Drawing on the correspondence of contemporary rulers and diplomats and on the work of modern European and American historians, this article reinterprets the origins of the War of the Spanish Succession by examining the triangular relationship between Leopold I, Louis XIV and William III during the last quarter of the seventeenth century. It disposes of two ‘myths’: namely that Leopold I and William III were natural allies and that Louis XIV and William III were natural enemies. During the Dutch War and the Nine Years War, relations between the allies William and Leopold were strained for various reasons. And although William regarded Louis XIV as his main rival after the Peace of Nijmegen (1678), at Rijswijk (1697) his relationship with Louis improved significantly. This resulted in two treaties between Louis and William partitioning the Spanish Empire after the death of Carlos II. Leopold I, who took no part in the treaty negotiations, refused to accept the second treaty, which widened the rift between him and the stadholder‐king. As William III refused to force Leopold I to accept the second treaty, Louis XIV accepted Carlos II's will, which left the Spanish inheritance to Philip of Anjou, Louis's grandson. When Louis XIV started to behave like a Spanish king and invaded the Spanish Netherlands, whose independence was the cornerstone of William's foreign policy, a rapprochement between Leopold and William took place, leading to the renewal of their former alliance and the outbreak of the War of the Spanish Succession.
In 1690 William III and the city of Amsterdam fought out one of their regularly occurring political battles. This time the fight centred around Amsterdam's refusal to send the nomination of the city sheriffs to England, where William III stayed after his ascent to the English throne. Amsterdam appealed to a privilege of Philip II which stated that the nomination should be sent to the Court of Holland in case the stadholder was not in the country. Superficially the conflict dealt with the sheriffs' nomination, but in reality Amsterdam wanted to show William III its independence. The city feared the increased power of their stadholder who had also become the king of England. Moreover the Amsterdam regents thought that the king had subordinated the interests of the Republic to those of England, when he negotiated various treaties with the English in 1689. The political struggle was accompanied by a pamphlet war in which the pro-Amsterdam pamphlets accused the king of wanting to become a sovereign in the Netherlands. The pro-Williamite forces, who were supported by Romeyn de Hooghe and Eric Walten, denied this and blamed the Amsterdammers for playing into the French king's hands by threatening to stop paying for the war against France if their privilege was not upheld. In the end, Amsterdam lost the battle because the other Holland towns did not support Amsterdam's struggle to maintain its privilege.
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