and next, to forbid Colbert de Croissy's allowing any express ratification of the Pyrenean treaty to be inserted in the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, in 1668.

These claims, however, were not put forward in their entirety till the death of Charles II. in 1700. It was on the death of Philip IV., the father of that prince, in 1665, that Louis asserted what are known as the Rights of the Devolution. These are chiefly founded, of course, on the general invalidity of the renunciation; but they rest also on other grounds; and constitute, we do not hesitate to say, the most shameless and flagrant assumption of right to be found in the whole. history of European usurpations.

It seems that by a local custom of inheritance that prevailed among the people of Brabant, the daughters of a first marriage excluded the issue male of a second. This rule Louis XIV. proposed to apply to the descent, not of private property, but of empire and royal authority. In right of his wife, Maria Theresa, the only child of her father's first wife, he accordingly laid claim, on the death of Philip IV., to certain portions of the Spanish Netherlands. It would have been a case precisely parallel if, on the death of King George III., his sons had proposed to partition Kent into little principalities on the plea that by the custom of gavel-kind the private property of intestates in that locality was divided among their children We should remark, however, that Louis XIV. was at that moment reigning over Brittany in virtue of the Salic law, though that province had come through females to the House of Valois; and that there the laws, not of private descent, but of sovereign succession, had of course been altered, and exercised in conformity with the general law of France. It is to be observed, also, that the ambitious prince, who here asserted the immutability of laws regulating succession, himself supported his grandson in introducing the Salic law into Spain, and personally confirmed the arbitrary limitations of the treaty of Utrecht. Nor was it ever pretended that the Flemish provinces themselves should again descend among the children of Louis XIV. on any such principle as that now promulgated by him; or that the Salic law, in all its strictness, was not to replace the momentary revival of this obso

lete custom.

Extravagant as these pretensions of Louis XIV. must now appear, we shall have but an inadequate conception of the advantages which tempted him to their assertion, without

a glance at the contrast of his position with that of the rest of Europe at the time. An interval of repose had followed the troubles of the Fronde. It gave him leisure for recruiting his army, for organizing his finances, for surrounding himself with such ministers as Colbert and Lionne. Above all, by a steady, conscientious application to the routine of business and ordinary official life, he had taken care to ensure his own complete independence of his nominal subordinates, and to show himself (if we may borrow a phrase of Mr. D'Israeli's) equally great as a minister and a king.

Before him, on the other hand, Europe lay crushed and bleeding, from the long struggle of the Thirty Years' War. Nowhere but in France was there unity of council or energy of action. The cabals which followed the Restoration in England, and the wrongheaded opposition which the Orange party in Holland had kept up against De Witt's government, imposed on both those states the necessity of an humble and unambitious diplomacy. Sweden was bound to France by the recollections of the late war, and by gratitude for the care with which Mazarin had protected her at Osnaburgh. Spain had exhausted the produce of her American mines by the lavish profusion of her military establishments in the Peninsula, in the Netherlands, in Italy, and in Franche Comté. Her population, too, had suffered an alarming diminution by the expulsion of the Moors, and the equally pernicious stream of emigration that flowed to Mexico and Peru.

Neither Spain nor Germany were likely to disturb the prospects of French supremacy in Europe. But Lionne, a minister whom nothing but his master's prominent individuality prevented from occupying a station in French history as imposing as that of Richelieu and Mazarin, saw at once that the main impediment to his dynastic policy would lie in the possible union of Spain or Austria with those Protestant powers, whose governments might now and then acquiesce in French aggrandizement, but whose people had no feeling but that of rooted antipathy for French priests, French diplomatists, French courtiers, and French mistresses. There were, also, English and Dutch statesmen to discern that the only security for European peace and law lay in rallying the Protestant party against France; and in urging upon Catholics and Protestants alike, the abandonment of the commercial and religious jealousies which the Restoration had inherited from Cromwell's government.

