Fire and sword swept Spain clean. The long drawn war of succession broke down much of the old exclusiveness and conceit which had been for two centuries the bane of the Spanish people, and a new patriotic spirit was aroused which proved that the nation was not effete but only drugged. The accession of Philip V. had been looked upon by his grandfather as practically annexing Spain to France. ‘Il n’y a plus de PyrÉnÉes,’ he announced; and his first act proved his determination of treating his grandson’s realm as a vassal state of his own. Again it was to a large extent the influence of women which directed the course of Spanish politics, even to the confusion of the roi soleil. It has been shown in this history how often feminine influence had been invoked by statesmen to bring Spain to a sympathetic line of policy for their own ends, and how often circumstances had rendered their efforts ineffectual.

The confident anticipations of Louis XIV. that, by rightly choosing his feminine instruments he might use Spain entirely for the aggrandisement of France, were even more conspicuously defeated than any previous attempts had been in a similar direction; for the ladies upon whom he depended were one after the other caught up by the chivalrous patriotism of the Spanish people, newly aroused from the bad dream of a hundred years, and boldly braving Louis, they did their best for Spain and for their own ends, whether France benefited or not.

The bride that Louis chose for his grandson was one from whom no resistance could be expected. She was a mere child, under fifteen, Maria Louisa Gabriela of Savoy, daughter of Victor Amadeus and Anne Marie of Orleans, sister of that Marie Louise, Queen of Spain, whose life has been told in detail in these pages. In September 1701 young Philip went to meet his bride at Barcelona; and even thus early it was seen that he had to face a coalition of all Europe against him. Revolt had been stirred up in Naples; and Philip had hardly time to snatch a brief honeymoon before he was obliged to hurry away to Italy to fight for his crown; leaving the girl whom he had married to rule Spain in his absence and to marshal the elements of defence in a country utterly prostrate and disorganised. Maria Louisa was, of course, entirely inexperienced, but she came of a stout race and never flinched from the responsibilities cast upon her. The young married couple were already deeply in love with each other; and Philip, though only seventeen, had thus early begun to show the strange uxoriousness that in later life became an obsession which made him a mere appanage of the woman by his side; so that Maria Louisa began her strenuous life assured that she would meet with no captious opposition from her husband.

Louis XIV. and Mme. de Maintenon had placed by her side a far stronger personality than Philip; one of the greatest women of her century, whose mission it was to keep the young King and Queen of Spain in the narrow path of French interests. Anne Marie de la Tremouille, Duchess of Bracciano, whom the Spaniards called the Princess of Ursinos, took charge of the young Queen at once when the Piedmontese household was dismissed at the frontier; and through the most troublous period of the great struggle which finally gave the throne to Philip, she ruled the rulers gently, wisely and firmly for their own interests and those of Spain. No cantankerous straitlaced Mistress of the Robes was she, such as the Duchess of Terranova who had embittered the life of the other Marie Louise, but a great lady full of wit and knowledge, and as brave as a lioness in defence of the best interests of those in her charge.

The young Queen herself, when she had been installed in the capital as Regent, showed how changed were the circumstances of a Queen of Spain, now that the dull gloom of the house of Austria had been swept away, and a new Spain was gazing towards the dawn. Nothing could exceed the diligence and ability of this girl of fifteen in administering the government of Madrid in the absence of the new King. Instead of the dull round of devotion and frivolity which had filled the lives of other Queen Consorts, she, with the wise old Princess at her side, worked incessantly. She would sign nothing she did not understand: she insisted upon all complaints being investigated, and reports made direct to her. Supplies of men and money for the war in which Philip was already plunged in Italy, were collected and remitted with an activity and regularity which filled old-fashioned Spaniards with surprise, and encouraged those who possessed means to contribute from their hoards resources previously unsuspected. The manners of the Court were reformed; immorality and vice, so long rampant in Madrid, was frowned at and discouraged; and, instead of allowing the news of the wars in which the King was engaged to filter slowly and incorrectly from the palace to the gossips of the street, the Queen herself read aloud from a balcony to the people below the despatches she daily received from her husband.

All this was enough to make the old Queen Consorts of Spain turn with horror in their porphyry urns at the Escorial; but it came like a breeze of pure mountain air into the miasmatic apathy which had hitherto cloaked the capital; and all Spain plucked up heart and spirit from the energy of this girl of fifteen, with the wise old Frenchwoman behind her. But even they could only administer things as they found them, and the root of the governmental system itself was vicious. Time, and above all knowledge, was required to re-organise the country; and Spaniards grew restive at the foreign auspices under which the reforms were introduced. Maria Louisa and her husband well knew that without French support liberally given, they could never hold their own: for when the King returned to Madrid early in 1703, the Spaniards, who had belonged to the Austrian party in the last reign, had thrown off the mask and fled to join the enemy: and it was clear that no Spaniards would fight to make Spain a dependency of France.

