The dying, half-delirious king, appalled by the terrors of eternal damnation, yielded helplessly to their demands.  A will was already prepared awaiting his signature.  With a hand trembling in death, the king attached to it his name; but as he did so, he burst into tears, exclaiming, “I am already nothing.”  It was supposed that he could then survive but a few hours.  Contrary to all expectation he revived, and expressed the keenest indignation and anguish that he had been thus beguiled to decide against Austria, and in favor of France.  He even sent a courier to the emperor, announcing his determination to decide in favor of the Austrian claimant.  The flickering flame of life, thus revived for a moment, glimmered again in the socket and expired.  The wretched king died the 1st of November, 1699, in the fortieth year of his age, and the thirty-sixth of his reign.

On the day of his death a council of State was convened, and the will, the very existence of which was generally unknown, was read.  It declared the Dauphin of France, son of the Spanish princess Maria Theresa, to be the successor to all the Spanish dominions; and required all subjects and vassals of Spain to acknowledge him.  The Austrian party were astounded at this revelation.  The French party were prepared to receive it without any surprise.  The son of Maria Theresa was dead, and the crown consequently passed to her grandson Philip.  Louis XIV. immediately acknowledged his title, when he was proclaimed king, and took quiet possession of the throne of Spain on the 24th of November, 1700, as Philip V.

It was by such fraud that the Bourbons of France attained the succession to the Spanish crown; a fraud as palpable as was ever committed; for Maria Theresa had renounced all her rights to the throne; this renunciation had been confirmed by the will of her father Philip IV., sanctioned by the Cortes of Spain, and solemnly ratified by her husband, Louis XIV.  Such is “legitimacy—­the divine right of kings.”  All the great powers of Europe, excepting the emperor, promptly acknowledged the title of Philip V.

Leopold, enraged beyond measure, dispatched envoys to rouse the empire, and made the most formidable preparations for war.  A force of eighty thousand men was soon assembled.  The war commenced in Italy.  Leopold sent down his German troops through the defiles of the Tyrol, and, in the valley of the Adige, they encountered the combined armies of France, Spain and Italy.  Prince Eugene, who had already acquired great renown in the wars against the Turks, though by birth a French noble, had long been in the Austrian service, and led the Austrian troops.  William, of England, jealous of the encroachments of Louis XIV., and leading with him the States of Holland, formed an alliance with Austria.  This was pretty equally dividing the military power of Europe, and a war of course ensued, almost unparalleled in its sanguinary ferocity.  The English nation supported the monarch; the House of Lords, in an address to the king, declared that “his majesty, his subjects and his allies, could never be secure till the house of Austria should be restored to its rights, and the invader of the Spanish monarchy brought to reason.”  Forty thousand sailors and forty thousand land troops were promptly voted for the war.