The Duc de Villars, a marshal of France, leading his troops during the Battle of Denain in 1712.
Map: Europe in 1700
The year 1683 represented the high-water mark of French
hegemony in Europe. ‘Not a dog barks in Europe unless our king says he may’,
was the hubristic boast of one French diplomat. There is good–if not
conclusive-evidence that Louis was hoping (and expecting) to see the Turks
defeat the Austrians, capture Vienna and annex the Habsburg Monarchy. That
would allow him to step forward as the champion of Christendom and, more
specifically, as the only possible defender of the Holy Roman Empire. He
encouraged the Turks to begin their invasion, discouraged the Poles from
intervening, and declined a request from the Pope to rally to the Christian
cause on the grounds that crusades were no longer appropriate and that he would
not risk French commercial interests in the Levant. By means of agreements with
the Electors of Saxony, Bavaria, Brandenburg and Cologne, he had already paved
the way for the election of himself or a member of his family as the next Holy
Roman Emperor.
It was not to be. John Sobieski of Poland did bring an army
south, the Turks were defeated, it was Leopold I who emerged as the champion of
Christendom and the Holy Roman Empire, and it was Leopold’s son Joseph who was
elected ‘King of the Romans’, thus guaranteeing him the imperial succession. At
least part of Louis’ response was, first to bully the Huguenots into converting
to the true faith and then, in 1685, to revoke the Edict of Nantes which had
permitted freedom of worship for Protestants. Despite an official ban on
emigration, around 200,000 refugees then gave the lie to Louis’ claim that his
forcible conversion campaign had succeeded. Protestant Europe was outraged. It
was not just universal monarchy that Louis now seemed to be seeking but a
religious dictatorship too. What he had done to the Protestants in his own
country, he might very well do to their co-religionists outside it. At the very
least, it can be said that it made the task of the hawks easier in constructing
an anti-French coalition. In Brandenburg, Frederick William the Great Elector
abandoned his long-standing alliance with Louis. More crucially, in the Dutch
Republic, William III now found it much easier to persuade the towns of Holland
of the need to pursue a forward policy. The English envoy noted in October
1685, ‘they beginne to exclaime very loudly here against the usage which the
French Protestants have in France and a day of humiliation and fasting is to be
appointed throughout these provinces by reason of that persecution’. That cry
of execration could only gain in strength as around 60,000 French refugees
poured into the Dutch Republic. In August 1687 the Dutch in effect abrogated
the commercial clauses of the Peace of Nyjmegen and resumed a trade war with
France. By the early summer of 1688, the French envoy was reporting that the
Dutch were convinced that Louis was seeking ‘to destroy their religion and
especially their commerce’. On 10 June 1688 the birth of a healthy son to James
II of England not only dashed the hopes of his daughter Mary and her husband
William III of succeeding, it raised the awful spectre of a permanently
Catholic England in alliance with an aggressively Catholic France. So when
shortly afterwards ‘the immortal seven’ English grandees invited William over
to liberate them from the Jacobite yoke, he was able to win the support of the
States of Holland without which he could have done nothing. The French threat
that a Dutch landing in England would be regarded as a declaration of war was
ignored.
This marked the beginning of the ‘Second Hundred Years War’
which was to end only on the battlefield of Waterloo 127 years later. The first
phase was dominated by James’s attempt to regain the throne he had abandoned so
precipitately in November 1688. The decisive battle was fought in Ireland on
the River Boyne north of Dublin on 12 June 1690, when William III’s
multinational force defeated James II’s French and Irish troops. Among the
casualties was Frederick Schomberg, once a marshal in the army of Louis XIV,
until his refusal to abandon his Protestant faith sent him into exile and the
service of William III, who made him a duke in the peerage of England.
Meanwhile Louis XIV had embarked on what he hoped would be a limited war on the
Rhine but which turned out to be a world war lasting nine years (and variously
known as the Nine Years War, the Ten Years War, the War of the League of
Augsburg or the War of the Grand Alliance).
