144

LEAGUE OF AUGSBURG.

[BOOK V. brother, had married the sister of the Elector Palatine, the last of the House of Simmern, who died in May 1685, when his next relative, the Count Palatine Philip William, Duke of Neuburg, took possession of the Electorate. The Duchess of Orléans had by her marriage contract renounced all her feudal rights to the Palatinate, but not her claims to the allodial property and the moveables of her family. In these latter, Louis, on the part of his sister-in-law, insisted on including not only the furniture of the electoral palaces but even the cannon of the fortresses; and the new Elector was forced to satisfy these claims by the payment of 100,000 livres. The claims of the Duchess on the allodial property were far more embarrassing. Under this head were demanded the principalities of Simmern and Lautern, the county of Sponheim, with numerous other territories, towns, and lordships; in short, the larger portion of the whole Electorate. Philip William resisted these demands, and Louis, who was now busy at home with the Hugonots, and who was shortly afterwards seized with a dangerous and painful malady, did not at present attempt to assert them by force. He had, however, done enough to excite a general alarm, and to show that he had not abandoned his designs of enriching himself at the expense of his neighbours. The new Elector implored the protection of the Empire, and thus redoubled the uneasiness felt in Germany, and indeed throughout the greater part of Europe, respecting the schemes of Louis. The Prince of Orange availed himself of these suspicions to forward his plans against Louis. He artfully inflamed the general alarm, and at length succeeded in inducing the Emperor Leopold, the Kings of Spain and Sweden, as princes of the Empire, the Electors of Saxony and Bavaria, the circles of Suabia, Franconia, Upper Saxony, and Bavaria to enter into the celebrated LEAGUE OF AUGSBURG (July 9th 1686). The object of this league was to maintain the Treaties of Münster and Nimeguen and the Truce of Ratisbon. If any of the members of it was attacked he was to be assisted by the whole confederacy: 60,000 men were to be raised, who were to be frequently drilled, and to form a camp during some weeks of every year, and a common fund for their support was to be established at Frankfort. The League was to be in force only for three years, but might be prolonged at the expiration of that term should the public safety require it.25

The Elector Palatine, who was in fact the party most directly interested, acceded to the League early in September, as well as the Duke of Holstein Gottorp. The Elector of Brandenburg had

25 Dumont, t. vii. pt. ii. p. 131 sqq.

already made a separate alliance with the Emperor by three treaties (Dec. 25th 1685 and Jan. 4th, and March 22nd 1686), by which certain exchanges of territory were made between them; and the Elector had pledged himself to defend the Empire against all assailants. He did not, therefore, join the League of Augsburg, to avoid giving any open cause of offence to the French King. Nor did the Stadtholder himself become a party to it, since it ostensibly professed to be an association only of the members of the Empire. Most French writers are of opinion that William organised this league in order to assist his scheme for seizing the crown of England; and it is certain that it eventually proved very useful to him in that undertaking. Yet, although the idea of supplanting his father-in-law may already have occurred to him, he could hardly have foreseen that two years afterwards he should be invited into England by the Whigs, and that at the same time Louis should have declared war against the Empire; and it seems, therefore, more probable that William, without any definite view of self-advantage, merely organised the league as part of his general policy against the French King.

The establishment of the League of Augsburg gave rise to some sharp correspondence between Louis and the Emperor; and by way of defiance, the French King caused a fort to be built opposite Hüningen, on the right bank of the Rhine, in the territory of the Margrave of Baden. It was not, however, till two years afterwards, as we have already said, that war actually broke out between France and the Empire. The reason why it should have been so long postponed, or why it should have been entered into at that particular juncture, it is not easy to explain. Some French writers have attributed it to a quarrel between Louis and his minister Louvois respecting the size of a window in the little palace of Trianon; when Louvois, mortified by the hard words which he received from his master, resolved to divert his attention from such subjects by finding employment for him in a war.26 This, probably, is only one of those anecdotes, more piquant than veracious, in which the French writers of memoirs delight; yet, had it been true, the pretexts for war set forth by Louis in his manifesto of Sept. 24th 1688, could hardly have been more flimsy. The main grounds assigned for declaring war were, that the Emperor intended to conclude a peace with the Turks in order that he might turn his arms against France; that he had supported the Elector Palatine in his unjust hesitation to do justice to the claims of the Duchess of Orléans; and that he had deprived the Cardinal 26 Mémoires de St. Simon, t. xiii. p. 9; Martin, t. xiv. p. 90.

146

WILLIAM VON FÜRSTENBERG.

[Book V. Von Fürstenberg, an ally of the French kings, who had been elected by part of the Chapter of the archbishopric of Cologne, and had procured to be chosen in his stead the Bavarian prince, Joseph Clement.27 Louis also called upon the Emperor to convert the truce of Ratisbon into a definitive peace; or, in other words, to cede to him in perpetuity the acquisitions which had been assigned to him only for a limited period.

With regard to the first of these charges, it is true, as we have related in another chapter, that Austria, since the siege of Vienna, had achieved some signal triumphs both over the Turks and the Hungarians, triumphs which had excited great jealousy and anger in the French Court, but which can hardly be regarded as affording Louis any legitimate cause of war against the Emperor. The affair of the Duchess of Orléans we have already explained. It had been referred, with the consent of Louis, to the arbitration of the Pope; and the delay which had taken place was, therefore, imputable to Innocent XI. and not to the Emperor. It is certain, however, that Innocent was the implacable adversary of France. No pope since the Reformation had exercised so much political influence as he; and, strange to say, for the sake of opposing Louis, this influence was ranged on the side of the heretic William, against his orthodox uncle, James II., the sovereign whose devotion to Rome was so blind and implicit that he hesitated not to sacrifice three kingdoms for a mass. Innocent had also thrown in his weight against Louis in the affair of the electorate of Cologne, which requires a few words of explanation.

