central Europe to make any other history than that of struggle
and battle, invasion and devastation, intrigue and faithless
diplomacy, shifting of political landmarks and traffic in
border populations, as though they were pastured cattle, for
fifty years, in the last part of the seventeenth century and
the first part of the eighteenth (1665-1715). It will be
remembered that when this King of France married the Infanta
of Spain, he joined in a solemn renunciation of all rights on
her part and on that of her children to such dominions as she
might otherwise inherit. But such a renunciation, with no
sentiment of honor behind it, was worthless, of course, and
Louis XIV., in his own esteem, stood on a height quite above
the moral considerations that have force with common men. When
Philip IV. of Spain died, in 1665, Louis promptly began to put
forward the claims which he had pledged himself not to make.
He demanded part of the Netherlands, and Franche Comté--the
old county (not the duchy) of Burgundy--as belonging to his
queen. It was his good fortune to be served by some of the
greatest generals, military engineers and administrators of
the day--by Turenne, Condé, Vauban, Louvois, and others--and
when he sent his armies of invasion into Flanders and Franche
Comté they carried all before them. Holland took alarm at
these aggressions which came so near to her, and formed an
alliance with England and Sweden to assist Spain. But the
unprincipled English king, Charles II., was easily bribed to
betray his ally; Sweden was bought over; Spain submitted to a
treaty which gave the Burgundian county back to her, and
surrendered an important part of the Spanish Netherlands to
France. Louis' first exploit of national brigandage had thus
been a glorious success, as glory is defined in the vocabulary
of sovereigns of his class. He had stolen several valuable
towns, killed some thousands of people, carried misery into
the lives of some thousands more, and provoked the Dutch to a
challenge of war that seemed promising of more glory of like
kind.
In 1672 he prepared himself to chastise the Dutch, and his
English pensioner, Charles II., with several German princes,
joined him in the war. It was this war, as related already,
which brought about the fall and the death of John de Witt,
Grand Pensionary of Holland; which raised William of Orange to
the restored stadtholdership, and which gave him a certain
leadership of influence in Europe, as against the French king.
It was this war, likewise, which gave the Hohenzollerns their
first great battle-triumph, in the defeat of the Swedes,
allies of the French, at Fehrbellin. For Frederick William,
the Great Elector, had joined the Emperor Leopold and the King
of Spain in another league with Holland to resist the
aggressions of France; while Sweden now took sides with Louis.
England was soon withdrawn from the contest, by the determined
action of Parliament, which forced its king to make peace.
Otherwise the war became general in western Europe and was
frightful in the death and misery it cost. Generally the
French had the most success. Turenne was killed in 1675 and
Condé retired the same year; but able commanders were found in
Luxemburg and Crequi to succeed them. In opposition to William
of Orange, the Dutch made peace at Nimegueu, in 1678, and
Spain was forced to give up Franche Comté, with another
fraction of her Netherland territories; but Holland lost
nothing. Again Louis XIV. had beaten and robbed his neighbors
with success, and was at the pinnacle of his glory. France, it
is true, was oppressed and exhausted, but her king was a
"grand monarch," and she must needs be content.
{1082}
For a few years the grand monarch contented himself with small
filchings of territory, which kept his conscience supple and
gave practice to his sleight-of-hand. On one pretext and
another he seized town after town in Alsace, and, at last,
1681, surprised and captured the imperial free city of
Strasburg, in a time of entire peace. He bombarded Genoa, took
Avignon from the Pope, bullied and abused feeble Spain, made
large claims on the Palatinate in the name of his
sister-in-law, but against her will, and did nearly what he
was pleased to do, without any effective resistance, until
after William of Orange had been called to the English throne.
That completed a great change in the European situation.
Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
The change had already been more than half brought about by a
foul and foolish measure which Louis had adopted in his
domestic administration. Cursed by a tyrant's impatience at
the idea of free thought and free opinion among his subjects,
he had been persuaded by Catholic zealots near his person to
revoke the Edict of Nantes and revive persecution of the
Huguenots. This was done in 1685. The fatal effects within
France resembled those which followed the persecution of the
Moriscoes of Spain. The Huguenots formed a large proportion of
the best middle class of the kingdom,--its manufacturers, its
merchants, its skilled and thrifty artisans. Infamous efforts
were made to detain them in the country and there force them
to apostacy or hold them under punishment if they withstood.
