British South Sea ship Prince Frederick, seized by the Spaniards and claimed as lawful prize, served as a pretext to delay the ratification of the preliminaries at Madrid; and the siege of Gibraltar was still unraised at the accession of George II (12 June 1727).
To the new king Townshend was but ‘a choleric blockhead,’ but to Walpole he was still indispensable, and he was accordingly continued in office. Misled by a spurious version of the Austro-Spanish secret treaty of 5 Nov. 1725 (N.S.), in which the emperor was represented as pledged to aid a Spanish attack on Gibraltar by an invasion of Hanover (see this curious forgery and the relevant correspondence in Addit. MS. 32752 ff. 38 et seq., and cf. Walpole, Horation, Lord Walpole), Townshend negotiated at Westminster (25 Nov. 1727) a subsidiary treaty with the Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, for the common defence of the duchy and the electorate against a danger which was wholly imaginary. The emperor did not so much as offer his mediation between the belligerents; and Spain, finding Gibraltar impregnable, accepted the preliminaries of Paris with some slight modifications by the convention of the Pardo (6 March 1727–8, N.S.). She entered the congress of Soissons (14 June 1728, N.S.) bent on extorting from the emperor the promised archduchess for Don Carlos, and, as security for his succession to the Italian duchies, the immediate occupation of the cautionary towns by Spanish troops. Townshend was willing that Don Carlos should have his bride, provided security were taken against the union of the imperial and Spanish crowns. In regard to the duchies he was prepared to support the Spanish claim, which England and France were already pledged not to oppose, as a means of embarrassing the emperor. He accordingly ranged the Hanoverian League on the side of Spain, and, in concert with Fleury, attempted to detach the four Rhenish electors—Mainz, Köln, Baiern, and Pfalz—from the imperial cause. The result of his policy was that by June 1729 the emperor, who was equally averse from the Spanish match and the Spanish occupation of the duchies, had become completely estranged from Spain, and England had the option of an alliance with either power. The majority of the cabinet inclined to an imperial alliance; and it was only after a sharp contest that Townshend's Spanish policy gained the day (Coxe, Walpole, ii. 641 et seq.). The proceedings at Soissons had long fallen into abeyance, and Paris now became the centre of a negotiation which terminated in the treaty of Seville (9 Nov. 1729, N.S.), concerted at Versailles by Horatio Walpole [q. v.] and Fleury on the basis of a draft by William Stanhope (afterwards Lord Harrington) [q. v.] (Addit. MSS. 32755 ff. 247–301, 32756 f. 228, 32757 f. 28, 32758 f. 102, 32761 ff. 208 et seq.). By this curious piece of statecraft, in return for a mere confirmation of treaties prior to those of Vienna of 1725, and a guarantee of their possessions (a tacit waiver of the Spanish claim to Gibraltar), Spain obtained from England and France a guarantee of the succession of Don Carlos to the Italian duchies, with the mesne right of garrisoning the cautionary towns with her own troops. The accession of Holland to the treaty was secured (21 Nov., N.S.) by a pledge of renewed efforts on the part of England and France to procure the abolition of the Ostend company, and a satisfactory settlement of the affairs of East Friesland. The treaty served to flatter Spanish and humble imperial pride, to bring France and Spain into closer accord and so to prepare the way for the family compact of 1733, besides jeopardising the peace not only of Italy but of Europe, while the so-called concessions to England were merely a restitutio in integrum. Even the retrocession of Gibraltar was prevented only by the loudly expressed will of the English people. No provision was made against the dreaded contingency of the union of the Spanish and imperial crowns by means of a matrimonial alliance. In England the treaty was justly denounced by tories and malcontent whigs as a flagrant infringement of the quadruple alliance, and twenty-four peers recorded their protest against it in the journal of their house (27 Jan. 1729–30). Townshend's zeal for its enforcement when the emperor mustered his forces in Italy to oppose the landing of the Spanish troops knew no bounds, and had for its ulterior object the partition of the Austrian dominions. Spain, recoiling from a single-handed contest with the emperor, called on her allies for aid, and discovered that they were by no means at one. The English cabinet was determined to enforce the treaty, but was not prepared to precipitate a war. Fleury was minded to keep out of the imbroglio altogether. The emperor's solicitude for the pragmatic sanction afforded prospect of a compromise, and on that basis negotiations began. The emperor was willing to let the Spaniard into his fiefs in return for a joint guarantee of the pragmatic sanction by the allies. Fleury and Townshend were both indisposed to enter upon the question of the guarantee at all, and certainly not until the Spaniard had been let into possession and the grievances of the allies redressed (Addit. MS. 32764,
