From the signing of the Peace of Utrecht in 1713 till the beginning of the colonial war with Spain in 1739, the Royal Navy was used as an instrument in the hand of diplomacy to keep the peace, or as the police of the seas. Europe was disturbed in the North by the last stages of the struggle between Peter the Great of Russia and Charles XII. of Sweden, in the South by the foolish ambitions of Philip V., the first Bourbon king of Spain, and his second wife, Elizabeth Farnese. But the statesmen who controlled the policy of Western Europe during most of these years, Sir Robert Walpole in England and Cardinal Fleury in France, were unwearied in warding off another war. Once, in 1718, a strong fleet sent into the Mediterranean, to put a stop to one of the Italian ventures of Philip V., destroyed a much weaker and very ill-handled Spanish fleet off Cape Passaro, in Sicily. As a rule, the appearance of our ships was enough. Now and then an officer found some chance of distinction in service against the pirates, largely recruited among the privateers of the war, who swarmed in distant seas. The most signal example was the suppression of a noted adventurer of this class, named Roberts, by Sir Chaloner Ogle, on the West Coast of Africa in 1722. Meanwhile war on a vast scale was being prepared by two causes—on the Continent by the rivalries of France and Austria in Germany, and Spain and Austria in Italy, together with the ambition of the rising kingdom of Prussia and its great King Frederick; and on the sea by the collision of England with Spain and France in America, and with France in India. Great Britain was drawn into the Continental War by the Hanoverian interests of the royal family and the desire to maintain the balance of power. Here the navy played an indispensable but secondary part. But in the colonial struggle it was the foremost combatant, and exercised a decisive influence.