open ground, a trial which proved too much even for them. Nevertheless, it was they who eventually stormed a breach from which another of the assaulting columns had been repulsed, and ensured the surrender of the citadel a few days later. For their service on this occasion the Eighteenth Foot were made the Royal Irish; and a Latin inscription on their colours still records that this was the reward of their valour at Namur.
Thus William on his return to England could for the first time show his Parliament a solid success due to the British red-coats; and the House of Commons gladly voted once more a total force of eighty-seven thousand men. But the war need be followed no further. The campaign of 1696 was interrupted by a futile attempt of the French to invade England, and in 1697 France, reduced to utter exhaustion, gladly concluded the Peace of Ryswick. So ended, not without honour, the first stage of the great conflict with King Lewis the Fourteenth. The position of the two protagonists, England and France, was not wholly unlike that which they occupied a century later at the Peace of Amiens. The British, though they had not reaped great victories, had made their presence felt, and terribly felt, on the battlefield; and, as the French in the Peninsula remembered that the British had fought them with a tenacity which they had not found in other nations, not only in Egypt, but even earlier at Tournay and Linselles, so, too, after Blenheim and Ramillies they looked back to the furious attack at Steenkirk and the indomitable defence of Neerwinden. "Without the concurrence of the valour and power of England," said William to the Parliament at the close of 1695, "it were impossible to put a stop to the ambition and greatness of France." So it was
