Britain, Spain and the Treaty of Utrecht 1713-2013

Trevor J. Dadson

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781909662223
• eBook ISBN: 9781351191333
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

"In July 1713 Great Britain and Spain signed a 'Treaty of Peace and Friendship' that brought to an end a conflict that had begun in 1701, following the death the year before of the Spanish King Charles II, who died without leaving a direct descendant or heir. The War of the Spanish Succession that ensued involved the major European powers who all had an interest in the question of who would occupy the Spanish throne. As a result of the various peace treaties that were signed between 1713 and 1714 between the warring countries - Spain, Britain, France, the Austrian Empire, the Dutch Republic -, the Bourbon candidate became king of Spain as Philip V, but Spain lost its last European possessions (the Spanish Netherlands, Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia, among others) and ceded to Great Britain the island of Minorca and Gibraltar. Considered by many historians to be the first real world war, as it involved fighting in the Americas as well as in Europe, the War of the Spanish Succession changed the map of Europe and led to significant alterations in the balance of power. In this volume twelve eminent historians and legal experts from Spain and the United Kingdom consider the political and legal context and consequences of the War and the Treaty of Utrecht that brought it to an end, consequences that still resonate today. This volume is edited by Trevor J. Dadson with the assistance of the Office for Cultural and Scientific Affairs, Embassy of Spain, London."

Part I
The Historical Context

Chapter 1
The Road to Utrecht: War and Peace

John H. Elliott

The essays published in this volume derive from the papers given at a Symposium held in the Spanish Embassy in London on 24 and 25 October 2013. The idea for a conference commemorating the third centenary of the Treaty of Utrecht came from the Ambassador of Spain, and it seemed appropriate that historians and legal scholars from Britain and Spain should meet for the occasion to reflect on the War of the Spanish Succession and the resulting peace settlement, in both of which the two countries were so deeply involved.

This introduction is intended as no more than a brief general survey designed to provide a historical context for the essays that follow. These essays discuss, from a variety of angles, the immediate and long-term implications for Britain and Spain of the War of the Spanish Succession of 1701–13 and the peace settlement of 1713–14 generally known as the Peace of Utrecht. In reality the settlement consisted of a whole series of treaties, of which the first series, signed on 11 April 1713 by the plenipotentiaries meeting in Utrecht of Britain, Savoy, Portugal, Prussia, and the Dutch Republic, consisted of treaties between these respective powers and the France of Louis XIV. Although it, too, generally goes under the name of ‘the Treaty of Utrecht’, Britain and Spain, which had opened direct negotiations with each other in October 1712, signed their own separate treaty of peace and friendship on 13 July 1713, three months after the signing of the treaties with France. This treaty, preceded by the signing in Madrid in March of that year of the Asiento Treaty between the two countries allowing an annual British ship to trade with the Spanish Indies (see Chapter 5), contained the famous, or notorious, Article x, ceding to Great Britain the Rock of Gibraltar, ‘without any territorial jurisdiction’. Following the signing of these various treaties the Holy Roman (or Austrian) Emperor Charles VI and the constituent states of the Empire decided to fight on, and did not make peace with France until March and September 1714 respectively. In June 1714 Spain made peace with the Dutch, and in February 1715 with Portugal.¹

This general peace settlement brought to a rather untidy end a string of later seventeenth-century European conflicts and wars. The Nine Years War of 1688–97 was followed within three years by the War of the Spanish Succession, the immediate concern of this volume. The two wars were closely related. Underlying both were deep-seated fears among the Protestant states of Europe about the ambitions of the France of Louis XIV, who was thought to be aiming at European hegemony, or, in the language of the period, at ‘universal monarchy’ (see Chapter 6). In 1688 the Glorious Revolution in England drove the Roman Catholic James II into exile, and replaced him on the English throne with the Stadholder of Holland as King William III. William proceeded to secure the English constitution along the lines advocated by his Whig supporters, imposed a new settlement on Ireland, which he feared would fall into the hands of the French, and forged a grand coalition designed to halt Louis XIV in his tracks. The war ended in 1697 with exhaustion on both sides, but looming over the 1697 settlement was the prospect of the long-awaited death of Carlos II of Spain. When he eventually died in November 1700 his will created a serious dilemma for all the great powers. Under its terms the territories of the Spanish crown were to pass whole and undivided to the Bourbon candidate, the Dauphin’s second son, Philip, Duke of Anjou. Failing him, they were to go to the Habsburg candidate, the Archduke Charles of Austria, second son of the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I.

