The fervid eloquence of preachers who declaimed against the horrors of the French persecution, and the lamentations of bankrupts who ascribed their ruin to the French decrees, had wrought up the people to such a temper, that no citizen could declare himself favourable to France without imminent risk of being flung into the nearest canal.

Men remembered that, only fifteen years before, the most illustrious chief of the party adverse to the House of Orange had been torn to pieces by an infuriated mob in the very precinct of the palace of the States General.

A similar fate might not improbably befall those who should, at this crisis, be accused of serving the purposes of France against their native land, and against the reformed religion.

[450] While Lewis was thus forcing his friends in Holland to become, or to pretend to become, his enemies, he was labouring with not less success to remove all the scruples which might have prevented the Roman Catholic princes of the Continent from countenancing William's designs.

A new quarrel had arisen between the Court of Versailles and the Vatican, a quarrel in which the injustice and insolence of the French King were perhaps more offensively displayed than in any other transaction of his reign.
It had long been the rule at Rome that no officer of justice or finance could enter the dwelling inhabited by the minister who represented a Catholic state.