CHAPTER XIX
On Friday, 1 November 1700, King Charles II of Spain died in his palace in Madrid. Weak in body as in mind, he had come to the throne at the age of four on the death of his father, Philip IV, and one glance at the luckless child had been enough to convince the court of his total inadequacy for the tasks that lay ahead of him. Charles looked like a caricature of a Habsburg, his chin and jaw projecting so far that the lower teeth could make no contact with the upper ones. He was always ill, to the point where many suspected witchcraft. Few of his subjects believed for an instant that he would grow up to assume power over his immense dominions. But grow up he did, and after a ten-year regency under his mother, Mariana–daughter of the Emperor Ferdinand III–he took over, at least in theory, the reins of government. Thus, from the day of his accession in 1665 and for the next thirty-five years Spain was effectively a great monarchy without a monarch. Never was there a suggestion that Charles might have a personal policy of his own. He was hardly ever at his desk except when there were papers–almost always unread–for him to sign, and the day in May 1694 when he was obliged to miss his lunch caused such astonishment that it was recorded in a contemporary journal. Government of the country was left to a succession of Prime Ministers of varying ability, and to the grandees of Spain.
And, above all, to the Church and its principal instrument, the Inquisition. As the King himself told the British ambassador, he never meddled in religious affairs. Jews and Protestants were the Inquisition’s most usual victims, but in fact no foreigner was safe. When the ambassador’s chaplain died in 1691 he had to be buried in secret; even then, his body was subsequently dug up and mutilated. And there is no doubt that the expulsion of the Moriscos161 in 1610–achieved by the Inquisition acting with the dreadful Duke of Lerma–had dealt Spain a blow from which it took centuries to recover. On the Moriscos had depended much of the agricultural production of the country: cereals, sugar, rice, cotton, even paper. What little industry Spain could boast had also been in their hands. Thus by 1700 Seville and Toledo, Segovia and Burgos were pale shadows of what they had been a hundred years before. For the peasantry and the working-class populations of the towns, conditions grew bleaker with every year that passed. In 1699 came famine: a crowd of 20,000 assembled before the royal palace, and a full-scale revolution was narrowly averted.
It came as no surprise that Charles II, despite two marriages, had failed to produce any offspring, and as the century drew to its close the question of who should succeed him grew steadily in importance. The problem was that the Spanish crown was coveted–and indeed claimed–by the two mightiest dynasties of Europe. Of the two daughters of King Philip III the elder, Anne, had been married to Louis XIII of France; the younger, Maria, to the Emperor Ferdinand III of Austria. Anne had in due course given birth to the future Louis XIV, Maria to the Emperor Leopold I. Louis might have been thought to have a secondary claim through his wife, Maria Teresa, who was Charles II’s elder sister; unfortunately for him, however, his bride had been obliged on her marriage formally to renounce all her hereditary rights in the Spanish dominions.
Charles’s younger sister Margaret, on the other hand, had made no such renunciation when she had married the Emperor Leopold I; her small grandson Joseph Ferdinand–son of her daughter Maria Antonia and Max Emanuel, Elector of Bavaria–was consequently the Habsburg claimant. Already the scene seemed to be set for a struggle. When in 1698 Charles made a will confirming Joseph Ferdinand as his heir and successor, the matter might have been thought to be settled, but in February 1699 the young prince unexpectedly died. His sudden death was attributed, rather unconvincingly, to smallpox; there were many, among them the boy’s own father, who suspected poison and did not hesitate to say so. Once again, intricate diplomatic negotiations began–not only among the three powers most directly concerned, but also with the participation of England and Holland.162 These two maritime countries both carried on immensely profitable trade with Spain; there were several British and Dutch merchants permanently resident in Cadiz and other Spanish ports. Through much of the seventeenth century the two had been at loggerheads; now, however, they shared a common concern: to keep out the French. If Spain were to pass from the hands of the weakest monarch in Europe into those of the strongest, what chance was there that trade would be allowed to continue?
Backwards and forwards shuttled the ambassadors between the European capitals, until in June 1699 what was known as the Second Treaty of Partition (never mind the First) was signed by William III of England and Louis XIV of France; it was hoped that the States-General of Holland and the Emperor Leopold would give their assent later. By its terms the formerly Spanish kingdoms of Naples and Sicily were allotted to France, together with the Spanish lands along the coast of Tuscany and–in exchange for Milan–the Duchy of Lorraine. Spain and the rest of Charles II’s inheritance would fall to the Emperor’s younger son, the Archduke Charles. In March 1700 the States-General signed up; only Leopold held out. He saw no reason why France should help herself to any imperial territories, and he was particularly incensed at the idea that he should surrender Milan. So far as he was concerned, his son should assume the entire Spanish inheritance–and he was prepared to fight for it.
Leopold’s reactions were moderate, however, in comparison to those of the Spanish court when, in June, the terms of the treaty were communicated to Madrid. It was reported that, on receipt of the news, the King ‘flew into an extraordinary passion, and the Queen in her rage smashed to pieces everything in her room’. Clearly, Spain’s greatest hope of support lay with Austria, a natural ally against the partitioning powers. Letters flew between King and Emperor, and the prospect of war began to loom larger still. But Charles had one more surprise up his sleeve. By the autumn of 1700 it was plain that he had not long to live, and on 3 October he put his tremulous signature to a new will, by the terms of which he left all his dominions without exception to Louis XIV’s seventeen-year-old grandson, Philip, Duke of Anjou. A month later he was dead.
What caused this sudden change of heart in favour of France? Above all, the Church. The Inquisition, and indeed the whole hierarchy and clergy of Spain, had long favoured a French solution, and Pope Innocent XII–who was actually to die five weeks before the King–had himself written to him recommending the Duke of Anjou. With the consciousness of approaching death and the voice of his father confessor whispering into his ear, Charles no longer had the strength to argue.
‘Never,’ wrote King William III of England on 16 November 1700, ‘did I much rely on engagements with France; but I must confess I did not think they would have broken, in the face of the whole world, a solemn treaty before it was well accomplished.’ He cannot in truth have been all that surprised; Louis–or at least his grandson–had been offered on a plate far more than he could ever have hoped for, and the King’s character was certainly not such as to pass it all up for the sake of a treaty upon which the ink was scarcely dry. Well aware that Leopold would not accept this new dispensation without protest, he lost no time in packing the young claimant off to Madrid to assume his throne without delay, in company with a bevy of French officials to take over all the key posts of government and, as his special guide and mentor, the redoubtable Princesse des Ursins.163 In fact, Philip V was to be readily accepted in his new kingdom, only Catalonia proving hostile, but this was by no means enough to ensure an uncontested succession. What Louis could not have known was how long and how desperate the ensuing war would be, or what a price he would have to pay for his grandson’s throne.
The Treaty of Partition was now hardly worth the paper it was written on; clearly it would have to be replaced. And so, on 7 September 1701 at the Hague, representatives of England, Holland and the Empire signed what was to become known as the Grand Alliance. In certain areas its terms were left deliberately vague, but its principal objectives for the coming war–the imminence of which could no longer be in doubt–were plain enough. The imperial aims were frankly political: Leopold was out to recover for the Empire all the Spanish possessions in Italy. Those of England and Holland, on the other hand, were almost exclusively commercial: they wished only to secure the future of their navigation and trade.
