y, intact, to
the emperor; his final condition was to reduce the new king,
Philip V., to Spain proper, and to secure to England and Holland
at once the commercial use of all the regions that had been
under the Spanish monarchy, together with important military and
maritime positions against France."[75]

But though war was imminent, the countries about to engage hesitated.
Holland would not move without England, and despite the strong
feeling of the latter country against France, the manufacturers and
merchants still remembered the terrible sufferings of the last war.
Just then, as the scales were wavering, James II. died. Louis,
yielding to a sentiment of sympathy and urged by his nearest
intimates, formally recognized the son of James as king of England;
and the English people, enraged at what they looked on as a threat and
an insult, threw aside all merely prudential considerations. The House
of Lords declared that "there could be no security till the usurper of
the Spanish monarchy was brought to reason;" and the House of Commons
voted fifty thousand soldiers and thirty-five thousand seamen, besides
subsidies for German and Danish auxiliaries. William III. died soon
after, in March, 1702; but Queen Anne took up his policy, which had
become that of the English and Dutch peoples.

Louis XIV. tried to break part of the on-coming storm by forming a
league of neutrals among the other German States; but the emperor
adroitly made use of the German feeling, and won to his side the
Elector of Brandenburg by acknowledging him as king of Prussia, thus
creating a North-German Protestant royal house, around which the other
Protestant States naturally gathered, and which was in the future to
prove a formidable rival to Austria. The immediate result was that
France and Spain, whose cause was thenceforth known as that of the two
crowns, went into the war without any ally save Bavaria. War was
declared in May by Holland against the kings of France and Spain; by
England against France and Spain, Anne refusing to recognize Philip V.
even in declaring war, because he had recognized James III. as king of
England; while the emperor was still more outspoken, declaring against
the King of France and the Duke of Anjou. Thus began the great War of
the Spanish Succession.

It is far from easy, in dealing with a war of such proportions,
lasting for more than ten years, to disentangle from the general
narrative that part