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.
These were the main clauses of Napoleon’s letter, but they are embedded in a quantity of turgid verbiage, in which we are only uncertain whether the hypocrisy or the bad taste is the more offensive. ‘How perilous is it for kings to permit their subjects to seek justice for themselves by deeds of blood! I pray God that your royal highness may not experience this for yourself some day! It is not for the interest of Spain that the Prince of the Peace should be hunted down: he is allied by marriage to the royal house and has governed the realm for many years. He has no friends now: but if your royal highness were to fall into similar disgrace you would have no more friends than he. You cannot touch him without touching your parents. You have no rights to the crown save those which your mother has transmitted to you: if in trying the Prince you smirch her honour, you are destroying your own rights. You have no power to bring him to judgement: his evil deeds are hidden behind the throne.... O wretched Humanity! Weakness, and Error, such is our device! But all can be hushed up: turn the Prince out of Spain, and I will give him an asylum in France.’
In the next paragraph Napoleon tells Ferdinand that he should never have written to him in the preceding autumn without his father’s knowledge—‘in that your royal highness was culpable; but I flatter myself that I contributed by my remonstrances in securing a happy end to the affair of the Escurial.’ Finally Ferdinand might assure himself that he should have from his ally precisely the same treatment that his father had always experienced—which again is a double-edged saying, if we take into consideration the history of the relations of Charles IV and France.
The King and his confidant Escoiquiz read and reread this curious document without coming to any certain conclusion: probably they thought (as would any one else who did not know the Emperor thoroughly) that the meeting at Bayonne would open with a scolding, and end with some tiresome concessions, but that Ferdinand’s title would be recognized. Savary’s commentary was reassuring: Spanish witnesses say that he exclaimed ‘I am ready to have my head taken off if, within a quarter of an hour of your majesty’s arrival at Bayonne, the Emperor has not saluted you as King of Spain and the Indies.... The whole negotiation will not take three days, and your majesty will be back in Spain in a moment[50].’
On April 19, therefore, the royal party set out amid the groans of the populace of Vittoria, who tried to hold back the horses, and to cut the traces of the King’s coach: on the twentieth they reached Bayonne. Napoleon entertained them at dinner, but would not talk politics: after the meal they were sent home to the not very spacious or magnificent lodgings prepared for them. An hour later the shameless Savary presented himself at the door, with the astounding message that the Emperor had thought matters over, and had come to the conclusion that the best thing for Spain would be that the house of Bourbon should cease to reign, and that a French prince should take their place. A prompt acquiescence in the bargain should be rewarded by the gift of the kingdom of Etruria, which had just been taken from Ferdinand’s widowed sister and her young son.
The possibility of such an outrage had never occurred to the young king and his counsellors: when something of the kind had been suggested to them at Vittoria, they had cried out that it was insulting to the honour of the greatest hero of the age to dream that he could be plotting treachery[51]. And now, too late, they learnt the stuff of which heroes were made. Even with Savary’s words ringing in their ears, they could not believe that they had heard aright. It must be some mere threat intended to frighten them before negotiations began: probably it meant that Spain would have to cede some American colonies or some Catalonian frontier districts. Next morning, therefore, Ferdinand sent his minister Cevallos to plead his cause: Napoleon refused to bargain or compromise: he wanted nothing, he said, but a prompt resignation of his rights by the Prince of the Asturias: there was nothing left to haggle about. It was gradually borne in upon Ferdinand that the Emperor meant what he had said. But though timid he was obstinate, and nothing like an abdication could be got out of him. He merely continued to send to Napoleon one agent after another—first the minister Cevallos, then his tutor and confidant Escoiquiz, then Don Pedro Labrador, a councillor of state, all charged with professions of his great readiness to do anything, short of resigning the Spanish throne, which might satisfy his captor. Cevallos and Escoiquiz have left long narratives of their fruitless embassies. That of the latter is especially interesting: he was admitted to a long conference with Bonaparte, in which he plied every argument to induce him to leave Ferdinand on the throne, after marrying him to a French princess and exacting from him every possible guarantee of fidelity. The Emperor was ready to listen to every remonstrance, but would not move from his projects. He laughed at the idea that Spain would rise in arms, and give him trouble. ‘Countries full of monks, like yours,’ he said, ‘are easy to subjugate. There may be some riots, but the Spaniards will quiet down when they see that I offer them the integrity of the boundaries of the monarchy, a liberal constitution, and the preservation of their religion and their national customs[52].’
When such were Napoleon’s ideas it was useless to argue with him. But Ferdinand refused to understand this, and kept reiterating all sorts of impracticable offers of concession and subservience, while refusing to do the one thing which the Emperor required of him. Napoleon, much irritated at the refusal of such a poor creature to bow to his will, has left a sketch of him during these trying days. ‘The Prince of the Asturias,’ he wrote, ‘is very stupid, very malicious, a very great hater of France.... He is a thoroughly uninteresting person, so dull that I cannot get a word out of him. Whatever one says to him he makes no reply. Whether I scold him, or whether I coax him, his face never moves. After studying him you can sum him up in a single word—he is a sulky fellow[53].’
As Ferdinand would not budge, Bonaparte had now to bring his second device to the front. With the old king’s protest before him, the Emperor could say that Charles IV had never abdicated in any real sense of the word. He had been made to sign a resignation ‘with a pistol levelled at his head,’ as a leading article in the Moniteur duly set forth. Such a document was, of course, worth nothing: therefore Charles was still King of Spain, and might sign that surrender of his rights which Ferdinand denied. Napoleon promptly sent for the old king and queen, who arrived under a French escort on April 30, ten days after their son’s captivity began. At Bayonne they rejoined their dearly-loved Godoy, whom Murat had extorted from the Junta of Regency, under cover of a consent sent by Ferdinand to Napoleon from Vittoria two days before he crossed the frontier.
Charles IV arrived in a state of lachrymose collapse, sank on Napoleon’s breast and called him his true friend and his only support. ‘I really do not know whether it is his position or the circumstances, but he looks like a good honest old man,’ commented the Emperor. ‘The Queen has her past written on her face—that is enough to define her. As to the Prince of the Peace, he looked like a prize bull, with a dash of Count Daru about him.’ Godoy and the Queen had only one thought, to avenge themselves on Ferdinand: after what had taken place they could never go back to rule in Spain, so they cared little what happened to the country. As to the King, his wife and his favourite pulled the strings, and he gesticulated in the fashion that they desired. The Emperor treated them with an ostentatious politeness which he had always refused to the new king: at the first banquet that he gave them occurred the absurd scene (already mentioned by us), in which Charles refused to sit down to table till Godoy had been found and put near him.
Two days after their arrival Napoleon compelled Ferdinand to appear before his parents: he himself was also present. The interview[54] commenced by King Charles ordering his son to sign a complete and absolute renunciation of the Spanish throne. Bonaparte then threw in a few threatening words: but Ferdinand, still unmoved, made a steady refusal. At this the old king rose from his chair—he was half-crippled with rheumatism—and tried to strike his son with his cane, while the Queen burst in with a stream of abuse worthy of a fishwife. Napoleon, horrified at the odious scene, according to his own narrative of it, hurried Ferdinand, ‘who looked scared,’ out of the room.