But seven months before, in February of that same year, Philip of Anjou had entered Madrid as Philip V of Spain, and French troops had occupied the Spanish Netherlands.164 The war had already begun.
The War of the Spanish Succession is, for most of us, associated with the great Duke of Marlborough; and it was in northern Europe, not in the south, that he created his magnificent legend. Those blood-soaked battlefields of Blenheim and Ramillies, of Oudenarde and Malplaquet, are hundreds of miles from the Mediterranean and no business of ours. But the Middle Sea too played its part; indeed, the war began with a brief land campaign on Italian soil, during which the French were able to secure various formerly Spanish possessions in Lombardy and the Po valley; and at the very outbreak of hostilities in 1701, a considerable allied army had assembled in the south Tyrol under the command of Prince Eugene of Savoy165 with the object of expelling them. Meanwhile the French commander, the splendidly named Marshal Nicholas Catinat de la Fauconnerie, who had no intention of being expelled and assumed that the Prince would follow the valley of the Adige, drew up his army on the shores of Lake Garda and awaited the attack. But Eugene was too clever for him. Sending a small detachment along the right bank of the Adige as a feint, he brought the bulk of his army–16,000 foot and some 6,000 horse–by narrow and obscure mountain paths over Monte Baldo, finally approaching the French unexpectedly, on their right flank.
Catinat lost his head. Taken completely off guard and uncertain of Eugene’s intentions, he spread out his army in small detachments over some sixty miles. It was a fatal mistake, of which the Prince took full advantage. Attacking one detachment after another, he scored a succession of small but decisive victories–culminating in a midwinter raid on Cremona to capture another marshal, the Duc de Villeroi166 –and threw the French into total confusion. The following year they recovered: Catinat had been succeeded by the Duc de Vendôme–an infinitely better general–whose army had received massive reinforcements sent by Philip of Spain from Naples. Eugene, his lines of communication with Vienna suddenly cut off, was thrown for the first time on to the defensive. By then, however, the epicentre of the war had shifted. Italy was largely forgotten.
But not the Mediterranean. Already at the time of the Partition Treaty, the future of the Middle Sea had been much in King William’s mind. It was not only the continuation of trade with Spain that preoccupied him; it was also the realisation that, if Spain were to pass into Bourbon hands, England might be excluded from the entire Mediterranean basin unless she could find herself a secure stronghold within it. He had long had his eye on Minorca, and he was also planning with his admiral, Sir George Rooke, to occupy Cadiz before the French could do so.167 William’s death in March 1702 put paid to this latter idea; Rooke had never had much enthusiasm for it, and his attack on the port the following autumn proved a fiasco. Two years later, however, he redeemed it in full–when, with an Anglo-Dutch fleet, he captured Gibraltar.
The Rock had been in Spanish hands since 1462, and in 1501 had been formally annexed to Spain by Queen Isabella; but its defences were poor and its tiny garrison showed little appetite for resistance. It surrendered to Rooke on 4 August, having held out for just three days, at a cost to the attackers of sixty killed and some 200 wounded. The admiral had a real chance to show his mettle only three weeks afterwards when, on 23 August, off the Spanish coast near Malaga, he ran into a French fleet of about fifty sail under the Count of Toulouse. What followed was later described by Rooke as ‘the sharpest day’s service I ever saw’. Losses were high on both sides. There was no doubt, however, that the British had the best of it; when day broke on 27 August there was not a Frenchman in sight. The French fleet had withdrawn to Toulon, and for the rest of the war made no effort to dispute the allied control of the Mediterranean.
The capture of Gibraltar had not immediately made it a British colony. Technically, Rooke had taken it on behalf of the imperialist claimant, the Archduke Charles, and almost exactly a year after its fall, on 2 August 1705, the Archduke had disembarked from a British naval vessel and had been formally recognised there as King Charles III of Spain. Meanwhile the Rock was garrisoned by two British and two Dutch regiments, and although its governor, Major-General Sir John Shrimpton, was an Englishman, he and his staff continued to acknowledge Charles’s sovereignty. On the King’s birthday in 1705 three rounds from thirty-five guns were fired in salute; on that of Queen Anne five months later, there was only one round from twenty-one guns. But these were early days, when Charles still seemed to have a fair chance of winning the Spanish throne. Later, as those chances diminished, the future of Gibraltar took on a different complexion. Surely there could be no question of its passing to the hated Philip V–and through him, for all anybody knew, to his still more hated grandfather, Louis XIV? How much safer if it were kept, permanently, in British hands…
The next major Italian campaign opened only in 1706. Prince Eugene had recognised that further progress was impossible without substantial reinforcements, and had returned to Vienna to find them. Taking advantage of his absence, Vendôme had launched a surprise attack on the imperial army at its camp near Brescia and had driven it back into the Tyrol. He had, however, reckoned without Eugene who, with 24,000 troops from Germany–raised thanks to an English subsidy of £250,000–entered Italy early in July down the valley of the Adige and marched south to the Po. Crossing it, he then headed west along the right bank, driving the enemy before him. At Villa Stellona, just south of Pavia, he joined another army under the Duke of Savoy, and together they advanced on Turin, where–though easily outnumbered–they inflicted a resounding defeat on the French forces. It was the end. In March 1707, by the Convention of Milan, Louis XIV abandoned northern Italy.
In Spain, on the other hand, he continued to fight; indeed, he had no choice. In the spring of 1706 a squadron commanded by Admiral Sir Clowdisley Shovell had carried a force under the Earl of Peterborough through the Straits of Gibraltar to the east coast, where Barcelona had willingly accepted the imperial claimant as King Charles III. Meanwhile an English–Dutch–Portuguese army under the Earl of Galway168 had invaded Extremadura from Portugal and had continued eastward to Madrid. It entered the city on 26 June, only to evacuate it again after a few weeks in recognition of one indisputable fact: that outside Catalonia and Valencia Spain was overwhelmingly in support of King Philip. Disappointment over Madrid was, however, easily outweighed by allied successes in northern Europe, to the point where, in August, King Louis made it known that he was ready to come to terms: he would leave Spain to Charles in return for the recognition of Philip’s right to Milan, Naples and Sicily.
At that time, it need hardly be said, neither England nor the Empire were prepared to listen; twelve months later, they may well have wished that they had. The year 1707 saw no great victories in the north and, in the south, two disasters. The first was when on 25 April Galway’s motley force of some 15,000 men was heavily defeated at Almansa, some sixty miles southwest of Valencia, by a greatly superior army of French and Spaniards under King Louis’s leading general the Duke of Berwick, the natural son of King James II of England by the Duke of Marlborough’s sister Arabella.169 At a single blow Valencia, Murcia and Aragon were lost to the allies. Worse still, perhaps, they were therefore unable to supplement the forces of Prince Eugene when, in July, he attacked Toulon. Eugene was almost as great a general as was his chief, the Duke of Marlborough; it is sad indeed that his last venture in the Mediterranean should, through no fault of his own, have cast something of a shadow over his reputation. If his attempt on Toulon proved a failure, this was due entirely to his two principal allies, the Emperor Leopold and the Duke of Savoy. Leopold had at the critical moment seen fit to detach some 13,000 men to attack Naples; Savoy for his part had shown himself to be weak and indecisive–so much so that by the time Eugene eventually landed on Provençal soil on 26 July the battle was already as good as lost. Ten thousand men were needlessly sacrificed. It was perhaps some consolation to know that, rather than allowing Toulon to fall into allied hands, the French had deliberately scuttled their squadron of some fifty sail in its harbour; the fact remained that their principal southern port, which should have been Eugene’s for the taking, had been forfeited through sheer inefficiency and muddle, and the English fleet was still deprived of the one thing it needed more than any other: a good, safe harbour in the Mediterranean where it would be protected from winter storms, where its provisions and supplies could be safely stored and where its ships could be properly refitted.
