Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 61.djvu/324

 French ambassador, Count de Tallard, was entertained by William at Newmarket. Here and at Paris the question of the Spanish succession was, without the knowledge of parliament, informally pushed forward with a view to the succession of the electoral prince of Bavaria to at least the nucleus of the Spanish monarchy (, i. 290, 340), a scheme favoured by William already in the previous year (, Mémoires, p. 513). Louis, although his ambassador Harcourt, at Madrid, was pressing the French claims to the Spanish inheritance, was gradually brought to concede the principle of its partition; and in apprehension of the death of Charles II of Spain, William laboured hard to hasten a conclusion, keeping the secret so far as possible from the emperor and the Spanish government (Vernon Letters, ii. 189), but labouring hard to obtain for the former the solid compensation of the Milanese (, ii. 182). Only a few days before the signing of the treaty at the Hague (11 Oct.) it was communicated by William to Somers, and by him shown to four other members of the ministry; but although Vernon, as secretary of state, declined to give his warrant for the affixing to it of the great seal, Somers, while stating to the king the objections of himself and his colleagues to the treaty, forwarded to him the necessary commission for plenipotentaries; and, having been signed by them, the treaty was ratified by William at the Loo before the end of October (see ; for the text of the treaty see, vol. ii. appendix i.) In order to defeat the project of a French succession, he had abandoned the chief secret purpose of the ‘grand alliance;’ and had obtained no tangible advantages for England to stand him in stead in the day of reckoning.

The new House of Commons, though it had been returned under a whig government and elected a whig speaker (Sir Thomas Littleton), at once showed itself unwilling to respond to the king's opening admonition as to the necessity of keeping up the national armaments by land and sea (, iii. 758), and resolved in reply to limit the land forces to seven thousand men, all of whom were to be native-born Englishmen. Moved in part by his affection for his Dutch foot guards, William told Heinsius that he was being ‘driven mad’ by the doings of parliament, and not obscurely spoke of withdrawing to Holland (, ii. 219, 233; cf. Somers to Shrewsbury, in Shrewsbury Correspondence, p. 572;, chap. xv. n.) He actually drafted what was to be his last speech from the throne (the manuscript is preserved in the British Museum). But on 1 Feb. he gave his assent to the proposal in a candid and dignified speech (, iii. 759), and the house replied with a loyal address. It should be noticed that parliament had only fixed the total of men under arms, and that it was left to the crown whether this should largely consist of cadres of regiments. A few days afterwards came the news of the death (6 Feb.) of the electoral prince of Bavaria, whom Charles II of Spain had acknowledged (14 Nov. 1698) as his heir. William soon found that Louis had no intention of acting upon the secret article of the first partition treaty, which, in the event of the death of the prince, transferred his claims to his father (, ii. 251), and at once began to take thought of a fresh combination. He made one more attempt by a message to the commons to retain his Dutch guards (18 March), but the previous question was carried without a division. The appointment, before the prorogation of parliament (4 May), of a commission to consider his grants of forfeited Irish estates increased the existing tension. He had already admitted some tories into the administration; but of far deeper personal importance to him was the resignation about this time of all his offices by Portland, who resented the continued rise in the royal favour of Albemarle (see, iv. 412; and cf. , first ). During his absence in Holland (31 May–18 Oct.) his attention was absorbed by the negotiations for the second partition treaty, which, when interchanging friendly letters with Louis XIV in November and December, he described as completed (, vol. vi. app.) It had been formally submitted to the cabinet council in 1699, but with an unmistakable intimation from Portland that it must be taken or left as it stood (see Hardwicke Papers, ii. 399). It was actually signed in London on 21 Feb. 1700, a month later at the Hague, and was not communicated to parliament. Although the second partition treaty (for the text see, vol. ii. app. ii.), in giving Milan to France, granted her terms neither excessive nor equal to those which she had at first asked, its conditions were not really satisfactory to William, and would not have been accepted by him but for the weakness of his position at home and the absence of any understanding between him and the emperor. The cardinal objection to the treaty, however, lay not in its actual terms but in the inherent improbability that, under the circumstances of its conclusion, it would ever be carried out.