The siege, however, failed, and the campaign
was inconclusive. Returning home, the admiral, Sir Cloudesley Shovel,
with several ships-of-the-line, was lost on the Scilly Islands, in one
of those shipwrecks which have become historical.

In 1708 the allied fleets seized Sardinia, which from its fruitfulness
and nearness to Barcelona became a rich storehouse to the Austrian
claimant, so long as by the allied help he controlled the sea. The
same year Minorca, with its valuable harbor, Port Mahon, was also
taken, and from that time for fifty years remained in English hands.
Blocking Cadiz and Cartagena by the possession of Gibraltar, and
facing Toulon with Port Mahon, Great Britain was now as strongly based
in the Mediterranean as either France or Spain; while, with Portugal
as an ally, she controlled the two stations of Lisbon and Gibraltar,
watching the trade routes both of the ocean and of the inland sea. By
the end of 1708 the disasters of France by land and sea, the frightful
sufferings of the kingdom, and the almost hopelessness of carrying on
a strife which was destroying France, and easily borne by England, led
Louis XIV. to offer most humiliating concessions to obtain peace. He
undertook to surrender the whole Spanish monarchy, reserving only
Naples for the Bourbon king. The allies refused; they demanded the
abandonment of the whole Spanish Empire without exception by the Duke
of Anjou, refusing to call him king, and added thereto ruinous
conditions for France herself. Louis would not yield these, and the
war went on.

During the remaining years the strenuous action of the sea power of
the allies, which had by this time come to be that of Great Britain
alone, with little help from Holland, was less than ever obtrusive,
but the reality of its effect remained. The Austrian claimant,
confined to Catalonia for the most part, was kept in communication
with Sardinia and the Italian provinces of Germany by the English
fleet; but the entire disappearance of the French navy and the evident
intention on the part of Louis to keep no squadrons at sea, allowed
some diminution of the Mediterranean fleet, with the result of greater
protection to trade. In the years 1710 and 1711 expeditions were also
made against the French colonies in North America. Nova Scotia was
taken, but an attempt on Quebec failed.

During the winter of 1709 and 1710 Louis withdrew all the French
troops from Spain, thus abandoning the cause of his grand