But there was not power enough in the monarchy, with all its
absolutism, to enclose France in such a wall. Vast numbers
escaped--half a million it is thought--carrying their skill,
their knowledge, their industry and their energy into Holland,
England, Switzerland, all parts of Protestant Germany, and
across the ocean to America. France was half ruined by the
loss.
The League of Augsburg.
At the same time, the Protestant allies in Germany and the
North, whom Louis had held in subserviency to himself so long,
were angered and alarmed by his act. They joined a new
defensive league against him, formed at Augsburg, in 1686,
which embraced the Emperor, Spain, Holland, and Sweden, at
first, and afterwards took in Savoy and other Italian states,
along with Germany almost entire. But the League was miserably
unprepared for war, and hardly hindered the march of Louis'
armies when he suddenly moved them into the Rhenish
electorates in 1688. For the second time in his reign, and
under his orders, the Palatinate was fearfully devastated with
fire and sword. But this attack on Germany, occupying the arms
of France, gave William of Orange his opportunity to enter
England unopposed and take the English crown. That
accomplished, he speedily brought England into the League,
enlarging it to a "grand alliance" of all western Europe
against the dangerous monarch of France, and inspiring it with
some measure of his own energy and courage. France had now to
deal with enemies on every side. They swarmed on all her
frontiers, and the strength and valor with which she met them
were amazing. For three years the French more than held their
own, not only in land-fighting, but on the sea, where they
seemed likely, for a time, to dispute the supremacy of the
English and the Dutch with success. But the frightful draft
made on the resources of the nation, and the strain on its
spirit, were more than could be kept up. The obstinacy of the
king, and his indifference to the sufferings of his people,
prolonged the war until 1697, but with steady loss to the
French of the advantages with which they began. Two years
before the end, Louis had bought over the Duke of Savoy, by
giving back to him all that France had taken from his Italian
territories since Richelieu's time. When the final peace was
settled, at Ryswick, like surrenders had to be made in the
Netherlands, Lorraine, and beyond the Rhine; but Alsace, with
Strasburg, was kept, to be a German graft on France, until the
sharp Prussian pruning knife, in our own time, cut it away.
War of the Spanish Succession.
There were three years of peace after the treaty of Ryswick,
an then a new war--longer, more bitter, and more destructive
than those before it--arose out of questions connected with
the succession to the crown of Spain. Charles II., last of the
Austro-Spanish or Spanish-Hapsburg kings, died in 1700,
leaving no heir. The nearest of his relatives to the throne
were the descendants of his two sisters, one of whom had
married Louis XIV. and the other the Emperor Leopold, of the
Austrian House. Louis XIV., as we know, had renounced all the
Spanish rights of his queen and her issue; but that
renunciation had been shown already to be wasted paper.
Leopold had renounced nothing; but he had required a
renunciation of her Spanish claims from the one daughter,
Maria, of his Spanish wife, and he put forward claims to the
Spanish succession, on his own behalf, because his mother had
been a princess of that nation, as well as his wife. He was
willing, however, to transfer his own rights to a younger son,
fruit of a second marriage, the Archduke Charles.
The question of the Spanish succession was one of European
interest and importance, and attempts had been made to settle
it two years before the death of the Spanish king, in 1698, by
a treaty, or agreement, between France, England, and Holland.
By that treaty these outside powers (consulting Spain not at
all) undertook a partition of the Spanish monarchy, in what
they assumed to be the interest of the European balance of
power. They awarded Naples, Sicily, and some lesser Italian
possessions to a grandson of Louis XIV., the Milanese
territory to the Archduke Charles, and the rest of the Spanish
dominions to an infant son of Maria, the Emperor's daughter,
who was married to the elector of Bavaria. But the infant so
selected to wear the crown of Spain died soon afterwards, and
a second treaty of partition was framed. This gave the
Milanese to the Duke of Lorraine, in exchange for his own
duchy, which he promised to cede to France, and the whole
remainder of the Spanish inheritance was conceded to the
Austrian archduke, Charles. In Spain, these arrangements were
naturally resented, by both people and king, and the latter
was persuaded to set against them a will, bequeathing all that
he ruled to the younger grandson of Louis XIV., Philip of
Anjou, on condition that the latter renounce for himself and
for his heirs all claims to the crown of France. The
inducement to this bequest was the power which the King of
France possessed to enforce it, and so to preserve the unity
of the Spanish realm. That the argument and the persuasion
came from Louis' own agents, while other agents amused
England, Holland and Austria with treaties of partition, is
tolerably clear.