By the late 1680s Louis had become increasingly alarmed by
the continuing run of success enjoyed by the Habsburg Emperor Leopold I in the
east. On 2 September 1686 Buda fell to an Austrian assault, bringing to an end
145 years of Turkish rule; on 12 August the following year, a Turkish
counter-attack was crushed by an Austrian army commanded by Prince Charles of
Lorraine at Mohács on the Danube, at a cost of 30,000 Turkish dead–a victory
all the more sweet because it had been at the same place in 1526 that a Turkish
victory had established their domination of Hungary; also in 1687 Transylvania
recognized Austrian sovereignty; in 1688 the Hungarian Parliament recognized
Leopold’s son Joseph as his heir to the Hungarian throne; and on 6 September
Belgrade fell to an imperial army commanded by the Elector of Bavaria. With
Austrian influence now extended deep into the Balkans and the Turks cowed for
the foreseeable future, Louis might reasonably fear that Leopold would turn
west and exact retribution for the reunions. Such a step had been prepared
diplomatically in 1686 by a league formed at Augsburg by Austria, Spain, Sweden
and several German princes.
Louis now committed what John Lynn has called ‘the great miscalculation’. He believed that, with William III preoccupied by events in England and almost certain to come to grief there, a short sharp campaign of intimidation on the Rhine would be sufficient to persuade the Emperor and the German princes to turn the truce agreed at Regensburg in 1684 into a permanent settlement. In the event, he had the worst of both worlds. His own move to the east allowed William III a free hand in the west, where far from coming to grief he had succeeded in deposing James II by the end of the year, while his intended Blitzkrieg turned into a prolonged war of attrition. However, one sinister aspect of the war does need to be identified, because of its far-reaching consequences. The manifesto of 24 September 1688 announcing the French war aims stressed their moderation. All Louis was seeking, it was stated, was formal recognition of the reunions, compensation for abandoning French claims to the Palatinate (where a cadet branch of the Wittelsbachs had just succeeded) and to make a protest against the election of Joseph Clement of Bavaria as Elector of Cologne.
As far as it went, that was a not entirely disingenuous
summary. French policy and strategy can indeed be described as defensive from
now on. The means adopted were quite a different matter. The same brutal
scorched-earth tactics adopted during the Dutch War were now employed again,
but magnified to the power of ten. The two men responsible for advising Louis
on military policy–the marquis de Chamlay and the marquis de Louvois persuaded
him to authorize the physical destruction of western Germany on such a scale
that a buffer-zone of devastation would be created. As a bonus, it was
believed, the other princes would be so intimidated as to offer no further
resistance to French demands. At the very start of the campaign, Louvois
instructed General Montclair to pillage Württemberg systematically, while
Chamlay proposed to go further. In a letter to his colleague of 27 October 1688
he wrote: ‘I would dare to propose to you something that perhaps will not be to
your taste, that is the day after we take Mannheim [in the Palatinate], I would
put the city to the sword and plough it under.’ Mannheim was indeed levelled to
the ground ‘like a field’ (Chamlay) the following March. When the inhabitants
declined to help by destroying their own homes, peasants were conscripted to do
the job for them. This was a policy dictated from the top, as Louvois revealed
when he wrote to Montclair on 18 December 1688: ‘His Majesty recommends you to
ruin completely all the places that you leave along the upper and lower Neckar
so that the enemy, finding no forage or food whatever, will not try to approach
there.’ The King gave his express approval to Louvois’ list of communities earmarked
for eradication, exempting only certain religious buildings.
This ghastly process is usually referred to as ‘the
devastation of the Palatinate’, but in fact it embraced a much more extensive
swathe of German territory on both the left and the right banks of the Rhine.
