Spanish Succession, War of the

I

Introduction

Spanish Succession, War of the, military conflict that started in Italy in 1701, and came to involve most of the states of Western Europe and their overseas territories, before it was ended by the treaties of Utrecht, Rastatt, and Baden in 1713-1714.

II

Origins and Expansion of the War, 1701-1703

The War of the Spanish Succession was sparked off by the will of Charles II, the last Habsburg king of Spain, who died in November 1700 leaving his entire inheritance—Spain, its overseas dominions, the Spanish Netherlands, and lands in Italy—to the younger grandson of Louis XIV of France, Philip, Duke of Anjou (later Philip V of Spain). When the next military campaigning season opened, Leopold I of the Holy Roman Empire, indignant at the ignoring of his own dynastic claims and fearful of a French presence on his southern borders, attempted to seize Milan; but the war was initially confined to northern Italy. Leopold’s former allies in England (Great Britain as of 1707) and the United Provinces (see Netherlands) held aloof. William III was, indeed, dismayed that Louis had opted for the will of Charles II over the Partition Treaty they had negotiated together in 1699. This latter arrangement had sought to maintain the balance of power by assigning the lion’s share of the Spanish Empire to Leopold’s younger son, Archduke Charles (later Charles VI), while compensating the French Bourbons with the Italian lands. Leopold, however, was determined to have Milan, and had himself rejected the Partition Treaty. However, William III’s subjects in both England and the United Provinces were fearful of jeopardizing the peace and prosperity they had enjoyed since the end of the Nine Years’ War. By the spring of 1701, both England and the United Provinces had recognized Philip V.

The war expanded when Louis XIV proceeded to overreach himself, establishing a direct and potentially threatening control of his grandson’s dominions, replacing the Dutch garrisons in the barrier fortresses of the Spanish Netherlands by French troops, and conceding to French merchants’ extensive and exclusive trading privileges in the Spanish Empire at the expense of the maritime powers (principally England and the United Provinces). On September 7, 1701, the latter joined with Leopold in a Grand Alliance, which in addition to its defensive aspects bore a marked acquisitive character. For example, in pursuit of what they termed their “rights” in the Spanish Empire, the maritime powers agreed to retain any Spanish colonies they might capture, while Leopold was to make good his claims, not only in northern Italy but in the Netherlands. (There, the Dutch reckoned, he would prove a more amenable neighbour than Maximilian II of Bavaria, whom Philip and the French had installed as governor.)

When the exiled James II died on September 16, 1701, Louis XIV’s recognition of his son as King James III of England represented a chivalrous gesture towards a cousin, but a disastrous one, in that it enabled William III to present the impending war to Parliament as one to safeguard not only the balance of power but the Protestant succession from over-mighty France. By 1702 the Grand Alliance, reinforced by Brandenburg (on whose elector Leopold had recently conferred the title “King in Prussia”) and most of the states of the Holy Roman Empire, were at war with Louis XIV and Philip V, who were supported only by their Wittelsbach satellites, the electors of Bavaria and Cologne, the Elector of Trier, and the Duke of Savoy.

It was not until 1703 that the crown of Spain itself became an issue in the war, when the maritime powers decided that a change of regime in Spain would facilitate their commercial exploitation of both Spain and its empire, and when also Portugal, who since the Methuen Treaty of 1703 was fast becoming a commercial satellite of England, voiced misgivings about fighting Philip V if he were to be their neighbour after the war. Allied war aims were consequently extended to include the enthronement of Archduke Charles as king of Spain (although Leopold made it clear that this would be a task for allied, and not for Habsburg forces). By the summer, Portugal and the Duke of Savoy, hopeful of securing a slice of Milan, had joined the anti-Bourbon cause.

III

Course of the War

Initially, the performance of the Grand Alliance was distinctly unimpressive. If the Dutch were reluctant to act beyond the narrow confines of the Netherlands, the military achievements in northern Italy of Leopold’s ablest commander, Prince Eugene of Savoy, were vitiated by the logistical blunders of senile ministers in Austria. Indeed, the French, now entrenched in northern Italy, were threatening to combine with Bavarian forces that had overrun the Tirol and move down the Danube. To add to the Habsburgs’ embarrassments, 1703 saw the outbreak of a serious uprising in Hungary, a reaction to the centralizing and Catholicizing policies of Austria, but supported financially by the French; until its suppression in 1711, this constituted a serious drain on the Habsburg war effort.

In 1704 the tide turned when the Duke of Marlborough broke free from the stranglehold of the Dutch, combined forces with Eugene, and inflicted a crushing defeat on the Franco-Bavarians at the Battle of Blenheim. At a stroke, southern Germany was cleared of French forces, and Bavaria itself was occupied. In subsequent years a succession of victories saw the Netherlands freed from the French (the Battle of Ramillies, in 1706); France itself invaded (the Battle of Oudenaarde, in 1708), and eventually, despite an extraordinarily bloody Pyrrhic victory at the Battle of Malplaquet in 1709, even the great fortress of Lille was in allied hands. Meanwhile, in the Mediterranean the British captured Gibraltar (1704) and Minorca (1708). Gradually, the French were expelled from northern Italy, although an allied expedition along the French coast against the naval base of Toulon came to nothing. Only in Spain itself was the allied record largely one of failure. The deep aversion felt by the mass of the population towards both the invading Portuguese and the predatory Protestant powers ensured that although Archduke Charles was able to maintain a foothold in separatist Catalonia, he was never able to establish control of the country as a whole.

IV

Peace Negotiations, 1709-1714

By 1709 Louis XIV was ready for peace. The French economy—always less well equipped to finance a war than those of the maritime powers with their credit-based systems—was ravaged by famine and the extraordinarily severe winter of 1709. There was no hope of assistance from elsewhere: Louis’s efforts to entice Charles XII of Sweden from Saxony into the Habsburg lands failed in the face of Marlborough’s diplomacy and Charles’s obsession with fighting in Poland and Russia. Indeed, by 1710 Louis was prepared to cede to the allies not only Spanish Italy, the Spanish Netherlands, and Spain itself, but French possessions in Canada and such important symbols of his prestige as Strasbourg. The allies, however, strung the bow too tight. Frustrated at their own inability to impose Archduke Charles on the Spaniards, they demanded that Louis use his own troops to expel his grandson from Spain; and on this point of honour the negotiations of 1710 and 1711 broke down.

For the allies the opportunity never returned. Already, and not surprisingly, as the French threat receded, divergences intensified within the coalition: Leopold’s successor Joseph I resented Dutch attempts to use the barrier fortresses to establish a commercial and military stranglehold over the soon-to-be Austrian Netherlands; and the maritime powers, for their part, complained about their ally’s ineffective performance in Spain and preoccupation with Hungary. In 1710 the Whigs were replaced in London by a Tory government more responsive to complaints about cost of the war and the level of the land tax than to the commercial prospects implicit in the cry of “no peace without Spain”. When in 1711 Archduke Charles succeeded his brother Joseph as Holy Roman emperor, the Anglo-Dutch were only too ready to abandon their forlorn struggle to establish him in Spain. Certainly, they had no interest in seeing the Spanish and Austrian empires united under one ruler—a resurrection of the oppressively powerful empire of Charles V. The upshot was a new round of peace negotiations leading to the Peace of Utrecht in which the allies proved less demanding (although Charles VI eventually withdrew, outraged by Louis XIV’s attempts to protect his Bavarian ally).

Charles VI finally made peace with France in 1714 at Rastatt, with the states of the empire following suit at Baden. But although the fighting stopped, no peace was concluded between Charles VI and Philip V, who continued to uphold their Spanish and Italian claims against each other.