SVI. THE PEACE OF UTRECHT.

Things had changed rapidly since Gertruydenburg. Passion, a bad counsellor in politics, had made the allies lose the opportunity of dictating peace to Louis XIV. God put a limit to the misfortunes of France. There was one power which had been counted for nothing in all this affair, and which ended by deciding the question; it was Spain. A nation so proud was shocked to see debated at the Hague or at Gertruydenberg the question who should reign at Madrid. She had formerly had equal causes of complaint against all the pretenders, for they had all wounded her vanity by anticipated partitions; but good fortune had thrown into her arms the duke of Anjou, a young prince of the age of seventeen years, and who showed himself worthy of the courage she displayed to sustain him. He gained battles while his grandfather lost them, and he continued to wrestle, with obstinacy, while Louis XIV seemed to be sinking. The good condition in which his constancy and the skill of his generals had put his affairs, contributed not a little to retrieve those of his grandfather. The right was for Spain and for France. The two nations fought with an energy which the coalition no longer possessed.

In spite of extreme necessities, the prosperity of Spain had increased since its alliance with France. Here is the proof, at the same time curious and convincing. It is taken from a petition of the council of state of the United Provinces to the States General, and dated the 13th November 1711. We there read: The kingdom of Spain, since the duke of Anjou has ascended the throne, and governed it after the manner and according to the genius of the French, has begun to raise itself from the great decline in which it was fallen since the peace of Vervins, under its last three kings Spain has furnished more troops than it had done before during fifty years.

* See Actes et mémoires touchant la paix d'Utrecht, tom. i. p. 173.

Holland and England, on the contrary, in spite of their victories, had long been almost as much exhausted as France. England paid in great part the expenses of a war which had lasted ten years, and which turned in reality against the interests of England: for if the self-love of some men was satisfied with what had passed at the Hague and Gertruydenberg, the public interest of Europe was not. The Dutch people complained, the British parliament was dissatisfied; the English people murmured also, and insulted prince Eugene, who had come to engage the cabinet of Whitehall to continue the war. Marlborough, chief of the governing party,-the party of the whigs-was a weight upon queen Anne, and upon his country. In spite of his brilliant services, he was unpopular and little esteemed. English good sense did not agree with the direction which this warrior impressed on public affairs. A peace, advantageous to England, might have been made in 1709 and 1710, and in place of it a ruinous war continued, with a reverse of chances; the desperate energy to which France and Spain had been pushed was bearing its fruits. In Flanders, in 1711, the resistance of the French troops had arrested the successes of the foreign armies; a descent of the English, attempted at Cette, to support the Calvinistic insurrection of the Cevennes, had been repulsed with as much vigour as prince Eugene had been driven from before Toulon. In Spain the enemy was beaten on every point; and, on the sea, our sailors made head, with advantage, against the allies.

A great event, moreover, had passed since the rupture of the conferences of Gertruydenberg. The emperor Joseph I, son and heir of the emperor Leopold, had died on the 17th of April 1711, without children. His brother, the archduke Charles, acknowledged as king of Spain by the coalition, under the name of Charles III, had succeeded him in his hereditary states. He joined, therefore, de droit, the Spanish states to the Austrian states, which he possessed de

fait. It followed, therefore, that, after unexampled efforts, the war was on the point of ending in the result which England and Holland had always wished to avoid, the restoration of the monarchy of Charles V. The combats of ten years, the permanent polemic of the civilians of the coalition, had had for object the re-establishment of the European equilibrium; and the result of this long struggle was the destruction of the political balance, the doctrine so dear to Holland, and constantly sustained by England. Before public opinion, the policy of the allies was taken en flagrant délit; the direction of affairs was broken. This situation, in countries of free discussion like England and Holland, was not tolerable; and accordingly the Whig ministry lost the support of the majority in the chambers.

