Wellington, S.D., xii. 807.
Jullian, Précis Historique, p. 78.
Historia de la vida de Fernando VII., ii. 158.
Carrascosa, Mémoires, p. 25; Colletta, ii. 155.
Carrascosa p. 44.
Gentz. D.I., ii. 108, 122. It was rather too much even for the Austrians. "La conduite de ce malheureux souverain n'a été, dès le commencement des troubles, qu'un tissu de faiblesse et de duplicité," etc. "Voilà l'allié que le ciel a mis entre nos mains, et dont nous avons à rétablir les intérêts!" Ferdinand was guilty of such monstrous perjuries and cruelties that the reader ought to be warned not to think of him as a saturnine and Machiavellian Italian. He was a son of the Bourbon Charles III. of Spain. His character was that of a jovial, rather stupid farmer, whom a freak of fortune had made a king from infancy. A sort of grotesque comic element runs through his life, and through every picture drawn by persons in actual intercourse with him. The following, from one of Bentinck's despatches of 1814 (when Ferdinand had just heard that Austria had promised to keep Murat in Naples), is very characteristic: "I found his Majesty very much afflicted and very much roused. He expressed his determination never to renounce the rights which God had given him.... He said he might be poor, but he would die honest, and his children should not have to reproach him for having given up their rights. He was the son of the honest Charles III. ... he was his unworthy offspring, but he would never disgrace his family.... On my going away he took me by the hand, and said he hoped I should esteem him as he did me, and begged me to take a Pheasant pye to a gentleman who had been his constant shooting companion." Records, Sicily, vol. 97. Ferdinand was the last sovereign who habitually kept a professional fool, or jester, in attendance upon him.
British and Foreign State Papers, vii. 361, 995.
Except in Sicily, where, however, the course of events had not the same publicity as on the mainland.
Verbatim from the Russian Note of April 18. B. and F. State Papers, vii. 943.
Parliamentary Debates, N.S., viii. 1136.