But the actual declaration of war still failed to appear; indeed Charles was in heart as disinclined for war as ever. While Danby threatened France the king was busy turning the threat to his own profit, and gaining time by prorogations for a series of base negotiations. At one stage he demanded from Lewis a fresh pension for the next three years as the price of his good offices with the allies. Danby stooped to write the demand, and Charles added "This letter is written by my order, C. R." A force of three thousand English soldiers was landed at Ostend; but the allies were already broken by their suspicions of the king's real policy, and Charles soon agreed for a fresh pension to recall the brigade. The bargain was hardly struck when Lewis withdrew the terms of peace he had himself offered and on the faith of which England had ostensibly retired from the scene. Once more Danby offered aid to the allies. But all faith in England had now disappeared. One hostile power after another gave assent to the new conditions laid down by France, and though Holland, the original cause of the war, was saved, the Peace of Nimeguen in July 1678 made Lewis the arbiter of Europe. [Illustration: EUROPE From 1648 to 1700 from Spruner.] [Sidenote: The Catholic hopes.] Disgraceful as the peace was to England, it left Charles the master of a force of twenty thousand men levied for a war he had refused to declare. It left him too with nearly a million of French money in his pocket. His course had roused into fresh life the old suspicions of his perfidy and of a secret plot with Lewis for the ruin of English freedom and of English religion. That there was such a plot we know; and from the moment of the Treaty of Dover the hopes of the Catholic party had mounted even faster than the panic of the Protestants. But they had been bitterly disappointed by the king's sudden withdrawal from the prosecution of his schemes after his four years' ineffectual struggle, and roused to wild anger by his seeming return to the policy of Clarendon. Their anger and disappointment were revealed in the letters from English Jesuits which were afterwards to play so fatal a part in begetting a belief in the plot, and in the correspondence of Coleman. Coleman was secretary of the Duchess of York and a busy intriguer, who had gained sufficient knowledge of the real plans of the king and of his brother to warrant him in begging money from Lewis for the work of saving Catholic interests from Danby's hostility by intrigues in the Parliament. A passage from one of his letters gives us a glimpse of the wild dreams which were stirring among the hotter Catholics of the time. "They had a mighty work on their hands," he wrote, "no less than the conversion of three kingdoms, and by that perhaps the utter subduing of a pestilent heresy which had so long domineered over a great part of the northern world. Success would give the greatest blow to the Protestant