At length Louis, having consented to swear that the two crowns of France and Spain should never be united on the same head; and Philip having renounced, both for himself and his successors, all claim to the former—engagements which neither considered binding—a general peace was signed, April 11th, 1713, by the ambassadors of all the sovereigns except the emperor. Its provisions, as far as Spain is concerned, were few but momentous. Philip was acknowledged king of Spain and the Indies; but Sicily, with the regal title, was ceded to the duke of Savoy, and Milan, Naples, Sardinia, and the Netherlands to the emperor; Gibraltar, and Minorca, with the commercial advantages before mentioned, to the English; a general amnesty was guaranteed to the Catalans, but without any stipulations for the preservation of their ancient fueros. In case Philip died without issue, the succession was to devolve, not on a prince of the house of France but on the duke of Savoy.
By this celebrated peace Spain was stripped of half her possessions in Europe. The War of the Succession was now virtually at an end: Charles, disabled by the defection of his allies, opened negotiations for withdrawing his troops from Catalonia; and though the inhabitants of the capital were resolved to continue the struggle unaided, it could not be of long continuance. Neither this war, nor the peace which followed it, was honourable to the allies. It was signalised by many atrocities, and by incessant insults to the religion of the country, and the morals of the people.
Of all the parties in this war, England is by far the most censurable. Hurried into it by hereditary, and in this case absurd, jealousy of France, she conducted it without glory, and ended it with discredit. She forced the Catalans into rebellion, yet she now abandoned them to a cruel and vindictive persecution.
THE CATALAN REVOLT (1713-1714 A.D.)
[1713-1714 A.D.]
When the Catalans knew that the king had resolved to abolish their fueros, that neither honour nor justice was to be expected from England, and that the emperor himself was compelled to forsake them, instead of bewailing their situation, they manfully resolved to continue in arms against the whole force of the Bourbons. They rejected the proffered amnesty of Philip, unless their privileges were to be declared inviolable. Had the king complied with this condition, he would, doubtless, have attached to his throne, by the strongest of all ties, this brave and independent people; but he appears to have regarded every form of freedom with abhorrence, and to have considered the frequent insurrections as a consequence of their superior rights. A slight acquaintance with the national history would have taught him that they were occasioned by the repeated and unconstitutional usurpations of the crown.
The Catalans did not fall without one of the noblest struggles on record. An overwhelming army reduced all their fortresses, except Cardeña and the capital; the latter was invested, held for months in a state of blockade, while a formidable artillery played, with few intermissions, on the walls. In the spring of 1714, twenty thousand Frenchmen, under Berwick, arrived to reinforce the besiegers; nay, an English squadron was despatched for the same purpose. Nothing could daunt the inhabitants; all who were strong enough flew to arms; even the women and the ecclesiastics. Unfortunately they disgraced their cause by many excesses: never was tyranny more complete than that which reigned within the walls of Barcelona. All who did not prefer the rashest to the most moderate measures, were massacred by a ferocious mob. Even priests were forced from the altar or the pulpit to the scaffold or the gallows. In the meantime Berwick found that his most vigorous attacks were repulsed with loss. The desperate defenders had rallied round a black banner, on which was the representation of a death’s head,—an intimation that they would neither give nor receive quarter,—in a series of wild, almost superhuman efforts.
Pulpit, Burgos Cathedral