About twenty substantial towns were destroyed, including Bingen, Oppenheim,
Worms and Speyer, and untold numbers of villages. Predictably, resistance and
retaliation on the part of the wretched inhabitants unleashed a second, less
organized but even more terrible wave of atrocities. Heidelberg had been
targeted for destruction in March 1689, but the enterprising townspeople had
made preparations to extinguish the flames, with the result that only about 10
per cent of the buildings were destroyed. It was to no avail, for the French
came back in 1693 and this time made no mistake. They then advertised their
achievement by striking a medal bearing the motto ‘Heidelberga deleta’
(Heidelberg obliterated), thus paraphrasing the demand with which Cato famously
ended all his speeches in the Roman senate: ‘Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse
delendam’ (Furthermore it is my opinion that Carthage must be destroyed).
Needless to say, those on the receiving end reciprocated with a flood of
pamphlets and visual images recording French barbarism and calling for
retribution. It was from this episode that German demonization of France as the
‘hereditary enemy’ (Erbfeind) dated and was utilized by Leopold I, for example
in his submission to the Reichstag in 1689 which led the Holy Roman Empire to
declare war: ‘Germans, arm yourselves against France…all Germans, Catholic and
non-Catholic alike, have the most pressing reason to resist the French, as the
common enemies of all Germans, with united hearts, means and weapons.’ This was
no longer a war against Louis XIV and his armies but a war of German against
French. The diabolic image of the French was to have a long future. That the
events of 1689 lingered powerfully in the German collective memory was shown by
the centenary, which occurred just before the fall of the Bastille, and was
commemorated by a flood of pamphlets. Travelling through the Rhineland in the
mid-1770s, John Moore wrote of the devastation of the Palatinate: ‘the
particulars of that dismal scene have been transmitted from father to son, and
are still spoke of with horror by the peasantry of this country, among whom the
French nation is held in detestation to this day’.
In the war against soldiers, the French achieved the same
success they enjoyed against civilians, at least on land in the four main
theatres of the Spanish Netherlands, the Rhineland, northern Italy and
Catalonia. The war became a dreary succession of indecisive battles, sieges,
manœuvres and counter-manœuvres, from whose narrative only the most dedicated
military historian can derive much pleasure. It was now that the great dual
necklace of fortresses around northern and eastern France constructed by Vauban
proved its mettle. Suffice it to say that by 1693 it was clear that neither
side would be able to land a knock-out blow and that some sort of compromise
would have to be arranged by means of diplomacy. In one respect only was it
decisive, but that was important enough. The battle of the Boyne really did put
an end to James II’s attempt to impose a Catholic and absolutist regime on
England and it really did lead to the imposition of a Protestant ascendancy on
Ireland and the expropriation of its Catholic landowners. Across the water in
London, the English were developing the political, administrative and, above
all, financial institutions that would enable them to offset their demographic
weakness in dealing with the French threat, founding a National Debt in 1693
and the Bank of England in 1694. It was during these years that the foundations
of the English ‘military-fiscal state’ were laid. With Louis XIV committed to a
Jacobite restoration, Anglo-French hostility became as much an axiom of the
European states-system as did Franco-Dutch and Franco-Habsburg.
In negotiating a peace, Louis was greatly assisted by the
mutual jealousies and resentments that naturally flourished in the enemy ‘grand
coalition’ after so many years of indecisive warfare. The first to crack was
the Duke of Savoy, extracted from the war by the generous terms of the separate
Peace of Turin of 29 August 1696. That prompted the Austrians and Spanish to
conclude a truce in Italy to protect their now dangerously exposed position
there, thus allowing the French to move 30,000 troops to what became the main
front in the Low Countries. This additional pressure increased William III’s
determination to bring the war to an end. He had no qualms about abandoning his
Austrian allies, for Leopold I had devoted most of his attention and resources
to the war in the east against the Turks. All combatants, it need hardly be
said, were by now so exhausted financially and economically that they were
under pressure from their long-suffering subjects to settle. Once Louis XIV had
decided to swallow the bitter pill of recognizing William III as King of
England, the necessary treaties were signed at Ryswick in September and October
1697. France retained Alsace and Strassburg but was obliged to give up the rest
of the ‘reunited’ territory and the Rhenish fortresses, to restore Lorraine to
its duke and to evacuate the territory conquered in Spain. Although not obvious
at the time, recognition of French sovereignty over Saint Domingue in the
Caribbean opened the way for the development of the most profitable
sugar-island in the region.
