Antipathy towards England, nevertheless, kept
Catherine I. aloof from the Hanoverian league; she made alliance with the
emperor. France was not long before she made overtures to Spain. Philip
V. always found it painful to endure family dissensions; he became
reconciled with his nephew, and accepted the intervention of Cardinal
Fleury in his disagreements with England. The alliance, signed at
Seville on the 29th of November, 1729, secured to Spain, in return for
certain commercial advantages, the co-operation of England in Italy. The
Duke of Parma had just died; the Infante Don Carlos, supported by an
English fleet, took possession of his dominions. Elizabeth Farnese had
at last set foot in Italy. She no longer encountered there the able and
ambitious monarch whose diplomacy had for so long governed the affairs of
the peninsula; Victor Amadeo had just abdicated. Scarcely a year had
passed from the date of that resolution, when, suddenly, from fear, it
was said, of seeing his father resume power, the young king, Charles
Emmanuel, had him arrested in his castle of Pontarlier. "It will be a
fine subject for a tragedy, this that is just now happening to Victor,
King of Sardinia," writes M. d'Argenson. "What a catastrophe without a
death! A great king, who plagued Europe with his virtues and his vices,
with his courage, his artifices, and his perfidies, who had formed round
him a court of slaves, who had rendered his dominion formidable by his
industry and his labors; indefatigable in his designs, unresting in every
branch of government, cherishing none but great projects, credited in
every matter with greater designs than he had yet been known to execute,
--this king abdicates unexpectedly, and, almost immediately, here he
finds himself arrested by his son, whose benefactor he had been so
recently and so extraordinarily! This son is a young prince without
merit, without courage, and without capacity, gentle and under control.
His ministers persuaded him to be ungrateful: he accomplishes the height
of crime, without having crime in his nature; and here is his father shut
up like a bear in a prison, guarded at sight like a maniac, and separated
from the wife whom he had chosen for consolation in his retirement!"
Public indignation, however, soon forced the hand of Charles Emmanuel's
minister. Victor Amadeo was released; his wife, detained in shameful
captivity, was restored to him; he died soon afterwards in that sa