"To subscribe them would be suicide," he said: "even to discuss them is dangerous; but, if the majority of this assembly decide otherwise, there remains but one course for the friends of Protestantism and liberty, and that is, to retire to the colonies in the West Indies, and there found a new country, where their consciences and their persons will be beyond the reach of tyranny and despotism." The States General decided to "reject the hard and intolerable conditions proposed by their lordships the Kings of France and Great Britain, and to defend this state and its inhabitants with all their might." The province of Holland in its entirety followed the example of Amsterdam; the dikes were everywhere broken down, at the same time that the troops of the electors of Brandenburg and Saxony were advancing to the aid of the United Provinces, and that the emperor was signing with those two princes a defensive alliance for the maintenance of the treaties of Westphalia, the Pyrenees, and Aix-la-Chapelle.
Louis XIV.

could no longer fly from conquest to conquest; henceforth his troops had to remain on observation; care for his pleasures recalled him to France; he left the command-in-chief of his army to M.de Turenne, and set out for St.

Germain, where he arrived on the 1st of August.

Before leaving Holland, he had sent home almost without ransom twenty thousand prisoners of war, who before long entered the service of the States again.

"It was an excess of clemency of which I had reason afterwards to repent," says the king himself.