The political event on which William had founded hopes of re-opening the army question has been indirectly referred to in the last chapter. This event, as has been said, was one which might reasonably have been thought likely to dispose the English Parliament to a more liberal view of the military necessities of the country by bringing once more into prominence a European danger which diplomacy had been hitherto believed to have averted. In the early days of 1699 the Electoral Prince of Bavaria--the youthful heir-designate of the Spanish monarchy--took his departure from a troubled world whose confusions were to be formidably increased by his quitting it. The English Parliament, as we have seen, refused to allow the Prince's death to modify their policy. But William could not afford to overlook it; for it, of course, reopened at once the whole question which had been closed by the First Partition Treaty, and rendered it necessary to nominate a new successor to the Spanish kingdom and its possessions in the New World. Louis XIV. was the first to move in the matter. He instructed De Tallard to sound William as to a new Treaty, and, after one or two candidates had been mentioned and rejected, it was finally agreed between the French and English sovereigns that the Archduke Charles, the son of the Emperor Leopold, should be the future King of Spain and the Indies, and that the Milanese, which had been allotted to him under the First Treaty, should go to Louis, by whom it was to be bartered for Lorraine. The arrangement was complete in all respects except that of having received the sanction of the Emperor by the summer or early autumn of 1699; but the rumour of it caused a violent outbreak of indignation in Spain. The Marquis of Canales, Spanish Ambassador at the English Court, was instructed to protest, which he did in terms so insolently imperious that William, on being informed at Loo of the language used by him, at once directed that the Marquis's passports should be handed to him, and at the same time recalled our own ambassador at Madrid. By whose means the provisions of the new Treaty were communicated to the Spanish Court and people is not certainly known; but considering that one of the parties to whom it had been submitted rejected it (for the Emperor at the eleventh hour refused to sign), and, moreover, that another party--the French king--had never, in all probability, sincerely assented to it, there is no need for much speculation on this point. Leopold had known and obvious motives for disclosing it to the unhappy Charles, and Louis is more than suspected of having private motives for doing so. But whichever of the two was the medium of communication, Louis was indisputably the gainer. The news aroused a powerful anti-Austrian feeling in the minds of the Spanish people, of which the French King, who was far better served at the Court of Madrid than the Emperor, was not slow to take advantage. From the