Whatever energy Charles might have shown during the siege, all seemed now to evaporate.  When the shot of the foe were crumbling the walls of Barcelona, he was in danger of the terrible doom of being taken a captive, which would have been the annihilation of all his hopes.  Despair nerved him to effort.  But now his person was no longer in danger; and his natural inefficiency and dilatoriness returned.  Notwithstanding the urgent intreaties of the Earl of Peterborough to pursue the foe, he insisted upon first making a pilgrimage to the shrine of the holy Virgin at Montserrat, twenty-four miles from Barcelona.

This curious monastery consists of but a succession of cloisters or hermitages hewn out of the solid rock.  They are only accessible by steps as steep as a ladder, which are also hewn upon the face of the almost precipitous mountain.  The highest of these cells, and which are occupied by the youngest monks, are at an elevation of three or four thousand feet above the level of the Mediterranean.  Soon after Charles’s pilgrimage to Montserrat, he made a triumphal march to Madrid, entered the city, and caused himself to be proclaimed king under the title of Charles III.  But Philip soon came upon him with such force that he was compelled to retreat back to Barcelona.  Again, in 1710, he succeeded in reaching Madrid, and, as we have described, he was driven back, with accumulated disaster, to Catalonia.

Three months after this defeat, when his affairs in Spain were assuming the gloomiest aspect, a courier arrived at Barcelona, and informed him that his brother Joseph was dead; that he had already been proclaimed King of Hungary and Bohemia, and Archduke of Austria; and that it was a matter of the most urgent necessity that he should immediately return to Germany.  Charles immediately embarked at Barcelona, and landed near Genoa on the 27th of September.  Rapidly pressing on through the Italian States, he entered Milan on the 16th of October, where he was greeted with the joyful intelligence that a diet had been convened under the influence of Prince Eugene, and that by its unanimous vote he was invested with the imperial throne.  He immediately proceeded through the Tyrol to Frankfort, where he was crowned on the 22d of December.  He was now more than ever determined that the diadem of Spain should be added to the other crowns which had been placed upon his brow.

In the incessant wars which for centuries had been waged between the princes and States of Germany and the emperor, the States had acquired virtually a constitution, which they called a capitulation.  When Charles was crowned as Charles VI., he was obliged to promise that he would never assemble a diet or council without convening all the princes and States of the empire; that he would never wage war, or conclude peace, or enter into alliance with any nation without the consent of the States; that he would not, of his own authority, put any prince under the ban of the empire; that confiscated territory should never be conferred upon any members of his own family, and that no successor to the imperial crown should be chosen during his lifetime, unless absence from Germany or the infirmities of age rendered him incapable of administering the affairs of the empire.