Under these, Charles would provide military backing for a French invasion of the Dutch Republic, and committed to convert to Catholicism at some future date.

[1] Despite growing tensions over French ambitions in the Spanish Netherlands, Louis XIV of France decided an agreement with the Dutch Republic might allow him to achieve these without war.

To oppose French expansion in the region, a Triple Alliance was formed between the Dutch Republic, England and Sweden during 1668, which immediately pressured Louis into signing a peace treaty with Spain.

[8] Louis was married to Maria Theresa, the eldest daughter of Philip IV of Spain (died 1665); Maria Theresa had renounced her inheritance rights, but Louis consistently manoeuvred to acquire Spanish territory adjacent to France and to promote his wife's potential claim to the Spanish throne.

During the same period, Charles attempted to preserve the Triple Alliance by settling outstanding overseas trade issues with the Dutch, with little success.

Through his ambassador Lord St Albans, Charles attempted simultaneously to restart negotiations for a French alliance, but Louis repeated the condition that England must join him in attacking the Netherlands.

Charles remained unenthusiastic, but his failure to gain the security he sought by other diplomatic means forced him to accept this precondition, subject to substantial French financial assistance.

Provided that the conquest was successfully completed, England was promised several very profitable ports along one of the major rivers that run through the Dutch Republic.

[14]By Article 7 of the treaty, Charles was able to secure only a vague promise that the rights and interests of his nephew, William, Prince of Orange, would be respected.

[15] The secret treaty did not become public until 1771 when the historian Sir John Dalrymple published its contents in his Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland.

[16] Had it been published in Charles II's lifetime, the results might have been drastic; considering the enormous effect of Titus Oates's highly unreliable assertions of a Popish Plot, an even greater backlash might have followed had the English public learned that the King actually obliged himself to turn Catholic and that he was willing to rely on French troops to impose that conversion on his own subjects.

The year 1672 is known to the Dutch as the Rampjaar or 'Year of disaster': the Orangists blamed de Witt whom they forced to resign, and they later brutally killed him and his brother Cornelis.

Charles was short of money, as the costs of deploying the English fleet were much greater than expected despite French subsidies, and he faced increasing domestic opposition to the war.

Charles was forced to comply with Parliament's demands, thereby ending the chance offered by the treaty of reconciling England with the Roman Catholic Church.

At the time of the treaty, the Spanish monarch was only nine years old, but his infirmity was already evident and well-known, casting doubt on his ever being able to beget children.

[33] When, shortly after the conclusion of the Nine Years' War, the death of Charles II of Spain seemed imminent, the exhausted participants agreed by the First Partition Treaty of 1698, brokered by William III, that Joseph Ferdinand of Bavaria would succeed to the Spanish throne, and that France and Austria would divide Spain's European possessions outside the Iberian Peninsula.