There was much vacillation in the conduct, and many difficulties in the path, of these statesmen; but they succeeded at last in indoctrinating the English people with this principle. It alone prevented the reduction of this country to the rank of a second-rate power; and we firmly believe that we owe to William and Temple, not only the security that enabled Walpole to consolidate our constitutional throne, and the traditions which, after descending from Chatham to Charles Fox, were embraced by the younger Pitt in his wisest and calmest years, but also no small portion of the strength which carried us through the exhausting conflict with Napoleon.

The first attempt made by Louis XIV. to put in force his claims is well known to students of the Négociations d'Estrades; but we believe that before M. Mignet, no one had given a separate and authentic narrative of its progress. The Dutch Republic, to which Count d'Estrades was accredited, was recovering its strength under the pacific administration of the Grand Pensionary, De Witt; and proposals were soon on foot for advancing the northeastern frontier of France, as one among the conditions of a close alliance between the two countries. It had long been a favorite scheme with Dutch statesmen to strengthen themselves by a partition of the Belgian provinces with some powerful neighbor. In 1632, Charles I. of England had received similar offers from certain Belgian malcontents. It had been contemplated by Richelieu in the Gallo-Dutch alliance of 1635; and Mazarin had directed his plenipotentiaries at Munster to treat with Spain for a modification of the same plan, on condition of his withdrawing the French troops from Rousillon and Catalonia. Many circumstances contributed at this time to drive Holland into the French alliance. The quarrel with Spain was still too recent to admit of cordial co-operation against any but a very obvious danger. The adherents of the House of Orange, who formed the permanent opposition to De Witt, were habitually disposed to lean on England; and our envoy, Sir George Downing, though undoubtedly a man of singular ability, had the bad judgment to enter into cabals against a government which he supposed accessible to French sympathies; till he ended by adding the certainty of private, to the possibility of public animosity. Louis eagerly seized the opportunity to offer his dangerous protection; and heartily entering into De Witt's views, proposed an active concert, to take place on

The

the death of Philip IV. D'Estrades was commissioned cautiously to insinuate, and gradually to develope, the Devolution claims; but, fortunately for his country and his fame, De Witt began to take alarm, and to retreat from so embarrassing an intimacy. project, which at one time had seemed on the point of conclusion, was forthwith dropped; and, though the understanding between France and Holland remained unimpaired, Louis was compelled to postpone the prosecution. of his claim, till the crisis which the death of Philip IV. would inevitably bring about.

It did not arrive till four years after. The inglorious reign of Philip IV. ended in 1665; but the King of France was at that time engaged in the first Dutch war against England, and he did not choose, before peace was concluded, to alarm his allies in Holland with an application for their assistance. Philip's whole life had been a succession of defeat, insult, deception, and mortification. While France was growing in unity, in wealth, and in diplomatic influence, the vast fabric of the Spanish empire was silently sinking, under the joint influence of foreign aggression and internal disease. Round every branch of the public service, round almost every public man, there was perseveringly woven the insidious web of French intrigue. The diplomacy, even of Absolutist France, may be searched in vain for any parallel to the elaborate treachery which was now employed to precipitate the disruption of the monarchy. Cabals were industriously fomented in the Belgian towns; sham negotiations were set on foot; and offers of French protection were shamelessly paraded, with the view of nipping every project that held out a chance of restoring peace to the Peninsula. The seed could not have been sown on a more favorable soil. Even in 1668, when the war of the Devolution was at its height, the Spanish dowagers at Brussels never ceased to marvel how a King who had married an Infanta could behave so harshly to them; and the consciousness of the grandees that only two precarious and unhealthy lives stood in the way of Louis XIV., made them unwilling to scrutinize too jealously the proceedings of an ambassador who might soon be the representative of their own sovereign.

The peace of Breda (1667) brought with it the coveted opportunity; and French. troops instantly moved into Flanders in support of the claims which, according to the Devolutionary theory, the death of Philip IV. had opened to Louis in these provinces.

