THE CAMPAIGN OF SIR JOHN MOORE
I. Napoleon at Madrid 473
II. Moore at Salamanca 486
III. Moore’s advance to Sahagun 513
IV. Napoleon’s pursuit of Moore: Sahagun to Astorga 539
V. Soult’s pursuit of Moore: Astorga to Corunna 559
VI. The battle of Corunna 583
APPENDICES
I. Godoy’s Proclamation of Oct. 5, 1806 603
II. The Treaty of Fontainebleau 604
III. Papers relating to the ‘Affair of the Escurial’ 606
IV. Abdication of Charles IV 607
V. The Spanish Army in 1808 607
VI. The first French ‘Army of Spain’ 612
VII. Papers relating to the Treachery at Bayonne 616
VIII. Papers relating to the Capitulation of Baylen 618
IX. Papers relating to the Convention of Cintra 625
X. List of Members of the Central Junta 630
XI. The Spanish Armies, Oct.-Nov. 1808 631
XII. The second French ‘Army of Spain’ 640
XIII. The Army of Sir John Moore, its strength and its losses 646
INDEX 649
MAPS
1. MADRID 60
2. SARAGOSSA 160
3. MEDINA DE RIO SECO 168
4. ANDALUSIA AND BAYLEN 184
5. VIMIERO 249
6. CATALONIA 304
7. NORTHERN SPAIN 384
8. ESPINOSA 413
9. TUDELA 435
10. CORUNNA 584
LARGE MAP OF SPAIN _At end of volume_
PORTRAITS
CHARLES IV _Frontispiece_
MARIA LUISA QUEEN OF SPAIN 17
MANUEL GODOY, PRINCE OF THE PEACE 41
NOTE
The coins on the binding of the book are--the first a half-dollar of
the last issue of Charles IV, the second a siege-piece struck at Gerona
in 1808. That on the title-page is a peseta struck at Valencia, with a
patriotic legend on the reverse, RENUEVA VAL. SU JURAM. SELLADO CON SU
SANGRE.
SECTION I
NAPOLEON AND THE SPANISH BOURBONS
CHAPTER I
THE TREATY OF FONTAINEBLEAU
‘I am not the heir of Louis XIV, I am the heir of Charlemagne,’ wrote
Napoleon, in one of those moments of epigrammatic self-revelation
which are so precious to the students of the most interesting epoch
and the most interesting personality of modern history[2]. There are
historians who have sought for the origins of the Peninsular War far
back in the eternal and inevitable conflict between democracy and
privilege[3]: there are others who--accepting the Emperor’s own version
of the facts--have represented it as a fortuitous development arising
from his plan of forcing the Continental System upon every state in
Europe. To us it seems that the moment beyond which we need not search
backward was that in which Bonaparte formulated to himself the idea
that he was not the successor of the greatest of the Bourbons, but of
the founder of the Holy Roman Empire. It is a different thing to claim
to be the first of European monarchs, and to claim to be the king of
kings. Louis XIV had wide-reaching ambitions for himself and for his
family: but it was from his not very deep or accurate knowledge of
Charlemagne that Napoleon had derived his idea of a single imperial
power bestriding Europe, of a monarch whose writ ran alike at Paris and
at Mainz, at Milan and at Hamburg, at Rome and at Barcelona, and whose
vassal-princes brought him the tribute of all the lands of the Oder,
the Elbe, and the middle Danube[4].
[2] He works out the idea in his letter to Talleyrand of May 16,
1806.
[3] Such is the main thesis of chapter I of Napier’s _Peninsular
War_.
[4] It is curious to note how often the name of Charlemagne
occurs in Napoleon’s letters during the early months of 1806. It
is especially common in his correspondence about the relations of
the Papacy and the Empire.
There is no need for us to trace back the growth of Napoleon’s
conception of himself as the successor of Charlemagne beyond the winter
of 1805-6, the moment when victorious at Austerlitz and master for
the first time of Central Europe, he began to put into execution his
grandiose scheme for enfeoffing all the realms of the Continent as
vassal states of the French Empire. He had extorted from Francis of
Austria the renunciation of his meagre and time-worn rights as head
of the Holy Roman Empire, because he intended to replace the ancient
shadow by a new reality. The idea that he might be Emperor of Europe
and not merely Emperor of the French was already developed, though
Prussia still needed to be chastised, and Russia to be checked and
turned back on to the ways of the East. It was after Austerlitz but
before Jena that the foundations of the Confederation of the Rhine
were laid[5], and that the Emperor took in hand the erection of that
series of subject realms under princes of his own house, which was to
culminate in the new kingdom of Spain ruled by ‘Joseph Napoleon the
First.’ By the summer of 1806 the system was already well developed:
the first modest experiment, the planting out of his sister Eliza and
her insignificant husband in the duchy of Lucca and Piombino was now
twelve months old. There had followed the gift of the old Bourbon
kingdom of Naples to Joseph Bonaparte in February, 1806, and the
transformation of the Batavian Republic into Louis Bonaparte’s kingdom
of Holland in June. The Emperor’s brother-in-law, Joachim Murat, had
been made Grand-Duke of Berg in March, his sister, Pauline, Duchess
of Guastalla in the same month. It cannot be doubted that his eye was
already roving all round Europe, marking out every region in which the
system of feudatory states could be further extended.
[5] The negotiations for the Confederation were completed in
July, and it was formally constituted on Aug. 1, 1806.
At the ill-governed realms of Spain and Portugal it is certain that he
must have taken a specially long glance. He had against the house of
the Bourbons the grudge that men always feel against those whom they
have injured. He knew that they could never forgive the disappointed
hopes of 1799, nor the murder of the Duc d’Enghien, however much they
might disguise their sentiments by base servility. What their real
feelings were might be guessed from the treacherous conduct of their
kinsmen of Naples, whom he had just expelled from the Continent.
The Bourbons of Spain were at this moment the most subservient and
the most ill-used of his allies. Under the imbecile guidance of his
favourite Godoy, Charles IV had consistently held to the league with
France since 1795, and had thereby brought down untold calamities upon
his realm. Nevertheless Napoleon was profoundly dissatisfied with
him as an ally. The seventy-two million francs of subsidies which he
was annually wringing from his impoverished neighbour seemed to him
a trifle. The chief gain that he had hoped to secure, when he goaded
Spain into war with England in 1804, had been the assistance of her
fleet, by whose aid he had intended to gain the control of the narrow
seas, and to dominate the Channel long enough to enable him to launch
his projected invasion against the shores of Kent and Sussex. But the
Spanish navy, always more formidable on paper than in battle, had
proved a broken reed. The flower of its vessels had been destroyed at
Trafalgar. There only remained in 1806 a few ships rotting in harbour
at Cadiz, Cartagena, and Ferrol, unable even to concentrate on account
of the strictness of Collingwood’s blockade. Napoleon was angry at his
ally’s impotence, and was already reflecting that in hands more able
and energetic than those of Charles IV Spain might give aid of a very
different kind. In after years men remembered that as early as 1805 he
had muttered to his confidants that a Bourbon on the Spanish throne
was a tiresome neighbour--too weak as an ally, yet dangerous as a
possible enemy[6]. For in spite of all the subservience of Charles IV
the Emperor believed, and believed quite rightly, that a Bourbon prince
must in his heart loathe the unnatural alliance with the child of the
Revolution. But in 1806 Bonaparte had an impending war with Prussia on
his hands, and there was no leisure for interfering in the affairs of
the Peninsula. Spain, he thought, could wait, and it is improbable
that he had formulated in his brain any definite plan for dealing with
her.
[6] See, for example, the very interesting story told by Marshal
Jourdan in his _Mémoires_ (p. 9) of the long conversation which
the emperor had with him at Verona on June 16, 1805: ‘Tant pour
l’affermissement de ma dynastie que pour la sûreté de France,’
concluded Napoleon, ‘un Bourbon sur le trône d’Espagne est un
voisin trop dangereux.’
The determining factor in his subsequent action was undoubtedly
supplied in the autumn of 1806 by the conduct of the Spanish government
during the campaign of Jena. There was a moment, just before that
decisive battle had been fought, during which European public opinion
was expecting a check to the French arms. The military prestige of
Prussia was still very great, and it was well known that Russia had not
been able to put forth her full strength at Austerlitz. Combined it
was believed that they would be too much for Napoleon. While this idea
was still current, the Spanish king, or rather his favourite Godoy,
put forth a strange proclamation which showed how slight was the bond
of allegiance that united them to France, and how hollow their much
vaunted loyalty to the emperor[7]. It was an impassioned appeal to the
people of Spain to take arms _en masse_, and to help the government
with liberal gifts of men, horses and money. ‘Come,’ it said, ‘dear
fellow countrymen, come and swear loyalty beneath the banners of the
most benevolent of sovereigns.’ The God of Victories was to smile on a
people which helped itself, and a happy and enduring peace was to be
the result of a vigorous effort. It might have been pleaded in defence
of Charles IV that all this was very vague, and that the anonymous
enemy who was to be crushed might be England. But unfortunately for
this interpretation, three whole sentences of the document are filled
with demands for horses and an instant increase in the cavalry arm
of the Spanish military establishment. It could hardly be urged with
seriousness that horsemen were intended to be employed against the
English fleet. And of naval armaments there was not one word in the
proclamation.
[7] For the full text of this bombastic appeal see Appendix, No.
I. Godoy speaks throughout in his own name, not in that of his
master.
This document was issued on Oct. 5, 1806: not long after there arrived
in Madrid the news of the battle of Jena and the capture of Berlin.
The Prince of the Peace was thunderstruck at the non-fulfilment of
his expectations and the complete triumph of Napoleon. He hastened to
countermand his armaments, and to shower letters of explanation and
apology on the Emperor, pointing out that his respected ally could
not possibly have been the ‘enemy’ referred to in the proclamation.
That document had reached Napoleon on the very battle-field of Jena,
and had caused a violent paroxysm of rage in the august reader[8].
But, having Russia still to fight, he repressed his wrath for a
moment, affecting to regard as satisfactory Godoy’s servile letters
of explanation. Yet we can hardly doubt that this was the moment at
which he made up his mind that the House of Bourbon must cease to
reign in Spain. He must have reflected on the danger that southern
France had escaped; a hundred thousand Spaniards might have marched
on Bordeaux or Toulouse at the moment of Jena, and there would have
been no army whatever on the unguarded frontier of the Pyrenees to
hold them in check. Supposing that Jena had been deferred a month,
or that no decisive battle at all had been fought in the first stage
of the struggle with Prussia, it was clear that Godoy would have
committed himself to open war. A stab in the back, even if dealt with
no better weapon than the disorganized Spanish army, must have deranged
all Napoleon’s plans, and forced him to turn southward the reserves
destined to feed the ‘Grand Army.’ It was clear that such a condition
of affairs must never be allowed to recur, and we should naturally
expect to find that, the moment the war of 1806-7 was ended, Napoleon
would turn against Spain, either to dethrone Charles IV, or at least to
demand the dismissal from office of Godoy. He acknowledged this himself
at St. Helena: the right thing to have done, as he then conceded, would
have been to declare open war on Spain immediately after Tilsit[9].
[8] ‘Je jurai dès lors qu’ils me la paieraient, que je les
mettrais hors d’état de me nuire,’ said Napoleon to De Pradt,
eighteen months later (_Mémoires sur la Révolution d’Espagne_, p.
16). The archbishop’s story is amply borne out by the repeated
allusions to this unhappy proclamation in Napoleon’s official
justification of his conduct in Spain. The Spanish ambassador at
Berlin, Don Benito Pardo, was told by Napoleon at the time that
he had forgiven the Proclamation, but could not forget it.
[9] _Correspondance de Napoléon_, xxxii. 59.
After eight years of experience of Bonaparte as an ally, the rulers
of Spain ought to have known that his silence during the campaigns of
Eylau and Friedland boded them no good. But his present intentions
escaped them, and they hastened to atone for the proclamation of
Oct. 5 by a servile obedience to all the orders which he sent them.
The most important of these was the command to mobilize and send
to the Baltic 15,000 of their best troops [March, 1807]. This was
promptly done, the depleted battalions and squadrons being raised to
war-strength, by drafts of men and horses which disorganized dozens
of the corps that remained at home[10]. The reason alleged, the fear
of Swedish and English descents on the rear of the Grand Army, was
plausible, but there can be no doubt that the real purpose was to
deprive Spain of a considerable part, and that the most efficient, of
her disposable forces. If Godoy could have listened to the interviews
of Napoleon and Alexander of Russia at Tilsit, he would have been
terrified at the offhand way in which the Emperor suggested to the
Czar that the Balearic Isles should be taken from Spain and given to
Ferdinand of Naples, if the latter would consent to cede Sicily to
Joseph Napoleon[11]. To despoil his allies was quite in the usual
style of Bonaparte--Godoy cannot have forgotten the lot of Trinidad
and Ceylon--but he had not before proposed to tear from Spain, not a
distant colony, but an ancient province of the Aragonese crown. The
project was enshrined in the ‘secret and supplementary’ clauses of the
Treaty of Tilsit, which Napoleon wished to conceal till the times were
ripe.