{1083}
Near the end of the year 1700, the King of Spain died; his
will was disclosed; the treaties were as coolly ignored as the
prior renunciation had been, and the young French prince was
sent pompously into Spain to accept the proffered crown. For a
time, there was indignation in Europe, but no more. William of
Orange could persuade neither England nor Holland to war, and
Austria could not venture hostilities without their help. But
that submissiveness only drew from the grand monarch fresh
displays of his dishonesty and his insolence. Philip of
Anjou's renunciation of a possible succession to the French
throne, while occupying that of Spain, was practically
annulled: The government of Spain was guided from Paris like
that of a dependency of France. Dutch and English commerce was
injured by hostile measures. Movements alarming to Holland
were made on the frontiers of the Spanish Netherlands.
Finally, when the fugitive ex-king of England, James II., died
at St. Germains, in September, 1701, Louis acknowledged James'
son, the Pretender, as King of England. This insult roused the
war spirit in England which King William had striven so hard
to evoke. He had already arranged the terms of a new defensive
Grand Alliance with Holland, Austria, and most of the German
states. There was no difficulty now in making it an offensive
combination.
But William, always weak in health, and worn by many cares and
harassing troubles, died in March, 1702, before the war which
he desired broke out. His death made no pause in the movement
of events. Able statesmen, under Queen Anne, his successor,
carried forward his policy and a great soldier was found, in
the person of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, to command
the armies of England and the Dutch. Another commander, of
remarkable genius, Prince Eugene of Savoy, took service with
the Emperor, and these two, acting cordially together, humbled
the overweening pride of Louis XIV. in the later years of his
reign. He had worn out France by his long exactions. His
strong ministers, Colbert, Louvois and others, were dead, and
he did not find successors for them. He had able generals, but
none equal to Turenne, Condé or Luxemburg,--none to cope with
Marlborough and Prince Eugene. The war was widespread, on a
stupendous scale, and it lasted for twelve years. Its
campaigns were fought in the Low Countries, in Germany, in
Italy and in Spain. It glorified the reign of Anne, in English
history, by the shining victories of Blenheim, Ramilies,
Oudenarde and Malplaquet, and by the capture of Gibraltar, the
padlock of the Mediterranean. The misery to which France was
reduced in the later years of the war was probably the
greatest that the much suffering nation ever knew.
The Peace of Utrecht.
Louis sought peace, and was willing to go far in surrenders to
obtain it. But the allies pressed him too hard in their
demands. They would have him not only abandon the Bourbon
dynasty that he had set up in Spain, but join them in
overthrowing it. He refused to negotiate on such terms, and
Fortune approved his resolution, by giving decisive victories
to his arms in Spain, while dealing, out disaster and defeat
in every other field. England grew weary of the war when it
came to appear endless, and Marlborough and the Whigs, who had
carried it on, were ousted from power. The Tories, under
Harley and Bolingbroke, came into office and negotiated the
famous Peace of Utrecht (1713), to which all the belligerents
in the war, save the Emperor, consented. The Emperor yielded
to a supplementary treaty, signed at Rastadt the next year.
These treaties left the Bourbon King of Spain, Philip V., on
his throne, but bound him, by fresh renunciations, not to be
likewise King of France. They gave to England Gibraltar and
Minorca, at the expense of Spain, and Nova Scotia,
Newfoundland and Hudson's Bay at the expense of France. They
took much more from Spain. They took Sicily, which they gave
to the Duke of Savoy, with the title of King; they took
Naples, Milan, Mantua and Sardinia, which they gave to
Austria, or, more strictly speaking, to the Emperor; and they
took the Spanish Netherlands, which they gave to Austria in
the main, with some barrier towns to the Dutch. They took from
France her conquests on the right bank of the Rhine; but they
left her in possession of Alsace, with Strasburg and Landau.