At once the Spanish court awoke from its sleep, to learn that at Lisbon, too, French diplomacy had achieved its usual triumph; that the patience which had labored for such a consummation, through seven tedious years, was only equalled by the masterly decision which now hurried these intrigues to their close; that the Abbé St. Romain had succeeded in negotiating an offensive and defensive alliance between Portugal and Louis XIV. the Prince who had sworn at the peace of the Pyrenees to give no assistance, direct or indirect, to Portugal, and whose energies were now to be devoted to the task of keeping Austria, by threats and bribes, to a distorted and exaggerated observance of similar clauses in the treaty of Munster.

The shock of the French arms vibrated through Europe. Bavaria and Brandenburgh, even Poland and Sweden, were alarmed, and the diplomacy which had in some sort prepared the various courts for the present movement was again exerted to prevent their uniting to oppose it. We wish that it were in our power to follow M. Mignet through the steps by which M. Gravel, at Ratisbon, won over the Diet to refuse its guaranty to the Spanish fiefs of the Empire; while M. de Gremonville, at once the ablest and most unscrupulous negotiator of his day, succeeded in alternately bribing and bullying the government of Vienna, first into a toleration of the French policy, and next into an eventual treaty for the partition of the Spanish dominions. But the surpassing interest which attaches to the concluding stages of this drama forbids our pausing. On England and Holland, as Lionne had long ago foreseen, the present deliverance of Spain was to depend.

M. de Ruvigny had been dispatched to secure the co-operation of Charles II. by the bait of the Spanish West Indies. But Clarendon, on whose personal influence and friendship the French envoy had relied, was falling from power, before a furious attack, in which the republican opposition and the most infamous dependents of the Stuart family had combined. The French alliance had always been favored by the old Cavalier party; and it was about to suffer from the unpopularity of their chief. Several of the new ministers had also been drawn off from France by the relations which they kept up with the anti-monarchical sections of parliament. Buckingham had coqueted with the Presbyterians; Arlington had married Mademoiselle Bevarwaert, a Dutch lady, and had once served as ambassador in Spain.

By a fortunate chance, this important crisis found in Sir William Temple a man who had already read and thought much on the importance of strengthening Holland and Belgium, as a bulwark for central Europe. Everything, indeed, seems to have rested on his personal activity and resolution. For, the weak and extravagant Charles II. was to all appearance on the point of yielding to the subjection in which he was held by the lofty capacity of Louis. But Temple allowed no time for tergiversation. De Witt, on the other hand, was as eager to break through the meshes in which D'Estrades had involved him. The triple alliance was completed by the accession of Sweden to the two other Protestant powers; and Louis was forced to remain satisfied with a comparatively trifling advance of his north-eastern frontier, leaving to Spain Franche Comté and what remained of Belgium.

The Spanish Succession was not again seriously agitated for more than thirty years. The interval had swept away nearly an entire generation. Except William III. and Louis XIV., scarcely one among the soldiers and statesmen of the seventeenth century survived to carry this question to its close in the eighteenth. D'Estrades was gone ; and Lionne and Turenne. De Witt had perished by the madness of a ferocious mob; and Temple, far from diplomatic strife, was dragging out his last years in sickness and domestic sorrow.

Nor had time made less havoc of national interests than among public men.

In 1672 the storm of French arms broke over Holland; and, by 1689, the aggressions of the Chambres de Réunion had roused all Europe to resist the aggrandizement of France by conquest in time of peace. Providentially, the English revolution was already consummated; and this time our weight was thrown firmly into the Protestant scale.