After eleven years, which had passed since the death of Charles II, the interests of each party were more clearly delineated. The interest of Austria and the animosity of the three directors of the coalition had alone remained at the same point. The English interest had been carried back to the side of France, even before the death of the emperor; and from the instant that the hope of a bifurcation in the house of Austria was lost, the political necessity of separating Spain from every other continental monarchy made Europe lean towards Philip V. England had need of peace; she beat us in Flanders, but we beat her in Spain, and our sailors troubled her commerce on the seas. This was not our gain, and it was less hers, and Marlborough did not protect the English merchants by his victories. The war had become unpopular at London; and public opinion called to power the Tory party, the party of peace. Queen Anne wished, moreover, to drive from France a pretender who caused her uneasiness. Savoy and Portugal were, like England, interested in the dismemberment of the monarchy of Charles V; a dismemberment become impossible with the house of Hapsburg.

There had then taken place, by the force of circum

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stances, and in favour of France, a moral revolution, whether resulting from the change of the fortune of the arms, or from the change in the situation of parties in England, or from the metamorphosis of the will of the parties engaged, the coalition was sensibly weakened by it, from the year 1710. It was not an intrigue of the court which overthrew the Whigs; it was their own mad passion. The hatred of Marlborough served Austria, but not England and Europe; for it raised the gigantic colossus of a power, which, to the hereditary states of Austria, already_preponderant in Germany, would have joined Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and the Spanish Indies; that is, the greatest continental force of Europe to the greatest colonial riches of the world.

The coalition had at first been welcome at London, because it presented itself under the flag of political and commercial liberty. It ceased to be so when, forcing its principles, it exceeded the limits of moderation and appeared to pursue the indefinite humiliation of a powerful monarch, whose reign had honoured his age and the human mind, rather than the just and legitimate satisfaction of the interests of Europe, threatened for a moment by the policy of Louis XIV. With Eugene and Marlborough there was a retrogression towards Charles V and Philip II. A government and a king were to be forcibly imposed upon Spain, against her will. This was odious and senseless. A loyal and wise A loyal and wise peace with France guaranteed, on the contrary, the independence of the states, the civilization of the peoples, and the equilibrium of the powers. Such was the tendency of minds and position of things, and such was the true cause of the overthrow of the Whigs.

A Tory ministry then succeeded to the Whig ministry. The natural consequence was, that Marlborough, the chief of the Whig party, lost his credit and the coalition its principal agent. Propositions of peace were made, and the overtures came from England itself, which returned from this moment to the path that had been quitted since the treaty of Lisbon in

1703. Louis XIV and his prudent minister, M. de Torcy, took advantage of it with rare ability, to follow up separate negociations with each of the powers of the coalition, and the so striking example of the recent fault of the allies served as a lesson for France, in this return to good fortune.

It was easy for the two cabinets of London and Paris to come to an understanding, for the French interest had become again the English interest. Queen Anne was as desirous of peace as Louis XIV, and Lord Bolingbroke came to Paris to treat with France, which had entirely recovered its position. The coalition dreamt before of annihilating the house of Bourbon; and now the interests of the house of Bourbon were placed in the first rank. One single point preoccupied England, and in that she was in her right, I mean the danger of the junction of the two crowns of Spain and France upon one head; on this point, the cabinet of Versailles lent itself, with a remarkable good faith, to give to Europe the guarantees which she might legitimately require in the interest of the general safety.

The two principal bases of the negociation were the recognition of the interest which France had in the strict friendship with Spain, a friendship cemented by the union of the two reigning houses, and the prohibition of the joining together of the two crowns. There was as perfect an accord on the first head as on the second. The Austrian interest was replaced by that of the house of France, for with it the dismemberment of the Spanish monarchy was possible; the equilibrium was restored in the distribution of states and powers; the interest of the maritime powers was satisfied. The desire of peace was substituted for the passions of the Hague and Gertruydenberg; the change was so complete, that there was no longer any question of the propositions of 1709 and 1710; they were dead letter and forgotten. The peace, in fact, was regulated on bases diametrically opposite. On the former occasion the allies pursued the greatest abasement, the greatest spoliation of the house of France; they designed to render impossible all intimate alliance be