While England was working her way through these crises of party-strife and of the money-market to a thorough readiness for war, she had suffered a heavy loss in one of her allies, as we have already said. The French King had the good fortune to detach from the Alliance one of its most important members. While Victor Amadeus had been taking part in the renewed alliance of the summer of 1695, he had already become secretly faithless to it: during a pilgrimage to Loretto the next spring (in fulfilment of a vow made at Embrun in his illness) the foundations of his alliance with France were laid through mediation of the Pope: it was definitely carried into effect at Turin in August 1696.

The confusion and difficulties through which England was passing had contributed to the result, in so far as they had caused the withdrawal of the Mediterranean fleet; the feeling common to the Catholic world–the sense of oppression under the predominance of Protestantism–may have also been a motive. But the main cause certainly was the determination of Louis XIV to grant the Duke those concessions which he demanded, and to free him from the restraint of the occupation of Pinerolo and Casale, a pair of handcuffs which the Duke found almost unendurable. In 1695, in order to avoid being overwhelmed in his lines in the Low Countries, the King put Casale into Victor's hands, after a pretended siege, in which they did not hesitate to shed blood, rather than let the Allies suspect any preconcerted arrangement.