intolerable conditions proposed by their lordships the Kings of France and Great Britain, and to defend this state and its inhabitants with all their might.”  The province of Holland in its entirety followed the example of Amsterdam; the dikes were everywhere broken down, at the same time that the troops of the electors of Brandenburg and Saxony were advancing to the aid of the United Provinces, and that the emperor was signing with those two princes a defensive alliance for the maintenance of the treaties of Westphalia, the Pyrenees, and Aix-la-Chapelle.

Louis XIV. could no longer fly from conquest to conquest; henceforth his troops had to remain on observation; care for his pleasures recalled him to France; he left the command-in-chief of his army to M. de Turenne, and set out for St. Germain, where he arrived on the 1st of August.  Before leaving Holland, he had sent home almost without ransom twenty thousand prisoners of war, who before long entered the service of the States again.  “It was an excess of clemency of which I had reason afterwards to repent,” says the king himself.  His mistake was, that he did not understand either Holland or the new chief she had chosen.

Dispirited and beaten, like his country, John van Witt had just given in his resignation as councillor pensionary of Holland.  He wrote to Ruyter on the 5th of August, as follows:  “The capture of the towns on the Rhine in so short a time, the irruption of the enemy as far as the banks of the Yssel, and the total loss of the provinces of Gueldres, Utrecht, and Over-Yssel, almost without resistance and through unheard-of poltroonery, if not treason, on the part of certain people, have more and more convinced me of the truth of what was in olden times applied to the Roman republic:  Successes are claimed by everybody, reverses are put down to one (Prospera omnes sibi vindicant, adversa uni imputantur).  That is my own experience.  The people of Holland have not only laid at my door all the disasters and calamities that have befallen our republic; they have not been content to see me fall unarmed and defenceless into the hands of four individuals whose design was to murder me; but when, by the agency of Divine Providence, I escaped the assassins’ blows and had recovered from my wounds, they conceived a violent hatred against such of their magistrates as they believed to have most to do with the direction of public affairs; it is against me chiefly that this hatred has manifested itself, although I was nothing but a servant of the state; it is this that has obliged me to demand my discharge from the office of councillor-pensionary.”  He was at once succeeded by Gaspard van Fagel, passionately devoted to the Prince of Orange.