The first portion of the Princess’s labours was accomplished. Her most dangerous enemies had fallen: she reigned. But there yet remained a few hostile nobles, and she resolved to strike at them. One of them, formerly her ally, the Duke de Montellano, president of Castile, excited the suspicion of this mistrustful woman. She manifested towards him, from the moment of her return, a haughty coldness. She dreaded to see in a post of such eminence a man placed by his birth amongst her worst enemies. Montellano, offended at her attitude towards him, tendered his resignation. The King hesitated, but the Princess made him accept it, and the corregidor of Madrid, Ronquillo, a man of obscure origin, was nominated to the presidentship. Amelot was equally mistrustful of certain grandees in the Privy Council, as was the Princess; and, whether they tendered their resignation or that it was required of them, the Duke de Montalto and the Count de Monterei were replaced by devoted partisans of the Princess. The high aristocracy, indignant at this manœuvre, worked against her in an underhanded opposition, in which the double character of the Duke de Medina-Cœli was more and more developed. Their plans were foiled in the very outset, but we shall see them again make their appearance upon the political arena at a moment when it required nothing less than all the power and skill of Madame des Ursins to triumph over them.
The Princess was, in fact, triumphing on the very brink of a volcano. Spain was in a blaze, and every day seemed to call in question the existence of that throne under the shadow of which she had come to reign. Lord Peterborough had torn Barcelona from Philip V., and the greater part of its garrison had recognised the Archduke, who, acting henceforward as King of Spain, had just made his entrance into that city amidst the acclamations of the Catalan people. The principal fortresses of the province had shared the fate of the chief city; and on one side the insurrection spread to Saragossa, whilst on the other, the important city of Valencia proclaimed Charles III. The situation was little better in the west of the kingdom, for an Anglo-Portuguese army had penetrated into Estramadura, commanded by a French refugee who had been made an English peer,[35] and whose hatred pursued Louis XIV. on every field of battle. Constrained to carry on the struggle simultaneously in Flanders, Italy, and beyond the Pyrenees, in order to defend the integrity of a monarchy which more and more hesitated in its obedience, the French King had just sent to Spain thirty battalions and twenty squadrons, which it became necessary to supplement by despatching a new army. Unhappily, the time was approaching when the French soldiery had more cause to dread their own generals than those of the enemy; and these forces, besides being insufficient, were placed under the command of Marshal de Tessé, a cunning courtier but mediocre general, incapable of any initiative strategy, and whose sole study was to carry out to the letter the personal instructions of Louis XIV. and Chamillard. However, either from want of sufficient resources or want of skill, Tessé failed this once in the execution of his master’s formal orders, which directed him to suspend all his operations in order to retake Barcelona at any cost. A siege languidly conducted in presence of a fleet mistress of the seas, on which the French flag dared no longer show itself, was followed by a disaster aggravated by the presence of the King of Spain and by bitter recriminations between the two nations together engaged in that fatal enterprise. Alike indifferent to misfortune and success, still it might be seen in Philip, since the presence of his rival in Spain, that there was an indomitable resolution to die sword in hand in defence of the sole right which touched his pride and his conscience. Before Barcelona he had displayed a useless courage, and when de Tessé rendered it necessary to raise the siege by his refusal to continue it, the insurrection had closed to the King every road which gave access to his capital. To rejoin the Queen Regent in the heart of the two Castiles, Philip was compelled to take, in mortal agony, the road to France, in order to direct his steps by way of Rousillon towards Navarre, thus giving his enemies a plausible pretext for turning his going out of the kingdom into a desertion of the crown.
