The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean (54 page)

The next major Italian campaign opened only in 1706. Prince Eugene had recognised that further progress was impossible without substantial reinforcements, and had returned to Vienna to find them. Taking advantage of his absence, Vendôme had launched a surprise attack on the imperial army at its camp near Brescia and had driven it back into the Tyrol. He had, however, reckoned without Eugene who, with 24,000 troops from Germany–raised thanks to an English subsidy of £250,000–entered Italy early in July down the valley of the Adige and marched south to the Po. Crossing it, he then headed west along the right bank, driving the enemy before him. At Villa Stellona, just south of Pavia, he joined another army under the Duke of Savoy, and together they advanced on Turin, where–though easily outnumbered–they inflicted a resounding defeat on the French forces. It was the end. In March 1707, by the Convention of Milan, Louis XIV abandoned northern Italy.

In Spain, on the other hand, he continued to fight; indeed, he had no choice. In the spring of 1706 a squadron commanded by Admiral Sir Clowdisley Shovell had carried a force under the Earl of Peterborough through the Straits of Gibraltar to the east coast, where Barcelona had willingly accepted the imperial claimant as King Charles III. Meanwhile an English–Dutch–Portuguese army under the Earl of Galway
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had invaded Extremadura from Portugal and had continued eastward to Madrid. It entered the city on 26 June, only to evacuate it again after a few weeks in recognition of one indisputable fact: that outside Catalonia and Valencia Spain was overwhelmingly in support of King Philip. Disappointment over Madrid was, however, easily outweighed by allied successes in northern Europe, to the point where, in August, King Louis made it known that he was ready to come to terms: he would leave Spain to Charles in return for the recognition of Philip’s right to Milan, Naples and Sicily.

At that time, it need hardly be said, neither England nor the Empire were prepared to listen; twelve months later, they may well have wished that they had. The year 1707 saw no great victories in the north and, in the south, two disasters. The first was when on 25 April Galway’s motley force of some 15,000 men was heavily defeated at Almansa, some sixty miles southwest of Valencia, by a greatly superior army of French and Spaniards under King Louis’s leading general the Duke of Berwick, the natural son of King James II of England by the Duke of Marlborough’s sister Arabella.
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At a single blow Valencia, Murcia and Aragon were lost to the allies. Worse still, perhaps, they were therefore unable to supplement the forces of Prince Eugene when, in July, he attacked Toulon. Eugene was almost as great a general as was his chief, the Duke of Marlborough; it is sad indeed that his last venture in the Mediterranean should, through no fault of his own, have cast something of a shadow over his reputation. If his attempt on Toulon proved a failure, this was due entirely to his two principal allies, the Emperor Leopold and the Duke of Savoy. Leopold had at the critical moment seen fit to detach some 13,000 men to attack Naples; Savoy for his part had shown himself to be weak and indecisive–so much so that by the time Eugene eventually landed on Provençal soil on 26 July the battle was already as good as lost. Ten thousand men were needlessly sacrificed. It was perhaps some consolation to know that, rather than allowing Toulon to fall into allied hands, the French had deliberately scuttled their squadron of some fifty sail in its harbour; the fact remained that their principal southern port, which should have been Eugene’s for the taking, had been forfeited through sheer inefficiency and muddle, and the English fleet was still deprived of the one thing it needed more than any other: a good, safe harbour in the Mediterranean where it would be protected from winter storms, where its provisions and supplies could be safely stored and where its ships could be properly refitted.

