After eight years of war all sides were anxious for peace. To France, exhausted by maintaining year after year four armies at least in the field, peace was a necessity. Already the burden had become almost intolerable. The coinage was debased, the _taille_ had been doubled, offices were openly sold, and indeed created in order to be sold, one tenth of the population was without means of subsistence. The government too had fallen into very inferior hands. Colbert, Louvois, and Seignelay were all dead. Pontchartrain who took charge of the finances was incapable, Barbesieux, the son of Louvois, who succeeded to his father at the war office, was young and without experience. When he pleaded his inexperience to Louis, the infatuated king replied, ‘Do not disturb yourself, I formed your father and will form you.’ He seemed to think human nature was a blank sheet of paper on which he could write what he liked. England too was tired of a struggle which brought her neither glory nor profit. William himself, worn out by disease, hated by his subjects, thwarted by his Parliaments, plotted against by his courtiers, was willing if not anxious to sheathe the sword. In 1696 Victor Amadeus of Savoy left the League and made a treaty with France, and negotiations for a general peace were set on foot, which eventually were brought to a successful issue at Ryswick in 1698 chiefly through the efforts of Bouffiers and Portland. [Sidenote: =The treaty of Ryswick, 1698.=] By the treaty of Ryswick France surrendered all the towns which she had captured since the treaty of Nimwegen except Strasburg, and agreed that the chief frontier fortresses of the Netherlands should be garrisoned by the Dutch in order to secure their ‘barrier.’ Clement of Bavaria was acknowledged as the lawful archbishop of Köln, and the right of William III. to the throne of England, with the succession to his sister-in-law Anne, recognised. The peace of Ryswick was a serious blow, not merely to the pride of Louis XIV., but to his power. France never had time to recover from the strain of that terrible and heroic struggle before she was again involved in the war of the Spanish Succession. Her finances were ruined, her navy was crushed. And the heir to her greatness was her hated rival. William III. by ousting the Stuarts from the English throne, by forcing France to acknowledge his own right, had changed the personal duel between himself and Louis into a national duel between England and France, a duel in which England had scored the first pass by wresting from France the command of the ocean, and compelling Louis to renounce his claim to be the dictator of Europe and the champion of the cause of Roman Catholicism in England. CHAPTER XII SOUTH-EASTERN EUROPE