But, though such a dissolution had no terrors for the Catalonian or the Fleming, for the Lombard or the Calabrian, for the Mexican or the Peruvian, the thought of it was torture and madness to the Castilian. Castile enjoyed the supremacy in that great assemblage of races and languages. Castile sent out governors to Brussels, Milan, Naples, Mexico, Lima. To Castile came the annual galleons laden with the treasures of America. In Castile was ostentatiously displayed and lavishly spent great fortunes made in remote provinces by oppression and corruption. In Castile were the King and his Court. There stood the stately Escurial, once the centre of the politics of the world, the place to which distant potentates looked, some with hope and gratitude, some with dread and hatred, but none without anxiety and awe. The glory of the house had indeed departed. It was long since couriers bearing orders big with the fate of kings and commonwealths had ridden forth from those gloomy portals.
Military renown, maritime ascendency, the policy once reputed so profound, the wealth once deemed inexhaustible, had passed away.
An undisciplined army, a rotting fleet, an incapable council, an empty treasury, were all that remained of that which had been so great. Yet the proudest of nations could not bear to part even with the name and the shadow of a supremacy which was no more.
All, from the grandee of the first class to the peasant, looked forward with dread to the day when God should be pleased to take their king to himself. Some of them might have a predilection for Germany; but such predilections were subordinate to a stronger feeling. The paramount object was the integrity of the empire of which Castile was the head; and the prince who should appear to be most likely to preserve that integrity unviolated would have the best right to the allegiance of every true Castilian.
No man of sense, however, out of Castile, when he considered the nature of the inheritance and the situation of the claimants, could doubt that a partition was inevitable. Among those claimants three stood preeminent, the Dauphin, the Emperor Leopold, and the Electoral Prince of Bavaria.
If the question had been simply one of pedigree, the right of the Dauphin would have been incontestable. Lewis the Fourteeenth had married the Infanta Maria Theresa, eldest daughter of Philip the Fourth and sister of Charles the Second. Her eldest son, the Dauphin, would therefore, in the regular course of things, have been her brother's successor. But she had, at the time of her marriage, renounced, for herself and her posterity, all pretensions to the Spanish crown.
To that renunciation her husband had assented. It had been made an article of the Treaty of the Pyrenees. The Pope had been requested to give his apostolical sanction to an arrangement so important to the peace of Europe; and Lewis had sworn, by every thing that could bind a gentleman, a king, and a Christian, by his honour, by his royal word, by the canon of the Mass, by the Holy Gospels, by the Cross of Christ, that he would hold the renunciation sacred.11The claim of the Emperor was derived from his mother Mary Anne, daughter of Philip the Third, and aunt of Charles the Second, and could not therefore, if nearness of blood alone were to be regarded, come into competition with the claim of the Dauphin.
But the claim of the Emperor was barred by no renunciation. The rival pretensions of the great Houses of Bourbon and Habsburg furnished all Europe with an inexhaustible subject of discussion.
Plausible topics were not wanting to the supporters of either cause. The partisans of the House of Austria dwelt on the sacredness of treaties; the partisans of France on the sacredness of birthright. How, it was asked on one side, can a Christian king have the effrontery, the impiety, to insist on a claim which he has with such solemnity renounced in the face of heaven and earth? How, it was asked on the other side, can the fundamental laws of a monarchy be annulled by any authority but that of the supreme legislature? The only body which was competent to take away from the children of Maria Theresa their hereditary rights was the Comes. The Comes had not ratified her renunciation. That renunciation was therefore a nullity; and no swearing, no signing, no sealing, could turn that nullity into a reality.
Which of these two mighty competitors had the better case may perhaps be doubted. What could not be doubted was that neither would obtain the prize without a struggle which would shake the world. Nor can we justly blame either for refusing to give way to the other. For, on this occasion, the chief motive which actuated them was, not greediness, but the fear of degradation and ruin.
Lewis, in resolving to put every thing to hazard rather than suffer the power of the House of Austria to be doubled; Leopold, in determining to put every thing to hazard rather than suffer the power of the House of Bourbon to be doubled; merely obeyed the law of self preservation. There was therefore one way, and one alone, by which the great woe which seemed to be coming on Europe could be averted. Was it possible that the dispute might be compromised? Might not the two great rivals be induced to make to a third party concessions such as neither could reasonably be expected to make to the other?