As things turned out, it did not have to wait much longer. Minorca, the furthest of the Balearic Islands to the northeast and consequently the nearest to France, had long been an object of interest to the British navy; and in the summer of 1708 Major-General James Stanhope–who had been sent to Spain as Minister, but who had some months before succeeded Galway as Commander-in-Chief–received orders from Marlborough to take the island’s capital, Port Mahon. Supported by a fleet of thirty-four ships under Admiral Sir John Leake–who had hastened to Minorca from Sardinia, where he had been bombarding Cagliari
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–he landed in Minorca on 14 September with about 1,200 British, 800 Spanish and 600 Portuguese troops. It was another fortnight before he was ready to attack. A road had to be constructed to carry the guns and provisions the mile from his landing-place to his first objective, Fort St Philip; even then, the fort’s commanding position overlooking the harbour made it almost impregnable. Stanhope dealt with the problem by offering generous terms for its surrender and threatening to slaughter the entire garrison if these were not accepted. The French and Spanish commanders might even then have continued to resist, had it not been for the large number of women and children who had taken refuge there. They therefore decided to surrender–a decision they were later to regret. Both were subsequently imprisoned, and the Spanish commander killed himself.

Other forts quickly followed St Philip’s example, the speed of Stanhope’s progress being due largely to the goodwill of the local population, who had had quite enough of both French and Spaniards: the magistrates of Mahon willingly handed over the keys to the city as soon as the invaders approached. By the end of the month the entire island was effectively in British hands. It was to remain so, with a short intermission between 1756 and 1763, for very nearly a century. To Stanhope it mattered little that the island, like Gibraltar, had technically surrendered to King Charles III of Spain, who was indeed formally proclaimed as its king on 8 November. ‘England,’ he wrote, ‘ought never to part with this island, which will give the law to the Mediterranean both in time of war and of peace.’ To emphasise the fact, he left a garrison consisting entirely of British troops, all the Spanish and Portuguese being returned to Spain to assist King Charles. By June 1709 he had spent £11,000 on the island’s defences.

To Galway on the Spanish mainland, meanwhile, matters were looking increasingly grave. He tended to blame his reverses principally on his Portuguese troops–at Almansa they had been a distinct liability–and early in 1708 marched them back to their homeland. They were replaced by Germans made available by the recent armistice in Italy, under their commander Count von Starhemberg, but even then it proved impossible to stop the imperialists taking Tortosa, so cutting communications between Barcelona and Valencia. Not until 1710 was any progress made, when the allies marched for the second time on Madrid. The city fell on 23 September, but once again Charles failed to hold it: by the end of the year he had to retreat to Catalonia. Even there, his hold was tenuous enough: in January 1711 the French captured Gerona.

Then, just three months later on 17 April, the Emperor Joseph I died in Vienna at the age of thirty-three–this time it was unquestionably smallpox–and the entire European political scene was transformed overnight. Joseph had succeeded his father, Leopold, in 1705, had done much to reform the Empire’s chaotic finances and had warmly espoused the claims of his younger brother Charles to Spain. But Charles was now not just a Spanish claimant; he was the obvious successor to his brother on the imperial throne. The Grand Alliance had been formed only in order to prevent a single family, the Bourbons, from becoming too powerful; if Charles were to succeed to the Empire–as indeed he did, being elected in the following year–the Habsburgs threatened to be more powerful still, with all their dominions once more united as in the days of his great-great-great-great-uncle Charles V. Inevitably, many months were to pass before the European powers were able to come to terms with the new situation; it was not until New Year’s Day 1712 that negotiations began between the allies and France in the Dutch city of Utrecht.

Before we leave for Utrecht, however, we must return briefly to Minorca and to Gibraltar, whose status remained ambiguous. In England the Whigs, who had dominated the first half of Queen Anne’s reign,
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had been replaced by a Tory government, and the new ministry had decided that the Emperor Charles VI was now a far more serious danger than the Bourbons had ever been and no longer merited British support. Besides, the Bourbons too were now ready for peace. The war in the north was threatening France with disaster–Marlborough was still carrying all before him–and King Louis was increasingly anxious to come to terms. Concessions would therefore have to be made, preferably–Louis being Louis–with other people’s property; and what concessions could be more acceptable to the British than the acknowledgement of their claim to Gibraltar? On 31 May the King informed Queen Anne: ‘
On a parole du Roi d’Espagne de laisser aux Anglais Gibraltar pour la sûreté réelle de leur commerce en Espagne et dans la Méditerranée.
’
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In fact, he had nothing of the kind, but Philip was in no position to complain. Hitherto he had been a good deal more fortunate than his grandfather: the war in Spain against Charles and his allies had been moderately successful. But for how long would his luck hold? The succession of Charles to the Empire meant that the latter would henceforth have all its resources at his disposal. There were also rumours that Prince Eugene might be sent to take over the command in Spain, and Philip was all too well aware that he had no generals with half the Prince’s experience or brilliance to set against him. Finally, if France and Britain made a separate peace, he would be deprived of all French military support. He saw that he had no choice, and so he reluctantly informed King Louis that he was ready to offer the British both their recent conquests.

