'So Great a Revolution': Charles Townshend and the Partition of the Austrian Netherlands, September 1725

This article examines an exchange of dispatches between two prominent eighteenth-century British foreign policy makers, Charles Townshend (1674-1738) and Horace Walpole (1678-1757), wherein the former proposed a partition of the Southern Netherlands. In the immediate aftermath of the 1725 Ripperda treaty, whereby Austrian Habsburgs and Spanish Bourbons surprisingly came together in a potential new universal monarchy, Townshend saw opportunities to diminish Emperor Charles VI through conquest of his positions in the Low Countries. Habsburg, and not France, is seen as the main menace to European stability. Although the plan was never put into practice and consequently but scantly discussed in historiography, the arguments put forward by both men reveal crucial long-term thinking patterns. Townshend adapted his aggressive plans to the prevailing ideational dominance of balance-of-power-thinking after the 1713 Peace of Utrecht.