Yet the proudest of nations could not bear to part even with the name and the shadow of a supremacy which was no more.

All, from the grandee of the first class to the peasant, looked forward with dread to the day when God should be pleased to take their king to himself.
Some of them might have a predilection for Germany; but such predilections were subordinate to a stronger feeling.

The paramount object was the integrity of the empire of which Castile was the head; and the prince who should appear to be most likely to preserve that integrity unviolated would have the best right to the allegiance of every true Castilian.
No man of sense, however, out of Castile, when he considered the nature of the inheritance and the situation of the claimants, could doubt that a partition was inevitable.

Among those claimants three stood preeminent, the Dauphin, the Emperor Leopold, and the Electoral Prince of Bavaria.
If the question had been simply one of pedigree, the right of the Dauphin would have been incontestable.

Lewis the Fourteeenth had married the Infanta Maria Theresa, eldest daughter of Philip the Fourth and sister of Charles the Second.