Nothing less than this would satisfy Louis XIV.; and the Princess of Ursinos, who had tried to make the struggle a patriotic one for Spaniards, was warned from Paris that, unless she immediately retired from the country, King Louis would abandon Spain and his grandson to their fate. The Princess went into exile with a heavy heart, and the new French ambassador, Grammont, came when she had departed in 1704, instructed to make a clean sweep of all the national party in Madrid, and to obtain control for the French ministers. But Louis XIV. had underrated the power and ability of Maria Louisa, who resented the contemptuous dismissal of her wise mentor, and took no pains to conceal her opposition to the change. Louis sent scolding letters to her, berating her for her presumption in wishing, ‘at the age of eighteen to govern a vast disorganised monarchy,’ against the advice of those so much more experienced than herself. But at last he had to recognise that this girl, with the best part of Spain behind her, held the stronger position; and he took the wise course of conciliating her by re-enlisting and restoring to Spain the offended Princess of Ursinos. In vain his representatives in Madrid assured him that neither the Princess nor the Queen could be trusted to serve French interests blindly. The two women were too clever and too firm to be ignored, and the Princess returned to Madrid in triumph in August 1705, with carte blanche from Louis to do as she judged best to save Spain for the house of Bourbon, at all events.

Thenceforward the Mistress of the Robes governed the Queen, the Queen governed the King, and the King was supposed to govern the country; plunged in war at home and abroad, with the Spanish nobles either on the side of the Austrian or sullen at the foreign influence which pervaded the government measures, even when moderated and held in check by the Princess of Ursinos. At length, when the long war was wearing itself out, and peace was in the air, the stout-hearted little Savoyarde fell sick. She had borne many children to her husband, but only two sons, so far, had lived, Louis, born in 1707, and Ferdinand, born late in 1713. The birth of the latter heralded his mothers death. She had not spared herself in all the strenuous thirteen years of war and tumult, during which she had to a great extent governed Spain; for Philip, when not absent in the field, was an obedient husband; and now, at the dawn of a period of peace at the beginning of 1714, Maria Louisa died at the age of twenty-six.

Philip was still a young man; but the dependence upon his wife, and his long fits of apathy that afterwards led to lunacy, had made him unfit to fulfil the duties of his position without a clever helpmeet by his side. The first result of the death of Maria Louisa was enormously to increase the influence of the old Princess of Ursinos. She was the only person allowed to see the King in his heartbroken grief; and whilst he was in seclusion in the Medina Celi palace, the monks were turned out of a neighbouring monastery that the Princess might stay there and have free access to the King through a passage made for the purpose through the walls that separated the buildings. The gossips very soon began to say that the King was going to marry the Princess, though she was old enough to be his grandmother. But, as usual, the scandalmongers were wrong. The Princess of Ursinos was far too clever for such a stroke as that; but she and others saw that Philip must marry some one without loss of time, or he would lose what wits were left to him.

The marriage-mongers of Europe were on the alert, but the problem to be solved was not an easy one. A bride must be found whom Louis XIV. would accept, and yet one not too subservient to orders from France, nor one who would interfere with the absolute paramountcy of the Princess of Ursinos. So all the suggestions coming from France were regarded coldly; and the Princess set about finding a candidate who would suit her. There was an Italian priest in Spain at the time, one Father Alberoni, a cunning rogue, who could be a buffoon when it suited him, who had wormed himself into Court circles in the suite of the Duke of Vendome. This man, a Parmese, came to the Princess of Ursinos the day after Queen Maria Louisa Gabriela died and suggested that there was a modest, submissive little princess at Parma, the niece and stepdaughter of the reigning prince, who had no male heirs, and that this girl was exactly fitted to be the new consort to Philip V. The Princess of Ursinos was inclined to regard the idea favourably, for not only was it evident that so young and humble a princess would not attempt to interfere with her, but the match seemed to offer a chance for re-establishing the lost influence of Spain in Italy. Louis XIV. had other views for his grandson, and did not take kindly to the proposal, but he was grudgingly won over by the Princess of Ursinos, whom he could not afford to offend. Philip himself was as wax in the hands of the old Princess; and on the 16th September 1714 he married by proxy Isabel Farnese, Princess of Parma.

Isabel Farnese had been represented by Alberoni as a tractable young maiden, but she was a niece, by her mother, of the Queen Dowager, Marie Anne of Neuburg, who was eating her heart out in spite in her exile at Bayonne; and Alberoni knew full well when he suggested the Parmese bride that he was taking part in a deep-laid conspiracy to overthrow the Princess of Ursinos. His part was a difficult one to play at first, for he had to keep up an appearance of adhesion to the Princess of Ursinos whilst currying favour with the coming Queen. Isabel Farnese approached her new realm with the airs of a conqueror. She was to have landed at Alicante, and thither went Alberoni and her Spanish household to receive her: but she altered her mind suddenly, and decided to go overland through the south of France and visit her aunt Marie Anne at Bayonne. Marie Anne had a long score of her own to settle with the Princess of Ursinos, who had kept her in exile, and she instructed her niece how to proceed to make herself mistress of her husband’s realm.