[10] The demand was made in the most peremptory fashion, and
in almost threatening language. Napoleon writes to Talleyrand
that the Spanish division in Tuscany, which was to form part of
the expeditionary corps, must march in twenty-four hours after
receiving its orders. ‘If they refuse, everything is at an end,’
a most sinister phrase (Napoleon to Talleyrand, March 25, 1807).
[11] This was Article IV of the Seven ‘Secret Articles’ of the
Treaty of Tilsit. See for this proposal the notes in Vandal’s
_Napoléon et Alexandre Ier_, vol. i.
It was only when Bonaparte had returned to France from his long
campaign in Poland that the affairs of the Iberian Peninsula began to
come seriously to the front. The Emperor arrived in Paris at the end
of July, 1807, and this was the moment at which he might have been
expected to produce the rod, for the chastisement which the rulers of
Spain had merited by their foolish proclamation of the preceding year.
But no sign of any such intention was displayed: it is true that early
in August French troops in considerable numbers began to muster at
Bayonne[12], but Bonaparte openly declared that they were destined to
be used, not against Spain, but against Portugal. One of the articles
of the Peace of Tilsit had been to the effect that Sweden and Portugal,
the last powers in Europe which had not submitted to the Continental
System, should be compelled--if necessary by force--to adhere to it,
and to exclude the commerce of England from their ports. It was natural
that now, as in 1801, a French contingent should be sent to aid Spain
in bringing pressure to bear on her smaller neighbour. With this idea
Godoy and his master persisted in the voluntary blindness to the signs
of the times which they had so long been cultivating. They gave their
ambassador in Lisbon orders to act in all things in strict conjunction
with his French colleague.
[12] The first notice of the ‘Corps of Observation of the
Gironde’ is to be found in a dispatch of Masserano, the Spanish
ambassador at Paris, dated July 30, which gives notice of the
approaching concentration at Bayonne. But the quiet movement of
troops in this direction had begun long before the Russian war
was over.
On August 12, therefore, the representatives of Spain and France
delivered to John, the Prince-Regent of Portugal (his mother, Queen
Maria, was insane), almost identical notes, in which they declared that
they should ask for their passports and leave Lisbon, unless by the
first of September the Regent had declared war on England, joined his
fleet to that of the allied powers, confiscated all British goods in
his harbours, and arrested all British subjects within the bounds of
his kingdom. The prince, a timid and incapable person, whose only wish
was to preserve his neutrality, answered that he was ready to break
off diplomatic relations with England, and to close his ports against
British ships, but that the seizure of the persons and property of the
British merchants, without any previous declaration of war, would be
contrary to the rules of international law and morality. For a moment
he hoped that this half-measure would satisfy Napoleon, that he might
submit to the Continental System without actually being compelled to
declare war on Great Britain. But when dispatches had been interchanged
between the French minister Rayneval and his master at Paris, the
answer came that the Regent’s offer was insufficient, and that the
representatives of France and Spain were ordered to quit Lisbon at
once. This they did on September 30, but without issuing any formal
declaration of war.
On October 18, the French army, which had been concentrating at Bayonne
since the beginning of August, under the harmless name of the ‘Corps of
Observation of the Gironde,’ crossed the Bidassoa at Irun and entered
Spain. It had been placed under the orders of Junot, one of Napoleon’s
most active and vigorous officers, but not a great strategist after the
style of Masséna, Soult, or Davoust. He was a good fighting-man, but a
mediocre general. The reason that he received the appointment was that
he had already some knowledge of Portugal, from having held the post
of ambassador at Lisbon in 1805. He had been promised a duchy and a
marshal’s bâton if his mission was carried out to his master’s complete
satisfaction.
It is clear that from the first Napoleon had intended that Portugal
should refuse the ignominious orders which he had given to the
Prince-Regent. If he had only been wishing to complete the extension of
the Continental System over all Southern Europe, the form of obedience
which had been offered him by the Portuguese government would have
been amply sufficient. But he was aiming at annexation, and not at
the mere assertion of his suzerainty over Portugal. The fact that he
began to mass troops at Bayonne before he commenced to threaten the
Regent is sufficient proof of his intentions. An army was not needed
to coerce the Portuguese: for it was incredible that in the then
condition of European affairs they would dare to risk war with France
and Spain by adhering too stiffly to the cause of England. The Regent
was timid and his submission was certain; but Napoleon took care to
dictate the terms that he offered in such an offensive form that the
Portuguese government would be tempted to beg for changes of detail,
though it sorrowfully accepted the necessity of conceding the main
point--war with England and the acceptance of the Continental System.
The Prince-Regent, as might have been expected, made a feeble attempt
to haggle over the more ignominious details, and then Napoleon withdrew
his ambassador and let loose his armies.
Shortly after Junot had crossed the Bidassoa there was signed at
Fontainebleau the celebrated secret treaty which marks the second
stage of the Emperor’s designs against the Peninsula. It was drawn up
by Duroc, Napoleon’s marshal of the palace, and Eugenio Izquierdo,
the agent of Godoy. For the official ambassador of Spain in Paris,
the Prince of Masserano, was not taken into the confidence of his
master[13]. All delicate matters were conducted by the favourite’s
private representative, an obscure but astute personage, the director
of the Botanical Gardens at Madrid, whose position was legitimized by
a royal sign-manual giving him powers to treat as a plenipotentiary
with France. ‘Manuel is your protector: do what he tells you, and by
serving him you serve me,’ the old king had said, when giving him his
commission.
[13] Talleyrand declares in his _Mémoires_ (i. 349) that Napoleon
kept Champagny, his own minister of foreign affairs, in equal
darkness.
The Treaty of Fontainebleau is a strange document, whose main purpose,
at a first glance, seems to be the glorification of Godoy. It is
composed of fourteen articles[14], the most important of which contain
the details of a projected dismemberment of Portugal. The country was
to be cut up into three parts. Oporto and the northern province of
Entre-Douro-e-Minho were to become the ‘Kingdom of Northern Lusitania,’
and to be ceded to a Bourbon, the young King of Etruria, whom Napoleon
was just evicting from his pleasant abode at Florence. All Southern
Portugal, the large province of Alemtejo and the coast region of
Algarve, was to be given as an independent principality to Godoy, under
the title of ‘Prince of the Algarves’[15]. The rest of Portugal, Lisbon
and the provinces of Beira, Estremadura and Tras-os-Montes were to be
sequestrated till the conclusion of a general peace, and meanwhile were
to be governed and administered by the French. Ultimately they were to
be restored, or not restored, to the house of Braganza according as the
high contracting parties might determine.
[14] See the text in Appendix, No. II.
[15] In the curious exculpatory memoirs which Godoy published
in 1835-6, with the aid of d’Esménard, he endeavours to make
out that he never desired the principality, and that Napoleon
pressed it upon him, because he wished to remove him from about
the person of Charles IV. ‘The gift of the principality of the
Algarves was a banishment’ (i. 54). This plea will not stand
in the face of the fact that Godoy had solicited just such
preferment as far back as the spring of 1806; see Arteche,
_Guerra de la Independencia_, i. 148. His real object was to
secure a place of refuge at the death of Charles IV.
Instead therefore of receiving punishment for his escapade in the
autumn of 1806, Godoy was to be made by Napoleon a sovereign prince!
But Spain, as apart from the favourite, got small profit from this
extraordinary treaty: Charles IV might take, within the next three
years, the pompous title of ‘Emperor of the Two Americas,’ and was to
be given some share of the transmarine possessions of Portugal--which
meanwhile (treaties or no) would inevitably fall into the hands of
Great Britain, who held the command of the seas, while Napoleon did not.
It is incredible that Bonaparte ever seriously intended to carry out
the terms of the Treaty of Fontainebleau: they were not even to be
divulged (as Article XIV stipulated) till it was his pleasure. Godoy
had deserved badly of him, and the Emperor was never forgiving. The
favourite’s whole position and character (as we shall presently show)
were so odious and disgraceful, that it would have required an even
greater cynicism than Napoleon possessed, to overthrow an ancient and
respectable kingdom in order to make him a sovereign prince. To pose
perpetually as the regenerator of Europe, and her guardian against
the sordid schemes of Britain, and then to employ as one’s agent for
regeneration the corrupt and venal favourite of the wicked old Queen of
Spain, would have been too absurd. Napoleon’s keen intelligence would
have repudiated the idea, even in the state of growing autolatry into
which he was already lapsing in the year 1807. What profit could there
be in giving a kingdom to a false friend, already convicted of secret
disloyalty, incapable, disreputable, and universally detested?
But if we apply another meaning to the Treaty of Fontainebleau we
get a very different light upon it. If we adopt the hypothesis that
Bonaparte’s real aim was to obtain an excuse for marching French
armies into Spain without exciting suspicion, all its provisions
become intelligible. ‘This Prince of the Peace,’ he said in one of his
confidential moments, ‘this mayor of the palace, is loathed by the
nation; he is the rascal who will himself open for me the gates of
Spain[16].’ The phantom principality that was dangled before Godoy’s
eyes was only designed to attract his attention while the armies of
France were being poured across the Pyrenees. It is doubtful whether
the Emperor intended the project of the ‘Principality of the Algarves’
to become generally known. If he did, it must have been with the
intention of making the favourite more odious than he already was to
patriotic Spaniards, at the moment when he and his master were about
to be brushed away by a sweep of the imperial arm. That Napoleon was
already in October preparing other armies beside that of Junot, and
that he purposed to overrun Spain when the time was ripe, is shown in
the Treaty itself. Annexed to it is a convention regulating the details
of the invasion of Portugal: the sixth clause of this paper mentions
that it was the emperor’s intention to concentrate 40,000 more troops
at Bayonne--in case Great Britain should threaten an armed descent on
Portugal--and that this force would be ready to cross the Pyrenees by
November 20. Napoleon sent not 40,000 but 100,000 men, and pushed them
into Spain, though no English invasion of Portugal had taken place, or
even been projected. After this is it possible to believe for a moment
in his good faith, or to think that the Treaty of Fontainebleau was
anything more than a snare?
[16] ‘Le Prince de la Paix, véritable maire du palais, est en
horreur à la nation. C’est un gredin qui m’ouvrira lui-même les
portes de l’Espagne’ (Fouché, _Mémoires_, i. 365).
Those who could best judge what was at the back of the emperor’s mind,
such as Talleyrand and Fouché, penetrated his designs long before the
treaty of Fontainebleau had been signed. Talleyrand declares in his
memoirs[17] that the reason for which he was deprived of the portfolio
of Foreign Affairs in August, 1807, was that he had disliked the scheme
of invading Spain in a treacherous fashion, and warned his master
against it. No improbability is added to this allegation by the fact
that Napoleon at St. Helena repeatedly stated that Talleyrand had
first thought of the idea, and had recommended it to him ‘while at
the same time contriving to set an opinion abroad that he was opposed
to the design.’ On the other hand, we are not convinced of the Prince
of Benevento’s innocence merely by the fact that he wrote in his
autobiography that he was a strenuous opponent of the plan. He says
that the emperor broached the whole scheme to him the moment that he
returned from Tilsit, asseverating that he would never again expose
himself to the danger of a stab in the back at some moment when he
might be busy in Central Europe[18]. He himself, he adds, combated the
project by every possible argument, but could not move his master an
inch from his purpose. This is probably true; but we believe it not
because Talleyrand wrote it down--his bills require the endorsement of
some backer of a less tarnished reputation--but because the whole of
the Spanish episode is executed in the true Napoleonesque manner. Its
scientific mixture of force and fraud is clearly the work of the same
hand that managed the details of the fall of the Venetian Republic, and
of the dethroning of Pope Pius VII. It is impossible to ascribe the
plot to any other author.
[17] Talleyrand, _Mémoires_, i. 308-329.
[18] Ibid., i. 378, 379.
SECTION I: CHAPTER II
THE COURT OF SPAIN
Junot’s army was nearing the Portuguese frontier, and the reserve at
Bayonne was already beginning to assemble--it was now styled ‘the
Second Corps of Observation of the Gironde’--when a series of startling
events took place at the Spanish Court. On October 27, the very day
that the treaty of Fontainebleau was signed, Ferdinand, Prince of the
Asturias, was seized by his father and thrown into confinement, on a
charge of high treason, of having plotted to dethrone or even to murder
his aged parent. This astonishing development in the situation need
not be laid to Napoleon’s charge. There have been historians who think
that he deliberately stirred up the whole series of family quarrels at
Madrid: but all the materials for trouble were there already, and the
shape which they took was not particularly favourable to the Emperor’s
present designs. They sprang from the inevitable revolt against the
predominance of Godoy, which had long been due.
