peace of Christendom, and have brought on a heavy war, in which he could expect no assistance. The Parliament agreed to a series of resolutions, in which the national grievances of Darien were recapitulated, as if Scotland rejected all considerations of the general peace of Christendom, and stood isolated amongst the nations, proud and defiant. The House of Lords addressed the king in terms of strong condemnation of the proceedings of the colonists at Darien, and of approbation of the means adopted by the colonial governor to discourage and injure them. William, in his reply, declared that he was very sensibly touched with the loss his Scotch subjects had sustained, and he took "this opportunity of putting the House of Peers in mind of what he recommended to his Parliament soon after his accession to the throne, that they would consider of a Union between the two kingdoms."

CHAPTER XXXVII.

IN 1698, the question of the succession to the throne of Spain was very complicated. Charles II. was equally enfeebled in body and mind, and he had no issue. Louis XIV. had married Charles's eldest sister; but upon their marriage, the Infanta of Spain, by a solemn contract, had renounced for herself and her successors, all claim to the Spanish crown. The emperor Leopold had married a younger sister, and she had made a similar renunciation, which, however, was considered of none effect, from not having been confirmed by the Cortes. Her daughter had married the elector of Bavaria, and their son, the electoral prince, was the inheritor of his mother's claim. The emperor himself was a claimant to the succession in his own person, for he was the grandson of Philip III. of Spain, and first cousin to Charles II. Thus, the question of the Spanish succession influenced the political combinations of Europe. William's most anxious hours had been given to discussions with Tallard, the French ambassador, of the terms of a treaty which would reconcile these conflicting claims. Tallard wrote to Louis that the English nation "consider the partition of the succession of the king of Spain as something in which they must take a part." The scheme of a partition of the vast dominions of the crown of Spain unquestionably originated with the court of France. It was formally proposed to Portland soon after his arrival in Paris, as "a thing of the greatest importance, and which demanded the greatest secrecy." In the summer of 1698, William made his usual journey to Holland. Tallard was invited to follow the king, and the negotiations were resumed at Loo. William negotiated these treaties upon purely defensive principles. They had no reference to the especial advantage of England or the States-General, beyond their protection against the first imminent danger of a vast addition to the power of France, or the secondary danger of a similar addition to the power of Austria. On the 24th of

A.D. 1698.

THE FIRST PARTITION TREATY.

483

August Portland communicated to Mr. Secretary Vernon, the proposed conditions of a treaty, which he was to show to the Lord Chancellor, for the purpose of Somers deciding to whom else they should be imparted, "to the end," wrote the king, "that I might know your opinion upon so important an affair, and which requires the greatest secrecy." The important secret was communicated to Shrewsbury, Orford, and Montague. On the 8th of September Somers wrote to the king an elaborate letter, conveying their joint opinions. The whole tone of this despatch was to the effect that the king, who had always been his own minister for foreign affairs, was a better judge of such matters than the advisers of his domestic policy. William had written, "If it be fit this negotiation should be carried on, there is no time to be lost, and you will send me the full powers, under the great seal, with the names in blank, to treat with count Tallard." The Lord Chancellor made not the slightest objection to sending the king this blank commission. Before it arrived, William had signed the draft of the treaty, with a note at the foot, "in which he declares it to be converted into a treaty, if the king of Spain should die before the exchange of the ratifications.' This treaty, known as the First Partition Treaty, was definitively signed at the Hague on the 11th of October, by the earl of Portland and sir Joseph Williamson, as the two Commissioners whose names were inserted in the blank space of the commission sent by Somers. It was stipulated that the kingdom of Spain, with the Indies and the Netherlands, should be assigned to the electoral prince of Bavaria; that Naples and Sicily should belong to the dauphin of France; and that the duchy of Milan should be allotted to the archduke Charles, the second son of the emperor. Only four months after the treaty had been signed, the electoral prince of Bavaria, then in his eighth year, died. He had been named by the king of Spain as his successor, by a will made in 1698, with a condition that the vast Spanish dominions should not be dissevered. The Partition Treaty had become known, although William had been persuaded not to communicate it to Spain or to the emperor. In 1700, a Second Partition Treaty was concluded, which gave Spain, the Indies, and the Netherlands to the archduke Charles. The Bourbons were now to have the Milanese, or an equivalent territory, in addition to the arrangements of the former treaty.

