By the Treaty of Vienna the two crowns of Naples and Spain were never to be placed on the same head: hence Charles III, on his accession to the latter, was compelled to resign the other in favour of a son. As the eldest, Philip, was a constant prey to mental imbecility, the second, Charles, succeeded to the rights of primogeniture, and was declared heir to the Spanish monarchy; while the third, Ferdinand, was hailed as king of the Two Sicilies. Having appointed a council of regency during the minority of Ferdinand, Charles bade adieu to his former subjects, whom his administration had strongly attached to his person, and proceeded to Madrid. In the ministry he made few changes. He retained General Wall, but suffered Ensenada to return to court; he dismissed the minister of finance, whom he replaced by the marquis Squillaci [called Esquilache by the Spaniards], an Italian nobleman of considerable experience in that department; and he advised Farinelli to quit the kingdom.
When Charles ascended the throne, he found France and Great Britain involved in a war which, under the vigorous administration of Pitt, was highly disastrous to the arms of Louis. The success of the English displeased him; he feared lest the victors should turn their arms against his richest settlements in the New World. France was eager to make common cause with him. The result was an intimate alliance, known by the name of the Family Compact, by which the enemy of either was to be considered the enemy of both, and neither was to make peace without the consent of the other. However secret the articles, they were suspected by Pitt, who would have anticipated Spain by an immediate declaration of war, and by breaking off the hollow negotiations which, to gain time, France had commenced, had he not been replaced at this juncture by a court favourite, the earl of Bute. The new ministry were made the dupes of the Bourbon courts; the negotiations were artfully prolonged until the arrival of the Spanish treasures from the Indies, and until preparations were made by both countries to carry on the war with vigour.
[1762-1781 A.D.]
The mask was then dropped, and hostilities were invited. However unstable the English ministry, under a sovereign more feeble even than his predecessors, a vigour had been given by Pitt to every branch of the public service, which in the present war secured the triumph of English arms. In the West Indies, the Havana, in the east, Manila, were taken (1762); nor were the allied French and Spanish arms successful in Portugal, which, in punishment of its connection with England, was invaded by twenty-two thousand men, under the marquis of Soria. They could only take Almeida before they were compelled to retire within the Spanish territory. Worse than all other disasters was the state of the finances, which were, in fact, exhausted; while the interruption to trade, occasioned by the present hostilities, rendered it impossible for any minister to rely on new contributions. In this emergency, the two courts turned their eyes towards peace, which was concluded at Paris, February 10th, 1763. Omitting the concessions made by France, Spain purchased the restoration of the conquests which had been made, by the cession of Florida, by the permission to cut logwood in the bay of Honduras, and by a renunciation of all claim to the Newfoundland fisheries.
These unfavourable conditions were not likely to remove, however it might be prudent to smother, the irritation of the Spaniards. But such, at length, were the improvements effected in the collection of the revenues, and in the national forces by sea and land; such the results of a wise economy and a better discipline, under the superintendence of the count of Aranda, a man of enterprising genius, that these forces were considerably augmented, and taught to confide in their own strength. The British ambassadors at Madrid were no longer treated with even outward respect. That Spain was inclined to war is evident from the whole conduct of its ministers; but the desire was counteracted by the internal embarrassments of France. Thus affairs continued, until the count of Aranda being succeeded by the marquis of Grimaldi, and the latter, in his turn, by the count of Florida-Blanca, England received another blow through her ally Portugal. Portugal, the queen-dowager of which was the sister of Charles, joined the Family Compact.
The progress of the misunderstanding between England and her American colonies (1776-1783) afforded an opening for humbling her power. By entering into an alliance with the rebels, and by an open war with Britain, France at once indulged her hereditary enmity, and secured a friend in the rising states. With a policy as blind as it was vindictive, Florida-Blanca persuaded Charles to concur with France in behalf of the revolted colonies. Charles declared war, procured the co-operation of a French fleet, and caused Gibraltar to be closely invested. The situation of England, at this time, was exceedingly critical. By all Europe her ruin was considered at hand. Without an ally; opposed not only to her colonies, but to France and Spain, which were favoured by the secret wishes of Portugal, Morocco, Holland, Russia, and Austria; a prey to intestine commotions; cursed by an imbecile and extravagant court, and by a ministry no less despicable, her prospects were indeed hopeless. But the native vigour of her defenders, though it could not avert disasters unexampled in her history, and was in most instances lamentably misdirected, at least averted impending ruin. Gibraltar, though garrisoned with no more than a handful of men, exhibited a defence which astonished all Europe; and, though the coasts of England were frequently insulted by the appearance of a hostile flag, no descent followed. These fleets were not long suffered to exhibit even these ineffectual bravadoes. Having retired to the peninsular ports, one of them was defeated by Admiral Rodney, who about the same time had the good fortune to capture a convoy of fifteen sail. But the capture of a British merchant fleet by the enemy; the loss of some settlements in the West Indies and on the banks of the Mississippi, and the conquest of West Florida by Galvez, an enterprising Spanish officer, more than counterbalanced this advantage.
These disasters would have been much greater, had not the English cabinet contrived to spread division between the two allied powers. The offer of Gibraltar—an offer made with anything but sincerity—more than once arrested the hostile march of Spain, and led to secret negotiations. Florida-Blanca had, however, the good fortune to propose the famous armed neutrality, by which the maritime power of Europe endeavoured to annihilate the naval superiority of Britain; and he had the still greater glory of recovering Minorca [February, 1782, after seventy-four years of English possession]. Elated by this success the Bourbon ministers despatched a formidable fleet to expel the English from the West Indies, whilst their allies the Dutch, in concert with Hyder (Haidar) Ali, strove to drive the same enemy from the Carnatic. But the French admiral De Grasse sustained so signal a defeat that the enterprise, as far as regarded the West Indies, was abandoned. To England, however, the war was fatal: the American colonies obtained their independence. Humbled and discouraged, the ministry now made propositions for peace; and negotiations for the purpose were opened at Paris. It was at length concluded (1783) on terms sufficiently humiliating to the British nation. She surrendered the two Floridas, Minorca, Tobago, and Gorée on the African coast, consented to be excluded from the greater part of the Gulf of Mexico, and to admit the French to a participation of the Newfoundland fisheries: while, in return for such concessions, she could not obtain the slightest advantage for regulating her trade either with the peninsula or the American colonies.
Advantageous as were the conditions of peace, Charles, when his resentment towards England was cooled, could not fail to perceive the impolicy of the recent war. He had assisted to establish a republic on the confines of his Mexican empire, and he knew that his own colonies had caught the same fire of independence. In fact, he had soon the mortification to see extensive districts in South America in open insurrection.
The remaining foreign transactions of Charles may be shortly dismissed. His treaty with the sultan of Constantinople and with the Barbary states freed his subjects from piratical depredations, and procured them commercial advantages in the Mediterranean superior to those enjoyed by any other European power. In Portugal, where his influence was confirmed by the marriage of his daughter Carlotta with the infante João, afterwards João IV, he procured from the French a share in the commercial advantages which had been hitherto exclusively enjoyed by the English. In an equal degree was the English influence impaired in Holland by the ascendency of the Bourbon courts. He wrested from the ministry most of the commercial privileges which during two centuries had been possessed by the British in the West Indies. But as he grew in years he became less favourably disposed towards France, and more willing to cultivate a good understanding with England.
[1759-1783 A.D.]