The mere fact that an incapable upstart like Godoy had been able to
control the foreign and internal policy of Spain ever since 1792 is a
sufficient evidence of the miserable state of the country. He was a
mere court favourite of the worst class: to compare him to Buckingham
would be far too flattering--and even Piers Gaveston had a pretty
wit and no mean skill as a man-at-arms, though he was also a vain
ostentatious fool. After a few years, we may remember, the one met the
dagger and the other the axe, with the full approval of English public
opinion. But Godoy went on flourishing like the green bay-tree, for
sixteen years, decked with titles and offices and laden with plunder,
with no other support than the queen’s unconcealed partiality for
him, and the idiotic old king’s desire to have trouble taken off his
hands. Every thinking man in Spain hated the favourite as the outward
and visible sign of corruption in high places. Every patriot saw that
the would-be statesman who made himself the adulator first of Barras
and then of Bonaparte, and played cat’s-paw to each of them, to the
ultimate ruin and bankruptcy of the realm, ought to be removed. Yet
there was no sign of any movement against him, save obscure plots in
the household of the Prince Royal. But for the interference of Napoleon
in the affairs of Spain, it is possible that the Prince of the Peace
might have enjoyed many years more of power. Such is the price which
nations pay for handing over their bodies to autocratic monarchy and
their souls to three centuries of training under the Inquisition.
It is perhaps necessary to gain some detailed idea of the unpleasant
family party at Madrid. King Charles IV was now a man of sixty years
of age: he was so entirely simple and helpless that it is hardly an
exaggeration to say that his weakness bordered on imbecility. His elder
brother, Don Philip, was so clearly wanting in intellect that he had to
be placed in confinement and excluded from the throne. It might occur
to us that it would have been well for Spain if Charles had followed
him to the asylum, if we had not to remember that the crown would then
have fallen to Ferdinand of Naples, who if more intelligent was also
more morally worthless than his brother. Till the age of forty Charles
had been entirely suppressed and kept in tutelage by an autocratic
father: when he came to the throne he never developed any will or mind
of his own, and remained the tool and servant of those about him. He
may be described as a good-natured and benevolent imbecile: he was not
cruel or malicious or licentious, or given to extravagant fancies.
His one pronounced taste was hunting: if he could get away from his
ministers to some country palace, and go out all day with his dogs,
his gun, and his gamekeepers, he was perfectly happy. His brother of
Naples, it will be remembered, had precisely the same hobby. Of any
other tastes, save a slight interest in some of the minor handicrafts,
which he shared with his cousin Louis XVI, we find no trace in the old
king. He was very ugly, not with the fierce clever ugliness of his
father Charles III, but in an imbecile fashion, with a frightfully
receding forehead, a big nose, and a retreating jaw generally set in
a harmless grin. He did not understand business or politics, but was
quite capable of getting through speeches and ceremonies when properly
primed and prompted beforehand. Even his private letters were managed
for him by his wife and his favourite. He had just enough brains to be
proud of his position as king, and to resent anything that he regarded
as an attack on his dignity--such as the mention of old constitutional
rights and privileges, or any allusion to a Cortes. He liked, in fact,
to feel himself and to be called an absolute king, though he wished to
hand over all the duties and worries of kingship to his wife and his
chosen servants. Quite contrary to Spanish usage, he often associated
Maria Luisa’s name with his own in State documents, and in popular
diction they were often called ‘los Reyes,’ ‘the Kings,’ as Ferdinand
and Isabella had been three hundred years before.
The Queen was about the most unfit person in Europe to be placed on
the throne at the side of such an imbecile husband. She was his first
cousin, the daughter of his uncle Don Philip, Duke of Parma-Bourbon
on the mother’s side also, for she was the child of the daughter of
Louis XV of France. Maria Luisa was self-confident, flighty, reckless,
and utterly destitute of conscience of any sort. Her celebrated
portrait by Goya gives us at once an idea of the woman, bold,
shameless, pleasure-loving, and as corrupt as Southern court morality
allows--which is saying a good deal. She had from the first taken the
measure of her imbecile husband: she dominated him by her superior
force of will, made him her mere mouthpiece, and practically ruled
the realm, turning him out to hunt while she managed ministers and
ambassadors.
For the last twenty years her scandalous partiality for Don Manuel
Godoy had been public property. When Charles IV came to the throne
Godoy was a mere private in the bodyguard--a sort of ornamental corps
of gentlemen-at-arms. He was son of a decayed noble family, a big
handsome showy young man of twenty-one--barely able to read and write,
say his detractors--but a good singer and musician. Within four years
after he caught the Queen’s eye he was a grandee of Spain, a duke,
and prime minister! He was married to a royal princess, the Infanta
Teresa, a cousin of the King, a mésalliance unparalleled in the whole
history of the house of Bourbon. Three years later, to commemorate his
part in concluding the disgraceful peace of Basle, he was given the
odd title of ‘Prince of the Peace,’ ‘Principe de la Paz’: no Spanish
subject had ever before been decorated with any title higher than that
of duke[19]. In 1808 he was a man of forty, beginning to get a little
plump and bald after so many years of good (or evil) living, but still
a fine personable figure. He had stowed away enormous riches, not
only from the gifts of the King and Queen, but by the sale of offices
and commissions, the taking of all sorts of illicit percentages, and
(perhaps the worst symptom of all) by colossal speculations on the
stock exchange. A French ambassador recorded the fact that he had to
keep the treaty of peace of 1802 quiet for three days after it was
signed, in order that Godoy might complete his purchases ‘for a rise’
before the news got about[20]. Godoy was corrupt and licentious, but
not cruel or even tyrannical: though profoundly ignorant, he had the
vanity to pose as a patron of art and science. His foible was to be
hailed as a universal benefactor, and as the introducer of modern
civilization into Spain. He endeavoured to popularize the practice of
vaccination, waged a mild and intermittent war with the Inquisition,
and (a most astonishing piece of courage) tried to suppress the custom
of bull-fighting. The last two acts were by far the most creditable
items that can be put down to his account: unfortunately they were also
precisely those which appealed least to the populace of Spain. Godoy
was a notable collector of pictures and antiquities, and had a certain
liking for, and skill in, music. When this has been said, there is
nothing more to put down in his favour. Fifteen years of power had so
turned his head that for a long time he had been taking himself quite
seriously, and his ambition had grown so monstrous that, not contented
with his alliance by marriage with the royal house, he was dreaming of
becoming a sovereign prince. The bait by which Napoleon finally drew
him into the trap, the promise that he should be given the Algarves
and Alemtejo, was not the Corsican’s own invention. It had been an old
idea of Godoy’s which he broached to his ally early in 1806, only to
receive a severe rebuff. Hence came the joy with which he finally saw
it take shape in the treaty of Fontainebleau[21]. When such schemes
were running in his head, we can perfectly well credit the accusation
which Prince Ferdinand brought against him, of having intended to
change the succession to the crown of Spain, by a _coup d’état_ on the
death of Charles IV. The man had grown capable of any outburst of pride
and ambition. Meanwhile he continued to govern Spain by his hold over
the imbecile and gouty old king and his worthless wife, who was now far
over fifty, but as besotted on her favourite as ever. It was his weary
lot to be always in attendance on them. They could hardly let him out
of their sight. Toreño relates a ridiculous story that, when Napoleon
invited them to dinner on the first night of their unhappy visit to
Bayonne, he did not ask the Prince of the Peace to the royal table.
Charles was so unhappy and uncomfortable that he could not settle down
to his meal till the emperor had sent for Godoy, and found a place for
him near his master and mistress[22].
[19] The princes that occur in Spanish politics, e.g. Eboli or
Castelfranco, were holders of Italian, generally Neapolitan,
titles.
[20] Foy, _Guerre de la Péninsule_, ii. 267.
[21] See the proofs from papers in the Spanish Foreign Office,
quoted in Arteche’s _Guerra de la Independencia_, i. 148.
[22] Toreño, i. 86. The story is confirmed by Savary, in his
_Mémoires_, ii. 221.
The fourth individual with whose personality it is necessary to be
acquainted when studying the court of Spain in 1808 is the heir to the
throne, Ferdinand, Prince of the Asturias. Little was known of him,
for his parents and Godoy had carefully excluded him from political
life. But when a prince is getting on for thirty, and his father has
begun to show signs of failing health, it is impossible that eyes
should not be turned on him from all quarters. Ferdinand was not an
imbecile like his father, nor a scandalous person like his mother; but
(though Spain knew it not) he was coward and a cur. With such parents
he had naturally been brought up very badly. He was ignominiously
excluded from all public business, and kept in absolute ignorance of
all subjects on which a prince should have some knowledge: history,
military science, modern politics, foreign languages, were all sealed
books to him. He had been educated, so far as he was trained at all,
by a clever and ambitious priest, Juan Escoiquiz, a canon of Toledo.
An obscure churchman was not the best tutor for a future sovereign: he
could not instruct the prince in the more necessary arts of governance,
but he seems to have taught him dissimulation and superstition[23].
For Ferdinand was pious with a grovelling sort of piety, which made
him carry about strings of relics, spend much of his time in church
ceremonies, and (as rumour said) take to embroidering petticoats for
his favourite image of the Virgin in his old age.
[Illustration:
MARIA LUISA
_REYNA DE ESPAÑA_.]
The prince had one healthy sentiment, a deep hatred for Godoy, who had
from his earliest youth excluded him from his proper place in the court
and the state. But he was too timid to resent the favourite’s influence
by anything but sulky rudeness. If he had chosen, he could at once
have put himself at the head of the powerful body of persons whom the
favourite had disobliged or offended. His few intimate friends, and
above all his tutor Escoiquiz, were always spurring him on to take some
active measures against the Prince of the Peace. But Ferdinand was too
indolent and too cautious to move, though he was in his secret heart
convinced that his enemy was plotting his destruction, and intended to
exclude him from the throne at his father’s death.
[23] That Escoiquiz was a clever man, and not the mere intriguer
that he is often called, is (I think) shown not only by the
impression which he made upon Napoleon (who called him, in jest,
_le petit Ximénès_) and on De Pradt at Bayonne, but still more by
his work, the _Conversation avec Napoléon_. If he invented it,
he must have been a genius, so well has he caught the Emperor’s
style; if he only reproduced it he was at least an admirable and
picturesque reporter.
To give a fair idea of the education, character, and brains of this
miserable prince it is only necessary to quote a couple of his letters.
The first was written in November, 1807, when he had been imprisoned
by his father for carrying on the famous secret correspondence with
Napoleon. It runs as follows:--
DEAR PAPA[24],
I have done wrong: I have sinned against your majesty, both as
king and as father; but I have repented, and I now offer your
majesty the most humble obedience. I ought to have done nothing
without your majesty’s knowledge; but I was caught unawares. I
have given up the names of the guilty persons, and I beg your
majesty to pardon me for having lied to you the other night,
and to allow your grateful son to kiss your royal feet.
(Signed) FERNANDO.
San Lorenzo (The Escurial), Nov. 5, 1807.
[24] Observe ‘Papa Mio’ instead of ‘Padre Mio.’ The Spanish text
I have printed as Appendix 3 of this volume. Some say that Godoy
dictated the wording of the letter, and did not merely insist
that a letter of some sort must be written to secure a pardon. In
any case the terms were such as no self-respecting person could
have signed. The sentence ‘pido à V. M. me perdone por haberle
mentido la otra noche,’ the most vile in the whole composition,
are omitted by the courtly De Pradt when he translates it into
French.
It is doubtful whether the childish whining, the base betrayal of his
unfortunate accomplices, or the slavish tone of the confession forms
the most striking point in this epistle.
But the second document that we have to quote gives an even worse idea
of Ferdinand. Several years after he had been imprisoned by Napoleon
at Valençay, a desperate attempt was made to deliver him. Baron Colli,
a daring Austrian officer, entered France, amid a thousand dangers,
with a scheme for delivering the prince: he hoped to get him to the
coast, and to an English frigate, by means of false passports and
relays of swift horses. The unfortunate adventurer was caught and
thrown into a dungeon at Vincennes[25]. After the plot had miscarried
Ferdinand wrote as follows to his jailor:--
‘An unknown person got in here in disguise and proposed to Señor
Amezaga, my master of the horse and steward, to carry me off from
Valençay, asking him to pass on some papers, which he had brought, to
my hands, and to aid in carrying out this horrible undertaking. My
honour, my repose, and the good opinion due to my principles might all
have been compromised, if Señor Amezaga had not given proof of his
devotion to His Imperial Majesty and to myself, by revealing everything
to me at once. I write immediately to give information of the matter,
and take this opportunity of showing anew my inviolable fidelity to the
Emperor Napoleon, and the horror that I feel at this infernal project,
whose author, I hope, may be chastised according to his deserts.’