The great victim of the war was Spain.
France at the death of Louis XIV.
Louis XIV. was near the end of his reign when this last of the
fearful wars which he caused was brought to a close. He died
in September, 1715, leaving a kingdom which had reasons to
curse his memory in every particular of its state. He had
foiled the exertions of as wise a minister, Jean Colbert, as
ever strove to do good to France. He had dried the sources of
national life as with a searching and monstrous sponge. He had
repressed everything which he could not absorb in his
flaunting court, in his destroying armies, and in himself. He
had dealt with France as with a dumb beast that had been given
him to bestride; to display himself upon, before the gaze of an
envious world; to be bridled, and spurred at his pleasure, and
whipped; to toil for him and bear burdens as he willed; to
tread upon his enemies and trample his neighbors' fields. It
was he, more than all others before or after, who made France
that dumb creature which suffered and was still for a little
longer time, and then began thinking and went mad.
{1084}
Charles XII. of Sweden.
While the Powers of western Europe were wrestling in the great
war of the Spanish Succession, the nations of the North and
East were tearing each other, at the same time, with equal
stubbornness and ferocity. The beginning of their conflict was
a wanton attack from Russia, Poland and Denmark, on the
possessions of Sweden. Sweden, in the past century, had made
extensive, conquests, and her territories, outside of the
Scandinavian peninsula, were thrust provokingly into the sides
of all these three neighbors. There had been three Charleses
on the Swedish throne in succession, following Christina, the
daughter of Gustavus Adolphus. Queen Christina, an eccentric
character, had abdicated in 1654, in order to join the
Catholic Church, and had been succeeded by her cousin, Charles
X. The six years reign of this Charles was one of constant war
with the Danes and the Poles, and almost uniformly he was the
aggressor. His son and successor, Charles XI., suffered the
great defeat at Fehrbellin which gave prestige to Brandenburg;
but he was shielded by the puissant arm of Louis XIV., his
ally, and lost no territory. More successful in his domestic
policy than in his wars, he, both practically and formally,
established absolutism in the monarchy. Inheriting from his
father that absolute power, while inheriting at the same time
the ruthless ambition of his grandfather, Charles XII. came to
the throne in 1697.
In the first two years of his reign, this extraordinary young
autocrat showed so little of his character that his royal
neighbors thought him a weakling, and Peter the Great, of
Russia, conspired with Augustus of Poland and Frederick IV. of
Denmark to strip him of those parts of his dominion which they
severally coveted. The result was like the rousing of a lion
by hunters who went forth to pursue a hare. The young Swede,
dropping, instantly and forever, all frivolities, sprang at
his assailants before they dreamed of finding him awake, and
the game was suddenly reversed. The hunters became the hunted,
and they had no rest for nine years from the implacable
pursuit of them which Charles kept up. He defeated the Danes
and the Russians in the first year of the war (1700). In 1702
he invaded Poland and occupied Warsaw; in 1704 he forced the
deposition of the Saxon King of Poland, Augustus, and the
election of Stanislaus Leczinski. Not yet satisfied, he
followed Augustus into his electorate of Saxony, and compelled
him there to renounce the Polish crown and the Russian
alliance. In 1708 he invaded Russia, marching on Moscow, but
turning aside to meet an expected ally, Mazeppa the Cossack.
It was the mistake which Napoleon repeated a century later.
The Swedes exhausted themselves in the march, and the Russians
bided their time. Peter the Czar had devoted eight years,
since Charles defeated him at Narva, to making soldiers,
well-trained, out of the mob which that fight scattered. When
Charles had worn his army down to a slender and disheartened
force, Peter struck and destroyed it at Pultowa. Charles
escaped from the wreck and took refuge, with a few hundreds of
is guards, in the Turkish province of Bessarabia, at Bender. In
that shelter, which the Ottomans hospitably accorded to him,
he remained for five years, intriguing to bring the Porte into
war with his Muscovite enemy, while all the fruits of his nine
years of conquest in the North were stripped from him by the
old league revived. Augustus returned to Poland and recovered
his crown. Peter took possession of Livonia, Ingria, and a
great part of Finland. Frederick IV., of Denmark, attacked
Sweden itself. The kingless kingdom made a valiant defense
against the crowd of eager enemies; but Charles had used the
best of its energies and its resources, and it was not strong.
