centuries to come. Nevertheless, military-technical constraints of the day prevented the States Army to achieve a strategic breakthrough in the war in the Spanish Netherlands, even when the Dutch Republic entered into an offensive alliance with France in 1635. The logistical limitations to the size of field armies that kept the optimum size around 30,000 men till Louvois invented his system of forward bases around 1665, prevented the Dutch, even in combination with the French (as they tried in the ill-fated invasion of 1635), to gain a sufficient numerical superiority over the Army of Flanders to defeat that army in the field if an invasion from the east was attempted. An invasion from the north would require the patience destruction of the line of fortifications and water obstacles that the Spaniards had constructed opposite the equivalent Dutch defensive belt. And this proved again too much for the offensive capabilities of the States Army that never was able to overcome the defenses of Antwerp, the main strategic obstacle to an invasion of the Southern Netherlands from the north. The war therefore ended in a strategic stalemate between the Dutch and the Spaniards in the 1640s, though for their part the French (faced with easier terrain) made large conquests in that period. The strain on the public finances caused by the need to support large troop levels formed a continuous motivation for the Dutch Regents to limit the resources for the army. This was a source of tension within the government of the Republic between the stadtholder and the States during the entire history of the Republic. In 1650 this tension led to a coup d'état by the then captain-general William II, one of the three times (1618, 1650 and 1787) in the history of the Republic that the States Army was used by its leader to intervene in the politics of the day. Understandably, this experience made the Regents that opposed the policies of the Orangist party very wary of an overbearing army. After William II's unexpectedly early death in the same year these Regents therefore tried to make sure that such an intervention could not recur by curtailing the army for the duration of the First Stadtholderless Period. This curtailment (and the deterioration of the quality of the army that it entailed) led to the debacle of 1672 and the rise to power of William III. After his death in