o
negotiations with France. The queen acceded to these views, and
sent special envoys to communicate with the court of Versailles.
The states-general found it impossible to continue hostilities if
England withdrew from the coalition; conferences were consequently
opened at Utrecht in the month of January, 1712. England took
the important station of arbiter in the great question there
debated. The only essential conditions which she demanded
individually were the renunciation of all claims to the crown of
France by Philip V., and the demolition of the harbor of Dunkirk.
The first of these was the more readily acceded to, as the great
battles of Almanza and Villaviciosa, gained by Philip's generals,
the dukes of Berwick and Vendome, had steadily fixed him on the
throne of Spain--a point still more firmly secured by the death
of the emperor Joseph I., son of Leopold, and the elevation of
his brother Charles, Philip's competitor for the crown of Spain,
to the imperial dignity, by the title of Charles VI.

The peace was not definitively signed until the 11th of April,
1713; and France obtained far better conditions than those which
were refused her a few years previously. The Belgian provinces
were given to the new emperor, and must henceforth be called
the Austrian instead of the Spanish Netherlands. The gold and
the blood of Holland had been profusely expended during this
contest; it might seem for no positive results; but the exhaustion
produced to every one of the other belligerents was a source
of peace and prosperity to the republic. Its commerce was
re-established; its financial resources recovered their level;
and altogether we must fix on the epoch now before us as that
of its utmost point of influence and greatness. France, on the
contrary, was now reduced from its palmy state of almost European
sovereignty to one of the deepest misery; and its monarch, in
his old age, found little left of his former power but those
records of poetry, painting, sculpture, and architecture which
tell posterity of his magnificence, and the splendor of which
throw his faults and his misfortunes into the shade.

The great object now to be accomplished by the United Provinces
was the regulation of a distinct and guaranteed line of frontier
between the republic and France. This object had become by degrees,
ever since the peace of Munster, a fundamental maxim of their
politics. The interposition of the Belgian provinces between the