water was somewhat violent; but what would not one do to save one’s self from foreign domination?  I cannot help admiring and commending the zeal and stout-heartedness of those who broke off the negotiation of Amsterdam, though their decision, salutary as it was for their country, was very prejudicial to my service; the proposals made to me by the deputies from the States General were very advantageous, but I could never prevail upon myself to accept them.”

Louis XIV. was as yet ignorant what can be done amongst a proud people by patriotism driven to despair; the States General offered him Maestricht, the places on the Rhine, Brabant and Dutch Flanders, with a war-indemnity of ten millions; it was an open door to the Spanish Low Countries, which became a patch enclosed by French possessions; but the king wanted to annihilate the Hollanders; he demanded Southern Gueldres, the Island of Bonmel, twenty-four millions, the restoration of Catholic worship, and, every year, an embassy commissioned to thank the king for having a second time given peace to the United Provinces.  This was rather too much; and, whilst the deputies were negotiating with heavy hearts, the people of Holland had risen in wrath.

From the commencement of the war, the party of the house of Nassau had never ceased to gain ground.  John van Witt was accused of all the misfortunes of the state; the people demanded with loud outcries the restoration of the stadtholderate, but lately abolished by a law voted by the States under the presumptuous title of perpetual edict.  Dordrecht, the native place of the Van Witts, gave the signal of insurrection.  Cornelius van Witt, who was confined to his house by illness, yielded to the prayers of his wife and children, and signed the municipal act which destroyed his brother’s work; the contagion spread from town to town, from province to province; on the 4th of July the States General appointed William of Orange stadtholder, captain-general, and admiral of the Union; the national instinct had divined the savior of the country, and with tumultuous acclamations placed in his hands the reins of the state.

[Illustration:  William III., Prince of Orange——­434]

William of Orange was barely two and twenty when the fate of revolutions suddenly put him at the head of a country invaded, devastated, half conquered; but his mind as well as his spirit were up to the level of his task.  He loftily rejected at the assembly of the Estates the proposals brought forward in the king’s name by Peter van Groot.  “To subscribe them would be suicide,” he said:  “even to discuss them is dangerous; but, if the majority of this assembly decide otherwise, there remains but one course for the friends of Protestantism and liberty, and that is, to retire to the colonies in the West Indies, and there found a new country, where their consciences and their persons will be beyond the reach of tyranny and despotism.”  The States General decided to “reject the hard and