As things turned out, it did not have to wait much longer. Minorca, the furthest of the Balearic Islands to the northeast and consequently the nearest to France, had long been an object of interest to the British navy; and in the summer of 1708 Major-General James Stanhope–who had been sent to Spain as Minister, but who had some months before succeeded Galway as Commander-in-Chief–received orders from Marlborough to take the island’s capital, Port Mahon. Supported by a fleet of thirty-four ships under Admiral Sir John Leake–who had hastened to Minorca from Sardinia, where he had been bombarding Cagliari170 –he landed in Minorca on 14 September with about 1,200 British, 800 Spanish and 600 Portuguese troops. It was another fortnight before he was ready to attack. A road had to be constructed to carry the guns and provisions the mile from his landing-place to his first objective, Fort St Philip; even then, the fort’s commanding position overlooking the harbour made it almost impregnable. Stanhope dealt with the problem by offering generous terms for its surrender and threatening to slaughter the entire garrison if these were not accepted. The French and Spanish commanders might even then have continued to resist, had it not been for the large number of women and children who had taken refuge there. They therefore decided to surrender–a decision they were later to regret. Both were subsequently imprisoned, and the Spanish commander killed himself.
Other forts quickly followed St Philip’s example, the speed of Stanhope’s progress being due largely to the goodwill of the local population, who had had quite enough of both French and Spaniards: the magistrates of Mahon willingly handed over the keys to the city as soon as the invaders approached. By the end of the month the entire island was effectively in British hands. It was to remain so, with a short intermission between 1756 and 1763, for very nearly a century. To Stanhope it mattered little that the island, like Gibraltar, had technically surrendered to King Charles III of Spain, who was indeed formally proclaimed as its king on 8 November. ‘England,’ he wrote, ‘ought never to part with this island, which will give the law to the Mediterranean both in time of war and of peace.’ To emphasise the fact, he left a garrison consisting entirely of British troops, all the Spanish and Portuguese being returned to Spain to assist King Charles. By June 1709 he had spent £11,000 on the island’s defences.
To Galway on the Spanish mainland, meanwhile, matters were looking increasingly grave. He tended to blame his reverses principally on his Portuguese troops–at Almansa they had been a distinct liability–and early in 1708 marched them back to their homeland. They were replaced by Germans made available by the recent armistice in Italy, under their commander Count von Starhemberg, but even then it proved impossible to stop the imperialists taking Tortosa, so cutting communications between Barcelona and Valencia. Not until 1710 was any progress made, when the allies marched for the second time on Madrid. The city fell on 23 September, but once again Charles failed to hold it: by the end of the year he had to retreat to Catalonia. Even there, his hold was tenuous enough: in January 1711 the French captured Gerona.
Then, just three months later on 17 April, the Emperor Joseph I died in Vienna at the age of thirty-three–this time it was unquestionably smallpox–and the entire European political scene was transformed overnight. Joseph had succeeded his father, Leopold, in 1705, had done much to reform the Empire’s chaotic finances and had warmly espoused the claims of his younger brother Charles to Spain. But Charles was now not just a Spanish claimant; he was the obvious successor to his brother on the imperial throne. The Grand Alliance had been formed only in order to prevent a single family, the Bourbons, from becoming too powerful; if Charles were to succeed to the Empire–as indeed he did, being elected in the following year–the Habsburgs threatened to be more powerful still, with all their dominions once more united as in the days of his great-great-great-great-uncle Charles V. Inevitably, many months were to pass before the European powers were able to come to terms with the new situation; it was not until New Year’s Day 1712 that negotiations began between the allies and France in the Dutch city of Utrecht.
Before we leave for Utrecht, however, we must return briefly to Minorca and to Gibraltar, whose status remained ambiguous. In England the Whigs, who had dominated the first half of Queen Anne’s reign,171 had been replaced by a Tory government, and the new ministry had decided that the Emperor Charles VI was now a far more serious danger than the Bourbons had ever been and no longer merited British support. Besides, the Bourbons too were now ready for peace. The war in the north was threatening France with disaster–Marlborough was still carrying all before him–and King Louis was increasingly anxious to come to terms. Concessions would therefore have to be made, preferably–Louis being Louis–with other people’s property; and what concessions could be more acceptable to the British than the acknowledgement of their claim to Gibraltar? On 31 May the King informed Queen Anne: ‘On a parole du Roi d’Espagne de laisser aux Anglais Gibraltar pour la sûreté réelle de leur commerce en Espagne et dans la Méditerranée.’172
In fact, he had nothing of the kind, but Philip was in no position to complain. Hitherto he had been a good deal more fortunate than his grandfather: the war in Spain against Charles and his allies had been moderately successful. But for how long would his luck hold? The succession of Charles to the Empire meant that the latter would henceforth have all its resources at his disposal. There were also rumours that Prince Eugene might be sent to take over the command in Spain, and Philip was all too well aware that he had no generals with half the Prince’s experience or brilliance to set against him. Finally, if France and Britain made a separate peace, he would be deprived of all French military support. He saw that he had no choice, and so he reluctantly informed King Louis that he was ready to offer the British both their recent conquests.
Peace negotiations were quietly and discreetly set in train: Britain recognised Philip V as King of Spain, while Spain and France were obliged to accept that Minorca and Gibraltar would remain in British hands. At first Louis kept quiet about Minorca. The Rock was of little strategic value to him; the island, on the other hand, was only a day’s sail from France and, as he had recently seen, could be used as a springboard for an attack on Toulon and his Mediterranean coast, so he had no intention of handing it over unless he had to. What he did not know was the admonition that had been given to the British negotiators before they left for Utrecht: that they were to insist that ‘Gibraltar and Port Mahon, with the island of Minorca, be for the future annexed to the Crown of these realms’–and not to take no for an answer.
There was still a little trouble with the Dutch. They had played their part in the taking of the Rock in 1704, and they had provided an important part of its garrison ever since. They had understandably expected to be rewarded; now, equally understandably, they felt betrayed. At first they refused to withdraw their troops from Gibraltar, even threatening to continue the war alone. But no one took them too seriously. The truth was that they desperately needed British support to protect them in the Netherlands–and both they and the British knew it.
What is generally known as the Treaty of Utrecht was in fact a whole series of treaties in which, after a European upheaval that had lasted for eleven years, France and Spain attempted once again to regulate their relations with their neighbours. Most of the subjects upon which agreements were reached do not concern us here. Where the future of the Mediterranean was concerned, however, both countries made major concessions. France and Spain both formally recognised Duke Victor Amadeus II of Savoy–who happened to be King Philip’s father-in-law–as King of Sicily, his northern dominion extending to include the formerly French city of Nice. Spain in addition accepted the transfer to the Empire of the formerly Spanish areas of Italy and the Netherlands, and effectively handed over Minorca and Gibraltar to Britain. She did not, however, do so unconditionally. Although the treaty conferred on the British Crown perpetual property rights over part of the present territory of Gibraltar (Britain has shamelessly extended it since), provided that the Catholic religion should continue to be freely exercised and that Jews and Moors should be prohibited from settling there, the ultimate sovereignty over the Rock she explicitly reserved to herself.173 What is rather less well known is that she also put her name to the so-called asiento agreement, by which she gave the British the exclusive right to supply her overseas colonies with African slaves, at the rate of 4,800 slaves a year for thirty years.
