With Part 6, which covers the years 1710 to 1714, we conclude our series of posts on the War of the Spanish Succession.

In 1710, Louis XIV’s luck began to turn.  He sent a new army into Spain to help Felipe V.  In command was the Duc de Vendôme, this time without the Duc de Bourgogne to get in his way.  Left to his own lights, the old duke defeated the Anglo-Austrian forces and drove them out of Spain by the end of the year.  He returned to Versailles covered in glory and left Felipe V firmly on the Spanish throne once and for all.

The fighting season of 1706 had ended very badly for France, with its armies driven out of Flanders and in retreat everywhere else.  The Archduke Charles, with an Anglo-Austrian army behind him, had even taken Madrid and been proclaimed king as Carlos III, one of the main objectives of the War of the Spanish Succession.  In short, Louis XIV and his allies were beaten to their knees.

Peace Offer

So parlous was the state of France that Louis, for the first time in his career, sued for peace.  He offered to surrender his Flemish fortresses to the Dutch and to recognize the Archduke Charles as King of Spain on the condition that his grandson Felipe V be allowed to keep Sicily, Naples, and Milan.  The Grand Alliance was not impressed, except for the Dutch, whose aims had been achieved for them by Marlborough’s victories. England, Austria and the allied German states, however, scented blood and were determined to bring France low.  The war continued.

Today we bring you Part 4 of the War of the Spanish Succession.  In Part 3, we saw that war was officially declared on France and Spain by England, the United Provinces (today’s Netherlands), and Austria in the spring 1702.

The States of Europe Take Sides

In the beginning, France and Spain faced Europe alone.  They were soon joined by Bavaria, whose Elector still believed that his late son, Prince Joseph Ferdinand, the designated heir to the Spanish throne in the late 1690s, had been poisoned by Austrian agents.  The Elector of Cologne also signed on.  The last addition to the team was Savoy. It should perhaps be explained that the duchy of Savoy was an independent state at this time.  Its duke also possessed the principality of Piedmont and ruled from its capital, Turin.  The Duke of Savoy was more or less obligated to support France and Spain because one of his daughters was married to the Duc de Bourgogne, third in line in to the French throne as the eldest grandson of Louis XIV, and another daughter was married to Bourgogne’s younger brother, the newly minted Felipe V of Spain.  Savoy was an unreliable ally, however.  Nancy Mitford remarks in her biography of Louis XIV, The Sun King, that Duke Vittorio Amadeo was famous for never finishing a war on the same side that he started on.  On the whole, it was an underwhelming team.  Apart from Savoy’s unreliability, there was the problem of Spain’s near bankruptcy and general weakness. The Elector of Bavaria was a solid ally, but lacked resources.  Cologne, of course, was too insignificant to make much of a difference.  France would have to shoulder most of the financial and military burden itself.

Those who have been following this series from the beginning will recognize the map below because I used it in Part 1.  It may be helpful here in Part 4, too, so I’m reproducing it again.

Europe in 1700. Credit: Wikipedia.

On the other side, the Grand Alliance, as the England-United Provinces-Austria axis called itself, was joined by Portugal, Brandenburg-Prussia, Hanover, and various other German states, the most important of which was the Palatinate (German: Pfalz), a Rhineland state on the French border that was coincidentally ruled by another branch of the Bavarian ruling dynasty.  The Palatinate, to the horror of Louis XIV’s sister-in-law, a Palatine princess, had been devastated by French armies in a prior war and was itching for revenge.  It was more or less understood that Austria would supply most of the military muscle on the continent while England and the United Provinces would provide sea power.

When we last left Felipe V, he had just arrived in Madrid, his new capital, on 22 January, 1701, carrying a letter of advice from his grandfather, Louis XIV.  At first, his accession went smoothly, with no war imminent.

The portrait of Felipe V at left hangs in a state room at Versailles, where he was proclaimed King of Spain on 16 November, 1700.

All of the Spanish dominions accepted him as their king.  The nations of Europe did, too, except for Austria.  At the beginning of 1701 it seemed that Felipe V’s accession was a fait accompli.  The calm was not to last, however.

Small though it is, my local secondhand bookshop keeps turning up Versailles Century treasures.  Yesterday it was this original edition of John Miller’s The The Life and Times of William and Mary, which was part of a ‘Life and Times of —–‘ series on British monarchs published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson.  The series editor was the eminent biographer Antonia Fraser.

‘The Life and Times of William and Mary’ by John Miller.

This book, like the others in the series, is lavishly illustrated with both black and white and colour plates.

I’ve always been intrigued by William and Mary, who are such an anomaly in our history.  They were the only joint sovereigns of the British isles, and among the few anywhere.  That their reign was successful is due largely due to their harmonious marriage, and the fact that one generally deferred to the other, thus avoiding a power struggle.  Mary, like any God-fearing woman of her time, believed it was her place to submit to her husband.  William, for his part, who knew from the start that his wife was a potential heiress to the English, Scottish, and Irish crowns, once said that he would not be his “wife’s gentleman usher.” Even so, I had never really understood how the unprecedented joint sovereignty came about.  The book explains it succinctly.

One faction of Parliament, keen to maintain as much legal continuity as possible in the wake of the ouster of Mary’s father, the deeply unpopular James II, wanted Mary to succeed on her own.  An even more conservative faction wanted her merely to serve as regent and not ascend to the throne until her father’s natural death (overseas).  A more radical faction wanted William to take the throne as sole monarch by right of conquest, for which there was a precedent in the case of William the Conqueror more than 600 years earlier.  In the end, the compromise choice was joint sovereignty, with Mary’s sister Anne to be accepted as heiress presumptive.  Thus the pair were crowned William III (r. 1688-1702) and Mary II (r.1688-1694).