William elected Stadtholder of Holland—Murder of the De Witts—Campaign of 1672-3—Successes of the Prince—Declared hereditary Stadtholder—Progress of the French arms—Marriage with Mary—Negotiations of Nimeguen—Conclusion of the Peace—Battle of St. Denis.
Louis XIV., like other military malefactors before and since, was himself the creator of the enemy by whom his power was to be shaken to its foundations. His invasion of the United Provinces, an enterprise commenced with that contempt of public right in which no other potentate has ever equalled him, and prosecuted with that barbarity in which only Oriental conquerors have ever surpassed him, was the means of raising to power the one European foe by whom he was destined to be successfully withstood. The municipal party, unduly absorbed in the task of safeguarding the liberties of their country against the supposed ambitions of a single fellow-countryman, had wholly neglected the protection of its very existence against the known ambitions of a foreign aggressor. Most of their veteran troops had been disbanded; the greatest posts in their armies were in the hands of unskilled civilians; cities garrisoned with considerable forces of soldiery opened their gates and surrendered without firing a gun. Popular indignation rose high. Upon William, always a favourite among the commonalty, and the inheritor of a name ennobled not only by civil wisdom but by military exploits, all eyes were turned. An insurrection in his favour took place at Dort, and the magistrates of that city, intimidated by the clamour of the people, passed an ordinance repealing the perpetual edict, and made him Stadtholder. Other cities followed their example, and the States-General of the provinces confirmed their decrees. The two De Witts, John and his brother Cornelius, now the objects of popular suspicion and hatred, were assassinated in a street riot; and the people, as if inspired with new courage by the restoration of a Prince of Orange to a position from which princes of that name had so often led them to victory, turned fiercely upon their French invaders. Five thousand of Louis's troops were repulsed before Ardenburg by the bravery of no more than two hundred burghers, assisted by the women and children of the town, and one hundred garrison soldiers. The citizens of Groningen, aided by the spirited students of its university, defended themselves with equal vigour and good fortune against the warlike Bishop of Munster, at the head of 30,000 soldiers, compelling him to raise the siege. It was evident that a Dutch conquest was going to be no mere military promenade, as had first appeared to promise, and Louis thought it advisable to negotiate. To the chief of a state so desperately bested as were the United Provinces at that moment, the terms offered to William by the French monarch,—no less than the sovereignty of his country under the protection of England and France,—might well have appeared tempting. William rejected them with scorn. He would never, he said, "betray the trust of his country that his ancestors had so long defended." Solicitations addressed to him in the same sense by England met with the same reply. To Buckingham, who had pressed them upon him, and warned him that "if he persisted in his present humour he must unavoidably see the final ruin of his cause," he made the Spartan answer that he "had one way still left not to see that ruin completed, which was to die in the last dyke."
The winter of 1672-3 had stopped the progress of the French for the time, but William was unwilling to allow it to arrest his own action. He laid siege to the town of Woerden, and, though forced by the Duke of Luxembourg to retreat from it, inflicted heavy losses upon the enemy. Then, having invested Tongres, captured Walcheren, and demolished Binch, he himself retired reluctantly into winter quarters. In the following spring he besieged and took Naerden, and later on in the year achieved a still more important triumph in the capture of Bonn, which had been put into the hands of France at the beginning of the war. New honours now began to be contemplated by his grateful countrymen for their stout defender. The Stadtholdership of Holland and West Friesland was not only confirmed to him for life, but was settled upon his heirs male; and on the same day the like dignity was conferred on him by the States of Zealand—an example shortly afterwards followed by those of Utrecht. Nor were his successes without effect upon his enemies. Charles, with whose subjects the war had never been popular, concluded a peace with him after these two summers of fighting, and offered his mediation between the powers still at war, an offer which was accepted by France. Four years, however, were to elapse, and many souls of brave men to be sent to Hades, before this mediation took effect in a concluded peace. In the summer of 1674 was fought the fiercest engagement of the whole war—the bloody and indecisive battle of Seneff, in which William was pitted against the renowned Prince of CondÉ. The young Prince had too much to gain in reputation not to be eager to provoke a battle, and the old soldier too much to lose to be willing to accept one if it could be avoided; but William succeeded in his object. CondÉ was at first victorious in an encounter between a portion of the two armies, but he imprudently brought on a general battle, which, after raging furiously for a whole day, left both parties to claim the victory—"the allies because they were last upon the field, and the French on the strength of the great number of prisoners and standards they had carried off." "But whoever had the honour," adds Sir William Temple, "both had the loss." It was on this occasion that CondÉ paid his famous compliment to the Prince by describing him as having acted like an old general throughout the action in every respect save that of having "exposed himself like a young recruit."
