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ce of England with his designs. In spite of failure in both countries he resolved boldly on an attempt to recover the Italian provinces which Philip had lost. He selected the Duke of Savoy as the weakest of his opponents; and armaments greater than Spain had seen for a century put to sea in 1717, and reduced the island of Sardinia. The blow however was hardly needed to draw England and France together. The Abbe Dubois, a confidant of the Regent, had already met the English King with his Secretary, Lord Stanhope, at the Hague; and entered into a compact, by which France guaranteed the Hanoverian line in England, and England the succession of the house of Orleans should Lewis the Fifteenth die without heirs. The two powers were joined, though unwillingly, by Holland in an alliance, which was concluded on the basis of this compact; and, as in William's time, the existence of this alliance told on the whole aspect of European politics. Though in the summer of 1718 a strong Spanish force landed in Sicily, and made itself master of the island, the appearance of an English squadron in the Straits of Messina was followed by an engagement in which the Spanish fleet was all but destroyed. Alberoni strove to avenge the blow by fitting out an armament of five thousand men, which the Duke of Ormond was to command, for a revival of the Jacobite rising in Scotland. But the ships were wrecked in the Bay of Biscay; and the accession of Austria with Savoy to the Triple Alliance, with the death of the king of Sweden, left Spain alone in the face of Europe. The progress of the French armies in the north of Spain forced Philip at last to give way. Alberoni was dismissed; and the Spanish forces were withdrawn from Sardinia and Sicily. The last of these islands now passed to the Emperor, Savoy being compensated for its loss by the acquisition of Sardinia, from which its Duke took the title of King; while the work of the Treaty of Utrecht was completed by the Emperor's renunciation of his claims on the crown of Spain, and Philip's renunciation of his claims on the Milanese and the Two Sicilies. [Sidenote: Resignation of Townshend.] Successful as the Ministry had been in its work of peace, the struggle had disclosed the difficulties which the double position of its new sovereign was to bring upon England. George was not only King of England; he was Elector of Hanover; and in his own mind he cared far more for the interests of his Electorate
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