ver advantages in trade
they had enjoyed under the Austrian kings of Spain, and contained what
we should now call a most favored nation clause, providing that no
British subjects should be {160} exposed to higher duties than were
paid by Spaniards. Alberoni cautiously refrained from giving any
encouragement to the Stuarts, and always professed to the British
minister the strongest esteem and friendship for King George. Stanhope
himself had known Alberoni formerly in Spain, and had from the first
formed a very high opinion of his abilities. He now opened a
correspondence with the cardinal, expressing a strong wish for a
sincere and lasting friendship between England and Spain; and this
correspondence was kept up for some time in so friendly and
confidential a manner that very little was left for the regular
accredited minister from Spain at the Court of King George to do.

[Sidenote: 1714-1718--The Triple Alliance]

Alberoni, however, was somewhat too vain and impatient. He had brought
over Sweden to his side, partly because he found Charles the Twelfth in
a bad humor on account of the cession to Hanover of certain Swedish
territories by the King of Denmark, who had clutched them while the
warlike Charles was away in Turkey. The cession of those places
brought Hanover to the sea, and was of importance thus to Hanover and
to England alike. George the Elector was in his petty way an ambitious
Hanoverian prince, however little interest he had in English affairs.
He had always been anxious to get possession of the districts of Bremen
and Verden, which had been handed over to Sweden at the Peace of
Westphalia. Reckless enterprise had carried Charles the
Twelfth--"Swedish Charles," with "a frame of adamant, a soul of fire,"
whom no dangers frighted, and no labors tired, the "unconquered lord of
pleasure and of pain"--too far in the rush of his chivalrous madness.
His vaulting ambition had overleaped itself, and fallen on the other
side; and after his defeat at Pultowa, all his enemies, some of whom he
had scared into inaction before, turned upon him as the nations of
Europe turned upon Napoleon the First after Moscow. Charles had gone
into Turkey and taken refuge there, and it seemed as if he had fallen
never to rise again. In his absence the King of Denmark {161} seized
Schleswig-Holstein, Bremen, and Verden. At the close of 1714 Charles
suddenly roused himself from depression and appeared at the town of
Stralsund