plomacy gave way. Holland,
roused to a sense of danger by the appearance of French arms on the
Rhine, protested and appealed to England for aid; and though her appeals
remained at first unanswered, even England was roused from her lethargy
by the French seizure of the coast towns of Flanders. The earlier
efforts of English diplomacy indeed were of a selfish and unscrupulous
kind. Holland, Spain, and France were tempted in turn by secret offers
of alliance. A treaty offensive and defensive against all powers for the
defence of the Spanish Netherlands was proposed to the Dutch. Spain was
offered alliance and aid in return for the concession of free trade
with her dominions in America and the Philippines. Before France was
laid the project of an offensive and defensive alliance directed
especially against Holland, and perhaps against Spain, in return for
which England stipulated for admission to a share in the eventual
partition of the Spanish dominions, and for an assignment to her in such
a case of the Spanish Empire in the New World. Each of these offers was
alike refused. Spain looked on them as insincere. France regarded the
terms of alliance as extravagant, while she was anxious to hold the
Dutch to their present friendship and inactivity rather than to stir
them to war. Holland itself, while desirous to check French ambition,
still clung to its French alliance.

[Sidenote: The Triple Alliance.]

Repulsed as they were on every side, the need of action became clearer
every hour to the English ministers. The common refusal of France and
the Dutch roused fears that these powers were secretly leagued for a
partition of the Netherlands between them. Wider views too gradually set
aside the narrow dreams of merely national aggrandizement. To Ashley and
his followers an increase of the French power seemed dangerous not only
to the European balance of power but to English Protestantism. Even
Arlington, Catholic as in heart he was, thought more of the political
interests of England and of the invariable resolve of its statesmen
since Elizabeth's day to keep the French out of Flanders than of the
interests of Catholicism. One course alone remained. To lull the
general excitement Lewis had offered peace to Spain on terms either of
the cession of Franche Comte or of the retention of his conquests in the
Netherlands. The plan of John de Witt, the Pensionary of Holland, was to
take France at its word and to force on Spain the acce