CHAP. XXXII. dread of the king was, lest these renowned retreats of piety should set themselves above the Church, or abstract themselves from it. This was the case of Port Royal, as it had been the case of the Protestants, viz., to attempt to be religious and virtuous without the pious teaching and precepts of the Church. Yet in the very precincts of the court, nay, in its very heart, grew up a little sect which revived the idea of a religion of the heart independent of forms. The little coterie, rather than sect or party, which raised itself at Versailles on the fall of Louvois, and succeeded in partially persuading Louis to be more humane, honest, and humble in his policy, has been alluded to. Its influence, supported by the attractions of De Maintenon, would have been more durable and more useful, had the leading personage of its councils been more worldly and more adroit. But Fénelon had the weakness of a recluse and the errments of a visionary, and this led to an indulgence in superstition, of which the practical spirit of Bossuet was incapable. A certain Madame Guyon broached a system of sentimental devotion, which she called a pure love of God;" and which consisted in wrapt contemplation, rather than in the performance of the many mute duties of the Church. Her eloquence and unction won upon Madame de Maintenon, upon the Dukes of Noailles and Chevreuse, upon Fénelon himself, then tutor to the king's grandson. It was a harmless shape for party to assume, and certainly capable of suiting but few persons. Quietism, as it was called, invaded the school of St. Cyr, by the permission of Madame de Maintenon. The confessor of the establishment, Godot, was horrified that it set at nought his precepts, and superseded him in his functions. He complained, and Bossuet was indignant at what rendered the acts of the priesthood superfluous. This was the crime of which Protestantism had been guilty. The memoirs of the time do not clearly CHAP. indicate what most probably was the case, that the mild, hunane, and tolerant party was carefully watched XXXII. in all its actions by the more fierce, authoritative, and intolerant faction to which Louvois had and to which Bossuet still belonged. These instantly pounced upon the heresy of Madame Guyon and the weakness of Fénelon, and swelled an amiable foible into a fierce crime, which Godot first denounced, exaggerated, and anathematised. The prudent Maintenon drew back in affright, the entrance to St. Cyr was forbidden to Madame Guyon, and the fair enthusiast was soon sent to the Bastille. Fénelon, who knew her sincerity, and felt her genius, thought it base to abandon her. He published, in refutation of Bossuet, a work consisting of fragments and opinions of the Lives of the Saints, in which he showed how many of the canonised demigods had gained Christian apotheosis by doing no more than Madame Guyon had done. The king, however, would not hear of sanctification. In his reign St. François de Sales would have gone to the Bastille, and Ste. Thérèse been immured in a cell. Fénelon was dismissed from his functions at court, and exiled to his diocese at Cambray. Bossuet and rigid orthodoxy reigned at Versailles. Jesuitism was forbidden as much as Jansenism. And the only opposition to the Church which was allowed was that of utter disbelief. The libertins, as infidels were politely called, soon replaced Protestantism, Jansenism, or Jesuitism, as antagonists of the sacerdotal influence which reigned at court. Their standard, however, was not raised at Versailles. But in Paris, at the Palais Royal, at Anet, the residences of the heirs of the house of Orleans and of Vendome, that reaction against religion commenced which soon found an apostle in Voltaire, and a result in the Great Revolution. CHAP. XXXIII. 70 CHAPTER XXXIII. FROM THE TREATY OF RYSWICK TO THE DEATH OF LOUIS 1697-1715. NEVER was more fully shown the absurdity of the principle which governed succession in European monarchies, that of their being the exclusive property of certain families, and descending to their heirs like other estates, than on the failure of the race which for so many centuries had ruled in Spain. The enormity was indeed sufficiently manifest in the fact of one prince being in possession of territories extending in a circle from Antwerp to Gibraltar, passing up the Rhine and over the Alps into Italy, from whence the sea was to be crossed to the capital of the empire. The causes of the decadence of Spain are various; yet the one impossible task of seeking to subdue and to administer provinces and peoples so remote, and so estranged in language, interests, and habits, is quite sufficient to account for the government of Madrid having sunk under it. When, in addition, the reigning house became extinct, or threatened to be so, and when such rights as it bequeathed were represented by the offspring of female descendants, there came a perfect chaos of conflicting claims, at a period when the people themselves, with the sole exception of England, were accounted or considered to have no voice in so momentous a matter. The decadence, and promised disappearance, of the Austrian royal family of Spain were indeed at the bottom of all Louis the Fourteenth's schemes of ambition. It CHAP. XXXIII. prompted his first war, arising out of his doctrine of evolution, and terminating by a secret treaty with Austria for the partition of the Spanish monarchy. Had Louis adhered to the terms of this treaty, which gave him Belgium as well as Naples, leaving Spain to the Imperial family, he would probably have realised the darling wish of his nation-the frontier of the Rhine. Had he accepted the offers of the Dutch in his early successes during the war of 1672, he might have attained the same aim. The extravagant Louvois, who seemed to love war for war's sake, without fixing his view upon any definite end, drove Louis not only to refuse the Dutch offer in 1672, but to rush into hostilities against Germany and Italy in 1688; thus rendering the war universal, and at the same time bootless, because it soon became necessarily defensive, or only offensive for maraud. The result of Louvois' rashness proved too perilous not to impress the monarch with a dislike of his policy. Louis foresaw troublous times, and wars, as likely to arise from the Spanish succession; and he was resolved at least to secure one ally, and preclude the revival of a European coalition against him. The power which France now regarded as its chief antagonist was the Emperor, who claimed to succeed to the Spanish monarchy, as representative and continuer of the old house of Austria. Louis the Fourteenth pretended to the same heritage by right of his wife, daughter of Philip the Fourth. She had, indeed, formally renounced all such right on her marriage, but her dowry had remained unpaid, which, the French said, cancelled the renunciation. Another daughter of Philip the Fourth, the first wife of the Emperor Leopold, had left an only child, a daughter, married to the Elector of Bavaria. Their son, if it were desirable to have one empire distinct from another, ought to have been proclaimed the heir of the Spanish monarchy by the laws of CHAP. common sense. The Emperor Leopold would, however, XXXIII. neither listen to French nor to Bavarian pretensions. He was himself born of a sister of Philip the Fourth. But his true claim was, as has been said, that he represented the house of Austria, which had created, in a manner, the great empire of Spain and of the Indies. The Emperor Leopold was the most impracticable of sovereigns, one who could never resign himself to peace, nor exert himself in war. * He took it for granted that the Spanish court must be true to its Austrian origin. But there was one sentiment which prevailed in every Spanish mind over dynastic rights or ties, and that was Spanish pride, which demanded the future as well as past union of the vast monarchy, which so enshrined the national name. But though all entertained the same desire, each proposed different ways of attaining it. The queen regnant was for the Austrian succession, the queen mother for the Bavarian; whilst several of the grandees came to entertain the belief that no prince could maintain intact the extent of the monarchy save one of the house of Bourbon. The adroit French ambassador, Harcourt, fanned and flattered this idea in the minds of the Spaniards; but the head of the house of Bourbon, Louis the Fourteenth, himself was not sanguine of at least immediate success. The more just and pacific of his counsellors were of opinion that to secure. a portion, and even not the chief portion, of the Spanish monarchy was better than to rush into war for the whole.† There was then no potentate in Europe whose good sense, constancy, and power could be relied upon in an alliance save William the Third. With him the French king opened negotiations, for which indeed William himself gave the opportunity. In 1798 he despatched the Duke of Portland to Paris, to awe down the exiled James by his magnificence, and by the respect, which * Menzel, Neuere Geschichte. † Miguet, Succession d'Espagne. |