon held their own against England or the Dutch.

[Sidenote: Lewis the Fourteenth.]

Such a power would have been formidable at any time; but it was doubly
formidable when directed by statesmen who in knowledge and ability were
without rivals in Europe. No diplomatist could compare with Lionne, no
war minister with Louvois, no financier with Colbert. Their young
master, Lewis the Fourteenth, bigoted, narrow-minded, commonplace as he
was, without personal honour or personal courage, without gratitude and
without pity, insane in his pride, insatiable in his vanity, brutal in
his selfishness, had still many of the qualities of a great ruler,
industry, patience, quickness of resolve, firmness of purpose, a
capacity for discerning ability and using it, an immense self-belief and
self-confidence, and a temper utterly destitute indeed of real
greatness, but with a dramatic turn for seeming to be great. As a
politician Lewis had simply to reap the harvest which the two great
Cardinals who went before him had sown. Both had used to the profit of
France the exhaustion and dissension which the wars of religion had
brought upon Europe. Richelieu turned the scale against the House of
Austria by his alliance with Sweden, with the United Provinces, and with
the Protestant princes of Germany; and the two great treaties by which
Mazarin ended the Thirty Years War, the Treaty of Westphalia and the
Treaty of the Pyrenees, left the Empire disorganized and Spain
powerless. From that moment indeed Spain sank into a strange
decrepitude. Robbed of the chief source of her wealth by the
independence of Holland, weakened at home by the revolt of Portugal, her
infantry annihilated by Conde in his victory of Rocroi, her fleet ruined
by the Dutch, her best blood drained away to the Indies, the energies of
her people destroyed by the suppression of all liberty, civil or
religious, her intellectual life crushed by the Inquisition, her
industry crippled by the expulsion of the Moors, by financial
oppress