Did this rep resent a French victory? The marquis de Dangeau
was in no doubt: ‘The king gave peace to Europe on conditions which he wished
to impose. He was the master, and all his enemies acknowledged this and could
not forbear from praising and admiring his moderation.’ Certainly Alsace and
Strassburg were now more firmly part of France, but whether that was enough to
justify nine years of ruinously expensive warfare is a different matter. Derek
McKay’s summary of the French response suggests that Dangeau was whistling in
the dark: ‘The peace was very unpopular in France, where it was difficult to
understand why territory had been returned when France had not suffered
military defeat.’ Leopold I was disgruntled too, for he had failed to return
France to the frontiers of 1648, but he could draw consolation from his
continuing success in the east. On 11 September 1697, or nine days before the
first of the Ryswick treaties was signed, an Austrian army of about 50,000,
commanded by Prince Eugène of Savoy, defeated a Turkish army twice that number
and commanded by Sultan Mustafa II in person, at Zenta in central Hungary. So
crushing was the victory–one of the most complete in the history of European
warfare–that it effectively ended the centuries-old struggle between Habsburg and
Turk for the domination of Hungary. By the Treaty of Karlowitz of January 1699,
the Turks ceded Transylvania and all of Hungary except for the Bánát of
Temesvár. Symbolic of its definitive nature was the fact that this was the
first time that the Turks had agreed to make a peace rather than a truce with a
non-Muslim power. For the next two centuries, Hungary was to prove a thorn in
Austrian flesh, but its sheer size–much greater that the present-day state of
that name–ensured that the Austrian Habsburgs had finally emerged from the
shadow of the senior Spanish branch to become a truly major European power in
their own right.
The Nine Years War undoubtedly marked a shift by Louis XIV
to a more defensive strategy. The sudden death of the arch-hawk Louvois in 1691
may have contributed to this, as may Louis’ advancing age–he was now in his
fifties and entering old age by contemporary standards. During the early stages
of the war he still campaigned personally, as his war artists dutifully
recorded, most sumptuously in Jean-Baptiste Martin’s painting of Louis
directing the siege of Namur in 1692. But that proved to be his swan-song, for
in the following year he formally announced that he would no longer command his
armies in person. Yet if his youthful thirst for gloire was now sated, his
concern to promote the interests of the house of Bourbon burnt no less
intensely. This was revealed by his actions over the long-festering but now
critical question of the Spanish inheritance. Although Charles II had surprised
everyone by living so long, by the late 1690s it was becoming clear that he
could not last much longer. The following much-simplified family tree reveals
the conflicting claims of French Bourbons and Austrian Habsburgs.
As neither side could tolerate the entire Spanish
inheritance passing to the other, and both sides were anxious to avoid yet
another major war after the exertions of the Nine Years War, the obvious
solution was to agree to a partition. In 1698 the first such treaty found what
looked like a viable compromise by allocating the lion’s share–Spain itself,
the Spanish Netherlands and the colonial empire to one of Philip III’s numerous
great-great-grandsons, Joseph Ferdinand of Bavaria. France would get Naples,
Sicily and some fortresses in Tuscany, while the Austrian Habsburgs would get
the Duchy of Milan. Unfortunately, the Bavarian prince died the following year.