If Louis accepted the offer on behalf of his grandson, the Bourbons would be the masters of both France and Spain, and there was a distinct possibility that one day the two countries would be governed by a single monarch. In the eyes of William III and his allies, this represented a supreme threat to what they called ‘the liberties of Europe’. On the other hand, if Louis declined the offer, France would once again be encircled by the Habsburgs, as it was in the days of the Emperor Charles V. In the circumstances, it is understandable that he chose to accept the terms of Carlos’s will. Once he did so, war became almost inevitable, although, to William’s exasperation, the English prevaricated. In words that say as much about Britain and Europe today as they did at the end of 1700, he wrote to a Dutch confidant that ‘people here are perfectly unconcerned, and turn their thoughts but little to the great change which is happening in the affairs of the world. It seems as if it was a punishment of heaven that this nation should be so little alive to that which passes outside of its own island, although it ought to have the same interests and the same anxieties as the Continental nations’.²

When, on the death of James II in September 1701, Louis, after occupying the Spanish Netherlands in the name of Philip of Anjou, went on to compound his sins by proclaiming the dead monarch’s son as James III of England, even a Tory-dominated House of Commons felt that enough was enough. It passed the Act of Settlement in June 1701, ensuring a Protestant succession to the English throne, and endorsed military intervention on the continent, ‘in conjunction with the Emperor and the Estates-General [the Netherlands], for the preservation of the liberties of Europe, the prosperity and peace of England, and for reducing the exorbitant power of France’.³ This enabled William III to form his Grand Alliance of England, the Dutch Republic, and the Emperor in September 1701.

Although William died in March 1702 to be succeeded by Queen Anne, there would be no turning back, and the determination of the new queen to give her unstinting support to the Duke of Marlborough as the commander of the allied army in the Low Countries would do much to decide the fate of Britain and Europe. In the spring of 1702 Marlborough embarked on the first of his extraordinary continental campaigns, and the War of the Spanish Succession formally began. Two years later, following the signing in May 1703 of the Methuen treaty between England and Portugal and the creation of an Anglo-Portuguese alliance, war came to the Iberian Peninsula itself. The Archduke Charles, who had been proclaimed in Vienna as Charles III of Spain, landed in Lisbon in March 1704, and Portugal became a base for the allied invasion of Spain. Gibraltar fell to the English fleet in August of that year, and in 1705, following contacts between a number of Catalan leaders and the allies, it was decided to send an expeditionary force under the Earl of Peterborough to eastern Spain. The Archduke Charles was on board the fleet, which put in at Valencia in August 1705, and in October, after a short siege, Barcelona surrendered to the allies.

We have here, then, a series of interconnected wars.⁴ One was the actual succession war inside Spain itself, involving Britain, Portugal, and the French and Austrian claimants to the Spanish throne. The other conflicts included the Anglo-Dutch war with France, fought in Flanders and Germany to guarantee the safety of the Dutch Republic from French attacks; war in Italy, where the Emperor and Austrian forces hoped to put an end to Spanish domination, and where the Duke of Savoy had territorial ambitions of his own; and Austria’s war in central Europe against France and its ally, Bavaria, which was effectively eliminated from the contest by the crushing victory of the allied forces at Blenheim in 1704.

The first of these wars — the one fought inside Spain itself over the succession to the throne — was in many respects a Spanish civil war, with internal divisions over the two candidates running right through the peninsula. Not everyone in Castile favoured Philip V, nor was there by any means unanimity in the eastern territories — the kingdoms of Aragon and Valencia, and the principality of Catalonia — in favour of the Archduke Charles. Still less, as some sections of Catalan society are claiming today, was this a war between Catalonia and Spain — a nonsensical and totally a-historical claim.⁵

For some years the war in Spain swung to and fro, with 1706 being an annus horribilis for the Bourbons, both outside and inside Spain. The forces of Louis XIV were driven out of both Flanders and northern Italy, while in the peninsula Philip, who in effect was a French puppet totally dependent on his grandfather’s support and advice, was forced to raise the siege of Barcelona in May. At the end of June allied forces went on to occupy Madrid, and it looked as though the Bourbon cause was lost. But in April 1707 Philip’s army won a decisive victory in Valencia at the battle of Almansa — a victory that effectively settled the dynastic question in Spain in Philip’s favour (see Chapter 3).