[25] There is a very black underplot in the story of Baron
Colli. When he was caught the French police sent a spy with
his credentials to Valençay, to see how far the persons about
Ferdinand could be induced to compromise themselves. But the
prince’s terror, and abject delation of the supposed baron,
stopped further proceedings.
It is not surprising to find that the man who was capable of writing
this letter also wrote more than once to congratulate Joseph Bonaparte
on his victories over the ‘rebels’ in Spain.
It had been clear for some time that the bitter hatred which the
Prince Royal bore to Godoy, and the fear which the favourite felt
at the prospect of his enemy’s accession to the throne, would lead
to some explosion ere long. If Ferdinand had been a man of ordinary
ability and determination he could probably have organized a _coup
d’état_ to get rid of the favourite, without much trouble. But he
was so slow and timid that, in spite of all the exhortations of his
partisans, he never did more than copy out two letters to his father
which Escoiquiz drafted for him. He never screwed up his courage to the
point of sending them, or personally delivering them into his father’s
hands. They were rhetorical compositions, setting forth the moral and
political turpitude of Godoy, and warning the King that his favourite
was guilty of designs on the throne. If Charles IV had been given them,
he probably could not have made out half the meaning, and would have
handed them over for interpretation to the trusty Manuel himself. The
only other move which the prince was induced to make was to draw out
a warrant appointing his friend and confidant, the Duke of Infantado,
Captain-General of New Castile. It was to be used if the old king, who
was then labouring under one of his attacks of gout, should chance to
be carried off by it. The charge of Madrid, and of the troops in its
vicinity, was to be consigned to one whom Ferdinand could trust, so
that Godoy might be check-mated.
But the Prince of the Asturias took one other step in the autumn of
1807 which was destined to bring matters to a head. It occurred to
him that instead of incurring the risks of conspiracy at home he
would do better to apply for aid to his father’s all-powerful ally.
If Napoleon took up his cause, and promised him protection, he would
be safe against all the machinations of the Prince of the Peace: for
a frank and undisguised terror of the Emperor was the mainspring of
Godoy’s foreign and domestic policy. Ferdinand thought that he had a
sure method of enlisting Bonaparte’s benevolence: he was at this moment
the most eligible _parti_ in Europe: he had lost his first wife, a
daughter of his uncle of Naples, and being childless was bound to marry
again[26]. By offering to accept a spouse of the Emperor’s choice he
would give such a guarantee of future loyalty and obedience that his
patron (who was quite aware of Godoy’s real feelings towards France)
would withdraw all his support from the favourite and transfer it to
himself. Acting under the advice of Escoiquiz, with whom he was always
in secret communication, Ferdinand first sounded the French ambassador
at Madrid, the Marquis de Beauharnais, a brother-in-law of the Empress
Josephine. Escoiquiz saw the ambassador, who displayed much pleasure
at his proposals, and urged him to encourage the prince to proceed
with his plan[27]. The fact was that the diplomatist saw profit to
his own family in the scheme: for in default of eligible damsels of
the house of Bonaparte, it was probable that the lady whom the Emperor
might choose as Queen of Spain would be one of his own relatives--some
Beauharnais or Tascher--a niece or cousin of the Empress. A wife for
the hereditary prince of Baden had been already chosen from among them
in the preceding year.
[26] Godoy had the impudence to propose to the prince that
he should marry Donna Luisa, the younger sister of his own
unfortunate wife, and the cousin of the King. Ferdinand found
courage to refuse this alliance.
[27] The intrigues of Escoiquiz had begun as early as March,
1807, the month in which the letters to the King against Godoy
were drafted. The negotiation with Beauharnais began in June.
These dates are strongly against the idea that Bonaparte was at
the bottom of the whole affair; his hand does not appear till
July-August. Indeed he was far away in Eastern Germany when
Escoiquiz began his interviews with the ambassador.
When therefore Escoiquiz broached the matter to the ambassador in June,
1807, the latter only asked that he should be given full assurance
that the Prince of the Asturias would carry out his design. No private
interview could be managed between them in the existing state of
Spanish court etiquette, and with the spies of Godoy lurking in every
corner. But by a prearranged code of signals Ferdinand certified to
Beauharnais, at one of the royal levées, that he had given all his
confidence to Escoiquiz, and that the latter was really acting in his
name. The ambassador therefore undertook to transmit to his master at
Paris any document which the prince might entrust to him. Hence there
came to be written the celebrated letter of October 11, 1807, in which
Ferdinand implored the pity of ‘the hero sent by providence to save
Europe from anarchy, to strengthen tottering thrones, and to give to
the nations peace and felicity.’ His father, he said, was surrounded
by malignant and astute intriguers who had estranged him from his son.
But one word from Paris would suffice to discomfit such persons, and
to open the eyes of his loved parents to the just grievances of their
child. As a token of amity and protection he ventured to ask Bonaparte
for the hand of some lady of his august house. He does not seem to have
had any particular one in his eye, as the demand is made in the most
general terms. The choice would really have lain between the eldest
daughter of Lucien Bonaparte, who was then (as usual) on strained terms
with his brother, and one of the numerous kinswomen of the Empress
Josephine.
Godoy was so well served by his numerous spies that the news of the
letter addressed to Bonaparte was soon conveyed to him. He resolved to
take advantage to the full of the mistake which the prince had made
in opening a correspondence with a foreign power behind the back of
his father. He contrived an odious scene. He induced the old king to
make a sudden descent on his son’s apartments on the night of October
27, with an armed guard at his back, to accuse him publicly of aiming
at dethroning or even murdering his parents, and to throw him into
solitary confinement. Ferdinand’s papers were sequestrated, but there
was found among them nothing of importance except the two documents
denouncing Godoy, which the prince had composed or copied out under
the direction of his adviser Escoiquiz, and a cypher code which was
discovered to have belonged to the prince’s late wife, and to have been
used by her in her private letters to her mother, the Queen of Naples.
There was absolutely nothing that proved any intention on the part of
Ferdinand to commit himself to overt treason, though plenty to show
his deep discontent, and his hatred for the Prince of the Peace. The
only act that an honest critic could call disloyal was the attempt to
open up a correspondence with Napoleon. But Godoy thought that he had
found his opportunity of crushing the heir to the throne, and even of
removing him from the succession. He caused Charles IV to publish an
extraordinary manifesto to his subjects, in which he was made to speak
as follows:--
‘God, who watches over all creation, does not permit the success of
atrocious designs against an innocent victim. His omnipotence has just
delivered me from an incredible catastrophe. My people, my faithful
subjects, know my Christian life, my regular conduct: they all love me
and give me constant proof of their veneration, the reward due to a
parent who loves his children. I was living in perfect confidence, when
an unknown hand delated to me the most enormous and incredible plot,
hatched in my own palace against my person. The preservation of my
life, which has been already several times in danger, should have been
the special charge of the heir to my throne, but blinded, and estranged
from all those Christian principles in which my paternal care and
love have reared him, he has given his consent to a plot to dethrone
me. Taking in hand the investigation of the matter, I surprised him
in his apartments and found in his hands the cypher which he used
to communicate with his evil counsellors. I have thrown several of
these criminals into prison, and have put my son under arrest in his
own abode. This necessary punishment adds another sorrow to the many
which already afflict me; but as it is the most painful of all, it is
also the most necessary of all to carry out. Meanwhile I publish the
facts: I do not hide from my subjects the grief that I feel--which can
only be lessened by the proofs of loyalty which I know that they will
display’[28] [Oct. 30, 1807].
[28] The manuscript of this decree was in the handwriting of
Godoy himself.
Charles was therefore made to charge his son with a deliberate plot to
dethrone him, and even to hint that his life had been in danger. The
only possible reason for the formulating of this most unjustifiable
accusation must have been that Godoy thought that he might now dare to
sweep away the Prince of the Asturias from his path by imprisonment
or exile. There can be no other explanation for the washing in public
of so much of the dirty linen of the palace. Ferdinand, by his craven
conduct, did his best to help his enemy’s designs: in abject fear he
delated to the King the names of Escoiquiz and his other confidants,
the dukes of Infantado and San Carlos. He gave full particulars of his
attempt to communicate with Napoleon, and of all his correspondence
with his partisans--even acknowledging that he had given Infantado that
undated commission as Captain-General of New Castile, to come into
effect when he himself should become king, which we have already had
occasion to mention. This act, it must be owned, was a little unseemly,
but if it had really borne the sinister meaning that Godoy chose to
put upon it, we may guess that Ferdinand would never have divulged it.
In addition the prince wrote the disgusting letter of supplication to
his father which has been already quoted, owning that ‘he had lied the
other night,’ and asking leave to kiss his majesty’s royal feet. It
is beyond dispute that this epistle, with another similar one to the
Queen, was written after a stormy interview with Godoy. The favourite
had been allowed by his master and mistress to visit Ferdinand in
prison, and to bully him into writing these documents, which (as he
hoped) would ruin the prince’s reputation for ever with every man of
heart and honour. Godoy was wrong here: what struck the public mind far
more than the prince’s craven tone was the unseemliness of publishing
to the world his miserable letters. That a prince royal of Spain should
have been terrified by an upstart charlatan like Godoy into writing
such words maddened all who read them.
Napoleon was delighted to see the royal family of Spain putting itself
in such an odious light. He only intervened on a side issue by sending
peremptory orders that in any proceedings taken against the Prince of
the Asturias no mention was to be made of himself or of his ambassador,
i.e. the matter of the secret appeal to France (the one thing for which
Ferdinand could be justly blamed) was not to be allowed to transpire.
It was probably this communication from Paris which saved Ferdinand
from experiencing the full consequences of Godoy’s wrath[29]. If any
public trial took place, it was certain that either Ferdinand or some
of his friends would speak of the French intrigue, and if the story
came out Napoleon would be angry. The mere thought of this possibility
so worked upon the favourite that he suddenly resolved to stop the
impeachment of the prince. In return for his humiliating prayers for
mercy he was given a sort of ungracious pardon. ‘The voice of nature,’
so ran the turgid proclamation which Godoy dictated to the old king,
‘disarms the hand of vengeance; I forgive my son, and will restore
him to my good graces when his conduct shall have proved him a truly
reformed character.’ Ferdinand was left dishonoured and humiliated: he
had been accused of intended parricide, made to betray his friends and
to confess plots which he had never formed, and then pardoned. Godoy
hoped that he was so ruined in the eyes of the Spanish people, and
(what was more important) in the eyes of Napoleon, that there would be
no more trouble with him, a supposition in which he grievously erred.
After a decent interval the prince’s fellow conspirators, Escoiquiz and
Infantado, were acquitted of high treason by the court before which
they had been sent, and allowed to go free. Of the dreadful accusations
made in the Proclamation of Oct. 30 nothing more was heard.
[29] Cf. Foy and Toreño, who agree on this point. Napoleon
insinuates as much in his letter to Ferdinand of April 16, 1808:
‘I flatter myself that I contributed by my representations to the
happy ending of the affair of the Escurial’ (_Nap. Corresp._,
13,750).
The whole of the ‘Affair of the Escurial,’ as the arrest, imprisonment,
and forgiveness of Ferdinand came to be called, took place between the
twenty-seventh of October and the fifth of November, dates at which
it is pretty certain that Napoleon’s unscrupulous designs against the
royal house of Spain had long been matured. The open quarrel of the
imbecile father and the cowardly son only helped him in his plans, by
making more manifest than ever the deplorable state of the Spanish
court. It served as a useful plea to justify acts of aggression which
must have been planned many months before. If it had never taken place,
it is still certain that Napoleon would have found some other plea for
sweeping out the worthless house of Bourbon from the Peninsula. He
had begun to collect armies at the roots of the Pyrenees, without any
obvious military necessity, some weeks before Ferdinand was arrested.
When that simple fact is taken into consideration we see at once the
hollowness of his plea, elaborated during his exile at St. Helena[30],
that it was the disgraceful explosion of family hatred in the Spanish
royal house that first suggested to him the idea of removing the whole
generation of Bourbons, and giving Spain a new king and a new dynasty.
[30] Las Cases, ii. 206.