For yet another four years, as has been said, this struggle continued to rage, and, as it raged, to store up in his heart that exhaustless fund of resentment against Louis which underwent hardly any depletion till the day of his death. Several times were attempts made to detach William from his Spanish allies and to induce him to conclude a separate peace, but he remained firm against all such solicitations of betrayal. In vain did Arlington, specially commissioned for that purpose, endeavour to tempt him to the desertion of his allies by the offer of an English matrimonial alliance. William simply replied that his fortunes were not in a condition for him to think of a wife. Louis, however, was extremely desirous of peace on any honourable terms, and William, to meet him half-way, put forward a counter-proposal of a marriage between the King of Spain and the eldest daughter of the Duke of Orleans, to whom France should give in dowry the late conquered places in Flanders. This ingenious proposal for reconciling the vindication of Spanish and Dutch interests on the Flemish frontier with the maintenance of French military honour, can scarcely have been made with any other purpose than that of putting France in the wrong. William knew probably that it would not square with Louis's existing hopes and pretensions, and that whether Charles pressed it upon his cousin or not, it was pretty certain that no more would be heard of it. For the present, moreover, he was under no pressure to make a peace at all. The United Provinces had recovered their confidence and hopefulness, and were full of admiration for and attachment to their young leader. He had been actually offered the sovereignty of Guelderland, and though his politic moderation induced him to refuse it, opinion among the other provinces was divided as to the propriety of his rejecting the offer. Nothing, however, could have more strikingly illustrated the commanding position which he had attained among his countrymen than the complete paralysis which overcame them in 1675, during the fortunately brief period of the Prince's suffering from a dangerous attack of smallpox. From this disease, so fatal to his race, he recovered with apparent promptitude, but it is only too probable that it left deep traces behind it on his congenitally feeble frame.
After much dispute the scene of the peace negotiations had been fixed at Nimeguen, and the Congress met there in the month of July 1676. But the diplomatists there were still to deliberate for two years while armies were fighting; and if William could have prevented it, the peace would not have been made even as soon as it was. The next two years, however, were on the whole years of success for France and of defeat for the allies; and early in 1677 William, of his own accord, revived a project to which, when previously broached to him, he had refused to listen. The terms submitted to him during the deliberations at Nimeguen were intolerable, and yet, though he obstinately refused to accept them, town after town was falling before the French arms, and his country was at last beginning to weary of the struggle. If he must at last be forced to assent to distasteful conditions, why not, as the price of his assent, obtain for himself a matrimonial alliance which, besides bringing him a step nearer to the English throne, would immensely strengthen his position as a representative of the Protestant cause in Europe. A year before he had sounded Temple as to a proposal for the hand of his cousin Mary, the Duke of York's eldest daughter; and had been encouraged by that ambassador to hope for success in his suit. He now more formally pressed it, selecting the moment with considerable astuteness. Neither Charles nor James had any liking for the match, but the King was in the midst of a struggle with his Parliament; his subserviency to Louis was inflaming popular resentment against him, and a marriage of his niece to William, more especially if it could be made the means of bringing about a peace, appeared to promise the only means of extricating himself from his difficulties. Danby, his minister, moreover, was just at that moment trembling for his head, and was prepared to exert himself to the utmost to save it by the only means available—the detachment of his master from the French alliance. William was reluctantly invited to England, and it is clear, in the whole history of the affair, that he felt himself from the moment of his arrival to be dominus contractÛs. With respect to the question whether the business of the marriage should be arranged before that of the peace or vice versÂ, William insisted upon his own order of procedure, and procured its adoption. Charles consented to the marriage, and compelled the assent of his brother. The States-General, communicated with by express, immediately signified their approval; and William, who had fortunately found the person and manners of his cousin highly attractive to him, was married hurriedly and privately at eleven o'clock on the night of the 4th of November 1677, the anniversary of his birth. The King of England did his best to reconcile his brother of France to a match, the news of which, our ambassador at the French Court told Danby, he received "as he would have done the loss of an army," by representing it as an important step towards a peace; but William returned home with his bride, pledged only to his uncle to accept a basis of peace which was to a large extent, if not entirely, of his own formulation, and far more liberal to the allies than anything which France had proposed. Louis, however, was to get his own way after all. The United Provinces were now heartily sick of the war, and were, moreover, not uninfluenced by a party hostile to William, who felt or feigned apprehension of his designs upon the liberties of the Republic. The States-General accepted the articles of France, and having by their constitution the absolute power of peace and war, they were able, on the 11th of August, to conclude a treaty over William's head. Three days after the Prince, unaware, officially at least, that the signatures had been actually affixed to the treaty, made a dash upon the army of Luxembourg, then besieging Mons, and after a desperate encounter secured one of the most brilliant successes of the war. The next morning, however, advices arrived from the Hague of the conclusion of the peace, and William had the mortification of feeling that the fruits of a victory which had opened a way for the allies into the country of their enemy were to remain ungathered.