The new Parliament assembled on the 6th of December, 1698. In his speech to the House, William said, "The flourishing of trade, the supporting of credit, and the quiet of people's minds at home, will depend upon the opinion they have of their security; and to preserve to England the weight and influence it has at present in the councils and affairs abroad, it will be requisite that Europe should see you are not wanting to yourselves." The Commons met William's exhortations with unusual discourtesy. They voted no address in answer to the speech from the throne; and they passed a resolution that all the land forces of England, in English pay, exceeding seven thousand men, should be forthwith paid and disbanded; that the seven thousand should consist of natural born subjects; and that all the forces exceeding twelve thousand men in Ire

Tallard to Louis.

land, these also natural born subjects, should be paid and disbanded. This bill was carried through with unusual rapidity. The agony of mind which the king endured overthrew, for once in that troubled life entirely, his wonderful command of temper, and self-sacrificing discretion. He came to the resolution of abandoning the government of England. In the British Museum there is preserved a speech to that effect, written in William's own hand in French, which he intended to deliver to the Parlia ment. However, the equal mind soon came back to this extraordinary man. He finally gave his assent to the Disbanding Bill in these words: "I am come to pass the Bill for disbanding the army as soon as I understood it was ready for me. Though, in our present circumstances, there appears great hazard in breaking such a number of troops; and though I might think myself unkindly used, that those guards who came over with me to your assistance, and have constantly attended me in all the actions wherein I have been engaged, should be removed from me; yet it is my fixed opinion that nothing can be so fatal to us as that any distrust or jealousy should arise between me and my people." On the 18th of March, William sent a message to the Commons, that he intended to send his Dutch guards away immediately, "unless, out of consideration to him, the House be disposed to find a way for continuing them longer in his service, which his majesty would take very kindly." The House would not even appoint a Committee to consider this message, but drew up an address, in which the king was bluntly told "that nothing conduces more to the happiness and welfare of this kingdom than an entire confidence between his majesty and his people, which could no way be so firmly established as by entrusting his sacred person with his own subjects." The king's answer to this address was a model of forbearance: "I came hither to restore the ancient constitution of this government. I have had all possible regard to it since my coming, and I am resolved through the course of my reign to preserve it entire in all the parts of it.

It shall be my study to the utmost of my power to perform the part of a just and a good king; and as I will ever be strictly and nicely careful of observing my promise to my subjects, so I will not doubt of their tender regards to me."

The Parliament was prorogued on the 4th of May, after having appointed a Commission to inquire into the extent of the Irish forfeitures of estates, "in order to their being applied in case of the subjects of England.” The king had granted some of these estates to Portland, Albemarle, and other favourites, and a very natural and proper jealousy was excited. This measure was tacked to a money-bill, so that it could not be discussed in the House of Lords, or rejected by the Crown. In the next Session of Parliament, which commenced on the 16th of November, 1699, the Commissioners of Inquiry presented their report. A Bill of Resumption was brought in, by which the whole of the Irish forfeitures were to be applied to the public uses. The Whigs moved an amendment, to resume all grants of lands and revenues of the Crown made since the 6th of February, 1684-the date of the accession of James II. This was a much more sweeping resumption than the opponents of William contemplated. But they had the decency not to resist its adoption. Fierce disputes ensued

A.D. 1699.

INTOLERANT SPIRIT OF THE TORIES.

485

between the two Houses. The king gave his assent to the bill, and immediately prorogued the Parliament. The triumphant Tories succeeded now in effecting the removal from office of Somers, the only one of the Whig ministers that William had retained. No lawyer of eminence would accept the Great Seal; and after a month's delay it was given to serjeant Wright, as Lord Keeper. The violent hatreds of the rival factions rendered it very difficult for the king to conduct the government upon any settled principles. He had no resource but to aim at the neutralization of the violence of the Tory party by opening to them most of the chief employments of the State. These rivalries also made the most able and honest of the king's advisers shrink from the responsibility of office.

The tolerant disposition of William had in England made the old penal laws against papists in many respects a dead letter. In this Session, the House, so furious in its hostility to the Crown, passed the most disgraceful law of this reign--an "Act for the further preventing the growth of Popery," of which the chief object was to drive out the Catholic landowners. It is satisfactory to know that this intention was defeated, in most cases, by the more liberal spirit of the time.