The Emperor Charles fought on until 1714, and the final peace had to be signed without him. It was essentially on his behalf that the great struggle had continued for the past twelve years, and by distancing himself from the peacemakers he did his Empire a lasting disservice. His interests were not altogether ignored during the long negotiations at Utrecht, but since they were fundamentally opposed to those of France, Bourbon Spain and the United Provinces–as the Dutch now called themselves–while Britain remained largely indifferent, it was inevitable that they should have been to some degree neglected. Nevertheless, when the negotiators returned to their homes, Charles found himself master not only of the body of his Empire but also of the Catholic Netherlands, Milan, Naples and Sardinia. He was hardly in a position to complain, but with a modicum of diplomatic finesse he could probably have done better still.
And the Spanish throne? This was of course the most important question of all, the original casus belli, the reason for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of men across the continent. It was at last resolved–as it by now virtually had to be–in favour of Philip. His kingdom had been drastically amputated–though he would certainly not miss the Low Countries, which had long been a millstone round the Spanish neck. Anyway, there were compensations. He kept Spanish America and all the wealth that it brought him, and he was, thenceforth and for the next thirty years, to rule uncontested as King Philip V of Spain.174
Where he must stand condemned is in his treatment of the Catalans. Despite the fact that they had been staunch champions of Charles of Habsburg, in Article XIII of the Anglo-Spanish Treaty Philip formally accorded to them, by reason of his respect for the Queen of Great Britain, a complete amnesty and all the privileges at that time enjoyed by the Castilians, ‘of all the peoples of Spain, that which the King cherished most’. It was plain from the start, however, that he had no intention of forgiving them for what he considered their disloyalty, and early in 1713 he had demanded their unconditional submission. They not surprisingly had refused, and had set up a provisional government of their own; whereupon in July 1714 Philip had sent a detachment of troops to invest Barcelona. The city fought back, and indeed held out for nearly two months; even after the besiegers had been joined by a French army under the Duke of Berwick and a French fleet, it refused to surrender. On the night of 11 September there was a general assault. The Catalans doggedly defended every street, often every house, until they could fight no more. The survivors were sold into slavery, and the standards of Catalonia were, by the King’s orders, burned in the public market by the common hangman.
Whether Philip V ever felt remorse for his treatment of the Catalans is doubtful. He soon, however, had cause to regret his surrender of Spanish Italy. Soon after the death in 1714 of his first wife, Maria Louisa of Savoy, he married the twenty-two-year-old Elizabeth Farnese, niece and stepdaughter of the Duke of Parma. The new Queen–undistinguished by beauty, education or experience–began as she meant to continue. Before she even reached Madrid she picked a quarrel with the Princesse des Ursins–who had travelled half-way across the country to meet her–on the stairs of a wayside inn and bundled her unceremoniously, alone and shivering, over the snowy Pyrenees and back to France. On arrival in the capital she immediately summoned her uncle’s agent, a highly intelligent if unscrupulous churchman named Giulio Alberoni, the son of a gardener in Piacenza. From that day all French influence vanished from the Spanish court; it became Italian through and through, and Alberoni–whom just three years later she persuaded Pope Clement XI to appoint a cardinal–quietly set to work on the general reconstruction of Spain, with particular reference to the creation of a fleet.
Since Queen Maria Louisa had left three sons, Elizabeth could have little hope of the Spanish throne. Her long-term objective was therefore to ensure her succession after her uncle’s death to Parma and Piacenza, and also perhaps to Tuscany by virtue of her descent from the Medici. Nor was she alone in desiring it. The Emperor Charles was still unhappy with the recent dispensations. He was particularly riled by the grant of Sicily to the house of Savoy, and was known to be in contact with Victor Amadeus with a view to exchanging it for the island of Sardinia. Elizabeth and Alberoni were equally determined that he should do nothing of the kind: Sicily, once it had become part of the Empire, would constitute a permanent threat to Spain’s Mediterranean coast. They first moved, however, against imperial Sardinia. In August 1717 an expedition sailed from Barcelona to Cagliari, and by the end of November the island was theirs. Only then, emboldened by this easy success, did they decide to move directly on Sicily. On 1 July 1718 Spanish troops were landed near Palermo, where they received a warm welcome–giving strength to the Spanish argument that both islands, having been in the possession of Aragon since the thirteenth century and thus for more than a hundred years before that kingdom’s union with Castile, were far more Spanish than much of Spain.
And so at that time they were; but the argument was unlikely to appeal to Charles VI, and Charles had just concluded what was rather misleadingly described as the Quadruple Alliance with Britain and France.175 The Empire had no navy, but Britain did; and so it was that a British fleet under Admiral Sir George Byng hastened to Sicily, where it totally destroyed the Spanish fleet off Cape Passero, at the island’s southeast corner. Unfortunately Britain was not at that time at war with Spain; she was acting only on behalf of her ally the Emperor. Byng’s action thus created a tidal wave of violence, the effects of which were felt throughout Europe, as far away as the Sweden of Charles XII and the Russia of Peter the Great. Victor Amadeus, too, was loud in his protests, but he had to submit to the inevitable. The Kingdom of Sicily was taken from him and given to Charles; that of Sardinia was granted to him in its stead. Where Britain was concerned, Alberoni’s rage was such that he launched a second Armada, a threat which in London was taken very seriously indeed. On 17 December 1718 Parliament declared war; less than a month later France followed suit.
The Armada, when it sailed in the summer of 1719, proved no more successful than its famous predecessor: it ran into storms in the Bay of Biscay and was wrecked off Finisterre, never even reaching English waters. A separate expedition headed for Scotland and actually landed a Spanish force in the Western Highlands–of which, however, the clans soon made short shrift. More serious for Spain, and a good deal more surprising, was the arrival of a French army under the Duke of Berwick. Philip V had difficulty in believing that his own country would take up arms against him, or that Berwick would march against his old friend, but he was soon disillusioned. There was nothing much he could do about it, since his army was away in Sicily. He had to watch, powerless, while Catalonia was invaded and Vigo occupied.
Alberoni, the ultimate author of all these misfortunes, could no longer hold out. In December 1719, the victim of a conspiracy led by his old patron the Duke of Parma, he was dismissed and banished from Spain. In foreign affairs he had been an adventurer and an intriguer, impatient and over-ambitious; domestically, on the other hand, he had shown himself a fine administrator, and although primarily a patriotic Italian he had worked hard and on the whole effectively for the benefit of his adopted country. After his departure there seemed no reason to continue hostilities, and Philip hoped for favourable terms. He was disappointed. Britain, France and the Empire refused absolutely to listen to him until Spain too had joined the Quadruple Alliance–which on 17 February 1720, with extreme reluctance, she did.
