The insensibility of Englishmen to a danger which weighed heavily on the mind of William was exactly matched by his own indifference to one which appeared extremely serious to them. William dreaded the idea of a Bourbon reigning at Madrid, but he saw no very grave objection, as the two treaties showed, to Naples and Sicily passing into French hands. With his English subjects the exact converse was the case. They strongly deprecated the assignment of the Mediterranean possessions of the Spaniard to the Dauphin; but they were undisturbed by the sight of the Duke of Anjou seating himself on the Spanish throne. It has been said that on their own principles they ought to have disliked the will even more than the Partition Treaties, because the former document, in devising _all_ the possessions of Spain to the Duke of Anjou, "gave precisely the same advantages to France on the Mediterranean" as she would have obtained under the Treaties. But this argument obviously begs the whole question against the English view by assigning to the word "France" a meaning which it was of the essence of that view to repudiate. The very gist of the English case was that "France" and "the second son of the French Dauphin barred from the succession to the French Crown" were not convertible terms. Had Englishmen in general so regarded them, they would perhaps have been as jealous of the Duke of Anjou's succession to the Spanish throne as was William himself. They held, however,--whether rightly or wrongly, and I have already stated my reason for thinking that at the time and in the circumstances they were wrong--that the elevation of Louis's grandson to the Spanish throne did not mean the "solidarity" of France and Spain.[23] But while the Duke of Anjou, considered as the owner of the two Sicilies, did not in their opinion stand for "France," the Dauphin, who was to have had them under the Partition Treaties, undeniably did. The heir to the Crown of France of course is France, not as a matter of opinion, but as a matter of fact. The English view therefore, however mistaken on the point of policy, was unassailable on the ground of logic; and its inherent plausibility, in addition to the national dissatisfaction with the manner in which the Treaties had been negotiated, would, in all probability, have made it impossible for William to carry the country with him in a war policy directed against France.