now, at the close of the reign of Philip
IV., the kingdom was further diminished by the loss of Portugal;
which, in 1664, the Lusitanians recovered, and proclaimed the Duke
of Braganza King. When we add to this the loss of much of the
Netherlands, and of the island of Jamaica, and concessions here and
there to France and to Italy, it will be obvious that a process of
contraction had soon followed that of Spain's phenomenal expansion!

During the reign of Carlos II., who succeeded his father (1665), Spain
was still further diminished by the cession to Louis XIV., in 1678, of
more provinces in the Low Countries and also of the region now known
as Alsace and Lorraine; which, it will be remembered, have in our own
time passed from the keeping of France to that of victorious Germany.

In the year 1655 the island of Jamaica was captured by an expedition
sent out by Cromwell. It was between the years 1670 and 1686 that the
Spaniard and the Anglo-Saxon had their first collision in America.
St. Augustine had been founded in 1565, and the old Spanish colony was
much disturbed in 1663, when Charles II. of England planted an English
colony in their near neighborhood (the Carolinas). During the war
between Spain and England at the time above mentioned, feeling ran
high between Florida and the Carolinas, and houses were burned and
blood was shed. Spain had felt no concern about the little English
colony planted on the bleak New England coast in 1620. Death by
exposure and starvation promised speedily to remove that. But the
settlement on the Carolinas was more serious, and at the same time
the French were planting a colony of their own at the mouth of the
Mississippi. The "lords of America" began to feel anxious about their
control of the Gulf of Mexico. The cloud was a very small one, but it
was not to be the last which would dim their skies in the West.

The one thing which gives historic importance to the reign of Carlos
II. is that it marks the close--the ignominious close--of the great
Hapsburg dynasty in Spain. And if the death of Carlos, in 1700, was a
melancholy event, it is because with it the scepter so magnificently
wielded by Ferdinand and Isabella passed to the keeping of the House
of Bourbon, whose Spanish descendants have, excepting for two brief
intervals, ruled Spain ever since.

CHAPTER XX.

The last century had wrought great changes in European conditions.
"The Holy Roman Empire," after a thirty-years'