Isabel Farnese, girl though she was, did not need much instruction in imperious self-assertion, and began her operations as soon as she crossed the frontier. She flatly refused to dismiss her Italian suite, as had been arranged in accordance with the invariable Spanish rule, and showed from the first that she meant to have her own way in all things. She was in no hurry, moreover, to meet her husband until the Princess of Ursinos was out of the way; and when the latter, in great state, came to meet her at Jadraque, a short distance from Guadalajara, where the King was awaiting his bride, Isabel was ready for the decisive fray which should settle the question as to who should rule Spain.

The old Princess was quite aware also by this time that she had to meet a rival, and she began when she entered the presence by making some remark about the slowness of the Queen’s journey. Hardly were the words out of her mouth than the young termagant shouted: ‘Take this old fool away who dares to come and insult me:’ and then, in spite of protest and appeal, the Princess was hustled into a coach to be driven into exile through a snowstorm in the winter night over the bleakest uplands in Europe. Attired in her Court dress, with no change of garments or adequate protection against the weather, without respect, consideration or decency, the aged Princess was thus expelled from the country she had served so wisely. She saw now, as she had feared for some time before, that she had been tricked by the crafty Italian clown-cleric, and that her day was done.

The dominion of the new Queen Isabel Farnese over the spirit of Philip V. was soon more complete even than that of the Princess had been, and a letter of cold compliment from the King was all the reward or consolation that the Princess got for her protracted service to him and his cause in Spain; services without which, in all human probability, he would never have retained the crown. So long as Philip had a masterful woman always by his side to keep him in leading strings, it mattered little to him who the woman was; and Isabel Farnese, bold, ambitious, and intriguing, ruled Spain in the name of her husband thenceforward for thirty years. Her system was neither French nor Spanish, but founded upon the feline ecclesiastical methods of the smaller Italian Courts: and the object of Isabel’s life was to assert successfully the rights of her sons to the Italian principalities, she claimed in virtue of her descent. The pretext under which she cloaked her aims was the recovery of the Spanish influence in the sister Peninsula: but the wars which resulted were in no sense of Spanish national concern, but purely Italian and dynastic.

Thus, for many years to come, the progress of Spain was retarded, and her resources wasted in struggles by land and sea all over Europe, and with allies and opponents constantly changing, with the end of seating Isabel’s Bourbon sons upon Italian thrones. She succeeded, at the cost of a generation of war, and gave to Spain once more an appearance of some of her old potency, thanks to new ideas and more enlightened administration: but when the successive deaths of her two stepsons, the heirs of Philip by his first Savoyard wife, made her own eldest son Charles King of Spain, Isabel was plainly, but delicately, made to understand that the destinies of the country must in future be guided by men, and in enlightened national interests, and not by women for secondary ends.

Again, on the death of Charles III., the only strong King since Philip II., the regal mantle fell upon a weak uxorious man, whose wife, yet another Maria Louisa, led Spain by the miry path of disgraceful favouritism to the great war of Independence—the Peninsular war—which destroyed what was left of old Spain, and held up to the derision of the world the reigning family, of whom Napoleon made such cruel sport.

Forty years more of feminine rule in the next generation brought the unfortunate country to the revolution of 1868, and then the dawning came of a happier day, now brightening to its full. Only half a century ago the old, old struggle between France and Germany to provide a Consort for Spain was engaged anew, and brought England and France upon the very verge of war. But the fall of the Bourbons in France and Italy, and the disappearance of the French monarchy, as a result of the great war between the Frank and Teuton, still, on the ancient pretext of their rival interests in Spain, banished, at least for our time, the dynastic jealousy which had kept Europe at war for centuries.

An Austrian Queen-Regent has since then ruled Spain with consummate wisdom and the noblest self-sacrifice for nearly twenty years; and France has watched with sympathy, and no thought of aggression, the sustained effort of a good woman to hand down intact to her fatherless son the inheritance to which he was born. An English Queen Consort sits by the side of the Spanish King, now, for the first time for centuries, and yet no breath of discord comes from other nations to mar the love match that has ended in a happy marriage.

The world grows wiser at last. The old tradition that dynastic connection could override irresistible national tendencies has lingered long, but is really dying now. Matrimonial alliances between reigning families are symptoms, not causes, and as the personal power of the monarch wanes before the growth of popular government, the influence of the consort becomes more social, and consequently more personally interesting.

The stories told in these pages treat of a state of affairs never likely to recur. They show, amongst other things, with what little prescience the world has been governed. The attempt of Ferdinand the Catholic to make Aragon great by marriage ended in the swamping of Aragon: the attempt of Charles V. and his son to dictate the religion of the world, by means of the strength gained by matrimonial alliances, ended in the exhaustion and ruin of Spain: the attempts of France and Germany to obtain control of Spain by providing consorts for the ruling kings has ended in neither obtaining what it sought, and in Spain being as safe from foreign domination of any sort as any country in Europe. The lesson to be drawn surely is that rulers, grandly as they bulk for their little day in the eyes of men, are themselves but puppets, moved by aggregate spontaneous national forces infinitely more powerful than any individuality can be, and that a monarch’s seeming strength is only effective so long as it interprets truly the accumulated impulse, that, in obedience to some harmonious law as yet uncoded, guides to their destiny the nations of the earth.