XI. 1714. CHAP. Spanish people to place a king of their choice on the throne; kept alive for years a frightful and desolating civil war in the Basque provinces; concluded the Quadruple Alliance, in order to change the Salic law, which we ourselves had stipulated for Spain, and solemnly guaranteed by the treaty of Utrecht; and violated our pledged national faith, in order to place a succession of revolutionary queens on the throne of the Peninsula. 34. Results which have followed from it in stance. We have got our reward. The result has followed which the few thoughtful persons whom the prevailing mania of the day had not carried away, clearly anticithe last in pated at the very first, from our revolutionary propagandism. Our whole policy, for the ten years during which it was dictated by political passions-not regulated by regard to national interests-has turned to the advantage of our enemies. Louis Philippe profited, as well he might, by the temporary eclipse of our reason. He secured the Netherlands for France, with its magnificent fortresses, and noble harbour of Antwerp, by the marriage of a daughter; and to all appearance gained Spain, with its vast sea-coast and boundless capabilities, by the marriage of a son. He united these powers to France by a more enduring bond than even family alliance-the lasting tie of common interest arising from a common origin. Through all the changes of fortune, revolutionary powers will hold by each other, because they feel that mutual support is essential to their defence against legitimate monarchies. He condescended to accept the princess, whom our strange and perfidious policy had rendered the heiress-presumptive of the throne of Madrid, for a son of France. The dream of Louis XIV. was realised-there were no longer any Pyrenees. By erecting the revolutionary throne of We Belgium, and dispossessing the male line in Spain, we CHAP. 1714. sins which vails. It is stated by Capefigue, in his admirable history of 35. Louis XIV.,* that we should err much if we imagined Strange insensibility that the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes was regarded to national in the same light by its contemporaries with which it is often previewed by ourselves. Notwithstanding its frightful cruelty, it was universally considered by the dominant Catholic majority over all Europe as a masterpiece of political wisdom; a measure alike called for by its evident justice and its palpable expedience. Even the Massacre of St Bartholomew is never mentioned by the contemporary Catholic historians save with exultation; and Charles IX., who perpetrated it, is the object of universal eulogium. It was the same in 1793. The *By far the best history of that eventful reign which has yet appeared in Europe. 1714. CHAP. expatriation of a hundred thousand emigrants, the conXI. fiscation of their estates, the murder of a tithe of their number on the scaffold, the destruction of a million of lives during the Revolution, excited neither indignation nor commiseration in the Jacobin majority in France. They were universally regarded by them as measures equally expedient, justifiable, and necessary. The entire abandonment at once of our public faith and national policy, in like manner, during the fervour of political passions in this country, some years ago, in relation both to Spain and the Netherlands; the nourishing a frightful civil war for years together on the banks of the Ebro ; the dispossessing a sovereign we were pledged as a nation to maintain on the throne of Spain, excited no general feeling, either of pity or indignation, in this country. It was thought to be quite natural and proper that we should supplant legitimate kings by revolutionary queens in every country around us. We sent thousands of gallant desperadoes to "call a new world into existence," by revolutionising the colonies of Spain in South America, with which state we were then at peace, and the piratical act was generally applauded in the country the same act, when perpetrated by the Americans in Texas, and attempted in Cuba, excited universal reprobation. Examples of this sort are fitted to awaken at once feelings of charity and distrust in our breastscharity to others, distrust of ourselves. They may teach us to view with a lenient if not a forgiving eye the Capefigue, aberrations of those nations which have yielded to the Louis XIV. force of those passions under which, with so many more Hist. de la means of resistance, our own understandings have so iii. 239,240. violently reeled; and to examine anxiously whether Hist. de iii. 172. Réform. many of the public measures which at the time are the XI. subject of the most general approbation in this country, CHAP. are not in reality as unjust, and will not be condemned by posterity as unanimously, as the revocation of the 1714. Edict of Nantes, or any other of the most atrocious acts by which the pages of history are stained. 36. tween the situation of and the War of On the Tories in the Succes sion, and the that of the Whigs in Revolution. The remarkable analogy must strike even the most superficial observer, between the position of the Tories Analogy beand the policy which they adopted during the contest of the Succession, and that which the Whigs occupied, their conduct during the war of the Revolution. both occasions the Opposition was resolutely set against a war which a ministry in power was carrying on with vigour and success against a preponderating power in France, that threatened, and had well-nigh overturned, the independence of all the adjoining states in Europe. In both, the contest was one of life or death for the liberties, and even the existence, of England; and yet the Opposition in both exerted their whole influence and abilities to mar its progress and impede its success. In both, a great and victorious English general headed the forces of the alliance; and in both, for a series of years, his successes were underrated, his achievements vilified, his efforts thwarted, by the Opposition, in the very country whose glory he was daily augmenting, and securely establishing on a more durable foundation. In both, Great Britain was combating a power which had proved itself to be the deadliest enemy to real freedom, for it is hard to say whether Louis XIV.'s persecution of the Protestants, or the atrocities of the Convention at Paris a century after, inflicted the cruellest wounds on the cause of liberty. In both, the league of the Allies, though originally springing out of this unbearable oppression, had come to hinge mainly on the neces CHAP. sity of preventing the political power of France being XI. 1714. 37. Extraordi nary coin the crisis of the two contests. extended over Spain. In both, the chief seats of war for the English and French armies were Spain and the Low Countries; and in both, the decisive blows were at length struck on the Flemish plains. And the crisis in each brings the parallel still closer, and to a most singular, and some may think almost cidence in providential, coincidence. For in May 1712, the Tories consummated the war on which they had so long been engaged, by effecting the separation of England from the alliance, when the iron barrier of France was at last effectually broken through, and nothing remained to prevent Marlborough and Eugene from marching in triumph to Paris; and in May 1812, just a hundred years after, the Whigs had the means put into their hands of effecting their long-desired pacification with France, by the Prince-Regent sending for their leaders to form a ministry on the expiry of the year of restriction enforced on him by act of Parliament, on his assuming the power of King. If the Whigs had succeeded in forming a government at that period, if the apparently trivial dispute about the household appointments had not restored their opponents to power, there can be no doubt that a peace, similar to that of Utrecht, would have stopped the war for a time, and bequeathed its dangers and its burdens to another, perhaps the present age. And this was on the eve of the Salamanca campaign, and at the opening of the Moscow expedition !* *“The negotiation between the Prince-Regent and the Whigs was broken off on the 6th June 1812. On the 13th of the same month, Wellington crossed the Portuguese frontier, and commenced the Salamanca campaign; while on the 23d Napoleon passed the Niemen, and perilled his crown and his life on the precarious issue of a Russian invasion."-ALISON's Europe, chap. lxiv. § 45, |