Near the end of 1710, Charles succeeded in pushing the Sultan
into war with the Czar, and the latter, advancing into
Moldavia, rashly placed himself in a position of great peril,
where the Turks had him really at their mercy. But Catherine,
the Czarina, who was present, found means to bribe the Turkish
vizier in command, and Peter escaped with no loss more serious
than the surrender of Azov. That ended the war, and the hopes
of the Swedish king. But still the stubborn Charles wearied
the Porte with his importunities, until he was commanded to
quit the country. Even then he refused to depart,--resisted
when force was used to expel him, and did not take his leave
until late in November, 1714, when he received intelligence
that his subjects were preparing to appoint his sister regent
of the kingdom and to make peace with the Czar. That news
hurried him homeward; but only for continued war. He was about
to make terms with Russia, and to secure her alliance against
Denmark, Poland and Hanover, when he was killed during an
invasion of Norway, in the siege of Friedrickshall (December,
1718). The crown of Sweden was then conferred upon his sister,
but shorn of absolute powers, and practically dependent upon
the nobles. All the wars in which Charles XII. had involved
his kingdom were brought to an end by great sacrifices, and
Russia rose to the place of Sweden as the chief power in the
North. The Swedes paid heavily for the career of their
"Northern Alexander."
Alliance against Spain.
Before the belligerents in the North had quieted themselves,
those of the West were again in arms. Spain had fallen under
the influence of two eager and restless ambitions, that of the
queen, Elizabeth of Parma, and an Italian minister, Cardinal
Alberoni; and the schemes into which these two drew the
Bourbon king, Philip V., soon ruptured the close relations
with France which Louis XIV. had ruined his kingdom to bring
about. To check them, a triple alliance was formed (1717)
between France, England and Holland,--enlarged the next year
to a quadruple alliance by the adhesion of Austria. At the
outset of the war, Spain made a conquest of Sardinia, and
almost accomplished the same in Sicily; but the English
crushed her navy and her rising commerce, while the French
crossed the Pyrenees with an army which the Spaniards could
not resist. A vast combination which Alberoni was weaving, and
which took in Charles XII., Peter the Great, the Stuart
pretender, the English Jacobites, and the opponents of the
regency in France, fell to pieces when the Swedish king fell.
Alberoni was driven from Spain and all his plans were given
up. The Spanish king withdrew from Sicily and surrendered
Sardinia. The Emperor and the Duke of Savoy exchanged islands,
as stated before, and the former (holding Naples already)
revived the old Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, while the latter
became King of Sardinia.
{1085}
War of the Polish Succession.
These disturbances ended, there were a few years of rest in
Europe, and then another war, of the character peculiar to the
eighteenth century, broke out. It had its cause in the Polish
election of a king to succeed Augustus II. As usual, the
neighboring nations formed a betting ring of onlookers, so to
speak, and "backed" their several candidates heavily. The
deposed and exiled king, Stanislaus Leczinski, who received
his crown from Charles XII. and lost it after Pultowa, was the
French candidate; for he had married his daughter to Louis XV.
Frederick Augustus of Saxony, son of the late King Augustus,
was the Russian and Austrian candidate. The contest resulted
in a double election (1733), and out of that came war. Spain
and Sardinia joined France, and the Emperor had no allies.
Hence the House of Austria suffered greatly in the war, losing
the Two Sicilies, which went to Spain, and were conferred on a
younger son of the king, creating a third Bourbon monarchy.
Part of the duchy of Milan was also yielded by Austria to the
King of Sardinia; and the Duke of Lorraine, husband of the
Emperor's daughter, Maria Theresa, gave up his duchy to
Stanislaus, who renounced therefor his claim on the crown of
Poland. The Duke of Lorraine received as compensation a right
of succession to the grand duchy of Tuscany, where the
Medicean House was about to expire. These were the principal
consequences, humiliating to Austria, of what is known as the
First Family Compact of the French and Spanish Bourbons.
War of Jenkins' Ear.
This alliance between the two courts gave encouragement to
hostile demonstrations in the Spanish colonies against English
traders, who were accused of extensive smuggling, and the
outcome was a petty war (1739), called "the War of Jenkins'
Ear."