le have had such glad welcome as was given to the Huguenots.

Then came the rebound in a form not expected. William of Orange was
now King of England. James had been driven off his throne, and his
daughter Mary and her husband, William of Orange, wore the double
crown. All the hostile European states, under William's leadership,
sprang together for the common defence of Europe from this detested foe.

The smothered hatred of Holland and every protestant state burst into
flame, and the great War of the Coalition commenced. Beginning with
the League of Augsburg, in 1688, it continued until the peace of
Ryswick, 1697, with the defeat of France all along the line.

Humiliated and broken, there remained for the king an opportunity to
retrieve the past by attaching the Spanish peninsula to France. There
was a vacant throne at Madrid which his grandson Philip, through the
neglected Queen Maria Theresa, might claim as his inheritance. Such
were the conditions which might still change defeat into triumph. The
fact that the right to the succession had been waived by the king was
easily disposed of. Philip, Louis' grandson, presented his claim in
competition with that of the son of Leopold I., Emperor of Germany.
When the pope, with whom the decision lay, decided in favor of Philip,
grandson of the great Louis, all Europe sprang to the aid of the
Austrian archduke in the war of the Spanish succession.

It was a little side play in the opening of this great drama, which
brought the kingdom of Prussia into existence. Frederick, elector of
Brandenburg, when called upon to arm by the emperor, refused to do so
except upon one condition: that he might wear the title of king instead
of elector; which condition was granted, with the stipulation that the
name of Prussia, a detached piece of territory the ancestors of
Frederick had cut out of the side of Russia, be substituted for
Brandenburg. So out of this war of personal ambition there had sprung
a new kingdom, the kingdom of Prussia, of which France was to hear much
in the future.

England was not eager to join the new coalition in defence of the
Hapsburg, whom in common with the rest of Europe she had for years been
trying to pull down. But when Louis insolently espoused the cause of
the exiled King James, and promised by force to place the pretender on
the throne, then she needed no urging, and sent Marlborough and the
flower of her army to join Prince Eugene in Germany