When all those international agreements collectively known as the Treaty of Utrecht were signed during the first four months of 1713, Venice had been in possession of the Peloponnese for just over a quarter of a century. Her new experiment in empire had not been a success. The years of Turkish occupation that had preceded her reconquest had reduced a once prosperous land to a place of poverty and desolation; all too soon she had realised that the task of administration would be expensive and largely thankless. The downtrodden local populations, their patriotism nurtured and sanctified as always by the Orthodox clergy, dreamed of a nationhood of their own and saw little advantage in having their infidel overlords replaced by Christian schismatics who showed no greater sympathy with their aspirations. Defence was another problem. In former days, when the Venetian presence had been confined to a few important commercial colonies and garrison towns, it had been manageable enough; but how could nearly 1,000 miles of serrated coastline be made safe from invaders? Even such new defences as were deemed indispensable, like the lowering fortress of Acrocorinth–still today one of the most impressive examples of Venetian military architecture in existence–served only to antagonise still further the local inhabitants, with whose taxes it was paid for and with whose conscript labour it was built. No wonder that when in 1715 Turkish troops appeared once again on the soil of the Peloponnese, they were welcomed as liberators.
Damad Ali, Grand Vizir to the Sultan Ahmet III, had planned a combined operation, in which a land force would march down through Thessaly while a fleet sailed simultanously southwest through the Aegean; in the course of the summer both prongs of the attack scored success after success. By the time the fleet reached its destination it had already forced the surrender of Tinos and of Aegina, while the army captured Corinth after a five-day siege. Nauplia followed, then Modone and Corone, Monemvasia (Malvasia) and the island of Cythera. Meanwhile, the Turks in Crete, encouraged by reports of their compatriots’ success, had attacked and seized the last remaining Venetian outposts. By the end of 1715, with Crete and the Peloponnese both lost and all the great victories of Francesco Morosini set at naught, the Turks were once again at the gates of the Adriatic. For Venice only a single bulwark remained: Corfu.
The army that, early in 1716, the Grand Vizir flung against the citadel of Corfu consisted of 30,000 infantry and some 3,000 horse. For the Venetians, estimates differ. They were certainly outnumbered; but in siege warfare comparative strengths are less important than the sophistication of offensive and defensive techniques, and here Venice could count on the knowledge and skill of one of the leading soldiers of his day. Marshal Matthias Johann von der Schulenburg had fought under Marlborough at Oudenarde and Malplaquet, then after the peace had sought service with Venice. He had spent much of the winter improving the fortifications of Corfu, and though he could not prevent the Turkish army from disembarking, he was able to confront it with a defensive system far superior to anything it had previously encountered.
All through the heat of the summer the siege continued. Early in August, however, there arrived reports that gave new encouragement to the defenders and struck gloom into Turkish hearts. Venice had concluded an alliance with the Empire, which had entered the war. The almost legendary Prince Eugene was once again on the march. He had routed a Turkish army, appropriately enough at Karlowitz–the very town in which, eighteen years before, the Turks had signed that treaty which they had now so shamefully broken–and shortly afterwards had won a still more crushing victory at Peterwardein, where he had killed 20,000 of the enemy and seized 200 of their guns at the expense of fewer than 3,000 of his own men.
This unexpected necessity of fighting simultaneously on two fronts probably convinced the Turkish commander that if he could not take Corfu quickly he would be unlikely to take it at all. On the night of 18 August he ordered a general assault, to the usual accompaniment of an ear-splitting din of drums, trumpets, rifle and cannon fire and hideous shrieks and war-cries–psychological warfare of a primitive but by no means ineffectual kind. Schulenburg was instantly at his post, summoning every able-bodied Corfiot–women and children, the old and infirm, priests and monks alike–to the defences. After several hours the fighting was still desperate, and he decided to stake all on a sudden sortie. Shortly before dawn, at the head of 800 picked men, he slipped out of a small postern and fell on the Turkish flank from the rear. His success was immediate–and decisive. The Turks were taken by surprise and fled, leaving their rifles and ammunition behind them. Their bewildered colleagues along other sections of the wall saw that the assault had failed and also retired, though in better order. The next night, as if to consolidate the Venetian triumph, a storm broke–a storm of such violence that within hours the Turkish camp was a quagmire, the trenches turned to canals, the tents torn to ribbons or, with their guy-ropes snapped, lifted bodily into the air and carried off by the gale. Out in the roadstead many of the Turkish ships, similarly driven from their moorings, crashed into each other, splintering like matchwood.
When dawn broke and the full extent of the damage was revealed, few of the erstwhile besiegers wished to remain another moment on an island where the very gods seemed to be against them; indeed, within a matter of days the Turkish commander received orders to return at once. Corfu was saved; Schulenburg was awarded a jewelled sword, a life pension of 5,000 ducats, and the honour of a statue erected in his lifetime in the old fortress.176 The Turks withdrew, never again to seek to enlarge their empire at the expense of Christian Europe.
The effect on Venetian morale was enormous. Early the following spring a new fleet of twenty-seven sail set out from Zante for the Dardanelles under the command of a brilliant young admiral, Ludovico Flangini. On 21 June 1717 it met the Turks head-on, and after a battle that lasted several days won a splendid victory, marred only by the death of Flangini who, mortally wounded by an arrow, insisted on being carried up to his quarterdeck to watch, through glazing eyes, the last stages of the conflict. A month later, off Cape Matapan, the Ottoman fleet was again beaten and put to flight. By then Prince Eugene had reoccupied the all-important river fortress of Belgrade, and the Turks were retreating on all fronts.
Had the war continued another season and the Venetians managed to sustain their momentum, the Peloponnese might have been theirs once more–though whether this would have been in their long-term interests is open to doubt. But the Turks decided to sue for peace, and it was now that Venice was to discover how ill-advised she had been to conclude her Austrian alliance. The Empire, faced with new threats from Spain, was anxious to reach a quick settlement and paid little heed to Venetian territorial claims, on the entirely spurious grounds that the victory of Corfu and the subsequent upsurge of Venice’s fortunes were the direct results of Prince Eugene’s victory at Peterwardein. Thus, when the parties met in May 1718 at Passarowitz–together with representatives of England and Holland as mediators–the Venetian envoy, Carlo Ruzzini, found that he could make little impression on his colleagues. For six hours he pleaded, calling for the restitution to Venice of Soudha and Spinalonga, of Tinos, Cythera and the Peloponnese–or, in default of this last, an extension of Venetian territory in Albania as far south as Scutari and Dulcigno, a pirate stronghold that she was eager to eliminate. But his appeal coincided with the news that 18,000 Spanish troops had landed in Sardinia, and he was overruled.
The treaty was signed on 21 July 1718. Two months later to the day, in another of those terrifying Mediterranean summer storms, a bolt of lightning struck the powder magazine in the old fortress of Corfu. The explosion ignited three smaller ammunition stores, and the citadel was virtually destroyed. The governor’s palace was reduced to rubble, killing the Captain-General and several of his staff. Nature, in a split second, had achieved more than the combined Turkish forces had in several months; the futility of the recent war was more than ever underlined.
