The greatest story in the world, period 3 (of 3)

by Horace G. Hutchinson

CHAPTER VIII
FROM THE PEACE OF UTRECHT TO THE PEACE OF AIX-LA-CHAPELLE

In the last, short, chapter I tried to tell the story of the early years of the eighteenth century up to the Peace of Utrecht in 1713. Principally it is the story of the humbling of France, and of the checking of the ambition of Louis XIV. to unite in his descendants, together with the Crown of France, all that was included in the monarchy of Spain. That ambitious design was checked, and from now onward we shall see that a great motive in the story is the preservation of what became known as "the balance of power in Europe"; so that no one nation should have too preponderant a superiority over the rest.

The purpose of the present chapter is to carry forward the story to the middle of the century, or, more precisely, to another very important peace treaty, that between England and France, signed at Aix-la-Chapelle, in 1748.

The Peace of Utrecht had indeed included in its provisions a settlement between England and France; but within a few years war broke out again in Europe, which involved both these countries, and again it was war over the succession to thrones. There was war over the succession to the throne of Poland, to the throne of Austria, and, although it is not written of by historians as a war of succession, it really was a small war of the same kind in which England very soon found herself engaged in Scotland.. And, as ever of old, France and her Catholic king sided with the Scottish Catholics against the English Protestant king. The Court of France had, as we have noted, given welcome and shelter to the son, by his second marriage, of James II., who had a claim by birth to the English Crown.

Hanoverian English Kings

But by a recent law of England no Catholic could succeed to the throne. The Act of Settlement gave the Crown of England to George, Elector of Hanover, who was a Protestant and son of a Protestant grand-daughter of James I. It was thus that the Hanoverian dynasty, represented by our present King George V., attained the throne of England. Until Queen Victoria's accession, the sovereignty of Hanover, which became a kingdom when the Bourbon king was restored to the throne of France, also belonged to the King of England. But the laws of Hanover did not recognise succession through the female line, or admit of a queen as ruler; and therefore the two Crowns were separated when Victoria became sovereign of England.

The son of James II. came over to Scotland in 1715 and raised a revolt there, with the aid of some of the Highland clans; but this rising, known in history, from its date, as "The Fifteen," was easily put down and made no abiding mark on the story.

The next, which really was of some importance, of the wars of succession was that waged about the throne of Poland. It was a throne, as we have seen, in frequent dispute, but generally the trouble was fought out between Russia, Sweden, and Poland itself, with eastern German States taking some hand in it. Usually these German States acted as a kind of buffer between that particular trouble and the West of Europe, rather as Austria, southward, acted as a buffer for the West against the Turk. But now the King of France was drawn into the fight, because he had married a daughter of the Leszynska whom Charles of Sweden had made King of Poland for a few years before the disastrous overthrow of the Swedes at Pultowa. Russia supported the cause of a rival candidate to the throne, and Leszynska and his French allies were defeated. The chief importance of this war of the Polish succession, for the general story, is that it resulted in a large increase of Russia's power over Poland. The successive rulers of Russia began to be more and more fully recognised as the heads of the Slav people and the supreme upholders of the Greek Church.

At the same time another power, a Protestant power, that of Prussia, was becoming more and more formidable along the shores of the Baltic to the north of Poland, and the time is near at hand when we shall see these two, Russia and Prussia, playing a very leading part in the story.