NOTE TO CHAPTER II
It may perhaps be worth while to give, for what it is worth,
a story which I find in the _Vaughan Papers_ concerning the
causes of the final quarrel between Godoy and the Prince of
the Asturias, ending in the arrest of the latter and the whole
‘Affair of the Escurial.’ Among Vaughan’s large collection
of miscellaneous papers is a long document addressed to him
by one of his Spanish friends, purporting to give the secret
history of the rupture; the narrative is said by the author to
have been obtained from the mouth of the minister Caballero,
who would certainly have had the best means of gaining court
intelligence in October, 1807. The tale runs as follows: ‘The
Queen had for many years been accustomed to make secret visits
to Godoy’s palace under cover of the dark, escorted only by a
lady-in-waiting and a single body-servant. The sentinels round
the palace had been designedly so placed that none of them
covered the postern door by which her majesty was accustomed
to pass in and out. One night in the autumn of 1807 the whole
system of the palace-guards was suddenly changed without the
Queen’s knowledge, and when she returned from her excursion
she ran into the arms of a corporal’s guard placed in front of
the privy entrance. The men, fortunately for Maria Luisa, did
not recognize the three muffled figures who fell into their
clutches, and allowed them to buy their way in for an _onza
d’oro_, or gold twenty-dollar piece. But when Godoy and the
Queen talked the matter over, and found that King Charles had
ordered the inconvenient alterations in the sentinels, they
came to the conclusion that Ferdinand had deliberately induced
his father to change the posts of the guard, with the object
either of stopping his mother’s exits or of making a public
scandal by causing her to be arrested at this strange place and
hour. The Prince chanced to have had a private conversation
with his father on the previous day, and this might well have
been its result.’ In high wrath, the story proceeds, the Queen
and the favourite resolved to crush Ferdinand at once, and
to get him excluded from the succession. They chose the very
inadequate excuse of the letter of the Prince to Napoleon,
of which they had perfect cognizance from the very moment of
its being written. But, we are assured, they were quite wrong
in their suspicions, the originator of the movement of the
sentries, which had so disconcerted them, having been Baron
Versage, the newly appointed colonel of the Walloon Guards.
He had got the King’s leave to rearrange the watching of the
palace, and going round it had spied the private door, which he
had blocked with a new picquet, quite unaware of the purpose
for which it had been used for so many years. This Versage,
it will be remembered, served under Palafox, and was killed
in Aragon during the first year of the war. I should imagine
the whole tale to be an ingenious fiction, in spite of the
name of Caballero cited in its support: of that personage
Napoleon wrote [_Nap. Corresp._ 14,015] ‘il a une très mauvaise
réputation; c’est tout dire que de dire qu’il était l’homme de
confiance de la Reine.’ But the story was current in Spain very
soon after the alleged adventure took place.
SECTION I: CHAPTER III
THE CONQUEST OF PORTUGAL
There is certainly no example in history of a kingdom conquered in so
few days and with such small trouble as was Portugal in 1807. That a
nation of three million souls, which in earlier days had repeatedly
defended itself with success against numbers far greater than those
now employed against it, should yield without firing a single shot
was astonishing. It is a testimony not only to the timidity of the
Portuguese Government, but to the numbing power of Napoleon’s name.
The force destined by the Treaty of Fontainebleau for the invasion of
Portugal consisted of Junot’s ‘Army of the Gironde,’ 25,000 strong,
and of three auxiliary Spanish corps amounting in all to about the
same numbers. Of these one, coming from Galicia[31], was to strike at
Oporto and the Lower Douro; another, from Badajoz[32], was to take
the fortress of Elvas, the southern bulwark of Portugal, and then to
march on Lisbon by the left bank of the Tagus. These were flanking
operations: the main blow at the Portuguese capital was to be dealt by
Junot himself, strengthened by a third Spanish force[33]; they were to
concentrate at Salamanca and Ciudad Rodrigo, and make for Lisbon by the
high-road that passes by Almeida and Coimbra.
[31] Composed of 6,500 men under General Taranco, marching from
Vigo.
[32] Composed of 9,500 men under Solano, Captain-General of
Andalusia, and marching from Badajoz.
[33] Composed of 9,500 men under Caraffa.
The Army of the Gironde crossed the Bidassoa on October 18: by the 12th
of November it had arrived at Salamanca, having covered 300 miles in
twenty-five days--very leisurely marching at the rate of twelve miles
a day. The Spaniards would not have been pleased to know that, by
Napoleon’s orders, engineer officers were secretly taking sketches of
every fortified place and defile that the army passed, and preparing
reports as to the resources of all the towns of Old Castile and Leon.
This was one of the many signs of the Emperor’s ultimate designs. On
the 12th of November, in consequence we cannot doubt of the outbreak
of the troubles of October 27 at the Spanish court, Junot suddenly
received new orders, telling him to hurry. He was informed that every
day which intervened before his arrival at Lisbon was time granted to
the Portuguese in which to prepare resistance,--possibly also time in
which England, who had plenty of troops in the Mediterranean, might
make up her mind to send military aid to her old ally. Junot was
directed to quicken his pace, and to strike before the enemy could
mature plans of defence.
For this reason he was told to change his route. The Emperor had
originally intended to invade the country over the usual line of attack
from Spain, by Almeida and Coimbra, which Masséna was to take three
years later, in 1810. But when the events at the Escurial showed that a
crisis was impending in Spain, Napoleon changed his mind: there was the
fortress of Almeida in the way, which might offer resistance and cause
delay, and beyond were nearly 200 miles of difficult mountain roads.
Looking at his maps, Napoleon saw that there was a much shorter way to
Lisbon by another route, down the Tagus. From Alcantara, the Spanish
frontier town on that river, to Lisbon is only 120 miles, and there is
no fortress on the way. The maps could not show the Emperor that this
road was for half of its length a series of rocky defiles through an
almost unpeopled wilderness.
Orders were therefore sent to Junot to transfer his base of operations
from Salamanca to Alcantara, and to march down the Tagus. The Spaniards
(according to their orders) had collected the magazines for feeding
Junot’s force at Salamanca and Ciudad Rodrigo. But for that Napoleon
cared little. He wrote that the army must take the shortest road
at all costs, whatever the difficulty of getting supplies. ‘I will
not have the march of the army delayed for a single day,’ he added;
‘20,000 men can feed themselves anywhere, even in a desert.’ It was
indeed a desert that Junot was ordered to cross: the hill-road from
Ciudad Rodrigo to Alcantara, which hugs the Portuguese frontier, has
hardly a village on it; it crosses ridge after ridge, ravine after
ravine. In November the rains had just set in, and every torrent was
full. Over this stony wilderness, by the Pass of Perales, the French
army rushed in five days, but at the cost of dreadful privations.
When it reached Alcantara half the horses had perished of cold, all
the guns but six had been left behind, stranded at various points on
the road, and of the infantry more than a quarter was missing--the
famished men having scattered in all directions to find food. If
there had been a Portuguese force watching Alcantara, Junot must
have waited for many days to get his army together again, all the
more so because every cartridge that his men were carrying had been
spoiled by the wet. But there were no enemies near; Junot found at
the great Tagus bridge only a few Spanish battalions and guns on the
way to join his army. Confiscating their munitions to fill his men’s
pouches, and their food to provide them with two days’ rations, Junot
rushed on again upon the 19th of November. He found, to his surprise,
that there was no road suitable for wheeled traffic along the Tagus
valley, but only a poor track running along the foot of the mountains
to Castello Branco, the sole Portuguese town in this part of the
frontier. The march from Alcantara to Abrantes proved even more trying
than that from Ciudad Rodrigo to Alcantara. It was through a treeless
wilderness of grey granite, seamed with countless ravines. The rain
continued, the torrents were even fuller than before, the country even
more desolate than the Spanish side of the border. It was only after
terrible sufferings that the head of the column reached Abrantes on
November 23: the rear trailed in on the 26th. All the guns except four
Spanish pieces of horse artillery had fallen behind: the cavalry was
practically dismounted. Half the infantry was marauding off the road,
or resting dead-beat in the few poor villages that it had passed. If
there had been even 5,000 Portuguese troops at Abrantes the French
would have been brought to a stop. But instead of hostile battalions,
Junot found there only an anxious diplomatist, named Barreto, sent by
the Prince-Regent to stop his advance by offers of servile submission
to the Emperor and proffers of tribute. Reassured as to the possibility
that the Portuguese might have been intending armed resistance, Junot
now took a most hazardous step. Choosing the least disorganized
companies of every regiment, he made up four battalions of picked men,
and pushed on again for Lisbon, now only seventy-five miles distant.
This time he had neither a gun nor a horseman left, but he struggled
forward, and on the 30th of November entered the Portuguese capital at
the head of 1,500 weary soldiers, all that had been able to endure to
the end. They limped in utterly exhausted, their clothes in rags, and
their cartridges so soaked through that they could not have fired a
shot had they been attacked. If the mob of Lisbon had fallen on them
with sticks and stones, the starving invaders must have been driven
out of the city. But nothing of the kind happened, and Junot was able
to install himself as governor of Portugal without having to strike
a blow. It was ten days before the last of the stragglers came up
from the rear, and even more before the artillery appeared and the
cavalry began to remount itself with confiscated horses. Meanwhile
the Portuguese were digesting the fact that they had allowed 1,500
famished, half-armed men to seize their capital.
While Junot had been rushing on from Salamanca to Alcantara, and from
Alcantara to Abrantes, Lisbon had been the scene of much pitiful
commotion. The Prince-Regent had long refused to believe that Napoleon
really intended to dethrone him, and had been still occupying himself
with futile schemes for propitiating the Emperor. Of his courtiers
and generals, hardly one counselled resistance: there was no talk of
mobilizing the dilapidated army of some 30,000 men which the country
was supposed to possess, or of calling out the militia which had done
such good service in earlier wars with Spain and France. Prince John
contented himself with declaring war on England on the twentieth of
October, and with garrisoning the coast batteries which protect Lisbon
against attacks from the sea. Of these signs of obedience he sent
reports to Napoleon: on the eighth of November he seized the persons of
the few English merchants who still remained in Portugal; the majority
had wisely absconded in October. At the same time he let the British
Government know that he was at heart their friend, and only driven by
brute force to his present course: he even permitted their ambassador,
Lord Strangford, to linger in Lisbon.
In a few days the Regent began to see that Napoleon was inexorable: his
ambassador from Paris was sent back to him, and reported that he had
passed on the way the army of Junot marching by Burgos on Salamanca.
Presently an English fleet under Sir Sydney Smith, the hero of Acre,
appeared at the mouth of the Tagus, and declared Lisbon in a state of
blockade--the natural reply to the Regent’s declaration of war and
seizure of English residents. Other reasons existed for the blockade:
there had lately arrived in the Tagus a Russian squadron on its
homeward way from the Mediterranean. The Czar Alexander was at this
time Napoleon’s eager ally, and had just declared war on England;
it seemed wise to keep an eye on these ships, whose arrival appeared
to synchronize in a most suspicious way with the approach of Junot.
Moreover there was the Portuguese fleet to be considered: if the
Prince-Regent intended to hand it over to the French, it would have to
be dealt with in the same way as the Danish fleet had been treated a
few months before.
Lord Strangford retired on board Sydney Smith’s flagship, the
_Hibernia_, and from thence continued to exchange notes with the
miserable Portuguese Government. The Regent was still hesitating
between sending still more abject proposals of submission to Bonaparte,
and the only other alternative, that of getting on board his fleet and
crossing the Atlantic to the great Portuguese colony in Brazil. The
news that Junot had reached Alcantara only confused him still more; he
could not make up his mind to leave his comfortable palace at Mafra,
his gardens, and the countless chapels and shrines in which his soul
delighted, in order to dare the unaccustomed horrors of the deep. On
the other hand, he feared that, if he stayed, he might ere long find
himself a prisoner of state in some obscure French castle. At last
his mind was made up for him from without: Lord Strangford on the
twenty-fifth of November received a copy of the Paris _Moniteur_ of the
thirteenth of October, in which appeared a proclamation in the true
Napoleonesque vein, announcing that ‘the house of Braganza had ceased
to reign in Europe.’ The celerity with which the paper had been passed
on from Paris to London and from London to Lisbon was most fortunate,
as it was just not too late for the prince to fly, though far too late
for him to think of defending himself. Junot was already at Abrantes,
but during the four days which he spent between that place and Lisbon
the die was cast. Abandoning his wonted indecision, the Regent hurried
on shipboard his treasure, his state papers, his insane mother, his
young family, and all the hangers-on of his court. The whole fleet,
fifteen men-of-war, was crowded with official refugees and their
belongings. More than twenty merchant vessels were hastily manned and
freighted with other inhabitants of Lisbon, who determined to fly with
their prince: merchants and nobles alike preferred the voyage to Rio de
Janeiro to facing the dreaded French. On the twenty-ninth of November
the whole convoy passed out of the mouth of the Tagus and set sail for
the West. When he toiled in on the thirtieth, Junot found the birds
flown, and took possession of the dismantled city.
Junot’s Spanish auxiliaries were, as might have been expected from the
national character and the deplorable state of the government, much
slower than their French allies. Solano and the southern army did not
enter Portugal till the second of December, three days after Lisbon
had fallen. Taranco and the Galician corps only reached Oporto on the
thirteenth of December. To neither of them was any opposition offered:
the sole show of national feeling which they met was that the Governor
of Valenza closed his gates, and would not admit the Spaniards till he
heard that Lisbon was in the enemy’s hands, and that the Prince-Regent
had abandoned the country.
