IX. 1718. thinking to lay down the law, he will find him- CHAP. "self ill received. I have sent him a passport as "he requested, and I will hear the proposals he brings, but it will be impossible to give them the slightest attention unless they totally differ from "the project."* 66 Nor was the Cardinal daunted by the close approach and avowed object of the British expedition. On arriving off Cape St. Vincent, Admiral Byng had despatched a messenger with the tidings and with a copy of his instructions to Colonel Stanhope, requesting him to communicate both to the Spanish Government. In an interview which the British envoy consequently had with Alberoni, he found all his remonstrances met only with a burst of vehement invective against France and England; and when he presented a list of the British ships, the Cardinal furiously snatched it, tore it to pieces, and trampled it under his feet. At the close of the conversation, however, he promised to take the King's commands, and to send an answer in writing; but this answer, which was delayed for several days, brought merely a dry intimation that Admiral Byng might execute the orders of the King his master. In this temper of the Spanish Government the arrival of Lord Stanhope at Madrid, on the 12th of August (he had been delayed by their remissness in forwarding his passport), could produce little effect. Finding that the Court had gone to * St. Simon, Mém, vol. xvi. p. 343. and 349, ed. 1829. IX. 1718. 66 66 CHAP. the Escurial, he hastened thither, obtained the cooperation of the Marquis de Nancré, and had several conferences both with the King and with the Cardinal; but neither the royal puppet, nor the minister who pulled the strings, gave him any but very slight hopes of acceding to his propositions. Even these slight hopes were dispelled by the news of the reduction of Messina. " I showed my Lord Stanhope," says the Cardinal himself, "that as long as the Archduke (the Emperor) is master of Sicily, all Italy will be the slave of the Germans, "and all the powers of Europe not able to set her "at liberty. I also represented to him very clearly "that to make war in Lombardy was to make it "in a labyrinth, and that it was the destructive "burial-place of the French and English. In conclusion, I told him that the proposition of giving Sicily to the Archduke was absolutely fatal, and "that of setting bounds afterwards to his vast designs a mere dream and illusion. This is the "substance of all the conferences had by my Lord 66 66 66 Stanhope."*-From Stanhope's despatchest, however, it appears that Alberoni continued pacific professions to the last, and endeavoured to shift the blame from himself to his master. He declared that he wished for no conquests in Italy, and knew that Cardinal Alberoni to Marquis Beretti Landi, Aug. 29. 1718. Boyer's Political State, 1718, vol. ii. p. 222. + Stanhope's despatches from Fresneda near the Escurial, and from Bayonne on his return, are inserted in the Appendix, and give a very curious view of Alberoni's character and policy. IX. 1718. Spain would be far more powerful by confining it- CHAP. self to its continent and to its Indies, and improving its internal administration, than by spreading itself abroad in Europe as before. At parting with Stanhope he even shed tears, and promised to let slip no occasion that might offer of adjusting matters; and, more than once, he bitterly complained of the King of Spain's obstinacy and personal resentment against the Emperor and the Duke of Orleans. Yet, on the other hand, he could not altogether conceal his hopes of raising disturbances in France and England; he evidently felt no small share of the animosity which he ascribed solely to his master; and he seems to have fluctuated from hot to cold fits, according as the mail from Sicily brought him favourable or unfavourable news. With respect to Gibraltar, that affair was so secretly conducted, that it cannot be accurately traced. Whether, as some believe, there were other conditions annexed to the offer*, and that Alberoni would not comply with them, or whether Gibraltar itself appeared to him an inadequate reward for the relinquishment of his ambitious schemes, certain it is that the proposal did not move him from his "There is reason to believe that the offer of Gibraltar was 'coupled with some condition besides the immediate accession "of Spain to the peace." (Coxe's House of Bourbon, vol. ii. p. 329.) It may be observed that Gibraltar was about this period a source of profuse and ill-regulated expense. Lord Bolingbroke in a despatch to Lord Portmore of March 29. 1712, complains that "at Gibraltar things have hitherto been in the "utmost confusion and under the loosest management." H H IX. CHAP. purpose, and that the English Minister found it necessary to return homewards without succeeding in the object of his journey. 1718. But whatever resentment Stanhope might feel at the stubbornness of Alberoni, he did not fail to observe, nor hesitate to own, the eminent talents of that minister. He who had seen Spain in the evil days of her Charles the Second, when a decrepit sovereign feebly tottered on her sinking throne, when her agriculture, her trade, and her respect among nations were all but annihilated, when famine stalked through her palaces*, when her officers, chosen by Court favour, brought back nothing from their campaigns but ignorance and promotion, - when her soldiers, once the terror of Europe and the scourge of America, were reduced for want of pay to beg in the streets, or to wait at the convent doors for their daily dole of food t;—he who had seen Spain during the war of the succession, torn and bleeding with internal strife, city against city, and kingdom against kingdom, he could scarcely have believed that in the course of a few short years he should see the same country send forth an armada of nearly thirty line-of-battle ships, and of more than *Lettres de Villars, p. 220. + See Labat's Travels, vol. i. p. 252. This was no new case; the Duke of York told Pepys how the Spanish soldiers" will re"fuse no extraordinary service if commanded; but scorn to be "paid for it as in other countries, though at the same time they "will beg in the streets. . . . . In the citadel of Antwerp a sol"dier hath not a liberty of begging till he hath served three "years." (Pepys' Diary, December 20. 1668.) IX. 1718. thirty thousand well appointed, well paid, and well CHAP. disciplined troops that this fleet should be built in the long disused and forsaken harbours of Catalonia and Biscay-that this army should be clothed from new native manufactories that weavers from England and dyers from Holland should import their industry and ply their trade in Castille-that a great naval college should be established and flourishing at Cadiz-that new citadels should be built at Barcelona and Pamplona, and the old fortifications repaired at Rosas, Gerona, Fuenterabia, and St. Sebastian. Already had workmen begun to construct a new and extensive port at Ferrol - already had a Dutch engineer undertaken to render the river Manzanares navigable, and the capital of Spain open to water-carriage. America, which, in the words of Alberoni, "had become Terra Incognita even to Spain," again appeared an Eldorado; and a FLOTA arriving from it during Lord Stanhope's embassy, had on board A similar project, to connect Madrid and Lisbon by watercarriage, had been formed under Charles the Second; but the Council of Castille, after full deliberation, answered that if God had chosen to make these, rivers navigable, he could have done so without the aid of man, and that therefore such a project would be a daring violation of the divine decrees, and an impious attempt to improve the works of Providence! (Letters by the Rev. E. Clarke, 1763, p. 284.) The smallness of the Manzanares, which is almost dry in summer, has been a frequent subject of jest among the Spaniards themselves. That quaint old poet Gongora, however, allows it the rank of Viscount among rivers :— "Manzanares, Manzanares, "Os que en todo el aguatismo, |