Attempts to find another compromise foundered as the two main claimants in turn
dug their heels in. First, the Austrians refused to consider an agreement
reached by France and the Maritime Powers that would have given Leopold I’s
second son, the Archduke Charles, the whole Spanish inheritance apart from the
Italian possessions, insisting that they must have everything. Under this
scheme, France hoped to obtain Lorraine and Savoy in exchange for Milan and
Naples. When Charles II died on 1 November 1700, it was the turn of Louis XIV
to reject a compromise. Anxious above all else to preserve the territorial
integrity of his empire, the late king had left a will bequeathing everything
to Philip duc d’Anjou, great-grandson of Philip IV and the younger of Louis
XIV’s two grandsons. It did not take Louis long to make up his mind whether to
stick to the partition agreement already reached with William III or va banque.
He was encouraged to opt for the latter by the knowledge that if it was
declined for Philip, the Spanish envoy bearing the invitation had orders to go
straight on to Vienna to offer it to the Austrian candidate, the Archduke
Charles. News of the death of the Spanish king reached the French court on 9
November; a week later, Louis presented the duc d’Anjou to his court with the
words: ‘Messsieurs, before you stands the King of Spain. His birth has called
him to this crown; the whole nation wished it and asked me for it without
delay, and I granted it to them with pleasure. It is the command of Heaven.’
Take in Family Tree
War was not yet inevitable. In the wake of the Nine Years
War, none of the weary combatants wished to sally forth yet again. In both
England and the Dutch Republic, William III was restrained by constitutions
that gave peace a voice. The Austrians had plenty on their hands in the east,
digesting the enormous gains secured by the Peace of Karlowitz and nervously
awaiting the expected reaction from the Hungarians. Whether Louis XIV’s
subsequent actions should be regarded as a series of blunders depends on how
one assesses his overall objective. If it were simply his intention to see his
grandson peacefully installed as King of Spain, then he could hardly have been
more ham-fisted. He declared that in principle the new King of Spain could also
become King of France if the senior Bourbon line were to fail; Spain received
not just a new king but a whole team of French experts too, thus advertising
its satellite status; French troops were sent to take possession of the Spanish
Netherlands and to expel Dutch garrisons from the ten ‘barrier fortresses’
established with Spanish agreement in 1698; the new King of Spain granted the fabulously
lucrative right to supply the Spanish colonies with slaves–the asiento–to
French merchants; and on the death of ex-King James II in September 1701, Louis
recognized his son as the legitimate King of England, Scotland and Ireland as
James III.
By then war really was inevitable. It followed with the
declaration of war on France by England, the Dutch Republic and the Habsburg
Monarchy on 15 May 1702. The War of the Spanish Succession had begun. The
campaigns of the 1660s and 1670s had shown that in military terms, the French
were predominant; the campaigns of the late 1680s and 1690s showed that in
military terms the two sides were now more or less evenly balanced; the
campaigns of the 1700s showed that the allies had now achieved a decisive
military advantage. This was partly due to the superior quality of the
respective high commands. Following the retirement or death of the three French
generals acknowledged by military historians to be of exceptional
ability–Condéin 1674, Turenne in 1675 and Luxembourg in 1695–the next
generation proved to be sadly lacking in enterprise, although Villars did prove
capable of effective direction, as he demonstrated in 1711–13.
On the other side, Prince Eugène for the Austrians and the
Duke of Marlborough for the English demonstrated repeatedly a degree of energy,
enterprise and aggression that their opponents could not match. Ironically,
Eugène had first sought to enter the service of Louis XIV. It was only when he
was rebuffed, in 1683, that he went to Vienna, arriving just in time to grab
the opportunity offered by the Turkish siege to catch the imperial eye.
Rewarded for his distinguished service with the command of a regiment of
dragoons, he was a field marshal before he reached the age of thirty. His
meteoric career well illustrates the cosmopolitan nature of the Habsburg army;
nothing indeed could sum it up better than his trilingual signature: ‘Eugenio
von Savoie’. His three great building projects–the winter palace in the old
city of Vienna, the summer palace ‘Belvedere’ just outside it and his hunting
lodge Schlosshof–provide three-dimensional evidence of the riches that could be
accumulated by the gifted and the lucky. It was said that Eugène had arrived in
Vienna with just twenty-five gulden in his pocket but that when he died in 1736
he left an estate worth twenty-five million.
