GUELDERLAND WAR, THE, 1672 to 1678, the general war provoked by Louis the Fourteenth's invasion of the United Provinces across the Guelderland frontier, and the first occasion on which the Commonwealth took the field beside a power it had fought, within living memory, as an outright naval rival. The French armies crossed the Rhine in June of 1672 in a strength the Dutch land forces alone could not have met, and the republic's own inundation of its own polder country — the famous Water Line opened at the eleventh hour to drown the invasion's path to Amsterdam — bought the time the Commonwealth's own Senate required to debate, and at length to resolve, that a French mastery of the Dutch coast threatened the Commonwealth's own shipping interest a good deal more directly than the Dutch republic's trading rivalry ever had.
Sir Miles Rutherford, elected Strategus in 1672 for the duration of the conflict, commanded the Commonwealth's contribution chiefly at sea and in the Flanders campaigning of the war's middle years, a theatre this contributor's own study of the terrain finds considerably less decisive, in any single engagement, than the political fact the campaigning sustained: a Commonwealth squadron operating from the Dutch coast for six years running gave Louis's own admirals an enemy to divide their attention against that the Dutch alone, however stubborn, could not have supplied. The land campaigns in Flanders and along the Meuse produced no single action this contributor's colleagues rank with Barham Down or the Sambre, the war being decided, in the end, less by any battle than by the plain arithmetic of an alliance that could outlast a single aggressor's patience.
The Treaty of the Hague that closed the war in 1678 confirmed the Dutch republic's territorial integrity very nearly intact and established, in the same negotiation, the standing understanding examined at length under HAGUE, TREATY OF THE (1678) and ALLIANCE OF THE REPUBLICS, THE. Rutherford resigned the Strategate at the peace, in the ordinary course the Frame's own renewal clause requires, and the office lay vacant for the better part of eighty years until the Great Atlantic War (q.v.) called it back into being; the Guelderland War is remembered, on the whole, less for its own battles than for the alliance it began, which has outlasted every government that negotiated it by a margin no one at the Hague in 1678 had any particular reason to expect. (G. M. T.)