Spanish Succession, War of the (1701–1714)

SPANISH SUCCESSION, WAR OF THE (1701–1714)

SPANISH SUCCESSION, WAR OF THE (1701–1714). The succession to the extensive Spanish empire had been a live issue since the 1660s, when rumors spread that Philip IV's (ruled 1605–1665) only surviving son, crowned Charles II in 1665, was unlikely to survive childhood.

PARTITION TREATY OR INTEGRAL INHERITANCE?

The assumption that the new reign would be short motivated the first partition treaty between the head of the Austrian branch of the Habsburgs, Leopold I (ruled 1658–1705), and Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715) of France in January 1668. This treaty remained a dead letter since Charles II, though not siring an heir, survived the next three decades and only finally weakened during the 1690s. During this time the issue of the Spanish succession had not become less contentious. After the War of the League of Augsburg (1688–1697), Louis believed that France could not afford another major conflict. But this new realism about military resources was counterbalanced by considerations of dynastic honor and future French security; Louis could not accept that the entire Spanish inheritance might pass to the Austrian Habsburgs. This, however, was precisely what Leopold I now wanted, and, thanks to his conquests in Ottoman-controlled Hungary and his successful leadership of a substantial coalition of German princes in the recent war, he was unprepared to discuss partition. Louis nonetheless found an apparent ally in his previous archenemy, William III (ruled 1689–1702), king of England and de facto ruler of the Dutch Republic. William was equally anxious to avoid another costly war and had no wish to establish the same branch of the Habsburg family across western and central Europe. Bilateral negotiations in the summer and autumn 1698 proposed the exclusion of both Habsburg and Bourbon dynasties from the full succession, nominating instead Joseph Ferdinand, young son of the Bavarian Elector, as heir to most of Charles II's inheritance. As compensation it was proposed that Louis's son would receive the kingdoms of Naples and Sicily, and Milan would go to Leopold's second son, Archduke Charles. The sudden death of Joseph Ferdinand in 1699 annulled the plan, and Louis XIV's diplomats now proposed that France, Britain, and the Dutch Republic should sponsor a simple partition: France would receive all of Spanish Italy but would allow the rest of the empire to pass to Leopold I's son, Archduke Charles. Despite the apparent generosity of the offer, the Austrians realized that without the linchpin of Milan, the two Habsburg dominions could never function together, and the security of much of the Spanish inheritance would be jeopardized. Nevertheless Louis and William signed this new partition treaty in March 1700, hoping that Leopold would follow. Leopold had still refused to sign on 1 November when Charles II finally died. Against expectations—though rumors had been flying around the Spanish court for the previous month—Charles II's final will did not name Archduke Charles as his universal heir of choice. Giving priority to maintaining the territorial integrity of the empire, Charles II's councillors had persuaded him to make over the entire inheritance to Philip of Anjou (1683–1746), Louis's second grandson.

Historians have long debated Louis's decision to accept the will in the name of his grandson, but it is difficult to see that he could have done otherwise. Leopold had refused to ratify the partition treaty; if Louis rejected the Spanish offer, Charles II's testament then offered the entire inheritance to Archduke Charles. Louis could call on the military support of the English and the Dutch to make good his claims under the partition treaty, but there was little chance that either would act to uphold French dynastic rights. France would be left to fight the combined Habsburg powers to try to prize Italy from their grip. In contrast, by accepting Charles's will Louis would ensure that Spain and her territories would be his allies in any confrontation with the Austrian Habsburgs.

Louis's real error lay in the inability to see that consolidating the position of his grandson without provoking European war required qualities of restraint and empathy in dealing with other states. Leopold soon declared war, but so long as the Maritime Powers were reluctant to intervene, any conflict might be contained by France. Yet a succession of preemptive moves and provocations turned an ambiguous situation into one in which France was again faced by a hostile alliance of major powers. By moving French troops into the Spanish Netherlands and occupying the "barrier fortresses" garrisoned by Dutch troops since 1697, Louis undermined the key Dutch gain from the treaty of Ryswick (1697). Granting French merchants exclusive trading advantages in the Spanish New World antagonized both the Dutch and the English, while Louis's refusal to explicitly repudiate Philip's position in the French order of succession caused widespread consternation. By the time Louis formally recognized James II's son as James III of England and Scotland, the process of alienation had already led to renewal of the military alliance between the Austrian emperor, the English, and the Dutch (September 1701), and there was no turning back.

