ote to the Marquis de Torcy, "the
surest way is to show firmness. The closer I observe them, the less do I
find that they merit the esteem which I thought it would have been
impossible not to accord them." According to the Princess, the Spanish
nation in the persons of its grandees, had yielded obedience to a son of
France only, under the idea that France alone could defend and protect
it. France remaining powerful and victorious, Spain would be safe: but,
at each defeat that occurred in Flanders or Germany from the
irresistible sword of Marlborough, the eyes of the grandees were turned
towards the Archduke, and their fidelity was shaken. The skill and merit
of Madame des Ursins was to perceive how, in so short a time, to derive
so much advantage from the grace and affability of the Queen, whom she
made really popular among the faithful people of central Spain, and it
was wonderful to see the roots of that new royalty strike so quickly in
the hearts of the old Castilians, as to render it able later during the
stormy times to weather every rude attack. With an intuitive
foresightedness not a little remarkable, the Princess des Ursins had
from the first proposed to herself a twofold object. She sought to
become the intermedium of the close alliance formed between the
grandsire and the grandson, in order to regenerate Spain by causing
French measures to prevail in the government of that misruled country;
but to the extent only that their application should appear possible
without wounding the national sentiment. That policy was the wisest and
assuredly the most useful for the Peninsula in the extremity to which
the inept power it had just escaped from had brought it. Among the
princes who were neither vicious nor cruel, there are none who had done
more harm to mankind than the last descendants of Charles V. At the end
of the seventeenth century, the immense empire of Philip IV. and Charles
II., reduced to a feebleness which the Ottoman empire in our own days
has scarcely felt, was nothing more than the phantom of a nation. The
House of Austria had triumphed over feudality and municipal resistance
as completely as the House of Bourbon; but the successes of monarchical
power had been as sterile on one side of the Pyrenees as they had been
profitable to it on the other, for in Spain the impotence of the
vanquisher had still surpassed that of the vanquished.

So much blood shed by axe and sword, so many lives sacrificed under