suddenly attacked Holland with all his forces.[5]

[Footnote 5: See _Struggle of the Dutch against France and England_, page
86.]

For a moment the little republic seemed helpless. Her navy indeed withstood
ably the combined assaults of the French and English ships, but the French
armies overran almost her entire territory. It was then that her people
talked of entering their ships and sailing away together, transporting
their nation bodily to some colony beyond Louis's reach. It was then that
Amsterdam set the example which other districts heroically followed, of
opening her dykes and letting the ocean flood the land to drive out the
French. The leaders of the republic were murdered in a factional strife,
and the young Prince William III of Orange, descended from that William
the Silent who had led the Dutch against Philip II, was made practically
dictator of the land. This young Prince William, afterward King William III
of England, was the antagonist who sprang up against Louis, and in the end
united all Europe against him and annihilated his power.

Seeing the wonderful resistance that little Holland made against her
apparently overwhelming antagonists, the rest of Germany took heart; allies
came to the Dutch. Brandenburg and Austria and Spain forced Louis to fall
back upon his own frontier, though with much resolute battling by his great
general, Turenne.

Next to young William, Louis found his most persistent opponent in
Frederick William, the "Great Elector" of Brandenburg and Prussia,
undoubtedly the ablest German sovereign of the age, and the founder of
Prussia's modern importance. He had succeeded to his hereditary domains in
1640, when they lay utterly waste and exhausted in the Thirty Years' War;