Chapter 1249: Does He Who Holds India Hold the World?

August 16, 1666, The Hague, the residence of the Grand Pensionary.

An emergency session of the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands is underway!

This is already the tenth or eleventh emergency session since the outbreak of the war — no one can quite remember which — and yet the situation facing the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands has not eased in the slightest because of all these emergency sessions. On the contrary, it has grown more critical by the day, and now stands on the very brink of collapse. The mood in the emergency session of the States General has likewise grown heavier and heavier, until every man in the room feels as though he can scarcely draw breath.

In the council chamber, every face is ashen, and all eyes are fixed on the Grand Pensionary, Johan de Witt, who sits without a word.

This great statesman, ordinarily so resourceful and so adept at managing men and affairs, now sits slumped in his chair like a defeated fighting cock, his gaze vacant, no longer able to summon up a single clever scheme that might save the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands.

Oh, it is not that the schemes are beyond him — Johan de Witt's head is stuffed full of stratagems: drawing England into the war, drawing Sweden into the war, drawing Austria into the war, drawing Brandenburg into the war... So long as the silver content of the Dutch guilders in the Bank of Amsterdam still held good, Johan de Witt could find countries willing to bleed and fight for Holland.

But the problem now is that all these countries need time to mobilize their armies!

And the French, with a hundred thousand men, have already swept like lightning through the Ardennes Forest in the southern part of the Spanish Netherlands, through the Electorate of Cologne and the Prince-Bishopric of Münster, and have crashed with overwhelming force into the southeastern quarter of the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands.

The great scattering of petty states of the Holy Roman Empire bordering the Republic's southeast were so fragmented that they could pose no threat whatsoever to the rich and powerful Republic, and so there had seemed no need to spend vast sums building a host of useless bastioned fortresses there...

Yet who could have foreseen that the French would first use the "Turin wedding" as a cover for a surprise attack, and then execute a great turning march of a hundred leagues, hurling a hundred thousand men straight into the Republic's most weakly defended southeastern quarter!

The speed of the French advance was staggering. When the Prince de Condé's army passed through the Ardennes and reached the territory of the Electorate of Cologne, only six days had elapsed since France had declared war. Turenne's corps, attacking from the front, had not yet taken a single fortress held by the Spanish, and the Dutch grandees of Amsterdam and The Hague were still deliberating which power to ally with in order to check the ambitions of Louis XIV... In the end, before the Dutch envoys had even left The Hague, the Prince de Condé's hundred thousand men were already on Dutch soil.

Discovering that they themselves had become the first target of the French blow, the States General, which had previously been full of confidence, was thrown into complete disarray, and could only hastily assemble the provincial armies into a combined force to offer resistance.

But the hastily assembled Dutch army was in utter confusion, with no unified command and a shortage of competent generals. For since the death of Prince William II of Orange, the Netherlands had had no unified army; each province had seen to its own defense, and by 1666 the country had been without a unified army for sixteen years!

And in those sixteen years, the old generals who had once followed the House of Orange on its campaigns had either retired into idleness, died of illness, or gone abroad to take service elsewhere. In the rush, scarcely a handful of men who could actually fight could be gathered!

And William III, the Prince of Orange who might have commanded the loyalty of these followers of the House of Orange, was only sixteen years old... The States General could not possibly entrust the fate of the Netherlands to a boy of sixteen!

And even if they had done so, a sixteen-year-old William III could not have withstood the Prince de Condé, who commanded seventy thousand men of the new French army in the invasion.

So the combined army the Dutch had hastily thrown together became nothing more than a hapless foil for the Prince de Condé's battle honors. Two pitched battles were fought, at Deventer and Utrecht, and in those two battles forty thousand men of the Dutch provincial army were annihilated. More than twenty thousand were taken prisoner; the rest were either killed in action or gravely wounded. French casualties, by contrast, amounted to a mere few thousand!

Only then did the Dutch, who had neglected their army for sixteen years, awaken as if from a dream — the Dutch army had fallen completely behind the times!

They were simply no match for the mighty new French army!

After the Battle of Utrecht, the Dutch spirit began to crack. The citizens of Utrecht were the first to lose the courage to resist, and on August 12 they opened their gates and surrendered!

Utrecht was no ordinary city. It was the place where the Treaty of Utrecht, which founded the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands, had been signed, and it was also the gateway to the province of Holland, the very heart of the Republic!

Two days after the Prince de Condé occupied Utrecht, a French infantry division under the Vicomte de Rochefort advanced as far as Muiden, south of Amsterdam... and Muiden lies a mere three leagues from the center of Amsterdam!

Only two options now lay before the States General of the Netherlands. The first was to surrender to France and accept a humiliating peace with catastrophic losses.

The second was to breach the sea dikes around Amsterdam, using water as a weapon to hold back the French army for a time and buy the Netherlands a little breathing room.

But even the time won by breaching the dikes would be limited, for the Dutch winter at this season was bitterly cold, and the floodwaters would freeze. If the Netherlands could not rally within a bare three or four months, then the end of the country would be at hand.

Yet what could be accomplished in three or four months?

Could a sixteen-year-old William III train an army in three months capable of standing against the new French army? And if not, could the armies of those hired German princes hold their own against as many as a hundred thousand men of the new French army?

The very thought of it was enough to drive a man to despair!

In the midst of the dead silence, a secretary of the States General came running breathlessly into the chamber, holding up a wax-sealed envelope. Judging by the look on his face, the contents of that envelope ought to be good news!

"... Mister Grand Pensionary, the envoy of the King of France has arrived at the port of The Hague aboard an English merchantman, and he brings with him a letter in the hand of King Louis XIV..."

This was indeed good news!

The States General had not even chosen its own peace envoy yet, and here the victorious French had sent an envoy first. That showed Louis XIV had never considered the destruction of the Netherlands...

"Quickly, come here — bring that envelope to me at once!"

Johan de Witt hastily summoned the secretary over, took the envelope, tore off the wax seal, and drew out the letter within... Every deputy of the States General stared fixedly at him, and the deputies saw that their Grand Pensionary's hand was trembling without cease!

The hall was utterly silent; every man's heart was in his throat.

Just then, Johan de Witt let out a long, heavy breath and spoke: "Thanks be to Christ — the King of France's object is an alliance with us..."

What? An alliance?

The King of France sent the Prince de Condé with a hundred thousand French troops to the very gates of Amsterdam — all for the sake of an alliance?

By now tears were streaming down Johan de Witt's face. He said: "His Majesty the King writes in his letter that he considers France the foremost land power in Christendom, and Holland the foremost sea power in Christendom... and that therefore the two nations share a sacred duty to defend the glory of Christian civilization!

And that the world-empire of the Eastern civilization, with its boundless territories and its population of hundreds of millions, is rapidly rising to become the foremost empire in all the world. Unlike the great powers here in Europe, the Eastern world-empire is not merely a single state — it is the entirety of Eastern civilization! From the great steppes of Central Asia eastward, across the Pacific, to the western coast of the Americas, all lies under the rule of this great country that styles itself the Celestial Dynasty.

If France and Holland cannot unite and stand together against this Celestial Dynasty, then one day all of Christendom will grovel at the feet of the great Eastern power... forever!"

The Grand Pensionary of Holland wiped away his tears and looked at the deputies in the hall: "Gentlemen, Holland is saved... We are saved!"