An adverse combination had in the meantime also been formed to encounter William. While he became master in England and Scotland, the cause of James II was maintained in Ireland. The great monarchy which represented the ideas opposed to those of England made the interests of James its own.

The letter is still preserved in which the wife of James II informed King Louis of her arrival upon French soil. ‘A poor fugitive queen,’ she says therein, ‘bathed in tears, has exposed herself to the perils of the sea, in order to seek an asylum from the greatest and most generous monarch in the world.’ She represents her decision to him as a matter not only of necessity, but also of choice: surrounded by sorrows, she wished for nothing else but to live under the shadow of his protection; she entrusted to him the most precious thing that she had on earth, the Prince of Wales.

The fugitive Queen, Mary Beatrice, born Princess of Este, daughter of a niece of Mazarin, owed to King Louis himself her position in the world; he had brought about her marriage; she had paid him a visit with her mother when she was on her way to England, and had enjoyed a hospitable reception. She knew how to strike the note in which he wished to be addressed.

For all that, it was not only sympathy with the misfortune which had visited her that influenced Louis XIV.