The consequences of that victory extended far beyond the definitive settlement of the Bourbons on the Spanish throne. Philip and his advisers seized the opportunity to revoke the traditional fueros of Aragon and Valencia, as a punishment for their support for the Archduke Charles. This meant in effect the replacement of the contractual composite monarchy of the House of Austria with an authoritarian, centralized monarchy based on a uniformity of laws and government, although the uniformity would be by no means total. Resistance continued in parts of Valencia and in Catalonia, which was shielded by the British fleet, but when the new Tory government brought to power by the general election of 1710 decided in favour of bringing the war to a close, the fate of the Catalans was sealed. Barcelona surrendered after a long and bitter siege on 11 September 1714, and two years later the Catalans, like the Aragonese and the Valencians, were stripped of their traditional laws and liberties.

As Chapter 4 makes clear, however, it was not only in Spain that the war brought about a major constitutional reordering. In the British Isles William III had at least temporarily solved the problem of Ireland, but Scotland remained a continuing cause for concern. The Scots were resentful that the Act of Settlement transferring the succession to the Hanoverians after the death of Queen Anne had been passed without any consideration of Scottish opinion, and there was real fear in London that the Jacobite pretender to the throne would secure a foothold north of the border and that Scotland again might become independent.⁶ In a sense, then, there is a parallel between the situations of Britain and Spain in the opening years of the eighteenth century. There were separatist tendencies and rival claimants to the throne in both countries, but they resolved their dynastic and domestic problems in very different ways: Spain through victory on the battlefield and the imposition of a new system of government on the vanquished; and Britain by a legislative union in 1707, which compensated the Scots for the loss of their own representative assembly in Edinburgh by giving them an allocation of seats in the London Parliament and free access to England’s overseas possessions and colonial trade.

The Anglo-Scottish Act of Union of 1707 greatly reinforced British power over the long term, and, more immediately, it helped strengthen Britain’s prospects for securing a favourable outcome to the war. The Jacobite threat was lifted, although by no means entirely removed, and the Protestant succession was now assured throughout the British Isles. The new-found stability of a genuinely united kingdom ruled by a monarch responsive to parliament enhanced the credit-worthiness of the government and enabled it to continue raising the funds needed for waging an extremely costly war. But the political establishment was torn by vitriolic faction feuds between Whigs and Tories, and there was a growing war-weariness in the country (see Chapter 2).

The new Tory administration that came to power after the election of 1710 was opposed to continental entanglements and had as its top priority the safeguarding of Britain’s overseas trade and its American colonies. It believed that, following Philip’s victory at Almansa, the Bourbon succession in Spain was a fait accompli. It therefore disputed the insistence of the Whigs, with their cry of ‘No peace without Spain’, that the war should continue until the Archduke Charles replaced Philip on the Spanish throne. Determined to seek an accommodation with France that would bring the war to an end, Robert Harley’s Tory government sidelined Marlborough and starved the allied army of money, and it showed no scruples about letting down the Dutch, of whom the Tories had a visceral dislike. But the decisive event, which transformed the international landscape, was the unexpected death from smallpox in April 1711 of the Emperor Joseph I. With the succession of the Archduke Charles, his younger brother, as Holy Roman Emperor, the union of Austria and Spain under a single Habsburg monarch looked just as threatening to the European balance of power as did the union of France and Spain under Bourbon rule.

Although the Dutch remained preoccupied with the fate of the line of barrier fortresses defending them from French invading armies, there was now a widespread interest among the war-weary belligerents in reaching a general settlement, and the road was open to Utrecht. If we look at the Utrecht settlement of 1711–14, is it possible to summarize what the war was about, and who won and who lost? Perhaps the shortest answer to the second question is that almost everyone won something, except the Catalans, who found themselves abandoned by their British allies. Their British sympathizers could do no more than wring their hands and publish pamphlets under such titles as The Case of the Catalans Considered and The Deplorable History of the Catalans (see Chapter 3).⁷

While the allies failed in their original aim of preventing the accession of a Bourbon to the Spanish throne, t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgements
• List of Figures
• Notes on the Contributors
• Foreword
• PART I. THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT
• PART II. THE LEGAL CONTEXT
• APPENDIX. THE TREATY
• Bibliography
• Index