[Sidenote: The Swedish Plot, 1716-17.] On the collapse of the rising of 1715, the Jacobite Court, despairing of assistance from France or Spain, had turned for aid to Charles XII. of Sweden. Charles had conceived a violent hatred for George I., who had acquired by purchase from the King of Denmark two secular bishoprics which had been taken from Sweden by the Danes, and which had been incorporated in the electorate of Hanover. As early as 1715 Charles listened to a project of the Duke of Berwick, by which he should send a force of Swedish troops to Scotland, but he was then too busy fighting the Danes to engage in the scheme. In 1717 the Jacobites renewed negotiations with Sweden, and a plan was formed for a general rising in England simultaneously with an invasion of Scotland by the Swedish king in person at the head of an army of 12,000 Swedes. The plot came to the knowledge of the British Government in time; the Swedish ambassador in London was arrested; the project came to nothing; but in the following year a more promising scheme for a Stuart restoration was formed. [Sidenote: The Spanish Expedition of 1719.[10]] Spain, smarting under the loss of her Italian possessions, ceded to Austria by the Peace of Utrecht, had declared war on the Emperor and had actually landed an army in Sicily. In compliance with treaty obligations, Great Britain had to defend the Emperor, and in August 1718 a British squadron engaged and destroyed a Spanish fleet off Cape Passaro. Alberoni, the Spanish minister, was furious and determined on reprisals. He entered into an alliance with the Swedish king; a plan for invading Great Britain was formed, and negotiations were opened with the Jacobite Court. The death of Charles XII. in December detached Sweden from the scheme, but Alberoni went on with his preparations. A great armada under Ormonde was to carry a Spanish army to the west of England, and a subsidiary expedition under the Earl Marischal was to land in north-western Scotland. The Chevalier was summoned to Spain to join the expedition, or failing that to follow it to England. The fleet sailed from Cadiz in March 1719. James had left Rome in February, travelling by sea to Catalonia and thence to Madrid and on to Corunna. He reached the latter port on 17th April, only to learn of the dispersal of the Spanish fleet by a storm and the complete collapse of the adventure. The auxiliary Scottish expedition, unconscious of the disaster, landed in the north-western Highlands; but after some vicissitudes and much dissension the attempt ended with the Battle of Glenshiel on the 10th of June--the Chevalier’s thirty-first birthday--and the surrender next day of the remainder of the Spanish troops, originally three hundred and seven in number.