第51章 LETTER 7(6)

But this speculation concerning events so long ago passed is not much to the purpose here.I proceed therefore to observe,that notwithstanding the sale of Dunkirk,and the secret leanings of our court to that of France,yet England was first to take the alarm,when Louis the Fourteenth invaded the Spanish Netherlands in one thousand six hundred and sixty-seven:and the triple alliance was the work of an English minister.It was time to take this alarm;for from the moment that the king of France claimed a right to the county of Burgundy,the duchy of Brabant,and other portions of the Low Countries that devolved on his queen by the death of her father Philip the Fourth,he pulled off the mask entirely.Volumes were written to establish,and to refute this supposed right.Your lordship no doubt will look into a controversy that has employed so many pens and so many swords;and I believe you will think it was sufficiently bold in the French,to argue from customs,that regulated the course of private successions in certain provinces,to a right of succeeding to the sovereignty of those provinces:and to assert the divisibility of the Spanish monarchy,with the same breath with which they asserted the indivisibility of their own;although the proofs in one case were just as good as the proofs in the other,and the fundamental law of inadvisability was at least as good a law in Spain,as either this or the Salique law was in France.But however proper it might be for the French and Austrian pens to enter into long discussions,and to appeal,on this great occasion,to the rest of Europe;the rest of Europe had a short objection to make to the plea of France,which no sophisms.no quirks of law could evade.Spain accepted the renunciations as real security:France gave them as such to Spain,and in effect to the rest of Europe.If they had not been given,and thus taken,the Spaniards would not have married their Infanta to the king of France,whatever distress they might have endured by the prolongation of the war.These renunciations were renunciations of all rights whatsoever to the whole Spanish monarchy,and to every part of it.The provinces claimed by France at this time were parts of it.To claim them,was therefore to claim the whole;for if the renunciations were no bar to the rights accruing to Mary Theresa on the death of her father Philip the Fourth,neither could they be any to the rights that would accrue to her and her children,on the death of her brother Charles the Second:an unhealthful youth,and who at this instant was in immediate danger of dying;for to all the complicated distempers he brought into the world with him,the small-pox was added.Your lordship sees how the fatal contingency of uniting the two monarchies of France and Spain stared mankind in the face;and yet nothing,that I can remember,was done to prevent it:not so much as a guaranty given,or a declaration made to assert the validity of these renunciations,and for securing the effect of them.The triple alliance indeed stopped the progress of the French arms,and produced the treaty of Aix la Chapelle.But England,Sweden,and Holland,the contracting powers in this alliance,seemed to look,and probably did look,no farther.France kept a great and important part of what she had surprised or ravished,or purchased;for we cannot say with any propriety that she conquered:and the Spaniards were obliged to set all they saved to the account of gain.The German branch of Austria had been reduced very low in power and in credit under Ferdinand the Third,by the treaties of Westphalia,as I have said already.Louis the Fourteenth maintained,during many years,the influence these treaties had given him among the princes and states of the empire.The famous capitulation made at Frankfort on the election of Leopold,who succeeded Ferdinand about the year one thousand six hundred and fifty-seven,was encouraged by the intrigues of France:and the power of France was looked upon as the sole power that could ratify and secure effectually the observation of the conditions then made.The league of the Rhine was not renewed,I believe,after the year one thousand six hundred and sixty-six;but though this league was not renewed,yet some of these princes and states continued in their old engagements with France:

whilst others took new engagements on particular occasions,according as private and sometimes very paltry interests,and the emissaries of France in all their little courts,disposed them.In short,the princes of Germany showed no alarm at the growing ambition and power of Louis the Fourteenth,but contributed to encourage one,and to confirm the other.In such a state of things the German branch was little able to assist the Spanish branch against France,either in the war that eluded by the Pyrenean treaty,or in that we are speaking of here,the short war that began in one thousand six hundred and sixty-seven,and was ended by the treaty of Aix la Chapelle in one thousand six hundred and sixty-eight.But it was not this alone that disabled the emperor from acting with vigor in the cause of his family then,nor that has rendered the house of Austria a dead weight upon all her allies ever since.Bigotry,and its inseparable companion,cruelty,as well as the tyranny and avarice of the court of Vienna,created in those days,and has maintained in ours,almost a perpetual diversion of the imperial arms from an effectual opposition to France.I mean to speak of the troubles in Hungary.