Descendants of the Stuarts

142 THE DESCENDANTS
Hardly had the bereaved Sardinian queen began
to surmount the loss of her lamented daughters,
when her eldest son, Victor Philip, Prince of Pied-
mont, a promising youth of sixteen, and heir to
his father's, throne, died suddenly, in March, 1715;
so that of all her once numerous family, one only,
Charles Emanuel, Duke of Aosta, survived. This
prince, afterwards known as Charles Emanuel
III., King of Sardinia, now assumed the title of
Prince of Piedmont.
Into the domestic relations of Queen Anne, in
connexion with her position as eventual Heiress of
the House of Stuart, we have, as yet, made no
mention ; though it must not be forgotten that the
position she occupied was much less important than
when, by the death of Henry of York, in 1807, her
descendants became the representatives of Charles I.
Nevertheless, in the second great war which deso-
lated Europe under Victor Amadous, commencing
1701, Queen Anne of England, mindful of her
relationship to her cousin and namesake Queen
Anne of Sardinia, strenuously exerted herself in
favour of her Catholic cousins, and even endeavoured
to obtain for them the thrones of Spain and the
Indies in lieu of their little Duchy of Savoy ; but
this she was unable to accomplish. On the first
outbreak of hostilities, Victor Amadous, flattered by
his daughters' recent alliance with two grandsons of
Prance, and hemmed in by the Erench and Spanish
forces, had espoused the interests of those powers.