a, both
which they feared as the results of placing a Bourbon on the Spanish
throne. Louis XIV. wanted Naples and Sicily for one of his sons, in
case of any partition; thus giving France a strong Mediterranean
position, but one which would be at the mercy of the sea powers,--a
fact which induced William III. to acquiesce in this demand. The
Emperor of Austria particularly objected to these Mediterranean
positions going away from his family, and refused to come into any of
the partition treaties. Before any arrangement was perfected, the
actual king of Spain died, but before his death was induced by his
ministers to sign a will, bequeathing all his States to the grandson
of Louis XIV., then Duke of Anjou, known afterward as Philip V. of
Spain. By this step it was hoped to preserve the whole, by enlisting
in its defence the nearest and one of the most powerful States in
Europe,--nearest, if are excepted the powers ruling the sea, which are
always near any country whose ports are open to their ships.

Louis XIV. accepted the bequest, and in so doing felt bound in honor
to resist all attempts at partition. The union of the two kingdoms
under one family promised important advantages to France, henceforth
delivered from that old enemy in the rear, which had balked so many of
her efforts to extend her frontiers eastward. As a matter of fact,
from that time, with rare breaks, there existed between the two
kingdoms an alliance, the result of family ties, which only the
weakness of Spain kept from being dangerous to the rest of Europe. The
other countries at once realized the situation, and nothing could have
saved war but some backward step on the part of the French king. The
statesmen of England and Holland, the two powers on whose wealth the
threatened war must depend, proposed that the Italian States should be
given to the son of the Austrian emperor, Belgium be occupied by
themselves, and that the new king of Spain should grant no commercial
privileges in the Indies to France above other nations. To the credit
of their wisdom it must be said that this compromise was the one which
after ten years of war was found, on the whole, best; and in it is
seen the growing sense of the value of extension by sea. Louis,
however, would not yield; on the contrary, he occupied, by connivance
of the Spanish governors, towns in the Netherlands which had been held
by Dutch troops under treaties with Spain. Soon after, in February,
1701, the