Junot at first made some attempt to render himself popular and to keep
his troops in good discipline. But it was impossible to conciliate the
Portuguese: when they saw the exhausted condition and comparatively
small numbers of the army that had overrun their realm, they were
filled with rage to think that no attempt had been made to strike a
blow to save its independence. When, on the thirteenth of December,
Junot made a great show out of the ceremony of hauling down the
Portuguese flag and of hoisting the tricolour on the public buildings
of the metropolis, there broke out a fierce riot, which had to be
dispersed with a cavalry charge. But this was the work of the mob:
both the civil and the military authorities showed a servile obedience
to Junot’s orders, and no one of importance stood forward to head the
crowd.
The first precautionary measure of the French general was to dissolve
the Portuguese army. He ordered the discharge of all men with less than
one and more than six years’ service, dissolved the old regimental
_cadres_, and reorganized the 6,000 or 7,000 men left into nine new
corps, which were soon ordered out of the realm. Ultimately they
were sent to the Baltic, and remained garrisoned in Northern Germany
for some years. At the time of the Russian War of 1812 there were
still enough of these unhappy exiles left to constitute three strong
regiments. Nearly all of them perished in the snow during the retreat
from Moscow.
Further endeavour to make French rule popular in Portugal was soon
rendered impossible by orders from Paris. The Emperor’s mandate
not only bade Junot confiscate and realize all the property of the
15,000 persons, small and great, who had fled to Brazil with the
Prince-Regent; it also commanded him to raise a fine of 100,000,000
francs, four millions of our money, from the little kingdom. But the
emigrants had carried away nearly half the coined money in Portugal,
and the rest had been hidden, leaving nothing but coppers and
depreciated paper money visible in circulation. With the best will in
the world Junot found it difficult to begin to collect even the nucleus
of the required sum. The heavy taxes and imposts which he levied had
no small effect in adding to the discontent of the people, but their
total did little more than pay for the maintenance of the invaders.
Meanwhile the troops behaved with the usual licence of a French army in
a conquered country, and repeatedly provoked sanguinary brawls with the
peasantry. Military executions of persons who had resisted requisitions
by force began as early as January, 1808. Nothing was wanting to
prepare an insurrection but leaders: of their appearance there was
no sign; the most spirited members of the upper classes had gone off
with the Regent. Those who had remained were the miserable bureaucrats
which despotic governments always breed. They were ready to serve the
stranger if they could keep their posts and places. A discreditable
proportion of the old state servants acquiesced in the new government.
The Patriarch of Lisbon issued a fulsome address in praise of Napoleon.
The members of the provisional government which the Regent had
nominated on his departure mostly submitted to Junot. There was little
difficulty found in collecting a deputation, imposing by its numbers
and by the names of some of its personnel, which travelled to Bayonne,
to compliment Bonaparte and request him to grant some definite form
of government to Portugal. The Emperor treated them in a very offhand
way, asked them if they would like to be annexed to Spain, and on
their indignant repudiation of that proposal, sent them off with a few
platitudes to the effect that the lot of a nation depends upon itself,
and that his eye was upon them. But this interview only took place in
April, 1808, when events in Spain were assuming a very different aspect
from that which they displayed at the moment of Junot’s first seizure
of Lisbon.
SECTION I: CHAPTER IV
THE FRENCH AGGRESSION IN SPAIN: ABDICATION OF CHARLES IV
The ‘Affair of the Escurial’ added some complications to the situation
of affairs in Spain from Napoleon’s point of view. But there was
nothing in it to make him alter the plans which he was at this moment
carrying out: if the Bourbons were to be evicted from Spain, it
made the task somewhat easier to find that the heir to the throne
was now in deep disgrace. It would be possible to urge that by his
parricidal plots he had forfeited any rights to the kingdom which he
had hitherto possessed. In dealing with the politics of Spain he might
for the future be disregarded, and there would be no one to take into
consideration save the King and Queen and Godoy. All three were, as the
Emperor knew, profoundly unpopular: if anything had been needed to make
the nation more discontented, it was the late scandalous events at the
Escurial. Nothing could be more convenient than that the favourite and
his sovereigns should sink yet further into the abyss of unpopularity.
Napoleon therefore went steadily on with his plans for pushing more
and more French troops into Spain, with the object of occupying all
the main strategical points in the kingdom. The only doubtful point in
his schemes is whether he ultimately proposed to seize on the persons
of the royal family, or whether he intended by a series of threatening
acts to scare them off to Mexico, as he had already scared the Prince
of Portugal off to Rio de Janeiro. It is on the whole probable that
he leaned to the latter plan. Every week the attitude of the French
armies became more aggressive, and the language of their master more
haughty and sinister[34]. The tone in which he had forbidden the court
of Spain to allow any mention of himself or his ambassador to appear,
during the trial of Prince Ferdinand and his fellow conspirators, had
been menacing in the highest degree. After the occupation of Portugal
no further allusion had been made to the project for proclaiming Godoy
Prince of the Algarves. His name was never mentioned either to the
Portuguese or to the officers of Junot. The favourite soon saw that he
had been duped, but was too terrified to complain.
[34] It is impossible to doubt that Napoleon’s scheme was already
in progress as early as October. On Nov. 13 he sent orders for
the secret arming and provisioning of all the frontier fortresses
of France (_Nap. Corresp._, 13,343). On Nov. 24 he directed his
chamberlain, De Tournon, to spy out the condition of Pampeluna
and the other Spanish border strongholds, and to discover the
exact distribution of the Spanish army (13,354). Such moves could
have but one meaning.
But it was the constant influx into Spain of French troops which
contributed in the most serious way to frighten the Spanish court.
Junot had entered Lisbon on Nov. 30, and the news that he had mastered
the place without firing a shot had reached the Emperor early in
December. But long before, on the twenty-second of November, the French
reserves, hitherto known as the ‘Second Corps of Observation of the
Gironde,’ which had been collected at Bayonne in November, crossed the
Spanish frontier. They consisted of 25,000 men--nearly all recently
levied conscripts--under General Dupont. The treaty of Fontainebleau
had contained a clause providing that, if the English tried to defend
Portugal by landing troops, Napoleon might send 40,000 men to aid Junot
_after giving due notice to the King of Spain_. Instead of waiting
to hear how the first corps had fared, or apprising his ally of his
intention to dispatch Dupont’s corps across the frontier, the Emperor
merely ordered it to cross the Bidassoa without sending any information
to Madrid. The fact was that whether the preliminary condition stated
in the treaty, an English descent on Portugal, did or did not take
place, Bonaparte was determined to carry out his design. A month later
the Spaniards heard, to their growing alarm, that yet a third army
corps had come across the border: this was the ‘Corps of Observation
of the Ocean Coast,’ which had been hastily organized under Marshal
Moncey at Bordeaux, and pushed on to Bayonne when Dupont’s troops
moved forward. It was 30,000 strong, but mainly composed of conscript
battalions of the levy of 1808, which had been raised by anticipation
in the previous spring, while the Russian war was still in progress. On
the eighth of January this army began to pass the Pyrenees, occupying
all the chief towns of Biscay and Navarre, while Dupont’s divisions
pressed on and cantoned themselves in Burgos, Valladolid, and the
other chief cities of Old Castile. They made no further advance towards
Portugal, where Junot clearly did not require their aid.
The Spanish government was terror-stricken at the unexpected appearance
of more than 60,000 French troops on the road to Madrid. If anything
more was required to cause suspicion, it was the news that still more
‘corps of observation’ were being formed at Bordeaux and Poitiers.
What legitimate reason could there possibly be for the direction of
such masses of troops on Northern Spain? But any thought of resistance
was far from the mind of Godoy and the King. Their first plan was to
propitiate Napoleon by making the same request which had brought the
Prince of the Asturias into such trouble in October--that the hand of
a princess of the house of Bonaparte might be granted to the heir of
the Spanish throne. The Emperor was making an ostentatious tour in
Italy while his forces were overrunning the provinces of his ally--as
if the occupation of Castile and Biscay were no affair of his. His
most important act in November was to evict from Florence the ruling
sovereign, the King of Etruria, and the Regent, his mother, thus
annexing the last surviving Bourbon state save Spain to the French
crown. He wrote polite but meaningless letters to Madrid, making no
allusion to the boon asked by Charles IV. The fact was that Napoleon
could now treat Ferdinand as ‘damaged goods’; he was, by his father’s
own avowal, no more than a pardoned parricide, and it suited the policy
of the Emperor to regard him as a convicted criminal who had played
away his rights of succession. If Napoleon visited his brother Lucien
at Mantua, it was not (as was thought at the time) with any real
intention of persuading him to give his daughter to the craven suitor
offered her[35], but in order to tempt her father to accept the crown
of Portugal--even perhaps that of Spain. But Lucien, who always refused
to fall in with Napoleon’s family policy, showed no gratitude for the
offer of a thorny throne in the Iberian Peninsula, and not without
reason, for one of the details of the bargain was to be that he should
divorce a wife to whom he was fondly attached.
[35] Note on this point Talleyrand’s _Mémoires_, i. 333, and
_Nap. Corresp._, 13,402 (Napoleon to Joseph Bonaparte, Dec. 17,
1807).
It was only after returning from Italy in January that the Emperor
deigned to answer the King of Spain’s letter, now two months old, in
precise terms. He did not object to the principle of the alliance,
but doubted if he could give any daughter of his house to ‘a son
dishonoured by his own father’s declaration.’ This reply was not very
reassuring to Godoy and his master, and worse was to follow. In the
end of January the _Moniteur_, which the Emperor always used as a
means for ventilating schemes which were before long to take shape in
fact, began a systematic course of abusing the Prince of the Peace as
a bad minister and a false friend. More troops kept pouring across the
Pyrenees without any ostensible reason, and now it was not only at
the western passes that they began to appear, but also on the eastern
roads which lead from Roussillon into Catalonia and Valencia. These
provinces are so remote from Portugal that it was clear that the army
which was collecting opposite them could not be destined for Lisbon.
But on February 10, 1808, 14,000 men, half French, half Italians, under
General Duhesme, began to drift into Catalonia and to work their way
down towards its capital--Barcelona. A side-light on the meaning of
this development was given by Izquierdo, Godoy’s agent at Paris, who
now kept sending his master very disquieting reports. French ministers
had begun to sound him as to the way in which Spain would take a
proposal for the cession to France of Catalonia and part of Biscay, in
return for Central Portugal. King Charles would probably be asked ere
long to give up these ancient and loyal provinces, and to do so would
mean the outbreak of a revolution all over Spain.
In the middle of February Napoleon finally threw off the mask, and
frankly displayed himself as a robber in his ally’s abode. On the
sixteenth of the month began that infamous seizure by surprise of the
Spanish frontier fortresses, which would pass for the most odious act
of the Emperor’s whole career, if the kidnapping at Bayonne were not to
follow. The movement started at Pampeluna: French troops were quartered
in the lower town, while a Spanish garrison held, as was natural, the
citadel. One cold morning a large party of French soldiers congregated
about the gate of the fortress, without arms, and pretended to be
amusing themselves with snowballing, while waiting for a distribution
of rations. At a given signal many of them, as if beaten in the mock
contest, rushed in at the gate, pursued by the rest. The first men
knocked down the unsuspecting sentinels, and seized the muskets of the
guard stacked in the arms-racks of the guard-room. Then a company of
grenadiers, who had been hidden in a neighbouring house, suddenly ran
in at the gate, followed by a whole battalion which had been at drill a
few hundred yards away. The Spanish garrison, taken utterly by surprise
and unarmed, were hustled out of their quarters and turned into the
town[36].
[36] In _Nap. Corresp._, 13,588, will be found the orders to
General D’Armagnac to get possession of the citadel by menaces
if he can, but if he cannot, by the actual use of force. ‘S’il
arrivait que le commandant-général de Navarre se refusât à rendre
la citadelle, vous employeriez les troupes du Maréchal Moncey
pour l’y forcer.’
A high-spirited prince would have declared war at once, whatever the
odds against him, on receiving such an insulting blow. But this was
not to be expected from persons like Godoy and Charles IV. Accordingly
they exposed themselves to the continuation of these odious tricks. On
February 29 General Lecchi, the officer commanding the French troops
which were passing through Barcelona, ordered a review of his division
before, as he said, its approaching departure for the south. After
some evolutions he marched it through the city, and past the gate of
the citadel; when this point was reached, he suddenly bade the leading
company wheel to the left and enter the fortress. Before the Spaniards
understood what was happening, several thousand of their allies were
inside the place, and by the evening the rightful owners, who carried
their opposition no further than noisy protestations, had been evicted.
