第58章 LETTER 7(13)

and,this peace concluded,the emperor,and the empire,and the king of Spain would have been in a much better posture to treat with France.With these views,that were wise and just,the league of Augsburg was made between the emperor,the kings of Spain and Sweden as princes of the empire,and the other circles and princes.This league was purely defensive.An express article declared it to be so:and as it had no other regard,it was not only conformable to the laws and constitutions of the empire,and to the practice of all nations,but even to the terms of the act of truce so lately concluded.This pretence,therefore,for breaking the truce,seizing the electorate of Cologne,invading the Palatinate,besieging Philipsburg,and carrying unexpected and undeclared war into the empire could not be supported:nor is it possible to read the reasons published by France at this time,and drawn from her fears of the imperial power,without laughter.As little pretence was there to complain,that the emperor refused to convert at once the truce into a definitive treaty;since if he had done so,he would have confirmed in a lump,and without any discussion,all the arbitrary decrees of those chambers,or courts,that France had erected to cover her usurpation;and would have given up almost a sixth part of the provinces of the empire,that France one way or other had possessed herself of.The pretensions of the Duchess of Orleans on the succession of her father,and her brother,which were disputed by the then elector Palatine,and were to be determined by the laws and customs of the empire,afforded as little pretence for beginning this war,as any of the former allegations.The exclusion of the Cardinal of Fursteilburg,who had been elected to the archbishopric of Cologne,was capable of being aggravated:but even in this case his most Christian majesty opposed his judgment and his authority against the judgment and authority of that holy father,whose eldest son he was proud to be called.In short,the true reason why Louis the Fourteenth began that cruel war with the empire two years after he had concluded a cessation of hostilities for twenty was this:he resolved to keep what he had got;and,therefore,he resolved to encourage the Turks to continue the war.He did this effectually,by invading Germany at the very instant when the Sultan was suing for peace.Notwithstanding this,the Turks were in treaty again the following year:and good policy should have obliged the emperor,since he could not hope to carry on this war and that against France,at the same time,with vigor and effect,to conclude a peace with the least dangerous enemy of the two.The decision of his disputes with France could not be deferred,his designs against the Hungarians were in part accomplished,for his son was declared king,and the settlement of that crown in his family was made;and the rest of these,as well as those that he formed against the Turks,might be deferred.But the councils of Vienna judged differently,and insisted even at this critical moment on the most exorbitant terms;on some of such a nature,that the Turks showed more humanity and a better sense of religion in refusing,than they in asking them.Thus the war went on in Hungary,and proved a constant diversion in favor of France,during the whole course of that which Louis the Fourteenth began at time;for the treaty of Carlowitz was posterior to that of Ryswic.The empire,Spain,England,and Holland engaged in the war with France:and on them the emperor left the burden of it.In the short war of one thousand six hundred and sixty-seven,he was not so much as a party,and instead of assisting the king of Spain,which it must be owned,he was in no good condition of doing,he bargained for dividing that prince's succession,as I have observed above.In the war of one thousand six hundred and seventy-two he made some feeble efforts.In this of one thousand six hundred and eighty-eight he did still less:and in the war which broke out at the beginning of the present century he did nothing,at least after the first campaign in Italy,and after the engagements that England and Holland took by the grand alliance.In a word,from the time that an opposition to France became a common cause in Europe,the house of Austria has been a clog upon it in many instances,and of considerable assistance to it in none.The accession of England to this cause,which was brought about by the revolution of one thousand six hundred and eighty-eight,might have made amends,and more than amends,one would think,for this defect,and have thrown superiority of power and of success on the side of the confederates,with whom she took part against France.

This,I say,might be imagined,without over-rating the power of England,or undervaluing that of France;and it was imagined at that time.How it proved otherwise in the event;how France came triumphant out of the war that ended by the treaty of Ryswic,and though she gave up a great deal,yet preserved the greatest and the best part of her conquests and acquisitions made since the treaties of Westphalia,and the Pyrenees;how she acquired,by the gift of Spain,that whole monarchy for one of her princes,though she had no reason to expect the least part of it without a war at one time,nor the great lot of it even by a war at any time;in short,how she wound up advantageously the ambitious system she had been fifty years in weaving;how she concluded a war,in which she was defeated on every side,and wholly exhausted,with little diminution of the provinces and barriers acquired to France,and with the quiet possession of Spain and the Indies to a prince of the house of Bourbon:all this,my lord,will be the subject of your researches,when you come down to the latter part of the last period of modern history.