Peace negotiations were quietly and discreetly set in train: Britain recognised Philip V as King of Spain, while Spain and France were obliged to accept that Minorca and Gibraltar would remain in British hands. At first Louis kept quiet about Minorca. The Rock was of little strategic value to him; the island, on the other hand, was only a day’s sail from France and, as he had recently seen, could be used as a springboard for an attack on Toulon and his Mediterranean coast, so he had no intention of handing it over unless he had to. What he did not know was the admonition that had been given to the British negotiators before they left for Utrecht: that they were to insist that ‘Gibraltar and Port Mahon, with the island of Minorca, be for the future annexed to the Crown of these realms’–and not to take no for an answer.

There was still a little trouble with the Dutch. They had played their part in the taking of the Rock in 1704, and they had provided an important part of its garrison ever since. They had understandably expected to be rewarded; now, equally understandably, they felt betrayed. At first they refused to withdraw their troops from Gibraltar, even threatening to continue the war alone. But no one took them too seriously. The truth was that they desperately needed British support to protect them in the Netherlands–and both they and the British knew it.

What is generally known as the Treaty of Utrecht was in fact a whole series of treaties in which, after a European upheaval that had lasted for eleven years, France and Spain attempted once again to regulate their relations with their neighbours. Most of the subjects upon which agreements were reached do not concern us here. Where the future of the Mediterranean was concerned, however, both countries made major concessions. France and Spain both formally recognised Duke Victor Amadeus II of Savoy–who happened to be King Philip’s father-in-law–as King of Sicily, his northern dominion extending to include the formerly French city of Nice. Spain in addition accepted the transfer to the Empire of the formerly Spanish areas of Italy and the Netherlands, and effectively handed over Minorca and Gibraltar to Britain. She did not, however, do so unconditionally. Although the treaty conferred on the British Crown perpetual property rights over part of the present territory of Gibraltar (Britain has shamelessly extended it since), provided that the Catholic religion should continue to be freely exercised and that Jews and Moors should be prohibited from settling there, the ultimate sovereignty over the Rock she explicitly reserved to herself.
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What is rather less well known is that she also put her name to the so-called
asiento
agreement, by which she gave the British the exclusive right to supply her overseas colonies with African slaves, at the rate of 4,800 slaves a year for thirty years.

The Emperor Charles fought on until 1714, and the final peace had to be signed without him. It was essentially on his behalf that the great struggle had continued for the past twelve years, and by distancing himself from the peacemakers he did his Empire a lasting disservice. His interests were not altogether ignored during the long negotiations at Utrecht, but since they were fundamentally opposed to those of France, Bourbon Spain and the United Provinces–as the Dutch now called themselves–while Britain remained largely indifferent, it was inevitable that they should have been to some degree neglected. Nevertheless, when the negotiators returned to their homes, Charles found himself master not only of the body of his Empire but also of the Catholic Netherlands, Milan, Naples and Sardinia. He was hardly in a position to complain, but with a modicum of diplomatic finesse he could probably have done better still.

And the Spanish throne? This was of course the most important question of all, the original
casus belli
, the reason for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of men across the continent. It was at last resolved–as it by now virtually had to be–in favour of Philip. His kingdom had been drastically amputated–though he would certainly not miss the Low Countries, which had long been a millstone round the Spanish neck. Anyway, there were compensations. He kept Spanish America and all the wealth that it brought him, and he was, thenceforth and for the next thirty years, to rule uncontested as King Philip V of Spain.
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