A few days later the two remaining frontier fortresses of Spain, San
Sebastian, at the Atlantic end of the Pyrenees, and Figueras, at the
great pass along the Mediterranean coast, suffered the same fate: the
former place was surrendered by its governor when threatened with an
actual assault, which orders from Madrid forbade him to resist [March
5]. Figueras, on the other hand, was seized by a _coup de main_,
similar to that at Pampeluna; 200 French soldiers, having obtained
entrance within the walls on a futile pretext, suddenly seized the
gates and admitted a whole regiment, which turned out the Spanish
garrison [March 18][37]. It would be hard, if not impossible, to find
in the whole of modern history any incident approaching, in cynical
effrontery and mean cunning, to these first hostile acts of the French
on the territory of their allies. The net result was to leave the two
chief fortresses, on each of the main entries into Spain from France,
completely in the power of the Emperor.
[37] It will hardly be believed that Napier, in his blind
reverence for Napoleon, omits to give any details concerning the
seizure of the fortresses, merely saying that they were ‘taken
by various artifices’ (i. 13). It is the particulars which are
scandalous as well as the mere fact.
Godoy and his employers were driven into wild alarm by these acts of
open hostility. The favourite, in his memoirs[38], tells us that he
thought, for a moment, of responding by a declaration of war, but that
the old king replied that Napoleon could not be intending treachery,
because he had just sent him twelve fine coach-horses and several
polite letters. In face of his master’s reluctance, he tells us that he
temporized for some days more. The story is highly improbable: Charles
had no will save Godoy’s, and would have done whatever he was told. It
is much more likely that the reluctance to take a bold resolve was the
favourite’s own. When the French troops still continued to draw nearer
to Madrid, Godoy could only bethink himself of a plan for absconding.
He proposed to the King and Queen that they should leave Madrid and
take refuge in Seville, in order to place themselves as far as possible
from the French armies. Behind this move was a scheme for a much longer
voyage. It seems that he proposed that the court should follow the
example of the Regent of Portugal, and fly to America. At Mexico or
Buenos Ayres they would at least be safe from Bonaparte. To protect
the first stage of the flight, the troops in Portugal were directed to
slip away from Junot and mass in Estremadura. The garrison of Madrid
was drawn to Aranjuez, the palace where the court lay in February and
March, and was to act as its escort to Seville. It is certain that
nothing would have suited Napoleon’s plans better than that Charles IV
should abscond and leave his throne derelict: it would have given the
maximum of advantage with the minimum of odium. It is possible that the
Emperor was working precisely with the object of frightening Godoy into
flight. If so his scheme was foiled, because he forgot that he had to
deal not only with the contemptible court, but with the suspicious and
revengeful Spanish nation. In March the people intervened, and their
outbreak put quite a different face upon affairs.
[38] _Memoirs of Godoy_, i. 122. Cf. Arteche, i. 251.
Meanwhile the Emperor was launching a new figure upon the stage. On
February 26 his brother-in-law, Joachim Murat, the new Grand-Duke
of Berg, appeared at Bayonne with the title of ‘Lieutenant of the
Emperor,’ and a commission to take command of all the French forces in
Spain. On March 10 he crossed the Bidassoa and assumed possession of
his post. Murat’s character is well known: it was not very complicated.
He was a headstrong, unscrupulous soldier, with a genius for heading a
cavalry charge on a large scale, and an unbounded ambition. He was at
present meditating on thrones and kingdoms: Berg seemed a small thing
to this son of a Gascon innkeeper, and ever since his brothers-in-law
Joseph, Louis, and Jerome Bonaparte had become kings, he was determined
to climb up to be their equal. It has frequently been asserted that
Murat was at this moment dreaming of the Spanish crown: he was
certainly aware that the Emperor was plotting against the Bourbons, and
the military movements which he had been directed to carry out were
sufficient in themselves to indicate more or less his brother-in-law’s
intentions. Yet on the whole it is probable that he had not received
more than half-confidences from his august relative. His dispatches are
full of murmurs that he was being kept in the dark, and that he could
not act with full confidence for want of explicit directions. Napoleon
had certainly promised him promotion, if the Spanish affair came to a
successful end: but it is probable that Murat understood that he was
not to be rewarded with the crown of Charles IV. Perhaps Portugal, or
Holland, or Naples (if one of the Emperor’s brothers should pass on
to Madrid) was spoken of as his reward. Certainly there was enough at
stake to make him eager to carry out whatever Bonaparte ordered. In his
cheerful self-confidence he imagined himself quite capable of playing
the part of a Machiavelli, and of edging the old king out of the
country by threats and hints. But if grape-shot was required, he was
equally ready to administer an unsparing dose. With a kingdom in view
he could be utterly unscrupulous[39].
[39] That Murat did not dream of the Spanish crown is, I think,
fairly well demonstrated by his descendant, Count Murat, in his
useful _Murat, Lieutenant de l’Empereur en Espagne_ (1897). But
that after once reading the dispatches, _Nap. Corresp._, 13,588
and 13,589, he failed to see that his brother-in-law’s intention
was to seize Spain, is impossible.
On March 13 Murat arrived at Burgos, and issued a strange proclamation
bidding his army ‘treat the estimable Spanish nation as friends, for
the Emperor sought only the good and happiness of Spain.’ The curious
phrase could only suggest that unless he gave this warning, his troops
would have treated their allies as enemies. The scandalous pillage
committed by many regiments during February and March quite justified
the suspicion.
The approach of Murat scared Godoy into immediate action, all the
more because a new _corps d’armée_, more than 30,000 strong, under
Marshal Bessières, was already commencing to cross the Pyrenees,
bringing up the total of French troops in the Peninsula to more than
100,000 men. He ordered the departure of the King and his escort, the
Madrid garrison, for Seville on March 18. This brought matters to a
head: it was regarded as the commencement of the projected flight to
America, of which rumours were already floating round the court and
capital. A despotic government, which never takes the people into its
confidence, must always expect to have its actions interpreted in the
most unfavourable light. Except Godoy’s personal adherents, there was
not a soul in Madrid who did not believe that the favourite was acting
in collusion with Napoleon, and deliberately betraying his sovereign
and his country. It was by his consent, they thought, that the French
had crossed the Pyrenees, had seized Pampeluna and Barcelona, and were
now marching on the capital. They were far from imagining that of all
the persons in the game he was the greatest dupe, and that the recent
developments of Napoleon’s policy had reduced him to despair. It was
correct enough to attribute the present miserable situation of the
realm to Godoy’s policy, but only because his servility to Bonaparte
had tempted the latter to see how far he could go, and because his
maladministration had brought the army so low that it was no longer
capable of defending the fatherland. Men did well to be angry with
the Prince of the Peace, but they should have cursed him as a timid,
incompetent fool, not as a deliberate traitor. But upstarts who guide
the policy of a great realm for their private profit must naturally
expect to be misrepresented, and there can be no doubt that the
Spaniards judged Godoy to be a willing helper in the ruin of his master
and his country.
Aranjuez, ordinarily a quiet little place, was now crowded with the
hangers-on of the court, the garrison of Madrid, and a throng of
anxious and distraught inhabitants of the capital: some had come out to
avoid the advancing French, some to learn the latest news of the King’s
intentions, others with the deliberate intention of attacking the
favourite. Among the latter were the few friends of the Prince of the
Asturias, and a much greater number who sympathized with his unhappy
lot and had not gauged his miserable disposition. It is probable
that as things stood it was really the best move to send the King to
Seville, or even to America, and to commence open resistance to the
French when the royal person should be in safety. But the crowd could
see nothing but deliberate treason in the proposal: they waited only
for the confirmation of the news of the departure of the court before
breaking out into violence.
[Illustration:
DON MANUEL GODOY
PRINCE OF THE PEACE
AT THE AGE OF 25]
On the night of the seventeenth of March Godoy was actually commencing
the evacuation of Aranjuez, by sending off his most precious
possession, the too-celebrated Donna Josepha Tudo, under cover of
the dark. The party which was escorting her fell into the midst of a
knot of midnight loiterers, who were watching the palace. There was a
scuffle, a pistol was fired, and as if by a prearranged plan crowds
poured out into the streets. The cry went round that Godoy was carrying
off the King and Queen, and a general rush was made to his house. There
were guards before it, but they refused to fire on the mob, of which
no small proportion was composed of soldiers who had broken out of
their barracks without leave. In a moment the doors were battered down
and the assailants poured into the mansion, hunting for the favourite.
They could not find him, and in their disappointment smashed all his
works of art, and burnt his magnificent furniture. Then they flocked to
the palace, in which they suspected that he had taken refuge, calling
for his head. The King and Queen, in deadly terror, besought their
ill-used son to save them, by propitiating the mob, who would listen to
his voice if to no other. Then came the hour of Ferdinand’s triumph;
stepping out on to the balcony, he announced to the crowd that the King
was much displeased with the Prince of the Peace, and had determined to
dismiss him from office. The throng at once dispersed with loud cheers.
Next morning, in fact, a royal decree was issued, declaring Godoy
relieved of all his posts and duties and banished from the court.
Without the favourite at their elbow Charles and his queen seemed
perfectly helpless. The proclamation was received at first with
satisfaction, but the people still hung about the palace and kept
calling for the King, who had to come out several times and salute
them. It began to look like a scene from the beginning of the French
Revolution. There was already much talk in the crowd of the benefit
that would ensue to Spain if the Prince of the Asturias, with whose
sufferings every one had sympathized, were to be entrusted with some
part in the governance of the realm. His partisans openly spoke of the
abdication of the old king as a desirable possibility.
Next day the rioting commenced again, owing to the reappearance of
Godoy. He had lain concealed for thirty-six hours beneath a heap of
mats, in a hiding-place contrived under the rafters of his mansion; but
hunger at last drove him out, and, when he thought that the coast was
clear, he slipped down and tried to get away. In spite of his mantle
and slouched hat he was recognized almost at once, and would have been
pulled to pieces by the crowd if he had not been saved by a detachment
of the royal guard, who carried him off a prisoner to the palace. The
news that he was trapped brought thousands of rioters under the royal
windows, shouting for his instant trial and execution. The imbecile
King could not be convinced that he was himself safe, and the Queen,
who usually displayed more courage, seemed paralysed by her fears
for Godoy even more than for herself. This was the lucky hour of the
Prince of the Asturias; urged on by his secret advisers, he suggested
abdication to his father, promising that he would disperse the mob and
save the favourite’s life. The silly old man accepted the proposal with
alacrity, and drew up a short document of twelve lines, to the effect
‘that his many bodily infirmities made it hard for him to support any
longer the heavy weight of the administration of the realm, and that he
had decided to remove to some more temperate clime, there to enjoy the
peace of private life. After serious deliberation he had resolved to
abdicate in favour of his natural heir, and wished that Don Ferdinand
should at once be received as king in all the provinces of the Spanish
crown. That this free and spontaneous abdication should be immediately
published was to be the duty of the Council of Castile.’
SECTION I: CHAPTER V
THE TREACHERY AT BAYONNE
The news of the abdication of Charles IV was received with universal
joy. The rioters of Aranjuez dispersed after saluting the new
sovereign, and allowed Godoy to be taken off, without further trouble,
to the castle of Villaviciosa. Madrid, though Murat was now almost at
its gates, gave itself up to feasts and processions, after having first
sacked the palaces of the Prince of the Peace and some of his unpopular
relations and partisans. Completely ignorant of the personal character
of Ferdinand VII, the Spaniards attributed to him all the virtues and
graces, and blindly expected the commencement of a golden age--as if
the son of Charles IV and Maria Luisa was likely to be a genius and a
hero.
Looking at the general situation of affairs, there can be no doubt that
the wisest course for the young king to have taken would have been to
concentrate his army, put his person in safety, and ask Napoleon to
speak out and formulate his intentions. Instead of taking this, the
only manly course, Ferdinand resolved to throw himself on the Emperor’s
mercy, as if the fall of Godoy had been Napoleon’s object, and not
the conquest of Spain. Although Murat had actually arrived at Madrid
on March 23, with a great body of cavalry and 20,000 foot, the King
entered the city next day and practically put himself in the hands of
the invader. He wrote a fulsome letter to Napoleon assuring him of his
devotion, and begging once more for the hand of a princess of his house.
His reception in Madrid by the French ought to have undeceived
him at once. The ambassador Beauharnais, alone among the foreign
ministers, refrained from acknowledging him as king. Murat was equally
recalcitrant, and moreover most rude and disobliging in his language
and behaviour. The fact was that the Grand-Duke had supposed that he
was entering Madrid in order to chase out Godoy and rule in his stead.
The popular explosion which had swept away the favourite and the old
king, and substituted for them a young and popular monarch, had foiled
his design. He did not know how Bonaparte would take the new situation,
and meanwhile was surly and discourteous. But he was determined that
there should at least be grounds provided for a breach with Ferdinand,
if the Emperor should resolve to go on with his original plan.