THE COURSE OF THE WAR

Louis was initially optimistic that France's situation was better than it had been in the previous conflict: France would fight beside Spain and the Spanish empire, whose subjects had acclaimed Louis's grandson as Philip V and accepted French support to preserve the integrity of the kingdoms; Portugal, Savoy, and Bavaria were initially also allies of Louis XIV. But defeating the coalition would depend on rapid French military success, and despite some striking achievements in the first two years of war, this proved elusive. In 1703 the opportunity to launch a Franco-Bavarian campaign against the Austrian lands was lost. Meanwhile, English naval success at Vigo Bay (1702) was instrumental in persuading Portugal to abandon the French alliance, while Victor Amadeus II of Savoy (1666–1732) saw the north Italian operations of the imperial general, Prince Eugène (1663–1736) of Savoy, as an opportunity to slip out of his own commitment to France. The critical reversal came in August 1704 when allied armies under the Duke of Marlborough and Eugène annihilated the Franco-Bavarian forces at Blenheim and removed any prospect of knocking the Austrians out of the war. The subsequent four years of conflict saw a few successful French initiatives and some capacity to recover ground lost after the hammer-blows of subsequent allied victories at Ramillies (1706), Turin (1706), and Oudenarde (1708), but the balance had tipped toward the assertive, battle-seeking strategies of Marlborough and Eugène. The situation in Spain appeared even worse as allied forces acting in the name of Archduke Charles, now proclaimed Charles III of Spain, had by 1706 occupied Madrid, Barcelona, and other major cities.

The situation stabilized to some extent when French forces imposed huge casualties on the allies as the price of their victory at Malplaquet (1709); military affairs had been improving in Spain since 1707, above all because the population remained fiercely loyal to Philip V. But apparent revival was offset by domestic crisis in France, where a miserable harvest followed by the bitter winter of 1708–1709 led to catastrophic mortality, mass starvation, and tax failure. As in the 1690s, France lacked the resources to continue the war; faced with collapse at home not counterbalanced by overwhelming success in the field, Louis's diplomats began to negotiate for a settlement on allied terms.

PEACE NEGOTIATIONS AND FRENCH RECOVERY

Allied demands in the spring of 1710 were as harsh as France's worst expectations: Philip V would be ejected from the Spanish throne; France would relinquish most of her territorial gains since 1648. Yet Louis was desperate to extricate France from a war that threatened invasion and disintegration at home. Only the imputation that France should act alone in removing his grandson from Spanish territory finally led Louis to break off negotiations. The allies continued to take fortresses and breached the French frontiers in 1710, and once again managed briefly to expel Philip from Madrid. But beneath this success the allied coalition was cracking; the English, and to some extent the Dutch, recognized that they could now get everything they demanded in terms of security and economic advantage while the French military humiliation rendered France less prepared to sanction a Habsburg-dominated Europe. The fall of the Whig government in Britain signaled the end of Marlborough's political and military ascendancy. Soon after, the sudden death of Joseph I (ruled 1705–1711), ruler of the Habsburg lands and Holy Roman emperor since the death of his father Leopold in 1705, left Archduke Charles in 1711 as successor to his eldest brother in central Europe and allied claimant to the Spanish inheritance. During 1711 the English effectively withdrew from the war effort and drew up a bilateral peace with France. This winding-down of the war was abruptly halted by the sudden deaths of three of Louis XIV's direct heirs in the winter of 1711–1712, leaving the French succession to the two-year-old duke of Anjou and, after Anjou, to Philip V. But the dangerous issue of the separation of the Bourbon crowns was finally resolved through a further and explicit renunciation of the French throne by Philip. English forces once again withdrew from the conflict, and in July 1712 a French victory at Denain permitted the recapture of crucial frontier fortresses, blocking further allied incursions into France. The main settlement between France and the Maritime Powers was made at Utrecht in the first months of 1713. France escaped lightly, the peace being bought by Spanish concessions in Europe and the Americas. Britain in particular gained substantial colonial and commercial benefits from Spain's transatlantic empire. Archduke Charles, now Emperor Charles VI, held out to the end of 1713, but French successes in the empire persuaded him to settle at Rastatt in November, gaining Milan, Naples, and the Spanish Netherlands in return for accepting Philip V and the Bourbon succession to Spain. The settlements were finally ratified in 1714.

See also Bourbon Dynasty (France) ; Bourbon Dynasty (Spain) ; Charles II (Spain) ; Habsburg Dynasty ; League of Augsburg, War of the (1688–1697) ; Leopold I (Holy Roman Empire) ; Louis XIV (France) ; Philip IV (Spain) ; Philip V (Spain) ; Spain ; Utrecht, Peace of (1713) ; William and Mary .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

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Symcox, Geoffrey, ed. War, Diplomacy and Imperialism, 1618–1763. New York, 1974. See pp. 62–74 for a translation of the final will of Carlos II.

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David Parrott