English responses to Italian singing and all-sung opera in the Italian manner played out against the backdrop of domestic and foreign politics. Dominating both was the War of the Spanish Succession, which engaged the great powers of Europe for over a decade. Domestic politics was also inflamed by the ‘rage of party’ that consumed the entire twelve years of Queen Anne’s reign. The associations that Italian and English singers and singing had acquired in the 1680s and 1690s were put to partisan use in Tory-Whig party polemic.

Carlos II, the Habsburg King of Spain, was a dying invalid, without an heir. With his death long expected, for decades, the great powers of Europe had disputed over his successor. By virtue of family marriages, there were three claimants from the Habsburg and Bourdon dynasties: for the Bourbons, Louis XIV’s grandson Philip, duc d’Anjou; and for the Habsburgs, Emperor Leopold’s younger son, Archduke Charles, and the Electoral Prince of Bavaria (who soon died).

William III and Louis XIV had arranged two partition treaties in 1698 and 1700 to divide up among the claimants the Spanish empire after Carlos’s death – an empire comprising Spanish America, Naples, Sicily, Milan, and the Spanish Netherlands. The death of Carlos on 1 November 1700 set in train events that led to a continental war, fought mainly in the Low Countries, but reaching into Italy, Spain, and along the Danube. By his will, Carlos left his all possessions to Philip, on the condition they remain intact and that the French and Spanish crowns were not united. The Maritime powers England and Holland (the Dutch or the United Provinces) were content that Philip inherit only the Spanish crown, as long as it was not united with France.

By right of treaty the Emperor claimed Spain and her entire possessions for Archduke Charles. Louis accepted Carlos’s will and proclaimed Philip King of Spain, an action that antagonised the Maritime powers and other European states, for a Spanish empire under Bourbon control would upset the balance of power and jeopardise the Dutch and English access to trade in the Mediterranean and America.