A similar desire to assert its own absolute supremacy impelled the Cortes to refuse to countenance two dynastic intrigues which came from different quarters. The eldest daughter of Charles IV, Carlotta, Princess of the Brazils and wife of the Regent João of Portugal, was the nearest of kin to Ferdinand VII who had escaped Napoleon’s claws in 1808. She was of opinion that she had a good right to expect the Regency during her brother’s captivity at Valençay, and her agents repeatedly urged her claims, both during the days of the first Regency and after the Cortes had assembled. Sousa-Holstein, the Portuguese ambassador, naturally lent them his aid, and she had Spanish partisans, though few of them were persons of good reputation. Yet, by constant persuasion and promises, Carlotta’s representatives actually succeeded in inducing great numbers of the deputies to pledge themselves to push her interests. It is said that, at one time or another, a full half of the members had given the intriguers encouragement. But to do this, and to make a formal attempt to pass a decree conferring the Regency on her, were very different things. When overt action was urged by her agents, or their partisans in the Cortes, nothing came of the attempt. The assembly was naturally unwilling to surrender its own sovereignty, and to introduce a court and its intrigues into Cadiz. It must be added that João of Portugal had no liking for his wife’s scheme, that Wellington saw its disadvantages[636], and that the great bulk of the Spaniards would have resented the whole affair, as a Portuguese intrigue, if it had ever been laid before the nation as a definite proposal.
The second dynastic scheme which was running its course at this time was engineered by another branch of the Spanish royal house. The restless and unscrupulous Queen Caroline of Sicily could not forget that if Carlotta of Portugal was the nearest relative of the captive King, yet her husband Ferdinand was his nearest male kinsman, save the princes in Napoleon’s hands. She availed herself of this fact to urge that one of her children would be a very suitable person to be entrusted with power in Spain, and thought of her younger son Prince Leopold as a possible candidate for the Regency. But since he had not the necessary reputation or age, the Queen soon fell back upon her son-in-law Louis Philippe, Duke of Orleans, the exiled son of the infamous Philippe Égalité. He had not only a good military record for his services at Jemappes and elsewhere in the early Belgian campaigns, but was universally known as a man of ability. Unfortunately, he had fought on the Republican side in 1792—a thing hard to forget, and certain to cause suspicion: and his ability was always displayed for purposes of self-interest, and savoured of unscrupulousness.
Nevertheless, Orleans had already made overtures to the old Regency in the spring of 1810, and had been promised by them a command on the borders of Catalonia. They had failed to keep the pledge, and he now appeared at Cadiz, and wished to present himself before the Cortes and plead his cause. He took small profit thereby, for the assembly regarded him and his relatives as suspicious persons, refused to give him an audience when he presented himself before its doors, and politely but firmly insisted that he should return to Sicily in a few days—an order which he was forced to obey. ‘Whether it was that he was a Frenchman, though a Bourbon, or whether it was that he had once been a Republican, though he had ceased to be one, or whether it was that he was a prince of the royal house, and therefore distasteful to the newly-assembled Cortes, who were secretly inclined to democratic views, the majority viewed him with disfavour[637].’ On October 3 he set sail for Palermo.
At the end of 1810 we leave the Cortes still indulging in fiery constitutional debates, still busy in asserting its own supreme power, and curbing many attempts at self-assertion in the new Regency which it had created. With the English government it was not on the best of terms: though it decreed the erection of a statue to George III as the friend and deliverer of Spain—a monument which (it need hardly be said) was never erected—it was very slow to seek or follow the advice of the allied power. It clamoured for subsidies, but refused the opening of the South American trade—the only return that could be given for them. Money in hard gold or silver Great Britain could no longer supply—for the years 1810-11 were those when the paper-issues of the Bank were our sole currency; cash had almost disappeared, and could only be procured by offering six pounds or more in notes for five guineas. But the Spaniards did not want paper, but gifts or loans in gold or silver. They got no more of the precious metals—Great Britain had none to spare, and found it almost impossible even to procure dollars to pay Wellington’s army in Portugal. All that was given after 1809 was arms and munitions of war.
English observers in the Peninsula were not well pleased with the first months of the rule of the Cortes. ‘The natural course of all popular assemblies,’ wrote Wellington to his brother, Henry Wellesley, now minister at Cadiz, ‘and of the Spanish Cortes among others, is to adopt democratic principles, and to vest all the powers of the State in their own body. This assembly must take care that they do not run in that tempting course, as the wishes of the nation are decidedly for monarchy. Inclination to any other form of government would immediately deprive them of the confidence of the people, and they would become a worse government, and more impotent, because more numerous, than the old Central Junta.’ A few weeks later he doubted whether even a Regency under Carlotta of Portugal, with all its disadvantages, would not be better than mere democracy[638].
Vaughan, on the spot at Cadiz, gave quite a different view of the situation, but one equally unfavourable to the Cortes as a governing power. ‘It is full of priests, who (united with the Catalans) are for preserving the old routine, and adverse to everything that can give energy and vigour to the operation of government. Fanaticism and personal interest direct their opinions.... Be assured that the Cortes is, as at present constituted, anything but revolutionary or Jacobinical.... If there is not soon some new spirit infused into it, it will become an overgrown Junta, meddling with every paltry detail of police, and neglecting the safety of the country—and the Regency will be content to reign (very badly) over Cadiz and the Isla[639].’
There was much truth in both these verdicts, though Vaughan underrated the force of self-interest in driving a popular assembly to claim all power for itself, while Wellington underrated the dead-weight of clerical conservatism, which was the restraint upon that tendency. Both were right in asserting that, whatever the Cortes might be, the mass of the nation had no wish to set out on the path of Jacobinism. They both perceived the danger that the Cortes might turn itself into a constitutional debating society, and at the same time prevent any really efficient executive from being established. Such was its actual fate. Except that Spain now possessed a governing authority which, with all its faults, had infinitely more pretension to claim a legal mandate from the people than any of its predecessors, the situation was not greatly changed. From the military point of view, as we shall see in the next volume, the aspect of the Peninsula was in no degree improved. The same blunders that had marked the administration of the old Provincial Juntas, of the Supreme Central Junta, and of the first Regency, continued to exhibit themselves under the rule of the Cortes.