“The King of Prussia is a hero in comparison with the Prince of the Asturias. He has not yet said a word to me; he is indifferent to everything; very material; eats four times a day, and has no ideas; ... sullen and stupid.”
Madrid and Aranjuez, the Escorial and La Granja were to know King Charles and his court no more. After showing themselves for a few days at Bayonne, these relics of the eighteenth century disappeared to Compiègne, to Valençay, to one refuge after another, until in 1814 unhappy Spain welcomed back the sullen and stupid Ferdinand, only to learn his true character; while old King Charles, beggared and forgotten, dragged out a melancholy existence in Italy, served to the last by Godoy with a loyalty that half excused his faults and vices. The Bourbon rubbish was swept from Madrid; Don Carlos had already abdicated; Ferdinand, entrapped and terrified, was set aside; the old palaces were garnished for newcomers; and after Lucien and Louis Bonaparte had refused the proffered throne, Napoleon sent to Naples for Joseph, who was crowned, June 15, King of Spain at Bayonne.
Meanwhile the Spanish people woke to consciousness that their ancient empire had become a province of France, and their exasperation broke into acts of wild revenge. May 2 Madrid rose in an insurrection which Murat suppressed by force. Several hundred lives on either side were lost; and although the affair itself was one of no great importance, it had results which made the day an epoch in modern history.
The gradual breaking up of the old European system of politics was marked by an anniversary among each of the Western nations. The English race dated from July 4, 1776, the beginning of a new era; the French celebrated July 14, 1789, the capture of the Bastille, as decisive of their destinies. For a time, Bonaparte’s coup d’état of the 18th Brumaire in 1799 forced both France and England back on their steps; but the dethronement of Charles IV. began the process in a new direction. The Second of May—or as the Spaniards called it, the Dos de Maio—swept the vast Spanish empire into the vortex of dissolution. Each of the other anniversaries—that of July 4, 1776, and of July 14, 1789—had been followed by a long and bloody convulsion which ravaged large portions of the world; and the extent and violence of the convulsion which was to ravage the Spanish empire could be measured only by the vastness of Spanish dominion. So strangely had political forces been entangled by Napoleon’s hand, that the explosion at Madrid roused the most incongruous interests into active sympathy and strange companionship. The Spaniards themselves, the least progressive people in Europe, became by necessity democratic; not only the people, but even the governments of Austria and Germany felt the movement, and yielded to it; the Tories of England joined with the Whigs and Democrats in cheering a revolution which could not but shake the foundations of Tory principles; confusion became chaos, and while all Europe, except France, joined hands in active or passive support of Spanish freedom, America, the stronghold of free government, drew back and threw her weight on the opposite side. The workings of human development were never more strikingly shown than in the helplessness with which the strongest political and social forces in the world followed or resisted at haphazard the necessities of a movement which they could not control or comprehend. Spain, France, Germany, England, were swept into a vast and bloody torrent which dragged America, from Montreal to Valparaiso, slowly into its movement; while the familiar figures of famous men,—Napoleon, Alexander, Canning, Godoy, Jefferson, Madison, Talleyrand; emperors, generals, presidents, conspirators, patriots, tyrants, and martyrs by the thousand,—were borne away by the stream, struggling, gesticulating, praying, murdering, robbing; each blind to everything but a selfish interest, and all helping more or less unconsciously to reach the new level which society was obliged to seek. Half a century of disorder failed to settle the problems raised by the Dos de Maio; but from the first even a child could see that in the ruin of a world like the empire of Spain, the only nation certain to find a splendid and inexhaustible booty was the Republic of the United States. To President Jefferson the Spanish revolution opened an endless vista of democratic ambition.
Yet at first the Dos de Maio seemed only to rivet Napoleon’s power, and to strengthen the reaction begun on the 18th Brumaire. The Emperor expected local resistance, and was ready to suppress it. He had dealt effectually with such popular outbreaks in France, Italy, and Germany; he had been overcome in St. Domingo not by the people, but, as he believed, by the climate. If the Germans and Italians could be made obedient to his orders, the Spaniards could certainly offer no serious resistance. During the two or three months that followed the dethronement of the Bourbons, Napoleon stood at the summit of his hopes. If the letters he then wrote were not extant to prove the plans he had in mind, common-sense would refuse to believe that schemes so unsubstantial could have found lodgment in his brain. The English navy and English commerce were to be driven from the Mediterranean Sea, the Indian Ocean, and American waters, until the ruin of England should be accomplished, and the empire of the world should be secured. Order rapidly followed order for reconstructing the navies of France, Spain, and Portugal. Great expeditions were to occupy Ceuta, Egypt, Syria, Buenos Ayres, the Isle de France, and the East Indies.
“The concurrence of these operations,” he wrote May 13,[245] “will throw London into a panic. A single one of them, that of India, will do horrible damage there. England will then have no means of annoying us or of disturbing America. I am resolved on this expedition.”
For this purpose the Emperor required not only the submission of Spain, but also the support of Spanish America and of the United States. He acted as though he were already master of all these countries, which were not yet within his reach. Continuing to treat the United States as a dependent government, he issued April 17 a new order directing the seizure of all American vessels which should enter the ports of France, Italy, and the Hanse towns.[246] This measure, which became famous as the Bayonne Decree, surpassed the Decrees of Berlin and Milan in violence, and was gravely justified by Napoleon on the ground that, since the embargo, no vessel of the United States could navigate the seas without violating the law of its own government, and furnishing a presumption that it did so with false papers, on British account or in British connection. “This is very ingenious,” wrote Armstrong in reporting the fact.[247] Yet it was hardly more arbitrary or unreasonable than the British “Rule of 1756,” which declared that a neutral should practise no trade with a belligerent which it had not practised with the same nation during peace.
While these portentous events were passing rapidly before the eyes of Europe, no undue haste marked Madison’s movements. Champagny’s letter of Jan. 15, 1808, arrived and was sent to Congress toward the end of March; but although the United States quickly knew by heart Napoleon’s phrase, “War exists in fact between England and the United States, and his Majesty considers it as declared from the day on which England published her decrees;” although Rose departed March 22, and the embargo was shaped into a system of coercion long before Rose’s actual departure,—yet Congress waited until April 22 before authorizing the President to suspend the embargo, if he could succeed in persuading or compelling England or France to withdraw the belligerent decrees; and not until May 2—the famous Dos de Maio—did Madison send to Armstrong instructions which were to guide that minister through the dangers of Napoleonic diplomacy.
The Secretary began by noticing Champagny’s letter of January 15, which had assumed to declare war for the United States government.
“That [letter],” said Madison,[248] “... has, as you will see by the papers herewith sent, produced all the sensations here which the spirit and style of it were calculated to excite in minds alive to the interests and honor of the nation. To present to the United States the alternative of bending to the views of France against her enemy, or of incurring a confiscation of all the property of their citizens carried into the French prize courts, implied that they were susceptible of impressions by which no independent and honorable nation can be guided; and to prejudge and pronounce for them the effect which the conduct of another nation ought to have on their councils and course of proceeding, had the air at least of an assumed authority not less irritating to the public feeling. In these lights the President makes it your duty to present to the French government the contents of Mr. Champagny’s letter; taking care, as your discretion will doubtless suggest, that while you make that Government sensible of the offensive tone employed, you leave the way open for friendly and respectful explanations, if there be a disposition to offer them, and for a decision here on any reply which may be of a different character.”