it produced a great minister, the Portuguese Richelieu, in the Marquis of Pombal. The reign of John V., the eldest son of Pedro II., who at once assumed the royal power from the regent Catherine, was, though it commenced in war, remarkable for the long continuance of peace. The War of the Spanish Succession was still raging in the peninsula, and the first campaign after the accession of the new monarch was marked by the great defeat inflicted on the English and Portuguese by the French and Spaniards at Almanza, on April 15, 1707, a battle in which it chanced that the English were commanded by a Frenchman, Henri de Ruvigny, Lord Galway, and the French by an Englishman James Fitz-James, Duke of Berwick. Nevertheless John V., who was a young man of seventeen, in spite of this disaster, kept true to the English alliance and the Methuen treaty, and left the management of affairs in the hands of his father’s minister and friend João de Mascarenhas, Duke of Cadaval. This able statesman bound the king more surely to the Anglo-Austrian alliance by marrying him to the Archduchess Marianna, daughter of the late Emperor Leopold I., who was escorted to Lisbon by a powerful English fleet under Admiral Sir George Byng, in 1708. The war continued, however, to go steadily against the allies, for the Spaniards had rallied enthusiastically around their Bourbon king, Philip V.; and on May 7, 1709, a Portuguese army under the Marquis of Fronteira was defeated on the banks of the Caia, by the Spaniards under the Marquis de Bay. Far more serious was the capture of Rio de Janeiro, by the French admiral, Duguay-Trouin, on September 23, 1711, which cut off all supplies from Brazil for more than a year. The war languished all over Europe after the accession of the Archduke Charles as Emperor, and on February 6, 1715, nearly two years after the treaty of Utrecht, peace was signed between Spain and Portugal, at Madrid, by the Secretary of State, Diogo de Mendonça, Count of Corte-Real.