Letters from Spain

by Joseph Blanco White

The fears of the whole country at the progress of the French arms had been so strong, that peace was hailed with enthusiasm; and the public joy, on that occasion, would have been unalloyed but for the extravagant rewards granted to Godoy for concluding it. A new dignity above the grandeeship was created for him alone, and, under the title of Prince of the Peace, Godoy was placed next in rank to the Princes of the royal blood.

There was but one step in the scale of honours which could raise a mere subject higher than the Queen’s favour had exalted Godoy—a marriage into the royal family. But the only distinction which love seemed not blind enough to confer on the favourite, he actually owed to the jealousy of his mistress.

Among the beauties whom the hope of the young minister’s favour drew to Madrid from all parts of Spain, there was an unmarried lady of the name of Tudó, a native of Malaga, whose charms both of person and mind would have captivated a much less susceptible heart than Godoy’s. From the moment she was presented by her parents, La Tudó (we are perfectly unceremonious in naming ladies of all ranks) obtained so decided a supremacy above the numerous sharers in the favourite’s love, that the Queen, who had hitherto overlooked a crowd of occasional rivals, set her face against an attachment which bid fair to last for life. It had, indeed, subsisted long enough to produce unquestionable proof of the nature of the intimacy, in a child whose birth, though not blazoned forth as if sanctioned by public opinion, was not hidden with any consciousness of shame. A report being circulated at court, that the Prince of the Peace was secretly married to La Tudó, the Queen, in a fit of jealousy, accused him to the King as guilty of ingratitude, in thus having allied himself to a woman of no birth, without the slightest mark of deference to his royal benefactors. The King, whose fondness for Godoy had grown above his wife’s control, seemed inclined to discredit the story of the marriage; but, being at that time at one of the royal country residences called Sitios—the Escurial, I believe, where the ministers have apartments within the palace; the Queen led her husband through a secret passage, to a room where they surprised the lovers taking their supper in a comfortable tête-à-tête.

The feelings excited by this sight must have been so different in each of the royal couple, that one can scarcely feel surprised at the strangeness of the result. Godoy had only to deny the marriage to pacify the King, whose good nature was ready to make allowances for a mere love-intrigue of his favourite. The Queen, hopeless of ever being the exclusive object of the gallantries of a man to whom she was chained by the blindest infatuation, probably feared lest the step she had taken should tear him away from her presence. A slave to her vehement passions, and a perfect stranger to those delicate feelings which vice itself cannot smother in some hearts, she seemed satisfied with preventing her chief rival from rising above her own rank of a mistress; and, provided the place was occupied by one to whom her paramour was indifferent, wished to see him married, and be herself the match-maker.

The King’s late brother, Don Luis, who, in spite of a cardinal’s hat, and the archbishoprick of Seville, conferred on him before he was of age to take holy orders, stole a kind of left-handed marriage with a Spanish lady of the name of Vallabríga; had left two daughters and a son, under the guardianship of the archbishop of Toledo. Though not, hitherto, allowed to take their father’s name, these children were considered legitimate; and it is probable that the King had been desirous of putting them in possession of the honours due to their birth, long before the Queen proposed the eldest of her nieces both as a reward for Godoy’s services, and a means to prevent in future such sallies of youthful folly as divided his attention between pleasure and the service of the crown. These or similar reasons (for history must content herself with conjecture, when the main springs of events lie not only behind the curtain of state, but those of a four-post bed) produced in the space of a few weeks, a public recognition of Don Luis’s children, and the announcement of his eldest daughter’s intended marriage with the Prince of the Peace.

The vicious source of Godoy’s unbounded power, the temper of the Court where he enjoyed it, and the crowd of flatterers which his elevation had gathered about him, would preclude all expectation of any great or virtuous qualities in his character. Yet there are facts connected with the beginning of his government which prove that he was not void of those vague wishes of doing good, which, as they spring up, are “choked with cares and riches and pleasures of this world.” I have been assured by an acute and perfectly disinterested observer, whose high rank gave him free access to the favourite, during part of the period when with the title of Duke de la Alcúdia he was at the head of the Spanish ministry, that “there was every reason to believe him active, intelligent, and attentive in the discharge of his duty; and that he was perfectly exempt from all those airs and affectation which men who rise by fortune more than merit, are apt to be justly accused of.” Though, like all the Spanish youth brought up in the military profession, he was himself unlettered, he shewed great respect for talents and literature in the formation of the ministry which succeeded his own; when, from his new rank, and his marriage into the royal family, he was considered above the duties of office.