Accordingly, he not only refused to acknowledge the new king’s title,
but hastened to put himself in secret communication with the dethroned
sovereigns. They were only too eager to meet him halfway, and Maria
Luisa especially was half-mad with rage at her son’s success. At first
she and her husband thought of nothing but escaping from Spain: they
begged Murat to pass on to the Emperor letters in which they asked
to be permitted to buy a little estate in France, where they might
enjoy his protection during their declining years. But they begged
also that ‘the poor Prince of the Peace, who lies in a dungeon covered
with wounds and contusions and in danger of death,’ might be saved and
allowed to join them, ‘so that we may all live together in some healthy
spot far from intrigues and state business[40].’
[40] See the letters of March 22-7 in Toreño, Appendix, i. 436-45.
Murat saw that the angry old queen might be utilized to discredit her
son, and promised to send on everything to Napoleon. At the first
word of encouragement given by the Grand-Duke’s agent, De Monthion,
Maria Luisa began to cover many sheets with abuse of her son. ‘He is
false to the core: he has no natural affection: he is hard-hearted and
nowise inclined to clemency. He has been directed by villains and will
do anything that ambition suggests: he makes promises, but does not
always keep them[41].’ Again she writes:--‘From my son we have nothing
to expect but outrages and persecution. He has commenced by forgery,
and he will go on manufacturing evidence to prove that the Prince of
the Peace--that innocent and affectionate friend of the Emperor, the
Duke of Berg, and every Frenchman!--may appear a criminal in the eyes
of the Spanish people and of Napoleon himself. Do not believe a word
that he says, for our enemies have the power and means to make any
falsehood seem true[42].’ In another letter she says that the riots of
Aranjuez were no genuine explosion of popular wrath, but a deliberate
plot got up by her son, who spent countless sums on debauching the
soldiery and importing ruffians from Madrid. He gave the signal for the
outburst himself by putting a lamp in his window at a fixed hour--and
so forth[43].
[41] Letter of March 27, in Toreño, Appendix, i. 441.
[42] Ibid., p. 436.
[43] Letter of March 26 in Toreño, i. 439.
Finding the Queen in this state of mind, Murat saw his way to dealing a
deadly blow at Ferdinand: with his counsel and consent Charles IV was
induced to draw up and send to Bonaparte a formal protest against his
abdication. He was made to declare that his resignation had not been
voluntary, but imposed on him by force and threats. And so he ‘throws
himself into the arms of the great monarch who has been his ally, and
puts himself at his disposition wholly and for every purpose[44].’
This document placed in Napoleon’s hands the precise weapon which
he required to crush King Ferdinand. If the Emperor chose to take
it seriously, he could declare the new monarch a usurper--almost a
parricide--the legality of whose accession had been vitiated by force
and fraud.
[44] The Protest of Charles IV will be found printed in Appendix
No. 4.
As a matter of fact Bonaparte’s mind had long been made up. The
revolution of Aranjuez had been a surprise and a disappointment to
him: his designs against Spain were made infinitely more difficult
of realization thereby. While he had only the weak and unpopular
government of Godoy and Charles IV to deal with, he had fancied that
the game was in his hands. It had been more than probable that the
Prince of the Peace would take fright, and carry off the King and
Queen to America--in which case he would, as it were, find Spain left
derelict. If, however, the emigration did not take place, and it
became necessary to lay hands on Charles and his favourite, Napoleon
calculated that the Spaniards would be more pleased to be rid of Godoy
than angry to see force employed against him. He was so profoundly
ignorant of the character of the nation, that he imagined that a few
high-sounding proclamations and promises of liberal reforms would
induce them to accept from his hands any new sovereign whom he chose to
nominate. It was clear that the accession of a young and popular king
would make matters far more difficult. It was no longer possible to
pose as the deliverer of Spain from the shameful predominance of Godoy.
Any move against Ferdinand must bear the character of an open assault
on the national independence of the kingdom.
But Bonaparte had gone too far to recede: he had not moved 100,000
men across the Pyrenees, and seized Pampeluna and Barcelona, merely
in order that his troops might assist at the coronation ceremonies of
another Bourbon king. In spite of all difficulties he was resolved
to persevere in his iniquitous plan. He would not recognize the new
monarch, but would sweep him away, and put in his place some member
of his own family. But his chosen instrument was not to be Murat, but
one of the Bonapartes. He knew too well the Duke of Berg’s restless
spirit and overweening ambition to trust him with so great a charge
as Spain. And he was right--with only Naples at his back Joachim was
powerful enough to do his master grave harm in 1814. The tool was to
be one of his own brothers. It was on the night of March 26 that the
news of the abdication of Charles IV reached him: on the morning of
the twenty-seventh he wrote to Amsterdam offering Louis Bonaparte the
chance of exchanging the Dutch for the Spanish crown. The proposal was
made in the most casual form--‘You say that the climate of Holland does
not suit you. Besides the country is too thoroughly ruined to rise
again. Give me a categorical answer: if I nominate you King of Spain
will you take the offer; can I count on you?[45]’ Louis very wisely
refused the proffered crown: but his weaker brother Joseph, tired of
Naples and its brigands, made no scruples when the same proposal was
laid before him.
[45] _Nap. Corresp._, xvi. 500; see also in _Documents
historiques, publiés par Louis Bonaparte_ (Paris, 1829), ii. 290.
This letter to Louis of Holland having been written on the first
news of the events at Aranjuez, and four days before Murat began to
send in his own plans and the letters of protest from the King and
Queen of Spain, it is clear that the Emperor had never any intention
of recognizing Ferdinand, and was only playing with him during the
month that followed. It was not in mere caution that Beauharnais, the
ambassador, and Murat, the military representative, of France, were
bidden never to address the new sovereign as king but as Prince of the
Asturias, and to act as if Charles IV were still legally reigning until
they should have specific directions from Paris[46].
[46] It is scarcely necessary to say that the letter which
Napoleon is said to have sent Murat on March 29, and which is
printed in the _Mémorial de Ste-Hélène_, is (as Lanfrey and
Count Murat have shown) a forgery composed by Napoleon himself
long after. It is quite inconsistent with the offer to Louis
Bonaparte, and with other letters to Murat of the same week.
This state of semi-suspended relations lasted for a fortnight, from
Ferdinand’s arrival in Madrid on March 24, down to his departure from
it on April 10. They were very uncomfortable weeks for the new king,
who grew more alarmed as each day passed without a letter from Paris
ratifying his title, while French troops continued to pour into Madrid
till some 35,000 were assembled in it and its suburbs.
A very few days after his accession Ferdinand was informed that it
was probable that Napoleon was intending a visit to Madrid, and was
at any rate coming as far as Bayonne. He immediately sent off his
eldest brother Don Carlos (the hero of the unhappy wars of 1833-40) to
compliment his patron, and if necessary to receive him at the frontier
[April 5]. Two days later there appeared in Madrid a new French
emissary, General Savary--afterwards Duke of Rovigo--who purported
to come as Bonaparte’s harbinger, charged with the duty of preparing
Madrid for his arrival. He carried the farce so far that he asked for
a palace for the Emperor’s residence, produced trunks of his private
luggage[47], and began to refurnish the apartments granted him. That
he bore secret orders for Murat we know from the latter’s dispatches,
but this was only half his task. Napoleon had confided to him verbal
instructions to lure Ferdinand to come out to meet him in the north
of Spain, among the French armies massed in Biscay and Navarre--if
possible even to get him to Bayonne on French soil. In his St. Helena
memoirs Napoleon denies this, and Savary in his autobiography also
states that he did not act the part of tempter or make any promises
to the young king: the journey to Bayonne, he says, was a silly
inspiration of Ferdinand’s own. But neither Bonaparte nor Savary are
witnesses whom one would believe on their most solemn oath. The former
we know well: the latter had been one of the persons most implicated
in the shocking murder of the Duc d’Enghien. When we find the Spanish
witnesses, who conversed with Savary during his short stay in Madrid,
agreeing that the general promised that Napoleon would recognize
Ferdinand as king, give him an imperial princess as wife, and take him
into favour, we need not doubt them. It is not disputed that Savary,
unlike Murat and Beauharnais, regularly addressed his victim by the
royal title, and it is certain that he started in his company and
acted as his keeper during the journey[48]. The move that he at first
proposed was not a long one: the general said that according to his
advices the Emperor must be due at Burgos on April 13: it would be time
enough to start to meet him on the tenth. Burgos lies well inside the
frontiers of Castile, and if it was packed with French troops, so was
Madrid: one place was no more dangerous than the other.
[47] It is said that they afterwards turned out to be full of
smuggled goods, a private speculation of Savary or his underlings.
[48] Savary, in his mendacious autobiography, denies that he
persuaded Ferdinand to start for Bayonne. But he is refuted by
two contemporary documents. The young king, in his letter of
adieu to his father, states that Savary has convinced him of the
necessity of going; while Murat in a dispatch to Bonaparte says
that ‘Savary has in no small degree contributed to induce the new
court to quit Madrid’ [April 8].
Exactly how far the perjuries of Savary went, or how far he was
apprised of his master’s final intentions, we cannot tell, but it is
certain that on April 10 he set out from Madrid in the King’s company:
with them went Escoiquiz, Ferdinand’s clerical confidant, Cevallos
the minister of foreign affairs, and half a dozen dukes and marquises
chosen from among the King’s old partisans. To administer affairs in
his absence Ferdinand nominated a ‘Junta’ or council of regency, with
his uncle Don Antonio, a simple and very silly old man, at its head[49].
[49] For Don Antonio’s habits we have on Talleyrand’s authority
some very curious stories. He spent most of his time of captivity
at Valençay sitting in the library, mutilating illustrated books
with his scissors, not to make a scrap-book, but to destroy any
engravings that sinned against morals or religion!
On reaching Burgos, on April 12, the party found masses of French
troops but no signs of Napoleon. Savary appeared vexed, said that his
calculation must have been wrong, and got the King to go forward two
more stages, as far as Vittoria, at the southern foot of the Pyrenees
[April 14]. Here Ferdinand received a note from his brother Don Carlos,
whom he had sent ahead, saying that Bonaparte had been lingering
at Bordeaux, and was not expected at Bayonne till the fifteenth.
Ferdinand, always timid and suspicious, was getting restive: he had
nothing on paper to assure him of Napoleon’s intentions, and began
to suspect Savary’s blandishments. The latter doubted for a moment
whether he should not have the court seized by the French garrison of
Vittoria, but finally resolved to endeavour to get a letter from his
master, which would suffice to lure Ferdinand across the frontier. He
was entrusted with a petition of the same cast that Napoleon had been
in the habit of receiving from his would-be client, full of servile
loyalty and demands for the much-desired Bonaparte princess.
The four days during which Savary was absent, while the royal party
remained at Vittoria, were a period of harassing doubt to Ferdinand.
He was visited by all manner of persons who besought him not to go on,
and especially by Spaniards lately arrived from Paris, who detailed all
the disquieting rumours which they had heard at the French court. Some
besought him to disguise himself and escape by night from the 4,000
troops of the Imperial Guard who garrisoned Vittoria. Others pointed
out that the Spanish troops in Bilbao, which was still unoccupied by
the French, might be brought down by cross-roads, and assume charge
of the king’s person halfway between Vittoria and the frontier, in
spite of the 600 French cavalry which escorted the cavalcade. Guarded
by his own men Ferdinand might retire into the hills of Biscay. But
to adopt either of the courses proposed to him would have compelled
the King to come to an open breach with Bonaparte, and for this he had
not sufficient courage, as long as there was the slightest chance of
getting safely through his troubles by mere servility.
On April 18 Savary reappeared with the expected communication from
Bayonne. It was certainly one of the strangest epistles that one
sovereign ever wrote to another, and one of the most characteristic
products of Napoleon’s pen. It was addressed to the Prince of the
Asturias, not to the King of Spain, which was an ominous preface.
But on the other hand the Emperor distinctly stated that ‘he wished
to conciliate his friend in every way, and to find occasion to give
him proofs of his affection and perfect esteem.’ He added that ‘the
marriage of your royal highness to a French princess seems conformable
to the interests of my people, and likely to forge new links of union
between myself and the house of Bourbon.’ The core of the whole was
the explicit statement that ‘if the abdication of King Charles was
spontaneous, and not forced on him by the riot at Aranjuez, I shall
have no difficulty in recognizing your royal highness as King of Spain.
On these details I wish to converse with your royal highness.’ This was
a double-edged saying: Napoleon had in his pocket Charles’s protest,
complaining that the abdication had been forced upon him by fears for
his personal safety: but Ferdinand was not aware of the fact; indeed
he so little realized his parent’s state of mind that he had written
to him before quitting Madrid in the most friendly terms. If he had
fathomed the meaning of Napoleon’s carefully constructed sentence, he
would have fled for his life to the mountains.