stop when it is once set going,” said King Charles II., anxious to commence the war in order to handle the subsidies the sooner; he was, nevertheless, obliged to wait.  Louis XIV. had succeeded in dragging him into an enterprise contrary to the real interests of his country as well as of his national policy; in order to arrive at his ends he had set at work all the evil passions which divided the court of England; he had bought up the king, his mistresses, and his ministers; he had dangled before the fanaticism of the Duke of York the spectacle of England converted to Catholicism; but his work was not finished in Europe; he wished to assure himself of the neutrality of Germany in the great duel he was meditating with the republic of the United Provinces.

As long ago as 1667 Louis XIV. had practically paved the way towards the neutrality of the empire by a secret treaty regulating the eventual partition of the Spanish, monarchy.  In case the little King of Spain died without children, France was to receive the Low Countries, Franche-Comte, Navarre, Naples, and Sicily; Austria was to keep Spain and Milaness.  The Emperor Leopold therefore turned a deaf ear to the entreaties of the Hollanders who would fain have bound him down to the Triple Alliance; a new convention between France and the empire, secretly signed on the 1st of November, 1670, made it reciprocally obligatory on the two princes not to aid their enemies.  The German princes were more difficult to win over; they were beginning to feel alarm at the pretensions of France.  The electors of Treves and of Mayence had already collected some troops on the Rhine; the Duke of Lorraine seemed disposed to lend them assistance; Louis XIV. seized the pretext of the restoration of certain fortifications contrary to the treaty of Marsal; on the 23d of August, 1675, he ordered Marshal Crequi to enter Lorraine; at the commencement of September, the whole duchy was reduced, and the duke a fugitive.  “The king had at first been disposed to give up Lorraine to some one of the princes of that house,” writes Louvois; “but, just now, he no longer considers that province to be a country which he ought to quit so soon, and it appears likely that, as he sees more and more every day how useful that conquest will be for the unification of his kingdom, he will seek the means of preserving it for himself.”  In point of fact, the king, in answer to the emperor’s protests, replied that he did not want to turn Lorraine to account for his own profit, but that he would not give it up at the solicitations of anybody.  Brandenburg and Saxony alone refused point blank to observe neutrality; France had renounced Protestant alliances in Germany, and the Protestant electors comprehended the danger that threatened them.  Sweden also comprehended it, but Gustavus Adolphus and Oxenstiern were no longer there; there remained nothing but the remembrance of old alliances with France; the Swedish senators gave themselves up to the buyer one after another.