At Passarowitz the frontiers of the Venetian Empire were drawn for the last time. There would be no more gains, or losses, or exchanges. In the Mediterranean, apart from the historic city and the towns and islands of the lagoon, the empire embraced Istria, Dalmatia and its dependent islands; then northern Albania, including Cattaro (Kotor), Butrinto, Parga, Preveza and Vonitsa; then the Ionian islands of Corfu, Paxos and Antipaxos, Leucas, Cephalonia, Ithaca and Zante; finally, to the south of the Peloponnese, the island of Cythera. That was all. The age of imperial greatness was past. Still, there were compensations. Morosini’s conquests had given Venice nothing but trouble; she was better off without them. Passarowitz, inglorious as it may have appeared, settled her differences with the Turks and proclaimed eternal friendship with Habsburg Austria, the only other power which might have posed a serious political threat. The result was peace–peace which was to last the best part of a century, until the coming of Napoleon brought the Republic itself to an end.
When George I–having arrived somewhat reluctantly from Hanover–succeeded Queen Anne on the British throne in 1714, he expressed himself perfectly ready to return Gibraltar to Spain. So, somewhat more surprisingly, did Stanhope, the hero of Minorca, who now effectively held the rank of Foreign Secretary and who more than once gave it as his opinion that the Rock was more a liability than an advantage. When he suggested as much in Parliament, however, he was met by such a barrage of protest that he hastily withdrew, fearing a formal resolution which might make it even harder to dispose of. Then, in March 1721, a treaty of mutual defence was signed at Madrid between Spain and France in which the eleven-year-old Louis XV promised his enthusiastic support for the restoration of Gibraltar. Stanhope had died six weeks before, but his policy was pursued by his successors. King George actually wrote to Philip promising to restore it, in return for certain concessions, as soon as the consent of Parliament could be obtained–which was not, as it turned out, very soon; in June he even put his name to the treaty. Once again, in the great international game of musical chairs, the music had stopped: Britain, France, Spain and Prussia177 were now aligned against the Emperor and the Tsar.
It soon started again. Queen Elizabeth Farnese was always an impossible bedfellow, and she had been far from pleased when young Louis XV had summarily dismissed the young Spanish Infanta whom he had been due to marry. In April 1725 representatives of Austria and Spain signed a treaty at Vienna. Now it was the Emperor who promised to use all his good offices to induce the British to surrender both Gibraltar and Minorca to Spain. But the British had hardened their hearts: Foreign Secretary Lord Townshend showed a very different attitude from that of his predecessor Stanhope. ‘The Imperialists,’ he wrote in June 1725,
are thoroughly sensible of the great fondness the Parliament and even the whole nation have for Gibraltar; they likewise know that by our laws and Constitution the Crown cannot yield to any foreign power whatsoever any part of his dominions without the consent of Parliament, and that Gibraltar, being yielded to Great Britain by the Treaty of Utrecht, is as much annexed to the Crown as Ireland, or any part of England.
Nor did he stop there. He devoted the next year to the formation of a great league of northern powers–it included Sweden, Denmark, and many of the small German principalities–and by 1727 Europe was an armed camp. Already in February of that year Spain declared war on England and laid siege–unsuccessfully–to Gibraltar, while Britain concentrated with rather better results on blocking the annual Spanish treasure fleet from the Americas. Neither party, however, showed much enthusiasm for the war, and hostilities were suspended early in 1728. The ensuing peace, a lady wrote to Lord Carlisle, was rather like the peace of God: it was long in coming and passed all understanding.
Now, yet again, Queen Elizabeth changed sides. On 9 November 1729 at Seville, the representatives of England, France and Spain signed a treaty in which Spain was induced to grant, perhaps for the first time, an ungrudging recognition of the full consequences of the Treaty of Utrecht, including the British occupation of Gibraltar. In return, England and France promised to facilitate the introduction of Spanish garrisons into Tuscany and Parma–which, two years later, they did. Elizabeth’s uncle Antonio Farnese died suddenly in 1731, and her greatest ambition was realised in March 1732 when her son Don Carlos–with a mother like his, he was despite his name far more an Italian than a Spaniard–was formally installed as Duke of Parma and Grand Prince of Tuscany. That same year, infuriated by the increase of Mediterranean piracy, she sent a large expeditionary force to North Africa. Oran was taken, but soon afterwards the Spanish advance was checked and the commander killed in battle.
The Queen, however, was not discouraged; indeed, the success of her son in Italy had whetted her appetite for more. Skilful diplomacy with Louis XV now ensured France’s agreement that Don Carlos should also claim Naples and Sicily, at the Emperor’s expense. In the spring of 1734 he accordingly marched south through the Papal States and on 10 May made a triumphal entry into Naples; by the end of the autumn, despite some resistance from the citadels of Messina, Trapani and Syracuse, Sicily too had welcomed her new invaders. (Just four years later Austria was to be forced to make formal cession of the Two Sicilies, and Don Carlos could succeed to the Neapolitan throne as King Charles III.)
Elizabeth now turned her full attention back to Great Britain, the one enemy she detested more than any other. Of all the issues between the two countries, Gibraltar and Minorca inevitably remained by far the most important. They were not, however, the only bone of contention: there were other quarrels, on both sides of the Atlantic. In Spain, English merchants and seamen were constantly harried by the Inquisition, and even by the ubiquitous press-gangs. English ships provisioning Gibraltar were also subjected to a good deal of interference. In the Americas, there were disputes over boundaries and frontiers, over rights to cut timber and several other issues besides, but the most important was the lucrative smuggling trade that was being shamelessly carried on by the British between Jamaica–in their hands since 1655–and the Spanish colonies in the Caribbean.
Spain protected her interests as best she could with a fleet of coast guards, some of whom, it appeared, were less humane than others. In 1738 an English mariner named Robert Jenkins appeared before Parliament brandishing aloft his amputated ear, which he claimed had been cut from his head by one of these guarda-costas. It was, perhaps, only a minor atrocity, but the Whig opposition howled for blood and the whole country echoed with cries for revenge. The resultant War of Jenkins’ Ear was declared in 1739.178Once again Gibraltar and Minorca were under threat; they were, however, well protected by the navy’s Mediterranean fleet under its Commander-in-Chief, the happily-named Admiral Nicholas Haddock, who successfully blockaded both Cadiz and Barcelona and went on to capture two Spanish treasure ships, each reputed to be worth a million dollars. A war fought on so footling an issue should not have lasted long, but on 20 October 1740 the Emperor Charles VI died in Vienna at the age of fifty-five–and all Europe was once again plunged into confusion.
It must be accounted a misfortune for readers–and indeed for writers–of European history in the eighteenth century that the great struggle for the throne of Spain should have been followed after only twenty-seven years by another, this time for the throne of Austria. The War of the Austrian Succession had, however, less bearing on the Mediterranean, and will therefore take up a good deal less of our time.
The Austrian Empire, being not so much the successor to as the continuation of the Holy Roman, remained theoretically elective; during the three centuries of Habsburg rule, however, the duties of the electors had become more ceremonial than anything else and the throne was by now to all intents and purposes hereditary. Unfortunately, like their Spanish cousins, at this point in their history the Austrian Habsburgs suffered from an acute shortage of male heirs–to the point where, as early as 1703, Leopold I had specifically decreed that, in default of males, females should be allowed to succeed, the daughters of his elder son, Joseph, naturally enough taking precedence over those of his younger son, Charles. But, as we have seen, everything was changed by Joseph’s sudden death in 1711 and Charles’s succession the following year. By a secret family arrangement, known for some reason as the Pragmatic Sanction, Charles–now Charles VI–gave his own daughters priority over those of his brother, insisting at the same time that in future the Habsburg possessions in northern and central Europe should be indivisible.
