ptance of these
terms by the joint pressure of England and the United Provinces. It was
this plan which England suddenly adopted. In the opening of 1668 Sir
William Temple was despatched to the Hague, and an alliance was
concluded between England and Holland, in which Sweden, the third great
Protestant power, was soon included.

Few measures have won a greater popularity than this Triple Alliance.
"It is the only good public thing," says Pepys, "that hath been done
since the king came to England." Even Dryden, writing at the time as a
Tory, counted among the worst of Shaftesbury's crimes that "the Triple
Bond he broke." In form indeed the alliance simply bound Lewis to adhere
to terms of peace proposed by himself and those advantageous terms, the
possession of the southern half of Flanders and of a string of
fortresses which practically left him master of the Spanish Netherlands.
But in fact it utterly ruined his plans. His offer of peace had been
meant only as a blind. At the moment when Temple reached the Hague Lewis
was writing to his general, Turenne, "I am turning over in my head
things that are far from impossible, and go to carry them into execution
whatever they may cost." Three armies were ready to march at once on
Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands, when the intervention of the three
powers suddenly arrested these schemes of conquest and forced Lewis to
conclude peace at Aix-la-Chapelle. But the immediate gain was the least
result of the Triple Alliance. It brought about that union of the powers
of Europe against which, as Lewis felt instinctively, his ambition would
dash itself in vain. It was Arlington's aim to make the Alliance the
nucleus of a greater confederation: and he tried not only to perpetuate
it but to include within it the Swiss Cantons, the Empire, and the House
of Austria. His efforts were foiled; but the "Triple Bond" bore within
it the germs of the Grand Alliance which at last saved Europe. To
England it at once brought back the reputation which she had lost since
the death of Cromwell. It was a sign of her re-entry on the general
stage of European politics, and of her formal adoption of the balance of
power as a policy essential to the welfare not of one or another nation
but of Europe at large.

[Sidenote: Lewis and Holland.]

Lewis was maddened by the check. But it was not so much the action of
England which galled his pride as the action of Holland. That "a nation
of shopkeepers," for