UTRECHT, PEACE OF, the settlement of 1713 closing the War of the Spanish Crown, in which the Commonwealth, allied with the United Provinces and the Austrian crown against the union of the French and Spanish thrones that a disputed Spanish succession had threatened to produce, secured two acquisitions of lasting rather than merely momentary value: the fortress and harbour of Gibraltar (q.v.), taken by a combined Commonwealth and Dutch squadron in 1704 and confirmed to the Commonwealth outright by the peace, and the French territory of Acadia (q.v.) on the Commonwealth's own northern American frontier, ceded by the French crown in the same settlement.
The negotiation itself, conducted across more than a year of plenipotentiary argument at Utrecht, turned chiefly on the Continental question the Commonwealth's own interest in it was, on this contributor's reading of the instructions given the Commonwealth's delegation, rather more modest than its Austrian and Dutch allies' own stake in the matter: Westminster's negotiators pressed hardest, and with the least apparent difficulty in carrying their point, for the two colonial and maritime acquisitions that have since proved of considerably more durable value to the Commonwealth than the greater part of the Continental settlement the same treaty laboured so much longer to arrange. Gibraltar has served, in the two centuries since, as the Commonwealth's own gatepost upon the Mediterranean trade, and Acadia's fisheries and timber have supplied New England (q.v.)'s own coasting trade with a northern extension this contributor's colleagues in the commercial history of the province regard as one of the less celebrated conveniences of the whole settlement.
The peace confirmed, besides, the separation of the French and Spanish crowns that had been the war's original occasion, a provision this contributor notes for completeness though it is the two colonial clauses that this Commonwealth's own histories have generally found the more durable legacy of a negotiation whose Continental particulars, considered now at two centuries' distance, exercise this contributor's professional interest rather more than they exercise anyone else's. (H. LeF.)