When his one son predeceased him, Charles was the only male Habsburg alive; he was therefore determined to be succeeded on the Austrian throne by his daughter Maria Theresa. This, according to the Pragmatic Sanction, should have posed no problems, and indeed for the first few months after her father’s death in 1740 all promised well. Charles had taken care to obtain solemn guarantees from all the principal European powers that they would respect his daughter’s succession: the Papacy and the Republic of Venice, England and Holland all willingly recognised the twenty-three-year-old Queen,179 France though noncommittal was friendly and reassuring, and the new King of Prussia, Frederick II–later to be known as ‘the Great’–not only gave his recognition but even offered military assistance should she ever need it. He spoke, as it happened, with a forked tongue, but Maria Theresa was not to know it until, on 16 December 1740, a Prussian army of 30,000 invaded the imperial province of Silesia. The War of the Austrian Succession had begun.
It was to continue until 1748. Like its predecessor it was fought mainly in northern and central Europe–the Mediterranean was never at any stage a primary theatre. Indeed, to one of the two principal protagonists, Frederick of Prussia, it hardly figured at all. To two other rulers on the European stage, on the other hand, it mattered a great deal. Those rulers were Philip V of Spain and the King of Sardinia, Charles Emmanuel III. As we know, in 1718 Charles Emmanuel’s father, Victor Amadeus II of Savoy, had been obliged to surrender Sicily to the Austrian Habsburgs, receiving in exchange the comparatively unimportant island of Sardinia; from 1720–when he formally took possession of his new realm–until 1861, when his distant cousin Victor Emmanuel II became the first king of a united Italy, he and his successors were also known as Kings of Sardinia, although they continued to reign from their ancestral capital of Turin.
Charles Emmanuel was formidably intelligent, and ruled his subjects both wisely and well. As a European statesman, on the other hand, he would stop at nothing to extend his frontiers and increase his country’s power: Sardinia–or Savoy–was not to be known as ‘the Prussia of Italy’ for nothing. Cardinal Fleury, the octogenarian Chief Minister of Louis XV, prophesied that one day a King of Sardinia would throw the Bourbons out of the whole peninsula, while that most shrewd of observers President Charles de Brosses180went still further. ‘Of all the states of Italy,’ he noted, ‘the Italians fear only the King of Sardinia; he, they claim, is at their throats, and sooner or later he will throttle them.’
The body of Charles VI was scarcely cold before Elizabeth Farnese forced her ever-compliant husband to lay claim to all the Habsburg hereditary possessions. Their grounds were shaky, and she knew it. What she was really after, as always, was the Italian provinces, and she now had a new and valuable ally on the spot: her son Don Carlos, now King Charles III of Naples. Within weeks a Spanish army had crossed the Pyrenees and was advancing through the Languedoc and Provence; meanwhile, the Spanish Duke of Montemar sailed a further division to Orbetello (near the modern Porto Ercole), where it was joined by Neapolitan troops.
Almost simultaneously with the Spanish claim, Charles Emmanuel let it be known that the province of Milan was rightfully his–was not his great-great-grandmother the daughter of Philip II of Spain?–but as soon as he saw that Spain was also on the warpath with the same objective in view, he thought again and decided to throw in his lot with Maria Theresa. Henceforth Austria and Sardinia were pitted against the two Bourbon kingdoms of France and Spain. They had other allies too: in August 1742 a British naval squadron commanded by the sixty-six-year-old admiral Thomas Mathews appeared off Naples and threatened to bombard the city unless King Charles withdrew at once from the Bourbon coalition. The threat was gratifyingly effective; Mathews then turned against a squadron of French and Spanish ships, driving it back into Toulon and thus cutting off all naval communications between Italy and Spain. But the allies did not have it all their own way: that same month a Spanish army under Charles III’s brother Don Philip invaded Savoy. Despite desperate resistance by the terrorised population, it was to remain there for the next six years.
The war might have gone on a good deal longer than it did but for the death, on 9 July 1746, of Philip V of Spain. Philip himself had been anything but bellicose, spending much of his time either at his devotions or listening to the music he loved. From the moment of their marriage, however, he had been utterly dominated by his wife, whose Italian ambitions had done much to exacerbate the current hostilities, and in his last years his increasingly frequent bouts of insanity had strengthened her hold on him still further. The new king, Ferdinand VI–the sole survivor of Philip’s four children by his first wife, Maria Louisa of Savoy–had inherited all his father’s indolence and readiness to be guided by his consort; on the other hand, his Portuguese queen, Maria Barbara of Braganza, possessed none of her predecessor’s fire. For the moment, the war continued, but close ties had existed between Britain and Portugal since the days of John of Gaunt in the fourteenth century, and negotiations quietly began between the courts of Lisbon and London to bring about a peaceful settlement. One of Ferdinand’s first actions on ascending the throne was to dismiss his Foreign Minister, the openly pro-French Marquis of Villarias, and to replace him with an Anglophile descendant of Gaunt’s, Don José de Carvajal y Lancaster.
At last, thanks largely to the Queen and Carvajal, the Treaty of Aixla-Chapelle was signed in 1748 and the war came to an end. The only true victor was Frederick of Prussia, who had started it in the first place. Charles Emmanuel kept Savoy and Nice, together with a strip of Lombardy which brought his eastern frontier to the river Ticino. Don Philip secured Parma and Piacenza. The Pragmatic Sanction was given renewed guarantees, and Maria Theresa’s husband was duly recognised as the Emperor Francis I. True, Anglo-Spanish relations were now friendlier than they had been for half a century and more; to many people, nevertheless, the War of the Austrian Succession must have seemed to have been hardly worth the fighting.
As we know, the British had had their eye on the island of Minorca since the beginning of the century. They had successfully insisted upon it at Utrecht and had confidently believed that it would be a permanent addition to their empire. In fact, this first period of British rule was to last less than fifty years; on the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War in 1756, one of the first actions of Louis XV was to despatch an expedition under the famously libertine Duc de Richelieu to capture the island. With his garrison of barely 3,000 men, the eighty-four-year-old Irish Lieutenant-Governor, William Blakeney, put up a splendid resistance, but he knew that without substantial reinforcements he could not hold out for long. Fortunately, such reinforcements were available: a squadron of ten ships of the line was lying at Gibraltar under the command of Admiral Sir John Byng, who had clear instructions that in the event of any attack on Minorca ‘he was to use all possible means in his power for its relief’.
Although the Governor of Gibraltar had at the last moment refused to part with the battalion of infantry which he had been ordered to send–a decision which was subsequently to lead to his court-martial and disgrace–Byng sailed on 8 May and reached Port Mahon eleven days later. On the afternoon of the following day, 20 May, he bore down on the French fleet. In point of numbers the two were equal, but the French vessels were considerably larger, carrying heavier armament and more men. Such a superiority should not by itself have proved decisive, but Byng, almost at the start of the engagement, made a disastrous tactical error, leaving his line dangerously exposed to the enemy guns. The French took full advantage and left the British fleet effectively disabled. They made no attempt to follow up their victory; nevertheless, after holding a council of war, Byng decided to head back to Gibraltar, abandoning Minorca to its fate.
