Foreign affairs were in no worse hands than the administration of finance and of war.  M. de Lionne was an able diplomatist, broken in for a long, time past to important affairs, shrewd and sensible, more celebrated amongst his contemporaries than in history, always falling into the second rank, behind Mazarin or Louis XIV., “who have appropriated his fame,” says M. Mignet.  The negotiations conducted by M. de Lionne were of a delicate nature.  Louis XIV. had never renounced the rights of the queen to the succession in Spain.  King Philip IV. had not paid his daughter’s dowry, he said; the French ambassador at Madrid, the Archbishop of Embrun, was secretly negotiating to obtain a revocation of Maria Theresa’s renunciation, or, at the very least, a recognition of the right of devolution over the Catholic Low Countries.  This strange custom of Hainault secured to the children of the first marriage succession to the paternal property, to the exclusion of the offspring of the second marriage.  Louis XIV. claimed the application of it to the advantage of the queen his wife, daughter of Elizabeth of France.  “It is absolutely necessary that justice should sooner or later be done the queen, as regards the rights that may belong to her, or that I should try to exact it myself,” wrote Louis XIV. to the Archbishop of Embrun.  This justice and these rights were, sooth to say, the pivot of all the negotiations and all the wars of King Louis XIV.  “I cannot, all in a moment, change from white to black all the ancient maxims of this crown,” said the king.  He obtained no encouragement from Spain, and he began to make preparations, in anticipation, for war.

In this view and with these prospects, he needed the alliance of the Hollanders.  Shattered as it had been by the behavior of the United Provinces at the Congress of Munster and by their separate peace with Spain, the friendship between the States General and France had been re-soldered by the far-sighted policy of John Van Witt, grand pensionary of Holland, and preponderant, with good right, in the policy of his country.  Bold and prudent, courageous and wise, he had known better than anybody how to estimate the true interests of Holland, and how to maintain them everywhere, against Cromwell as well as Mazarin, with high-spirited moderation.  His great and cool judgment had inclined him towards France, the most useful ally Holland could have.  In spite of the difficulties put in the way of their friendly relations by Colbert’s commercial measures, a new treaty was concluded between Louis XIV. and the United Provinces.  “I am informed from a good quarter,” says a letter to John van Witt from his ambassador at Paris, Boreel, June 8, 1662, “that his Majesty makes quite a special case of the new alliance between him and their High Mightinesses, which he regards as his own particular work.  He expects great advantages from it as regards the security of his kingdom and that of the United Provinces,