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little love for the English, who in 1738 had threatened his capital with bombardment. This personal animosity and a mistaken colonial policy were to cause him to plunge into the war, a blunder which he was to regret within a year. Choiseul, correctly said to have been one of the ablest statesmen of his day, immediately saw the opportunity for a French-Spanish alliance that would strengthen the position of France in the negotiations with England. The first step in his plan was the renewal of the Family Compact on August 15, 1761. At the same time a secret agreement was entered into by which Charles III unwittingly bound Spain to declare war against Great Britain, if a satisfactory peace was not concluded by May 1762.• This secret treaty joined the fate of Spain to that of France in her struggle for colonial supremacy with England and was destined to change the course of history to a far greater extent than either Louis XV or Charles III ever dreamed. Quickly matters reached a crisis. The news of the alliance caused a rupture of the peace negotiations and the resignation of Pitt in England. Choiseul now bent all his efforts to induce Spain to become an active ally, and Charles III formally declared a war on January 2, 1762. The renewal of hostilities proved disastrous to both France and Spain. The English soon captured Santa Lucia, the key to Martinique and Guadaloupe, the two most prized French island possessions in the West Indies. Shortly aftenvards they took Havana, the open sesame to the Gulf of Mexico. France was the first to realize the futility of continuing the war. Early in the spring of 1762 she began negotiations and offered to cede all the territory east of the Mississippi to Great Britain. The Spanish ambassador in Paris, the Marques de Grimaldi, strenuously objected to such a proposal, apprehensive of the danger which such an arrangement represented to the interests of Spain in America. He emphatically declared that France had no right to dispose of any part of Louisiana without the consent of Spain. 5 This contention ruffled the pride of the French. Choiseul was determined to obtain peace at all costs and deemed the loss of either a part or the whole of Louisiana to the English a small price to save her West Indies Island possessions. The cession of L01,isia11a to Spain. •F. P. Renault, L1 Pa&t d1 Famill1 et L'Ameriqu1 (Paris 1932); Aiton "The Diplomacy of the Louisiana Cession," American Historical R rvuw, XXXIV ( 1931) 701-710. sw. R. Shepherd, "The Cession of Louisiana to Spain," Political Scin1&1 (}uar- /6'1~, XIX, (1904) 443.
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