Austrian interest. So much so, that having made a will in favour of
the Bavarian prince, Charles revoked it; the ambassador Harrach, the
Prince of Hesse, who commanded in Catalonia, the queen, when her
confidant was not bribed on the other side, were active for the
archduke. But when the Partition Treaty became known, in November
1698, the king made another will, and publicly announced that his heir
was the young prince of Bavaria. He thus took the candidate of France
and England, assigning to him the whole, not a part. It was an
attempt to preserve unity and avert partition by adopting the chosen
claimant of the partitioning Powers. The English parliament, intent
on peace, and suspicious of William's foreign policy, which was
directed by him personally, with Dutch advisers, to the exclusion of
ministers, reduced the army to 7000 men. William carried his distrust
of Englishmen so far that he requested the imperial ambassador
Wratislaw, an important man in his own country, to consult nobody but
the Dutchman Albemarle. The public men of this country, he said,
revealed every secret to their friends.

Six months later, both the will and the treaty were void and annulled
by the death of the Bavarian prince, by small-pox, at Brussels, where
his father was governor. The work had to be begun over again. The
feeling of all Spanish statesmen in favour of maintaining the
integrity of the monarchy was unchanged. That could be done only by
choosing a Bourbon or a Habsburg. No other person could compete. The
court was divided simply into an Austrian and a French party. The
king's choice reverted to his nephew, the archduke. But those who had
preferred the electoral prince were opposed to the Austrian, and
became the partisans of France. They were a majority, and
preponderant. If it could be made her interest to keep up the Spanish
empire France was better able to do it than Austria. Especially now
that England was detached from her ally the emperor. For William
concluded with Lewis a second Treaty of Partition, giving Spain, the
Indies, and the Netherlands to the archduke, the Italian possessions
to France. Austria was no party to this agreement, and openly
preferred Italy to all the rest. In England it was received with
extreme coldness, and in Spain with indignation. In the summer of the
year 1700 the king's illness became alarming. The skill of his
physicians being exhausted, spiritual remedies were sought, a