and probity as might assuage in them those emotions of dread which everybody naturally experiences at sight of too great a power.  I was bound not to lack means of breaking with Spain when I pleased; Franche-Comte, which I gave up, might become reduced to such a condition that I should be master of it at any moment, and my new conquests, well secured, would open for me a surer entrance into the Low Countries.”  Determined by these wise motives, the king gave orders to sign the peace.  “M. de Turenne appeared yesterday like a man who had received a blow from a club,” writes Michael Le Tellier to his son:  “when Don Juan arrives, matters will change; he says that, meanwhile, all must go on just the same, and he repeated it more than a dozen times, which made the prince laugh.”  Don Juan did not protest, and on the 2d of May, 1668, the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle was concluded.  Before giving up Franche-Comte, the king issued orders for demolishing the fortifications of Dole and Gray; he at the same time commissioned Vauban to fortify Ath, Lille, and Tournay.  The Triple Alliance was triumphant, the Hollanders at the head.  “I cannot tell your Excellency all that these beer-brewers write to our traders,” said a letter to M. de Lionne from one of his correspondents; “as there is just now nothing further to hope for, in respect of they Low Countries, I vent all my feelings upon the Hollanders, whom I hold at this day to be our most formidable enemies, and I exhort your Excellency, as well for your own reputation as for the public satisfaction, to omit from your policy nothing that may tend to the discovery of means to abase this great power, which exalts itself too much.”

Louis XIV. held the same views as M. de Lionne’s correspondent, not merely from resentment against the Hollanders, who had stopped him in his career of success, but because he quite saw that the key to the barrier between the Catholic Low Countries and himself remained in the hands of the United Provinces.  He had relied upon his traditional influence in the Estates as well as on the influence of John van Witt; but the latter’s position had been shaken.  “I learn from a good quarter that there are great cabals forming against the authority of M. de Witt, and for the purpose of ousting him from it,” writel M. de Lionne on the 30th of March, 1668; Louis XIV. resolved to have recourse to arms in order to humiliate this insolent republic which had dared to hamper his designs.  For four years, every effort of his diplomacy tended solely to make Holland isolated in Europe.

It was to England that France would naturally first turn her eyes.  The sentiments of King Charles II. and of his people, as regarded Holland, were not the same.  Charles had not forgiven the Estates for having driven him from their territory at the request of Cromwell; the simple and austere manners of the republican patricians did not accord with his taste for luxury and debauchery; the English people,