第48章 LETTER 7(3)

The Dutch made their peace separately at Munster with Spain,who acknowledged then the sovereignty and independency of their commonwealth.The French,who had been,after our Elizabeth,their principal support,reproached them severely for this breach of faith.They excused themselves in the best manner,and by the best reasons,they could.All this your lordship will find in the monuments of that time.But I think it not improbable that they had a motive you will not find there,and which it was not proper to give as a reason or excuse to the French.Might not the wise men amongst them consider even when,besides the immediate advantages that accrued by this treaty to their Commonwealth,that the imperial power was fallen;that the power of Spain was vastly reduced;that the house of Austria was nothing more than the shadow of a great name,and that the house of Bourbon was advancing,by large strides,to a degree of power as exorbitant,and as formidable as that of the other family had been in the hands of Charles the Fifth,of Philip the Second,and lately of the two Ferdinands.Might they not foresee,even then,what happened in the course of very few years,when they were obliged,for their own security,to assist their old enemies the Spaniards against their old friends the French.I think they might.Our Charles the First was no great politician,and yet he seemed to discern that the balance of power was turning in favor of France,some years before the treaties of Westphalia.

He refused to be neuter,and threatened to take part with Spain,if the French pursued the design of besieging Dunkirk and Graveline,according to a concert taken between them and the Dutch,and in pursuance of a treaty for dividing the Spanish Low Countries,which Richelieu had negotiated.Cromwell either did not discern this turn of the balance of power,long afterwards when it was much more visible;or,discerning it,he was induced by reasons of private interest to act against the general interest of Europe.Cromwell joined with France against Spain,and though he got Jamaica and Dunkirk,he drove the Spaniards into a necessity of making a peace with France,that has disturbed the peace of the world almost fourscore years,and the consequences of which have well nigh beggared in our times the nation he enslaved in his.There is a tradition,I have heard it from persons who lived in those days,and I believe it came from Thurloe,that Cromwell was in treaty with Spain,and ready to turn his arms against France when he died.If this fact was certain,as little as I honor his memory,I should have some regret that he died so soon.But whatever his intentions were,we must charge,the Pyrenean treaty,and the fatal consequences of it,in great measure to his account.The Spaniards abhorred the thought of marrying their Infanta to Louis the Fourteenth.It was on this point that they broke the negotiation Lionne had begun:and your lordship will perceive,that if they resulted it afterwards,and offered the marriage they had before rejected,Cromwell's league with France was a principal inducement to this alteration of their resolutions.

The precise point at which the scales of power turn,like that of the solstice in either tropic,is imperceptible to common observation:and,in one case as in the other,some progress must be make in the new direction,before the change is perceived.They who are in the sinking scale,for in the political balance of power,unlike to all others,the scale that is empty sinks,and that which is fill rises;they who are in the sinking scale do not easily come off from the habitual prejudices of superior wealth,of power,or skill,or courage,nor from the confidence that these prejudices inspire.

They who are in the rising scale do not immediately feel their strength,nor assume that confidence in it which successful experience gives them afterwards.

They who are the most concerned to watch the variations of this balance,misjudge often in the same manner,and from the same prejudices.They continue to dread a power no longer able to hurt them,or they continue to have no apprehensions of a power that grows daily more formidable.Spain verified the first observation at the end of the second period,when,proud and poor,and enterprising and feeble,she still thought herself a match for France.

France verified the second observation at the beginning of the third period,when the triple alliance stopped the progress of progress of her arms,which alliances much more considerable were not able to effect afterwards.The other principal powers of Europe,in their turns,have verified the third observation in both its parts,through the whole course of this period.