The Suabian family of Fürstenberg was entirely devoted to France. Egon Von Fürstenberg, Bishop of Strasburg, had been very instrumental in putting the French in possession of that city; his brother William had, as we have seen, been seized by the Emperor at the Congress of Cologne for being too warm a partisan of French interests, but had subsequently recovered his liberty at the Peace of Nimeguen. Egon having died in 1682, Louis obtained for William, who had purposely entered the Church, the bishopric of Strasburg, and subsequently a cardinal's hat. Nor did the French King's views in his favour stop here: Louis resolved to procure for him the archbishopric and electorate of Cologne; a step by which the electorate would become almost a French province, while, at the same time, Louis would obtain through his creature and dependant a voice in the affairs of the Empire. Early in 1688, Maximilian, the archbishop-elector of Cologne, and

27 See Mémoire des Raisons qui ont obligé le Roy à reprendre les armes, in Dumont, t. vii. pt. ii. p. 170.

the Chapter being gained by French money, elected William Von Fürstenberg Coadjutor; that is, successor to the archbishopric when it should become vacant by the death of Maximilian, an event which happened a few months later (June 1688). But the Pope, who was in the interests of the Emperor, annulled the election of the Coadjutor; the League of Augsburg brought forwards the Bavarian prince, Joseph Clement, as a rival candidate for the archbishopric, and though Clement was only seventeen years of age, the Pope gave him a dispensation and a brief of eligibility. As both the candidates possessed bishoprics, they could only be elected by postulation, for which the canon law requires a reunion of two thirds of the votes. But of the twenty-four votes, Fürstenberg obtained only fifteen, while Clement had the remaining nine; and as he had been declared eligible by the Pope, while the same. privilege had not been accorded to Fürstenberg, the election fell upon Clement. Louis, however, declared that he would support Fürstenberg and the majority of the Chapter, and his troops took possession of most of the places of the electorate.

Thus the enmity between the Pope and the French King, first excited by the affair of the Régale, became irreconcilable. It had been recently aggravated by another dispute, which had involved the Parliament of Paris in Innocent's displeasure. The pontiff, with a view to the better administration of the police in Rome, had abrogated a privilege enjoyed by foreign ambassadors resident in that capital, by which not only the palace, but even the quarter which they inhabited, was considered inviolable, and thus afforded an asylum to malefactors of all kinds. All the other Powers submitted without a murmur to this wholesome regulation; but Louis haughtily declared "that his crown had never been guided by the conduct of others, but, on the contrary, God had established it to be for them an example, and he was determined, so long as he reigned, never to forfeit any of its rights." 28 The Marquis of Lavardin, who proceeded to Rome as French ambassador in November 1687, was instructed to disregard the Pope's abrogation of the ambassadorial franchise, although a bull of excommunication had been launched against all who should maintain it. Lavardin entered Rome at the head of near a thousand armed men; but Innocent refused to receive him, and placed the French church of St. Louis, which the ambassador was accustomed to attend, under an interdict. The matter was taken up by the Parliament of Paris. Several members, and especially De Harlai, the procureur-général, and Talon, the avocat-général, inveighed * Martin, Hist. de France, t. xiv. p. 78.

148

FRENCH PARLIAMENT EXCOMMUNICATED.

[BOOK V. vehemently against the Pope, and appealed to a future Council. The Parliament passed an Arrêt (January 1688), that the King should be supplicated to assemble provincial councils, or a National Council, in order to put an end to the disorder created by the vacancy of bishoprics (through the affair of the Régale); and that all commerce with Rome, and the remitting of money thither, should be forbidden.

These quarrels show how much France was then before other Roman Catholic nations in the little value which she set on the papal authority, and how near she was to an absolute separation from Rome. Nay, they were not without importance on the political events of the period, and caused Louis to feel that the Pope had not yet entirely lost his influence even in temporal matters. His rage and disappointment are shown in a violent and remarkable letter which he addressed to the Pope (September 6th), through the Cardinal d'Estrées, with orders to communicate it to Innocent and the Consistory. In this letter, which may almost be regarded as a declaration of the war he was meditating, he declared that he had lost all hope of reawakening in Innocent the feelings of the common father of Christendom, or to obtain any justice at his hands; and he intimated that the Pope's conduct would probably cause a general war in Europe. "It is a conduct," he continued, "which emboldens the Prince of Orange openly to manifest a design of attacking the King of England in his own dominions, and to hold out, on the pretext of so bold an enterprise, the maintenance of the Protestant religion, or rather the extirpation of Catholicism." He declared that he could no longer recognise Innocent as mediator in the affair of the Palatine succession, and that he should take care to obtain justice by the means which God had placed in his hands. He further announced that he should continue to assist the Cardinal Von Fürstenberg; and that if his ally, the Duke of Parma, was not immediately put in possession of the Duchies of Castro and Ronciglione, withheld from him by the Holy See since the Treaty of Pisa, the French troops would enter Italy, and Avignon would be seized.29 This last threat was carried into execution in October.

Innocent XI. replied by proclaiming Clement of Bavaria Archbishop of Cologne, and by excommunicating the Parliament of Paris and the Advocate-General Talon. Louis, on his side, followed up his Philippic against the Pope by the declaration of war against the Emperor already mentioned. For some weeks the

29 Lettre de Louis XIV. au Cardinal d'Estrées, in Dumont, t. vii. pt. ii. p. 167; Burnet, Own Times, vol. i. p. 759.