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CHAP.
I.
20 THE RESTORATION IN ENGLAND. 1660
which were both eagerly solicitous for the English alliance.
In spite of his French descent, he could not forget that France
had expelled him from her soil in order to gain the favour of
the usurper, and less than two years before the Restoration he
and his brother had led their followers in arms against France
in the service of Spain. On his return to London he had
refused to receive the French envoy who had conducted the
negotiations between Mazarin and Cromwell.
If Charles had followed his first impulse and established a
close alliance between England and Spain, his subjects would
have been pleased. 1 French ambition would have received a
severe check, and the history both of England and of Europe
in the later part of the century might have been profoundly
modified. But dynastic considerations prevented Philip IV.
from grasping at the opportunity when it was offered. His
only marriageable daughter, Margaret, was betrothed to the
Emperor Leopold, and their union was imperatively necessary
to secure the eventual succession in Spain of the Austrian
Hapsburgs. Charles was chagrined at the manner in which
the suggestion of a Spanish match was rejected, and when
Philip tried to redeem his mistake by proposing a princess of
Parma and by offering to dower her as if she were a Spanish
infanta, it was too late. The English ministers had agreed to
the marriage of Charles' sister, Henrietta, with Louis XIV.'s
brother, Philip of Orleans, which was solemnised on March 30,
1661, and even before this they had opened negotiations for
the marriage of the king himself, which committed England
indirectly to an alliance with France and to hostility to Spain.
Perhaps the most brilliantly successful of Richelieu's anti-
Spanish measures was the encouragement of the rebellion of
Portugal in 1640. With French aid John of Braganza, and
after his death in 1656 his widow, Luisa de Guzman, had
strenuously and successfully resisted all efforts on the part of
the Spaniards to recover their sovereignty over Portugal But
in 1659 Louis XIV. solemnly pledged himself to withdraw all
French assistance. Left to itself, the little Portuguese kingdom
seemed to have no hope of holding its own, unless England
1 Pepys, Sept. 30, 1661, " We do naturally all love the Spanish and hate
the French " ; compare Jusserand, A French Ambassador at the Court of Charles
II., p. 126.