Sweden had formed the Triple Alliance against France; while in 1672 France and England combined to attack Holland; and in 1678 the English again made a defensive league with Holland against France, when the English Company were required by the government to send out a large body of men to defend Bombay, and also employed an armed fleet of some thirty-five vessels. The motives for these rapid changes of attitude were largely connected with Asiatic commerce.
The three wars against Holland into which England drifted between 1652 and 1672 were all prompted, more or less, by commercial and colonial animosities. For the quarrel in Cromwell's time had arisen directly out of grievances against the Dutch in Asia; and we have seen that their determined attempts to thwart and repel the expansion of English commerce in the East Indies produced the rupture of 1665. France joined Holland in 1666, and some desperate naval engagements ensued, until the invasion of Spanish Flanders by Louis XIV so alarmed the Dutch that they consented to pacific proposals from the English and signed the Treaty of Breda in 1667 upon the basis of Uti possidetis as to territory, and the amicable adjustment of all commercial disputes.
England also made peace with France, but as Louis XIV nevertheless pushed on his invasion of Spanish Flanders, the Triple Alliance was formed to stop him by insisting on France and Spain corning to some arrangement. Then followed a fresh shuffle of the cards, for in 1670 the French and English kings agreed, by