Trials not less formidable awaited the young Queen at the hands of fortune. Excited by the greatness of the danger, but finding a succour in the sang-froid of Madame des Ursins, which her youth and ardour denied her, adored by the inhabitants of Madrid, to whom in the hour of crisis she confided herself with a touching helplessness, the Savoiana, by the spell of her gentle and steady virtues, alone maintained the royal authority in a country where “it was necessary to have almost an army in each province.”[36]
At length the day came when despair reigned everywhere save at the Retiro Palace. The square d’Alcantara, defended by ten battalions, the last remains of the Spanish army, had surrendered without fighting. Whether through folly or treason, Salamanca had also just fallen into the enemy’s hands, and the Anglo-Portuguese troops advanced by forced marches upon Madrid, in order there to proclaim Charles III. There was nothing left but flight—but to quit a city of proved devotion and confide in others of doubtful fidelity. The King had rejoined the French army; the Queen, accompanied by her camerara mayor and a few female attendants, was compelled to repair to Burgos, in order there to keep up at least some shadow of legitimate government. The little party was without resources, money, almost without victuals. The silver plate belonging to the palace was hastily flung into the melting-pot; the sovereign of so many realms, after having borrowed by pawning so many thousand pistoles, packed up with her own hands those jewels which were a tribute to her from the new world, the pride and recreation of her sorrowful youth, previous to pledging them to the Jew brokers. Her court, lately so numerous, had been dispersed by the wind of adversity, not with the intent of influencing events, but, shameful to record, only to await them; and Marie Louise enceinte with the first child of her marriage, shaped her course towards the land of the Cid, resolved to go thither and defend the monarchy even among those rugged mountains which had been its cradle. Destitution prevailed throughout the solitudes of Castile as well as in those poor posadas, bare as an Asiatic caravanserai. If in the central provinces the populace showed itself faithful, it was not without extreme suffering and the most cruel perplexity that the journey could be accomplished by almost impracticable ways, through detachments of the enemy, launched in pursuit of the royal retinue. Nothing certainly is more honourable to the memory of the Princess des Ursins than the letters in which she relates with charming naturalness the daily accidents of that adventurous life, which she supported at the age of sixty-five with all the gaiety of a youthful tourist.[37]
In the midst of these disasters, therefore, Philip V. found a firm support in the devotion of the people and in the indefatigable zeal of Madame des Ursins. At Madrid and in all the provinces, except Catalonia, the allies were received with that repugnance which presages a disastrous future and belies the most brilliant promises of victory. Madame des Ursins multiplied herself: speeches, letters, overtures—she spared nothing to obtain from the people the money indispensable for carrying on the war. She thus arrested desertion, consolidated in Old Castile, and even in Andalusia the King’s authority; she propagated, in short (if we may so express it) the feeling of devotedness. She knew how to surround Philip V. with the austere majesty of royal misfortune endured with courage and consoled by the watchful love of the nation. At the same time her cheerful and confident spirit restored to its serenity the little court of Burgos. She locked within her own bosom her discouragements and inquietudes: she clung to hope, and that successfully. She sought and found in her own firm will consolation justified by events. All her correspondence at this epoch, at times amiable, witty, affectionate, at others grave, precise, and altogether politic, full of facts, plans, exact details, worthy of a minister, and of a great minister too, shows the extraordinary genius of the woman. It was not she alone, certainly, who saved the dynasty, for it was necessary to fight and conquer to do that, but she was unquestionably one of the most vigorous instruments ever made use of by Providence to work out its own purposes in defence of a nation.
She had some ideas about war too—we do not say they were of the best, but she had some—and about plans of defence and the choice of generals. She anticipated coming dangers, which she laid bare and exposed without allowing herself to be discouraged by them. She described the native troops in their true colours, the places of importance entirely unprovided for, according to Spanish custom; she energetically claimed help from France, and after asking for strong battalions in the body of her letter, adds in a postscript that she has advised the King of Spain to have prayers offered up. She did not forget to send appropriate flatteries also to Madame de Maintenon.
A few days after the arrival of the Duke of Berwick, in order to thank Madame de Maintenon for such aid, she spoke to her about Saint-Cyr, well aware that nothing could be more agreeable, and knowing the weakness of mothers.
“The Queen has highly approved of all your Saint-Cyr rules; our ladies are anxious to have them, and I am working hard at translating them into Spanish to afford them that satisfaction. If her Majesty were not under engagements very different to those of the young ladies of Saint-Cyr, I really believe that she would like to be one of your pupils.”
Her flattery knew well in what language to couch itself; but there were moments at which, discontented at feeling Spain abandoned and lost sight of by Versailles, she became plain spoken even to rudeness. Great allowance, however, ought to be made for the Princess’s occasional bluntness when it is remembered that she was then in her sixty-fourth year, suffering from rheumatism and a painful affection of one of her eyes, a condition altogether very unpropitious in which to commence the career of arms in the capacity of field-marshal to a youthful Queen. Notwithstanding all this, however, she exerted herself to enliven everybody, to console, to inspire fortitude and a spirit of joyousness around her, never to see things on their darkest side or through her ailing eye, but to obey rather the buoyant spirit and an inclination to hope for the best, which was natural to her.