If you thought it would be very easy and very pleasant to be a king, you were very much mistaken." A sad confession for that powerful monarch, who in his youth found "the vocation of king beautiful, noble, and delightful." "The eighteenth century opened with a fulness of glory and unheard-of prosperity; "but Louis XIV.

did not suffer himself to be lulled to sleep by the apparent indifference with which Europe, the empire excepted, received the elevation of Philip V.to the throne of Spain.

On the 6th of February, 1701, the seven barrier towns of the Spanish Low Countries, which were occupied by Dutch garrisons in virtue of the peace of Ryswick, opened their gates to the French on an order from the King of Spain.
"The instructions which the Elector of Bavaria, governor of the Low Countries, had given to the various governors of the places, were so well executed," says M.de Vault in his account of the campaign in Flanders, "that we entered without any hinderance.

Some of the officers of the Dutch troops grumbled, and would have complained, but the French general officers who had led the troops pacified them, declaring that they did not come as enemies, and that all they wanted was to live in good understanding with them." The twenty-two Dutch battalions took the road back before long to their own country, and became the nucleus of the army which William of Orange was quietly getting ready in Holland as well as in England; his peoples were beginning to open their eyes; the States General, deprived of the barrier towns, had opened the dikes; the meadows were flooded.

On the 7th of September, 1701, England and Holland signed for the second time with the emperor a Grand Alliance, engaging not to lay down arms until they had reduced the possessions of King Philip V.to Spain and the Indies, restored the barrier of Holland, and secured an indemnity to Austria, and the definitive severance of the two crowns of France and Spain.