nt,
it might have seemed to him an additional argument in favor of peace;
for, his keen political sagacity warning him of the existence of a
danger which he yet could not see, he told the House of Commons that
"if the Spaniards had not private encouragement from powers more
considerable than themselves, they would never have ventured on the
insults and injuries which have been proved at your bar;" and he
expressed the opinion that "England was not a match for the French and
Spaniards too."

Fleuri had indeed given his old friend and fellow-statesman an ugly
fall. The particular question which excited the two years' War of the
Polish Succession, the choice of a ruler for a distracted kingdom
fated soon to disappear from the list of European States, seems a
small matter; but the turn imparted to European politics by the action
of the powers engaged gives it a very different importance. France and
Austria came to an arrangement in October, 1735, upon terms to which
Sardinia and Spain afterward acceded, the principal points of which
were as follows: The French claimant to the Polish throne gave up his
claim to it, and received instead the duchies of Bar and Lorraine on
the east of France, with the provision that upon his death they were
to go to his son-in-law, the King of France, in full sovereignty; the
two kingdoms of Sicily and Naples were confirmed to the Spanish
Bourbon prince, Don Carlos; and Austria received back Parma. The
Sardinian monarchy also got an increase to its Italian territory.
France thus, under the peace-loving Fleuri, obtained in Bar and
Lorraine an accession of strength which more warlike rulers had
coveted in vain; and at the same time her external position was
fortified at the expense of England, by the transfer of controlling
positions in the central Mediterranean to an ally. Yet the heart of
Fleuri might well have failed him as he remembered the secret
agreement to check the commerce of England, and thought of her mighty
sea power alongside of the decayed navy of France. That compact
between France and Spain, to which the Two Sicilies acceded later,
bore within it, in the then strained relations between England and
Spain, the germ of the great wars between England and the House of
Bourbon which issued in the creation of the British Empire and the
independence of the United States.

The clamor in England over Spanish outrages continued, and was
carefully nursed by the opposition to Walpole. The