But among English historians there has been a tendency to make Louis out more culpable than he really was. The whole negotiations for a Partition Treaty have been depicted as an elaborate deception intended to hoodwink the eyes of the maritime powers until the intrigue in Spain should be successful and the will in favour of the duke of Anjou procured. Harcourt at Madrid is described as carrying out the real policy of Louis, while Tallard at London is purposely his dupe, in order that he may with the greater honesty make William and Heinsius his dupes too. The drama is one in which unexampled villainy is everywhere triumphant, dull virtue oppressed and deceived, and retribution lamely limps along full thirteen years behind. Such a theory is opposed both to the facts of history and the limitations of human nature. To keep up a deception planned on such a gigantic scale for two years and a half, without accomplice, or confidant, in the face and to the disadvantage of the ablest intellects of Europe, most of whom were penetrated by suspicion and eager for revenge, is beyond the powers of human villainy and opposed to all that we know of Louis’s character. Louis had often played the hypocrite and broken faith before, but he had done it pompously in the face of Europe with a show of bravado. He had claimed the Netherlands by the law of devolution, and parts of Alsace by virtue of the decisions of the Chambres des Réunions, by sheer audacity not by cunning. He had often been a bully, there is nothing in his long reign, except perhaps his conduct to Fouquet, which could justify the faintest suspicion that he was an accomplished dissembler before whom even Louis XI. must bow the knee. For what does the theory involve? It involves the belief that for two years and a half he was deceiving not merely William and Heinsius, the Emperor, and the king of Spain, but his own most trusted emissaries and friends. He was deceiving Torcy his foreign minister, Tallard his ambassador in London, and Harcourt his ambassador at Madrid. He was to the last assuring the very man, through whose efforts alone he could obtain the whole succession, that he had determined on a different policy; and he was doing this, not in public letters which might see the light, but in his own secret correspondence, which was often sent by special messenger and never went through the foreign office at all. Further he must have carried out this wholesale deception with an elaboration at which the mind sinks back appalled. He wrote hundreds of letters in great detail, held a large number of conferences with his council as a whole, and with individuals by themselves, made numerous speeches to ambassadors, held many and long interviews with Lord Jersey and other envoys, and yet never once in the whole period said or did anything to suggest the slightest suspicion of his good faith! And more than that. He overacted his part terribly. If his real object was to amuse the maritime powers, while