Saavedra, whom he made first minister of state, is a man of great natural quickness, improved both by reading and the observation of real life; but so irresolute of purpose, so wavering in judgment, so incapable of decision, that, while in office, he seemed more fit to render public business interminable, than to direct its course in his own department. Jovellanos, appointed to be Saavedra’s colleague, is justly considered as one of the living ornaments of our literature. Educated at Salamanca in one of the Colegios Mayores, before the reform which stripped those bodies of their honours and influence, he was made a judge in his youth, and gradually ascended to one of the supreme councils of the nation. His upright and honourable conduct in every stage of his life, both public and private, the urbanity of his manners, and the formal elegance of his conversation, render him a striking exemplification of the old Spanish Caballero. With the virtues and agreeable qualities of that character, he unites many of the prejudices peculiar to the period to which it belongs. To a most passionate attachment to the privileges and distinctions of blood, he joins a superstitious veneration for all kinds of external forms. The strongest partialities warp his fine understanding, confining it, upon numerous subjects, to distorted or limited views. As a judge and a man of letters, he was respected and admired by all. As a chief justice in any of our provincial courts of law, he would have been a blessing to the people of his district; while the dignified leisure of that situation would have enabled him to enrich our literature with the productions of his elegant mind. As a minister, however, through whose hands all the gifts of the Crown were to be distributed to a hungry country, where two-thirds of the better classes look up to patronage for a comfortable subsistence, he disappointed the hopes of the nation. At Court, his high notions of rank converted his rather prim manner into downright stiffness; and his blind partiality for the natives of Asturias, his province—probably because he thought them the purest remnant of Gothic blood in Spain—made him the most unpopular of ministers. Instead of promoting the welfare of the nation by measures which gradually, and upon a large scale, might counteract the influence of a profligate Court, he tried to oppose the Queen’s established interference in detail. She once made a personal application to Jovellanos in favour of a certain candidate for a prebendal stall. The minister gave her a flat denial, alleging that the person in question had not qualified himself at any of the universities. “At which of them,” said the Queen, “did you receive your education?”—“At Salamanca, Madam.”—“What a pity,” rejoined she, “that they forgot to teach you manners!”

While employed in this petty warfare, which must have soon ended in his dismissal, a circumstance occurred, which, though it was the means of reconciling the Queen to Jovellanos for a time, has finally consigned him to a fortress in Majorca, where to this day he lingers under a confinement no less unjust than severe.

The ceremony of Godoy’s marriage was scarcely over, when he resumed his intimacy with La Tudó in the most open and unguarded manner. The Queen, under a relapse of jealousy, seemed so determined to clip the wings of her spoiled favourite, that Jovellanos was deceived into a hope of making this pique the means of reclaiming his patron, if not to the path of virtue, at least to the rules of external propriety. Saavedra, better acquainted with the world, and well aware that Godoy could, at pleasure, resume any degree of ascendancy over the Queen, entered reluctantly into the plot. Not so Jovellanos. Treating this Court intrigue as one of the regular lawsuits on which he had so long practised his skill and impartiality, he could not bring himself to proceed without serving a notice upon the party concerned. He accordingly forwarded a remonstrance to the Prince of the Peace, in which he reminded him of his public and conjugal duties, in the most forcible style of forensic and moral eloquence. The Queen, in the mean time, had worked up her husband into a feeling approaching to anger against Godoy, and the decree for his banishment was all but signed before the offending gallant thought himself in such danger as to require the act of submission, which alone could restore him to the good graces of his neglected mistress. He owed, however, his safety to nothing but Saavedra’s indecision and dilatoriness. That minister could not be persuaded to present the decree of banishment for the royal signature, till the day after it had been agreed upon. Godoy, in the mean time, obtained a private interview with the Queen, who, under the influence of a long-checked and returning passion, in order to exculpate herself, represented the Ministers—the very men whom Godoy had raised into power—as the authors of the plot; and probably attributed the plan to Jovellanos, making him, from this moment, the marked object of the favourite’s resentment.

The baffled Ministers, though not immediately dismissed, must have felt the unsteadiness of the ground on which they stood, and dreaded the revenge of an enemy, who had already shewn, in the case of Admiral Malaspina, that he was both able and willing to wreak it on the instruments of the Queen’s jealousy. That officer, an Italian by birth, had just returned from a voyage round the globe, performed at the expense of this Government, when the Queen, who found it difficult to regulate the feelings of her husband towards Godoy, to the sudden and rapid variations of her own, induced her confidant, the Countess of Matallana, to engage him in drawing up a memorial to the King, containing observations on the public and private conduct of the favourite, and representing him in the blackest colours. Malaspina was at this time preparing the account of his voyage for publication, with the assistance of a conceited sciolist, a Sevillian friar called Padre Gil, who, in our great dearth of real knowledge, was looked upon as a miracle of erudition and eloquence. The Admiral, putting aside his charts and log-books, eagerly collected every charge against Godoy which was likely to make an impression upon the King; while the friar, inspired with the vision of a mitre ready to drop on his head, clothed them in the most florid and powerful figures which used to enrapture his audience from the pulpit. Nothing was now wanting but the Queen’s command to spring the mine under the feet of the devoted Godoy, when the intended victim, informed of his danger, and taking advantage of one of those soft moments which made the Queen and all her power his own, drew from her a confession of the plot, together with the names of the conspirators. In a few days, Malaspina found himself conveyed to a fortress, where, with his voyage, maps, scientific collections, and every thing relating to the expedition, he remains completely forgotten; while the reverend writer of the memorial was forwarded under an escort to Seville, the scene of his former literary glory, to be confined in a house of correction, where juvenile offenders of the lower classes are sent to undergo a salutary course of flogging.