taking their families and household goods in their ships, seek new homes in lands beyond the sea. The desperate resolve was in part executed; for with the French threatening Amsterdam, the dykes were cut, and all the surrounding fields were laid under water, and the invaders thus forced to retreat.
The heroic resistance to the intruders made by the Hollanders in their half-drowned land, the havoc wrought by the stout Dutch sailors among the fleets of the allies, and the diplomacy of the Dutch statesmen, who, through skilful negotiations, detached almost all of the allies of the French from that side, and brought them into alliance with the republic,—all these things soon put a very different face upon affairs, and Louis found himself confronted by the armies of half of Europe.
For several years the war now went on by land and sea,—in the Netherlands, all along the Rhine, upon the English Channel, in the Mediterranean, and on the coasts of the New World. At length an end was put to the struggle by the Treaty of Nimeguen (1678). Louis gave up his conquests in Holland, but kept a large number of towns and fortresses in the Spanish Netherlands, besides the province of Franche-Comté and several Imperial cities on his German frontier.
Thus Louis came out of this tremendous struggle, in which half of Europe was leagued against him, with enhanced reputation and fresh acquisitions of territory. People now began to call him the Grand Monarch.
The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685).—Louis now committed an act the injustice of which was only equalled by its folly,—an act from which may be dated the decline of his power. This was the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the well-known decree by which Henry IV. secured religious freedom to the French Protestants (see p. 578). By this cruel measure all the Protestant churches were closed, and every Huguenot who refused to embrace the Roman Catholic faith was outlawed. The persecution which the Huguenots had been enduring and which was now greatly increased in violence, is known as the Dragonnades, from
