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.
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.
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?
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.
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.