ure
of the inheritance and the situation of the claimants, could doubt
that a partition was inevitable. Among those claimants three stood
preeminent, the Dauphin, the Emperor Leopold, and the Electoral Prince
of Bavaria.

If the question had been simply one of pedigree, the right of the
Dauphin would have been incontestable. Lewis the Fourteeenth had married
the Infanta Maria Theresa, eldest daughter of Philip the Fourth and
sister of Charles the Second. Her eldest son, the Dauphin, would
therefore, in the regular course of things, have been her brother's
successor. But she had, at the time of her marriage, renounced, for
herself and her posterity, all pretensions to the Spanish crown.

To that renunciation her husband had assented. It had been made an
article of the Treaty of the Pyrenees. The Pope had been requested to
give his apostolical sanction to an arrangement so important to the
peace of Europe; and Lewis had sworn, by every thing that could bind a
gentleman, a king, and a Christian, by his honour, by his royal word, by
the canon of the Mass, by the Holy Gospels, by the Cross of Christ, that
he would hold the renunciation sacred. [11]

The claim of the Emperor was derived from his mother Mary Anne, daughter
of Philip the Third, and aunt of Charles the Second, and could not
therefore, if nearness of blood alone were to be regarded, come into
competition with the claim of the Dauphin. But the claim of the Emperor
was barred by no renunciation. The rival pretensions of the great Houses
of Bourbon and Habsburg furnished all Europe with an inexhaustible
subject of discussion. Plausible topics were not wanting to the
supporters of either cause. The partisans of the House of Austria dwelt
on the sacredness of treaties; the partisans of France on the sacredness
of birthright. How, it was asked on one side, can a Christian king have
the effrontery, the impiety, to insist on a claim which he has with such
solemnity renounced in the face of heaven and earth? How, it was asked
on the other side, can the fundamental laws of a monarchy be annulled by
any authority but that of the supreme legislature? The only body which
was competent to take away from the children of Maria Theresa their
hereditary rights was the Comes. The Comes had not ratified her
renunciation. That renunciation was therefore a nullity; and no
swearing, no signing, no sealing, could turn that nullity into a
reality.

Which of these two mighty competit