France at one stroke was impoverished.  The skill, the trained hand, the element which was at the foundation of her excellence, and of that which was to constitute her future supremacy in the world, had gone to enrich her enemies.  And whether in Germany, in England, or America, no foreign people have had such glad welcome as was given to the Huguenots.

Then came the rebound in a form not expected.  William of Orange was now King of England.  James had been driven off his throne, and his daughter Mary and her husband, William of Orange, wore the double crown.  All the hostile European states, under William’s leadership, sprang together for the common defence of Europe from this detested foe.

The smothered hatred of Holland and every protestant state burst into flame, and the great War of the Coalition commenced.  Beginning with the League of Augsburg, in 1688, it continued until the peace of Ryswick, 1697, with the defeat of France all along the line.

Humiliated and broken, there remained for the king an opportunity to retrieve the past by attaching the Spanish peninsula to France.  There was a vacant throne at Madrid which his grandson Philip, through the neglected Queen Maria Theresa, might claim as his inheritance.  Such were the conditions which might still change defeat into triumph.  The fact that the right to the succession had been waived by the king was easily disposed of.  Philip, Louis’ grandson, presented his claim in competition with that of the son of Leopold I., Emperor of Germany.  When the pope, with whom the decision lay, decided in favor of Philip, grandson of the great Louis, all Europe sprang to the aid of the Austrian archduke in the war of the Spanish succession.

It was a little side play in the opening of this great drama, which brought the kingdom of Prussia into existence.  Frederick, elector of Brandenburg, when called upon to arm by the emperor, refused to do so except upon one condition:  that he might wear the title of king instead of elector; which condition was granted, with the stipulation that the name of Prussia, a detached piece of territory the ancestors of Frederick had cut out of the side of Russia, be substituted for Brandenburg.  So out of this war of personal ambition there had sprung a new kingdom, the kingdom of Prussia, of which France was to hear much in the future.

England was not eager to join the new coalition in defence of the Hapsburg, whom in common with the rest of Europe she had for years been trying to pull down.  But when Louis insolently espoused the cause of the exiled King James, and promised by force to place the pretender on the throne, then she needed no urging, and sent Marlborough and the flower of her army to join Prince Eugene in Germany.

It was Marlborough at Blenheim (1702) who drove the iron of defeat into the soul of Louis XIV.  When the war was ended he had made every concession demanded; had given up a vast extent of territory; banished the English pretender from his kingdom; and acknowledged Anne as queen of Great Britain.