.

It was Marlborough at Blenheim (1702) who drove the iron of defeat into
the soul of Louis XIV. When the war was ended he had made every
concession demanded; had given up a vast extent of territory; banished
the English pretender from his kingdom; and acknowledged Anne as queen
of Great Britain.

By the provisions of the treaty (the Peace of Utrecht) Gibraltar passed
to England; Spain ceded the Netherlands and all her possessions in
Italy to the German empire. And so the fine threads diplomacy had been
spinning over the Continent for two centuries were ruthlessly brushed
away as a spider's web.

An imbittered, broken old man, shorn of his omnipotence, who had
outlived his fame and his worshippers, was dying in his great palace at
Versailles; his only solace the austere woman who had inspired the
Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and who upon the death of his
unhappy queen he had privately made his wife. Marie Therese had borne
his mad infatuation for Louise la Valliere; la Valliere had carried her
broken heart to a convent, and been superseded by de Montespan, and de
Montespan had invited her own destruction by bringing into her
household Madame de Maintenon, the pious widow of the poet Scarron, in
order that the austere virtues of that lady might be engrafted upon the
children of the royal household. Grave, ambitious, talented, the
governess of de Montespan's children was not too much absorbed in her
duties to find ways of establishing an influence over the king.

This man, who had absorbed into himself all the functions of the
government, who was ministers, magistrates, parliaments, all in one,
this central sun of whom Corneille, Moliere, Racine were but single
rays, was destined to be enslaved in his old age by a designing
adventuress; her will his law. The hey-day of youth having passed, he
was beginning to be anxious about his soul. She artfully pricked his
conscience, and de Montespan was sent away, but de Maintenon remained.

She next convinced him that the only fitting atonement for his sins was
to drive heresy out of his kingdom, and re-establish the true faith.
At her bidding he undid the glorious work of Henry IV., signed the
Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and brutally stamped out
Protestantism.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the stake in the great
game played in Europe was the headship, the pre-eminent position held
by the house of Hapsburg. The entire reign of Louis XI