Not the least of Prince Eugène’s merits was his ability to
establish a good relationship with allied commanders, most notably the Duke of
Marlborough, who deserves similar credit for his diplomatic skills. Their most
important joint achievement was the victory at Blenheim on 13 August 1704, when
they routed a Franco-Bavarian army, taking 14,000 prisoners, including the
French commander the comte de Tallard, and inflicting 20,000 casualties. As the
first major land victory (part-) won by an English army since Agincourt nearly
three centuries earlier, its importance has been consistently overrated by
English historians. Yet, if it did not open to England ‘the gateways of the
modern world’, as Marlborough’s descendant Winston Churchill claimed, it did
have a major impact on the course of the War of the Spanish Succession. With
Hungary and Transylvania in revolt, there was every danger that the French,
supported by their Bavarian allies, would be able to march on Vienna and knock
the Habsburg Monarchy out of the war. Blenheim put a stop to that potentially
decisive initiative, turned Bavaria into an Austrian dependency for the
duration of the war, and forced the French to adopt a defensive strategy.
The allied victories kept coming. On 23 May 1706
Marlborough, commanding 62,000 allied troops, defeated a slightly smaller
French army under the duc de Villeroi at Ramillies, south-east of Brussels in
the Spanish Netherlands, and then spent the rest of the campaigning season
seizing one city after another. On the Italian front, on 7 September Prince
Eugène with an Austro-Piedmontese army defeated the duc d’Orléans at Turin,
with the result that the French signed a convention the following March by which
they withdrew from northern Italy altogether. After inconclusive campaigning in
1707, Marlborough and Eugène together inflicted another heavy defeat on the
French at Oudenarde on 11 July 1708 which led to the conquest of most of the
Spanish Netherlands. The last great set-piece victory was at Malplaquet near
Mons on 11 September 1709, but it was bought at so great a cost that it hardly
deserves to be called a victory. As the French commander, the duc de Villars,
reported to his King: ‘if God gives us the grace to lose another similar
battle, your Majesty can count on his enemies being destroyed.’
After this Pyrrhic victory, the war became a stalemate.
French forces had been ejected from northern Italy and the Spanish Netherlands,
but the allies had neither the military means nor the political will to deliver
a knock-out punch to metropolitan France. In Spain, the war had become a messy
civil conflict between Castile, supporting Philip V, and Catalonia, Aragon and
Valencia supporting the Archduke Charles, with neither side able to achieve a
decisive advantage. All parties were beginning to scrape the bottom of the
financial and demographic barrel, not least due to poor harvests and, in
1708–09, one of the coldest winters in recorded history. Peace negotiations
were long overdue, but so much was at stake for so many that they took a long
time to get going and even longer to reach a conclusion. An important step in
the right direction was taken in England in the course of 1710, when Queen Anne
freed herself from the ‘duumvirs’, the Earl of Godolphin and Marlborough (and
his wife Sarah), and called an election which brought a Tory landslide. Both
the dominant figures in the new administration, Robert Harley (Earl of Oxford
from 1711) and Henry St John (Viscount Bolingbroke from 1712) were keen to
bring the war to an end. Their enthusiasm was strengthened by the sudden death
of the Emperor Joseph I in April 1711, leaving his younger brother, the
Archduke Charles, as his sole heir. This created the prospect of a Habsburg
hegemony in Europe no more appealing to the English than the Bourbon version
against which they had been fighting for so long.