M. Grimblot's book, of which we shall now avail ourselves, opens with the peace of Ryswick, in 1697. It has been said (but the reverse is proved by this publication) that even during the conferences that preceded it, Marshal Boufflers and Lord Portland had discussed the possibility of peacefully settling the rival claims to Spain. The proposals afterwards made were, as is well known, frustrated for a time by the death of the Electoral Prince of Bavaria, for whom the bulk of the succession was designed; but they finally terminated in the arrangement known as the Second Partition Treaty; by which it was provided, that on the death of Charles II. without

The Spanish ambassador himself was far from discouraging the latter project; and had the inconceivable impudence to entertain the drawing-rooms of Vienna with contemptuous parallels between the august legitimacy of the continental monarchies, and the mushroom, mercantile establishments at London and the Hague. M. Hope, the Dutch resident, was alarmed at this growing intimacy; but as far as the French legation at Vienna was concerned, the Maritime Powers had no cause to complain. Louis had taken just measure of the Austrian court. He had plumbed and fathomed all the depths of its sloth, its pride, its meanness, and incapacity. He knew that the Emperor was less adroit than himself, and quite as faithless; and so, with an entire disregard of the offers made to Villars, he persisted in cultivating his own interests at Madrid and

London.

We need not be detained by the famous catastrophe which Louis had prepared for the discomfiture of all these schemes; the triumph of Harcourt at Madrid; the memorable Council with which St. Simon has made us so familiar, where Madame de Maintenon overthrew the scruples which still lingered in the mind of Louis, by exclaiming, in the true spirit of dynastic absolutism," What has the Duc d'Anjou done, sire, that you should deprive him of his inheritance?" nor by the stately ceremonial which attended the young monarch at Versailles; nor by the pageant which escorted him to the Bidassoa. But we shall not understand the conduct of England at this crisis unless we turn aside for a moment to our own domestic politics. Although the English revolution had been carried by a union of many parties, the character of that movement had been too essentially Whig-it had reflected too faithfully the authors of the Exclusion Bill and the victims of a long unsuccessful opposition, not to throw the government, for a time, and with a few personal exceptions, into the hands of the Whig party. They had governed generally well, and always honestly; above all, they had governed in the spirit of the institutions they were called on to administer, and had shown no backsliding on the great question which united the Liberal England of that day. They had supported the Dissenting interest at home; and manfully resisted the head of the Catholic system on the Continent. The remnant of the Tories, purged of avowed Jacobites, held, meanwhile, their principles of high monarchy necessarily in abeyance. They were restrict

ed to the task of criticising and discrediting a government upon which there rested the most arduous of all responsibilities, that of guiding a nation through a revolution. And they labored zealously in their vocation. It was easy to make the land tax an abomination to the future October Club; all of them, as sings Barry Cornwall

"Right, jolly squires, with brains made clear By the irresistible strength of beer." It was easy to declaim against a war expenditure in time of peace; to contrast the advocacy by the Whigs of a standing army with the opposition of their grandfathers to Charles I. The unpopularity thus fermented, steadily increased till William actually prepared to abdicate his ungrateful charge. When he gave up this idea, he attempted to rid himself of the unpopularity of his ministers; and to bind the Tories over to the constitution, by bringing them into office. few months later the nation began to sigh for the administration they had lost-and their sovereign, accordingly, to retrace his steps. Godolphin, the new Tory lord treasurer, was replaced by the Earl of Carlisle. But in little more than two months after this change, King William was laid in Henry VII.'s Chapel; and Godolphin resumed his office on the accession of Queen Anne.

A

The Tories had habitually been disposed to acquiesce in the projects of the court which was sheltering the banished Stuarts with the superb hospitality of St. Germain. But it is a signal proof of the respect paid to any policy which is recognized as embodying the deliberate convictions of the English nation; we will add, too, that it illustrates the habitual fairness and moderation of English statesmen-that, except in the case of Bolingbroke, in 1711, and of Mr. Pitt, in 1791, Tory governments have been generally more anxious to curb their supporters, than to attack their opponents. They have been either not bold enough, or not wicked enough, to answer the demands made on them for energy and strong action. The responsibilities of opposition have often sat too lightly on them; but in office, they have, on the whole, been true to their country, rather than to their consistency. Godolphin's administration was obedient to this tendency. Lord Rochester, it is true, at the head of the ultra-Tories, showed himself eager, if he could not prevent a war, at least to cripple its prosecution, by coupling it with an affront to the foreign refugees in the English service. But Godolphin's per