The Anglo-French Entente in the Seventeenth Century the Anglo-French Entente in the Seventeenth Century (Paperback)

Excerpt: ...Among them, the Prince of Orange recruited his soldiers and pamphleteers, who, like sharpshooters in front of an army, spread consternation among the upholders of arbitrary power in England a few years before the Dutch actually landed at Torbay. The advent of William iii. and the war that followed helped only to strengthen the party of resistance, insomuch that Protestantism has hitherto stood in France for a synonym of Republicanism. On all sides the pamphleteers have received Pg 124 scant consideration: Bayle attacked them violently, 240 Jurieu declined to acknowledge them as allies; 241 yet their influence on the issue of the struggle carried on in England between the house of Stuart and the Whigs was far from inconsiderable. A press war was waged between the Prince of Orange and his father-in-law long before the official war broke out. "Several libels," reports Luttrell in the early spring of 1688, "and pamphlets have been lately printed and sent about; many are come over from Holland." 242 These were not the able productions of the London clergy, the Stillingfleets and Tenisons and Tillotsons, raising the standard of a holy war against the Catholic divinity that was pouring forth from the King's press. Scurrilous, libellous, violent leaflets came over from Holland to be eagerly devoured by the same credulous mob that believed both the Popish and the Presbyterian plots. Short, pithy, coarse, they may be read to-day, if not with the interest born of warfare in which one takes part, at least without wearisomeness. The most popular are issued in English and in French, so as to sting at one blow James ii. and Louis xiv. Such is the letter of P