HISTORY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK. CHAPTER I. 1664. THE year sixteen hundred and sixty-four found the CHAP.I. strongest powers of Europe on the brink of a fierce war. That war determined the fate of New York. 1664. War at and Louis teenth. In France, Louis the Fourteenth was pushing up to its hand. pinnacle the idea of absolute monarchy. The king was himself the state. Laborious and untiring, Louis had the rare faculty of choosing well his subordinates. Colbert became his minister of finance; Lionne, of foreign affairs; Louvois, of war. Condé, Luxembourg, and Turenne, his victorious generals, earned him bloody renown. The French king was a devout son of the Roman Church. France But, above all other characteristics, he had the instinct of the Fourgrandeur and the thirst for glory. "There is stuff enough in him," said Mazarin, " to make four kings and an honest man." If Louis was not the greatest sovereign, he was "the best actor of majesty that ever filled a throne." More than any other monarch, he had "the marvellous art of reigning." Supreme in France, he wished to sway all Europe, and to that end he directed his subtile diplomacy. He soon established a control over the half French king of England. With the United Netherlands he made a treaty of alliance. But the system of bribery by which Louis succeeded almost every where else, failed when it was used against the chief servants of the Dutch Republic. After the death of the second William of Orange, in 1664. The Dutch Republic and Wil liam the Third. CHAP. I. November, 1650, the dignity of stadtholder had remained in abeyance, and the Dutch executive authority had been administered by statesmen whose political opinions were opposed to those of the deceased prince. One of these opinions was that the almost royal power which the stadtholderate gave to the house of Orange was dangerous to the republic. A few days after the death of William, his widow, who was the daughter of Charles the First of England, gave birth to a son, whom she desired to name Charles, but who was baptized William Henry, in the great Dutch Church at the Hague. He succeeded his father as William, the Third Prince of Orange. This event roused the apprehensions of the Louvestein, or aristocratic party, at the head of which was the young John De Witt, a disciple of Descartes, already conspicuous for his ability, firmness, and integrity. So highly were his talents and prudence esteemed, that he was frequently called "The wisdom of Holland." His mind was well compared with that of Richelieu. In 1653, De Witt was made Grand Pensionary of Holland, and thenceforward he became the real chief magistrate of the republic. To gratify Cromwell, he procured an act of the States excluding the Prince of Orange from the office of stadtholder. Upon the restoration of Charles the Second to the throne of England, this act, so insulting to his nephew, was repealed. De Witt, nevertheless, remained at the head of Dutch affairs, which he directed with consummate skill and nearly regal authority. His country had reached the zenith of its prosperity and glory. Domestic trade and manufactures maintained a growing population in content and abundance; while foreign commerce, searching every shore of the globe, poured continual riches into the warehouses of Holland and Zealand. An alliance had secured the friendship of France. A similar treaty promised peace with England; and Charles, solemnly professing gratitude and affection toward the Dutch people, confided to the States of Holland the guardianship of his infant nephew, William of Orange. With the king apparently so well disposed, it seemed as if enduring friendship was established between the two great Protestant nations of Europe-continental Holland and insular England. John De .1664. and her na It was an interesting circumstance that the royal family CHAP. I. of Great Britain was connected with the King of France and the Prince of Orange in a nearly equal degree. Toward Louis and William, Royalist Englishmen felt much more kindly than did the men of the Commonwealth. But Englishmen generally hated both Frenchmen and Hol- England landers with strong national antipathies. The court poets tional anpraised the frivolous French, whose fashions were imitated tipathies. at Whitehall, while they lampooned the honester Dutch, whose national virtues were a reproach to their king and to themselves. Even the most accomplished English scholars were superciliously ignorant of the literature of Holland, then so rich in varied learning. Yet, with all their affectation of contempt, the English were intensely jealous of the Dutch, whose enterprise, outrunning their own, had established a profitable commerce in Asia and Africa. The Navigation Act of the Commonwealth, devised to cripple the foreign trade of the Netherlands, was made more vindictive just after the Restoration. Dryden but uttered the envy of his countrymen when he wrote of the Hollanders "As Cato fruits of Afric did display, Second. Nevertheless, there was no cause of war between England and Holland. The British sovereign ostentatiously professed his own good feeling toward the nation which Charles the he allowed his courtiers to abuse. But there was no faith in the frivolous King of England. Of all her monarchs, Charles the Second was the meanest and most insincere. If Louis of France was the best actor of majesty, Charles of England was the greatest dissembler that ever sat on a throne. He did not lack talent, nor education, nor the training of adversity, but he did lack conscience, a sense of shame, and an honest heart. His early years had been passed in his father's palace, whence he had been driven into strange lands. During the period of the Commonwealth he had wandered among princes and peoples, enduring vicissitudes of fortune which few royal personages * Satire on the Dutch, 1662. |