England and Holland were under treaties of alliance with Sweden, and were bound to render her assistance should she be attacked. At this period, the young king, Charles XII., called upon England and Holland for support against the king of Denmark, the elector of Saxony and king of Poland, and the czar of Russia, who had formed a league for the dismemberment of Sweden. William asked for no vote from Parliament. The passing of the Act for disbanding the army, and the reduction of the navy by a vote of the Commons, left England in a very weakened condition. Yet the king did not abate one jot of his resolution to maintain the attitude before Europe that belonged to the states which he governed. He sent an armament of English and Dutch ships into the Baltic, under the command of Sir George Rooke, when his remonstrances to Denmark and the other powers were unheeded. Rooke formed a junction with the Swedish fleet, and they drove the Danish navy into Copenhagen. Charles exerted himself with wonderful spirit, and prepared with his allies for a siege of the Danish capital. Frederick IV. of Denmark now professed his willingness to accept the mediation of England and Holland; and a treaty of peace was signed under their guarantee.

On the 30th of July, 1700, the duke of Gloucester, the only one remaining of the seventeen children of the princess Anne, died at Windsor, after a short illness, having just entered upon his twelfth year. This event made the Jacobites " grow insolent upon it, and say, now the chief difficulty was removed out of the way of the prince of Wales' succession;" and, on the other hand, "turned the eyes of all the Protestants in the nation towards the electress of Brunswick." The electress Sophia of Hanover, now in her seventieth year, was the last surviving child of Elizabeth Stuart, the daughter of James I., and of Frederic, the ElectorPalatine, who accepted the crown of Bohemia. In 1658 she married Ernest Augustus, who became duke of Hanover in 1679, and elector in

Life of Burnet, "Own Times," vol. iv. p. 439.

1692. Her eldest son, George Lewis, became elector of Hanover in 1698, when in his 38th year. The electress had been visited by king William in 1699, and she now came to Loo, to return the visit, at the time when the interests of her family were thus affected by the death of the duke of Gloucester. She was a lady of unusual talent and knowledge, as much distinguished for her good sense and refined manners as for her various acquirements. There were many other claimants to the English succession who were disqualified by being Roman Catholics.

In October, the king of Spain was considered to be in the most imminent danger. The agents of Louis were about his death-bed, striving to influence the feeble prince to dispose of the succession by will in favour of the Bourbons. The agents of the emperor were also intriguing for the same object, in favour of the Imperial family. The emperor had not yet signed the Treaty of Partition, which existed between France, England, and Holland. The knowledge of this treaty had provoked such wrath at Madrid, that the Spanish ambassador at London published a declaration so insolent, that William commanded him to leave,-a measure which was retaliated by the dismissal from Spain of the English and Dutch ambassadors. The revelation of the secret of the treaty was attributed to Louis, as the readiest way to attain something better than those Italian possessions of Spain which the treaty gave him. Enfeebled in body and mind, the poor king still clung to the idea that he ought to preserve the inheritance of Spain to the Austrian family from which he had sprung. The authority of the pope was called in to determine for him what he ought to do. Innocent XII. decided that the whole Spanish monarchy belonged by right of inheritance to the dauphin; but to prevent the union of the crowns of Spain and France, it was desirable to give the succession to the duke of Anjou, the dauphin's second son. The famous Testament which plunged Europe into a war of ten years was signed. When the last breath had departed, after Charles had lingered four weeks, the duke of Abrantes came forth from the Council, and announced that Philip, duke of Anjou, was the sole inheritor of the vast Spanish monarchy. The king of France decided to accept the Will. One of his reasons was, that the emperor had not yet acceded to the Treaty. William knew what the pretended separation of the Crowns of France and Spain really meant. He wrote to Heinsius: "I am perfectly persuaded, that if this Will be executed, England and the Republic are in the utmost danger of being totally lost or ruined." In a letter, three days later, he says: My chief anxiety is to prevent the Spanish Netherlands from falling into the hands of France. You will easily conceive how this business goes to my heart."

The Parliament which had been prorogued in April was dissolved in December, 1700. The Tory party were now in the ascendant, and they had all the advantages of government influence in the elections. The Houses met on the 6th of February. Godolphin was now at the head of the Treasury; Rochester was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Under the ministerial influence Harley was chosen Speaker by the new Parliament, by a majority double that of the Whig nominee. The speech of the king touched upon the two great events of the past year-the death of the duke of Gloucester, and the death of the king of Spain. The House divided