Descendants of the Stuarts

144 THE DESCENDANTS
had signalized her entree into Spain by the dismissal
of the Princess des Ursins, the old and attached
friend of her husband and predecessor.* This was
a mark of peculiar ingratitude on her part, inas-
much as it was this lady who had gained her the
lofty position she now inherited. Leagued with
Cardinal Alberoni (a man of immense talent, and
who had raised himself from the station of a
gardener to the highest ofB.ces in the state; and
whose designs, had they succeeded, would have
acquired for himself an eternal renown, but who,
insomuch as from unforeseen circumstances they
failed, has been unduly deprecated to posterity),
the new queen determined on winning back for the
Spanish throne the acquisitions it had so recently
lost. Pacific measures having failed to obtain the
restoration of Sicily, and Victor Amadeus not
entering into her views, she at once ordered the
occupation of that island, which was effected with
little opposition, a.d. 1718. Unable to regain it
by force of arms, Victor appealed to England,
Austria and Prance for assistance; but the two
latter powers had never cordially acquiesced in his
aggrandizement, and in Anne, Queen of England,
he had lost the best and most constant of his
friends. A German dynasty inimical to his interests
now ruled in Great Britain, determined at all costs
* Madame de Maintenon's Correspondence with the Princess des Ursins.
Coxe's Kings of Spain of the House of Bourbon.