Nige Tassell and Dr Adrian Pearce discuss how history may have been different had the king not named a young French duke as his successor
When Charles II of Spain died in 1700, his infertility – “he had a single testicle,” his autopsy reported, “black as coal” – left no heir to the throne. A dispute between the great nations of Europe then ensued. Charles had named the teenage Philip of Anjou as his successor, handing the crown to the House of Bourbon and strengthening the bonds between Spain and France. Such closer ties were met with deep concern in other quarters of Europe – in particular Britain, the Dutch Republic and the Holy Roman Empire – where the preferred choice was Charles III of Austria. This Grand Alliance aimed to maintain Europe’s delicate balance of power and reduce French influence on the Iberian Peninsula. The dispute mutated into the War of the Spanish Succession, a 13-year conflict that fractured the continent.
In context: the death of Charles II
On 1 November 1700, five days before his 39th birthday, Charles II of Spain died where he was born, in the Royal Alcázar of Madrid. Despite being twice married, the king failed to produce an heir to the crown, his infertility linked to serial inbreeding within the House of Habsburg.
In the last weeks of his life, he had been persuaded to name the 16-year-old Philip of Anjou, the grandson of his elder sister and, most notably, Louis XIV of France, as his successor. This put the House of Bourbon on the Spanish throne, a move that precipitated the War of the Spanish Succession and significantly diverted the course of European history.
“Had Charles had a child,” says Dr Adrian Pearce, associate professor in the School of European Languages, Culture and Society at University College London, “this war would not, of course, have taken place. It was Charles’s will that threatened the existing European balance of power by placing a scion of the French ruling dynasty on the throne of Spain.” The Grand Alliance could not have been blamed for going to war. “The concerns in Britain and elsewhere regarding a natural Franco-Spanish alliance were not entirely unjustified.”
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Just as the war wouldn’t have taken place had Charles produced an heir, nor of course would the terms of the peace agreement at the end of the conflict. When the fighting stopped, Philip was confirmed as king of Spain, although – for the sake of that balance of power – he had to renounce his right, or that of his descendants, to inherit the French throne. While Spanish territory in Italy and the Low Countries was ceded, its colonies across the Atlantic were largely left intact, although significant trade concessions were made in the Spanish Americas to the British, who were the key winners in the war’s aftermath, becoming the dominant maritime power, usurping the Dutch who’d been run aground by debts from the war.
Bourbon reforms
Dr Pearce argues that it’s not inconceivable this would have happened anyway, just over a longer period of time. “Would Britannia have ended up ruling the waves without the War of the Spanish Succession? That is, was Britain’s naval power on the rise anyway and the aftermath of the war simply fuelled the inevitable? The latter seems likely to have been the case: the War of Succession acted as a catalyst and speeded up processes that were already in play. The 18th century was likely to have become increasingly ‘British’ over time, helped by the onset of the Industrial Revolution. It was just that the conflict in and over Spain brought Britain’s strength to the fore.” British domination of the slave trade, aided by the award of exclusive rights to supply the Spanish colonies with slaves after the war, would have been a likely outcome, too, in time.
The inheritance of Spanish power by the House of Bourbon brought great changes within Spain which, under the underwhelming Habsburg rule, had not been on the horizon. “The Spanish Habsburgs had long defaulted to conservatism and an antipathy to innovation in government. There is little reason to believe this would change after 1700. The Spanish national revival came about precisely because of the stimulus of a new dynasty bringing new ideas and new attitudes to government. Moreover, the War of Succession itself brought the abolition of the fueros, the traditional rights and privileges of the Crown of Aragon, a key landmark in the formation of Spain itself as a modern nation state.”
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The colonies in Spanish America also felt this wave of modernisation, which they almost certainly wouldn’t have had under the Habsburgs. “The Americas too were subject to their own Bourbon reforms,” explains Dr Pearce, “in a process that came to affect the economy, the state finances, matters of defence, church-state relations and the structures of government. The 18th century in the Hispanic world definitely has a different feel to it.”
With Britain empowered and Spain under a process of modernisation, what effect did the war have on France? Britain had weakened the French hold over the eastern coast of present-day Canada, including the conquering of Newfoundland and the renaming of French Acadia as Nova Scotia. Had there been no war, perhaps French influence would have spread westwards, offering the possibility of Canada being a wholly French-speaking nation today.
A fundamental shift
It could also be argued that the war – itself, of course, precipitated by that lack of a Spanish heir – sowed the seeds of a fundamental shift for France domestically. The nation had encountered huge debts from 13 years of conflict, with its monarchy being seen by the populace as over-powerful and out of touch as a result. A case can thus be made that these were the initial stirrings which gathered weight and momentum over the subsequent decades, culminating in the French Revolution. That is, without the financial aftermath of the War of the Spanish Succession, the move towards republicanism wouldn’t have been so soon, if at all.
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This article was first published in the July 2023 issue of BBC History Revealed