Still Blakeney refused to surrender, though his garrison in Fort St Philip was now under constant fire. By this time the besiegers too were beginning to suffer, both from dysentery–always a danger in siege conditions–and from the unremitting heat. They were well aware that another British fleet, greatly superior to Byng’s, was on its way to the island under the command of Admiral Sir Edward Hawke, and Richelieu was anxious to conclude matters before its arrival. He accordingly ordered a night attack, and at a council of war held by Blakeney the morning after, 29 June, all its members but three agreed that–given reasonable terms–the only sensible course was surrender. Approaching Mahon a few days later, Hawke passed a French convoy carrying the surviving members of the garrison back to Gibraltar; only then did he realise that he was too late.
When the news reached London, there was a surge of enthusiasm for Blakeney–who, it was revealed, had never once removed his clothes during the seventy days of the siege. King George II appropriately made him a Knight of the Bath, honorary colonel of the Enniskillen Regiment and finally Lord Blakeney of Mount Blakeney in the peerage of Ireland. Admiral Byng was less lucky. On 27 January 1757 a court-martial at Portsmouth found him guilty of dereliction of duty and sentenced him to death. The court added a strong recommendation to mercy, on the grounds that it did not believe that the admiral’s action was prompted by cowardice or disaffection, but the King refused to commute the sentence. On 14 March 1757 Byng was shot on the quarterdeck of HMS Monarquein Portsmouth harbour.
After Sicily, Sardinia and Cyprus, the island of Corsica is the fourth largest in the Mediterranean. Its early history was very much what might have been expected: after a fairly active prehistory, successive occupations by Greeks, Carthaginians, Etruscans, Romans, Vandals, Goths, Lombards and Arabs. In the eighth century, rather more surprisingly, it passed into the hands of the Papacy, who in 1077 entrusted it to the Bishop of Pisa. Under the Pisans, Corsica knew efficient and enlightened government for the first time. The island’s economy developed, the arts began to flourish: those two magnificent flowers of early Romanesque, the cathedral of Nebbio and the church of La Canonica, date from the beginning of the twelfth century. Inevitably, however, such a pearl in Pisa’s crown aroused the cupidity of her implacable rival, Genoa, and during the bitter struggles between the two sea republics throughout the later Middle Ages–in which they were sometimes joined by the Kingdom of Aragon–anarchy returned. Eventually, in the middle of the fifteenth century, Genoa established firm control over the island, which it was to maintain, with a few wobbles, for some three hundred years.
There then appeared on the Corsican scene the heroic figure of Pasquale Paoli. His father, Giaquinto, had led an uprising against Genoa in 1735, but after four years’ fighting had been ultimately unsuccessful; he and Pasquale had been lucky to escape a worse fate than exile to Naples. There Pasquale had studied at the military academy, preparing himself to carry on the struggle for independence, and in 1755 he was ready. He returned to Corsica, overcame the Genoese–who, however, refused to renounce their claim–declared an independent state and was elected to power under a constitution as liberal and democratic as any in Europe. Over the next nine years he pacified the hitherto turbulent island. He encouraged industries, built a fleet and instituted a system of national education, complete with university. Throughout this period he kept up a defensive and initially inconclusive war against Genoa, but Genoa sought the assistance of France and, in 1768, sold to the French her rights. France strengthened the Corsican garrisons to six full regiments, and in 1769, after twelve months of guerrilla warfare, Paoli was obliged to flee to England.
On 15 August of that same year, a baby boy was born in a house on the Rue Saint-Charles in Ajaccio. His name–in the Italian which was then Corsica’s national language–was Napoleone Buonaparte.
Almost exactly ten years before Napoleon’s birth, in August 1759, the Spanish King Ferdinand VI died at the age of forty-six. His mental powers had never been strong, and the death of his beloved wife in the previous year had had a disastrous effect upon him. He had become more and more reclusive, refused to speak and eventually lapsed into complete insanity. Strangely enough, he had been a remarkably good king. With the help of Queen Barbara he had restored the national finances, built up a formidable fleet, enthusiastically encouraged the arts and sciences and clamped down on the Inquisition, putting an end to the public autos-da-fé that so shocked eighteenth-century Europe. Many a monarch has done worse.
His kingdom now passed to his half-brother Charles III of Naples, the Queen Dowager Elizabeth Farnese becoming regent pending Charles’s arrival in Spain. The new king’s eldest son being an imbecile, as part of this royal reshuffle Charles designated his second son–also called Charles–to be Prince of Asturias and heir to the Spanish throne, abdicating the crown of Naples and the Two Sicilies in favour of his third son Ferdinand, then a child of eight. These dispensations completed, he and his wife, Amalia of Saxony, set sail for Barcelona with their family. On 9 December they reached Madrid, where the King was reunited with his mother for the first time since his departure twenty-eight years before. The two embraced affectionately, but Charles soon made it clear that he was his own man and had no intention of allowing Elizabeth any influence in state affairs. She soon retired to her palace at San Ildefonso, and never–even after the death of Queen Amalia only three months later–returned to Madrid.
Although Charles may not have been exceptionally intelligent, he was industrious, conscientious, deeply pious and utterly honest, and could call on over a quarter of a century’s experience as a ruler. At the same time he was a Bourbon through and through, and he had neither forgiven nor forgotten the British threat to bombard Naples seventeen years before. Now, with the Seven Years’ War half-way through its course, he hated to see British arms almost everywhere triumphant over French. As a Spaniard, he was well aware of his country’s continuing grievances against England over smuggling, contraband and the searching by the British of Spanish ships, to say nothing of various other disputes ranging from claims to the coast of Honduras to fishing rights off Newfoundland. When, therefore, the French Foreign Minister, the Duc de Choiseul, suggested to him that an English victory might prove calamitous to the Spanish dominions in the Americas, he found a ready listener.
The result was the signature, in August 1761, of two treaties together known as the Family Compact, whereby France agreed to make any conclusion of peace conditional on the settlement of Spanish grievances, while Spain undertook in return to enter the war at once if these terms were rejected. At this point–and before there was any question of peace between Britain and France–the British government demanded an explanation of Spain’s obvious military preparations. Spain refused to reply, expelled the British ambassador Lord Bristol and imposed an embargo on all British shipping in Spanish ports. The Seven Years’ War had now entered a new, Mediterranean phase. This proved, however, to be of remarkably short duration, and to have repercussions as far afield as the Caribbean and the Pacific. In August 1762 one British fleet captured Havana, and little more than a month later another one accepted the surrender of Manila. No wonder that by the year’s end France and Spain were ready for peace.
The treaty that ended the Seven Years’ War was signed in Paris on 20 February 1763. It contained only one clause of direct relevance to the Mediterranean: the restitution of Minorca to Britain. The Americas, on the other hand, were largely transformed. Britain acquired Canada, Nova Scotia, Cape Breton and a number of islands in the Caribbean from France, which also surrendered Senegal; in return France regained Martinique and Guadeloupe, and was guaranteed fishing rights off Newfoundland.181 Her former settlements in India were also restored to her, with the proviso that they might not be fortified. Spain for her part recovered Havana from Britain, but had to cede Florida in exchange; she also recovered Manila and the Philippines. Her most important new acquisition, however, was the formerly French territory of Louisiana. This was presumably some compensation for the loss of Florida, but to Charles III it must have been all too clear that he had made his first major mistake as King of Spain: to have listened to Choiseul. His predecessor’s policy of strict neutrality had been the right one. The Seven Years’ War would have been more wisely followed from the sidelines.