The war still went on; and the taking of Bouchain on the 30th of August, 1711, closed the almost unrivalled military career of Marlborough, by the success of one of his boldest and best conducted exploits.  Party intrigue had accomplished what, in court parlance, is called the disgrace, but which, in the language of common sense, means only the dismissal of this great man.  The new ministry, who hated the Dutch, now entered seriously into negotiations with France.  The queen acceded to these views, and sent special envoys to communicate with the court of Versailles.  The states-general found it impossible to continue hostilities if England withdrew from the coalition; conferences were consequently opened at Utrecht in the month of January, 1712.  England took the important station of arbiter in the great question there debated.  The only essential conditions which she demanded individually were the renunciation of all claims to the crown of France by Philip V., and the demolition of the harbor of Dunkirk.  The first of these was the more readily acceded to, as the great battles of Almanza and Villaviciosa, gained by Philip’s generals, the dukes of Berwick and Vendome, had steadily fixed him on the throne of Spain—­a point still more firmly secured by the death of the emperor Joseph I., son of Leopold, and the elevation of his brother Charles, Philip’s competitor for the crown of Spain, to the imperial dignity, by the title of Charles VI.

The peace was not definitively signed until the 11th of April, 1713; and France obtained far better conditions than those which were refused her a few years previously.  The Belgian provinces were given to the new emperor, and must henceforth be called the Austrian instead of the Spanish Netherlands.  The gold and the blood of Holland had been profusely expended during this contest; it might seem for no positive results; but the exhaustion produced to every one of the other belligerents was a source of peace and prosperity to the republic.  Its commerce was re-established; its financial resources recovered their level; and altogether we must fix on the epoch now before us as that of its utmost point of influence and greatness.  France, on the contrary, was now reduced from its palmy state of almost European sovereignty to one of the deepest misery; and its monarch, in his old age, found little left of his former power but those records of poetry, painting, sculpture, and architecture which tell posterity of his magnificence, and the splendor of which throw his faults and his misfortunes into the shade.

The great object now to be accomplished by the United Provinces was the regulation of a distinct and guaranteed line of frontier between the republic and France.  This object had become by degrees, ever since the peace of Munster, a fundamental maxim of their politics.  The interposition of the Belgian provinces between the republic and France was of serious inconvenience to the former in this point of view.  It was made