We have shown what the Princess was as a young woman, and also at the mature age of forty; but it is during the twenty-four years of her green old age (1698-1722) when having become a great political personage, we have to behold her exercising a powerful influence over the destinies of two great kingdoms, and aspiring to soar to a greater height than ever her painstaking ambition enabled her to attain. It was then that ambition began to take entire possession of her soul, and displaced in her heart every other sentiment that her previous sixty-two years had not extinguished. There can be no doubt of that fact when we discover in her letters such a glow of youthful feeling, such scarcely repressible delight, and finally that air of triumph with which she proposes to welcome and profit by her first elevation.
Her ambition, moreover, could not have had a more brilliant and legitimate aim than that of associating herself in the glorious task of France become the instructress of Spain; and Madame des Ursins, who joined to her own the aspirations of the other sex, entered upon her new mission with a zeal, an ardour, and an activity more than virile.
Into what profound decadence Spain had then fallen is well known to any reader of modern history, and the history of modern Europe contains no more terrible lesson. The Austrian dynasty, insatiable and jealous, had sought to impose at once upon Spain, Europe, and the world, her political and religious despotism. Charles V. had confiscated Spanish liberties and conquered the Commons. Philip II., his son, constituting himself the representative of Catholicism, had persecuted on all sides, whether by open violence or intrigue, by the aid of corruption or torture, the new principle of Protestantism. He had failed in every quarter. The sanguinary executions of the Duke of Alva had been answered by the creation of a new free State--Protestant and Republican Holland. With the _Invincible Armada_ was engulfed the last menace of the Spanish navy, which had been answered by the triumph of Protestant England under the glorious reign of Elizabeth. The Spanish nation itself had conspired, it must be confessed, to that decadence. It had shown no reaction either against the enervating despotism of royalty, or even the nature of the climate and soil, unequal and excessive in every way. The epoch of heroic deeds once elapsed upon the glowing arena of the Middle Ages, the Spanish people had despised labour, commerce, and industry. The soil, neglected, had returned to its primitive sterility, and almost entire provinces had become solitary deserts. Indolence and poverty are evil counsellors. The Spanish people, the nation of the Cid, had transformed her noble and fervent religion of the Middle Ages into a degrading, and too often cruel superstition. It was unhappily the popular sentiment of which Philip III. was the exponent when he expelled the Moors in 1603, thus depriving Spain--poor and already depopulated--of one hundred thousand rich and industrious families; and it was national opinion also which had accepted and maintained the domination of the monks and the hateful empire of the Inquisition.