Once the English paymasters had decided to settle, their
allies had no option but to follow suit, although the Austrians in particular
did so very slowly and reluctantly. Indeed, they declined to sign the Peace of
Utrecht when England, France, the Dutch Republic, Savoy, Philip V of Spain,
Portugal and Prussia did so on 11–12 April 1713. Only after Villars had
captured Landau and Freiburg in Breisgau later that year were they finally
convinced that they could gain nothing further and might lose a lot if they
continued the war alone. So peace was concluded between France and the Habsburg
Monarchy on 7 March 1714 at Rastatt. In effect, the Utrecht–Rastatt agreements
amounted to a new partition treaty. Louis XIV secured his primary war aim by
gaining international recognition of his grandson Philip V as King of Spain.
But there was no question of Philip or his descendants ever succeeding to the
French throne. This was less academic than it might seem, for between April
1711 and March the following year, a rash of fatalities in the house of Bourbon
had carried off Louis XIV’s son, grandson and eldest great-grandson, leaving
just one legitimate heir, born in 1710. The Treaty of Utrecht stated
categorically that, if this senior line were to fail, succession would pass to
the descendants of Louis XIV’s brother, the duc d’Orlèans. Moreover, Philip V
did not succeed to the entire Spanish inheritance, only to Spain itself and its
overseas possessions, and was obliged to recognize the English conquest of
Gibraltar and Minorca. Louis might console himself, however, with the thought
that he had retained Alsace and Strassburg and had only had to give up a few
towns in Flanders, a result which compared very favourably with the catastrophe
that had threatened in 1709.
For all their mutterings about English perfidy, the
Habsburgs had done very well, becoming a major force in western Europe by the
acquisition of the Spanish Netherlands, and the dominant force in Italy by the
acquisition of the Duchy of Milan, the enclaves in Tuscany known as the ‘Stato
dei Presidii’, and the Kingdom of Naples. Sicily and a royal title went to the
Duke of Savoy. Of the two ‘Maritime Powers’, the Dutch certainly achieved a
greater degree of security by the restoration of the ‘barrier fortresses’ in
what should now be called the Austrian Netherlands. The Austrians were also
obliged to confirm their adhesion to the clauses of the Peace of Westphalia
relating to their new possessions, including the continued closure of the River
Scheldt. This modest return for a decade of exertion was made no more palatable
by the knowledge that the British (as the English should be called following
the Treaty of Union with Scotland of 1707) had negotiated the peace with France
without reference to their Dutch allies. Another bone of contention was their
failure to win British support for their claim to Gelderland, most of which
passed to Prussia. That the latter now had its feet firmly under the top table
of European powers was confirmed by French recognition of its status as a
kingdom and its inheritance of the principality of Neuchâtel in Switzerland.
Such was the ‘rage of party’ in Great Britain that the Peace
of Utrecht was bound to be divisive. This was not helped by the accession of
George I in August 1714, for he was known to regard the treaty as a betrayal of
the Protestant cause, indeed the French were even afraid that he might abrogate
it altogether. Responding to his first speech from the throne, the new
Whig-dominated Parliament lamented ‘the reproach brought on the nation by the
unsuitable conclusion of a war, which…was attended with such unparalleled
successes’. Oxford went to the Tower and Bolingbroke went into exile. Yet not
too much hindsight should have been required to see that Utrecht marked a major
step on England/Great Britain’s march to world-power status. Louis XIV was now
obliged, not just to recognize the Protestant succession but to expel James
II’s son, the ‘Old Pretender’, from France. While France was still the dominant
power in Canada, recognition of Britain’s possession of the Hudson Bay
territory and the return of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland had obvious political implications
as well as immediate economic benefits. The same might be said of the cession
of St Kitt’s in the Caribbean. The acquisition of Gibraltar and Minorca made
Britain the dominant power in the western Mediterranean. The transfer of the
asiento from French to British merchants was lucrative in its own right and
also symbolized the defeat of the threat that Spain would become a French
satellite. On the European continent, the best possible result was achieved:
Louis XIV’s bid for hegemony had been finally defeated; the Low Countries were
now buffered against French pressure; and a balance of power had been achieved.
More generally, the peace treaties established the British objective of a
continental ‘balance of power’ as the goal of the European states-system.
