Shall I be the last of all?  Shall I have to sign perforce?” The coarse common sense of the Vandal soon prevailed over family alliances; Frederick William broke with France and England in order to rally to the emperor’s side.  Russia, but lately so attentive to France, was making advances to Spain.  “The czar’s envoy is the most taciturn Muscovite that ever came from Siberia,” wrote Marshal Tesse.  “Goodman Don Miguel Guerra is the minister with whom he treats, and the effect of eight or ten apoplexies is, that he has to hold his head with his hands, else his mouth would infallibly twist round over his shoulder.  During their audience they seat themselves opposite one another in arm-chairs, and, after a quarter of an hour’s silence, the Muscovite opens his mouth and says, ’Sir, I have orders from the emperor, my master, to assure the Catholic King that he loves him very much.’  ‘And I,’ replies Guerra, ’do assure you that the king my master loves your master the emperor very much.’  After this laconic conversation they stare at one another for a quarter of an hour without saying anything, and the audience is over.”

The tradition handed down by Peter the Great forbade any alliance with England; M. de Campredon, French ambassador at Petersburg, was seeking to destroy this prejudice.  One of the empress’s ministers, Jokosinski, rushed abruptly from the conference; he was half drunk, and he ran to the church where the remains of the czar were lying.  “O my dear master!” he cried before all the people, “rise from the tomb, and see how thy memory is trampled under foot!” Antipathy towards England, nevertheless, kept Catherine I. aloof from the Hanoverian league; she made alliance with the emperor.  France was not long before she made overtures to Spain.  Philip V. always found it painful to endure family dissensions; he became reconciled with his nephew, and accepted the intervention of Cardinal Fleury in his disagreements with England.  The alliance, signed at Seville on the 29th of November, 1729, secured to Spain, in return for certain commercial advantages, the co-operation of England in Italy.  The Duke of Parma had just died; the Infante Don Carlos, supported by an English fleet, took possession of his dominions.  Elizabeth Farnese had at last set foot in Italy.  She no longer encountered there the able and ambitious monarch whose diplomacy had for so long governed the affairs of the peninsula; Victor Amadeo had just abdicated.  Scarcely a year had passed from the date of that resolution, when, suddenly, from fear, it was said, of seeing his father resume power, the young king, Charles Emmanuel, had him arrested in his castle of Pontarlier.  “It will be a fine subject for a tragedy, this that is just now happening to Victor, King of Sardinia,” writes M. d’Argenson.  “What a catastrophe without a death!  A great king, who plagued Europe with his virtues and his vices, with his courage, his artifices, and his perfidies, who had formed round him a court of slaves,