Once again he recovered sufficiently to rise from his bed; and Stanhope wrote on the 19th September 1696; ‘The King’s danger is over for a time, but his constitution is so very weak and broken, much beyond his age, that it is feared what may be the success of another attack. They cut his hair off in this sickness, which the decay of nature had almost done before, all his crown being bald. He has a ravenous stomach, and swallows all he eats whole; for his nether jaw stands out so much that his two rows of teeth cannot meet; to compensate which he has a prodigious wide throat, so that a gizzard or a liver of a hen passes down whole, and his weak stomach not being able to digest it he voids it in the same manner.’
No sooner was the immediate danger over than Marie Anne wormed out of the King that he had made his will in favour of the Bavarian. Her rage and indignation knew no bounds, and she upbraided the King with hysterical violence, to which he retorted by childish outbursts, leading to the smashing of crockery, furniture, and the like, and usually ending in tears. Oropesa, who had just returned to Court reconciled to Marie Anne, added his persuasions to those of the Queen and the threats of the confessor, but for a time without success. In November 1696 Stanhope reports that the King was still very ill, and obliged to keep his bed: ‘although they sometimes make him rise out of his bed, much against his will and beyond his strength, the better to conceal his illness abroad. He is not only extremely weak in body, but has a great weight of melancholy and discontent upon his spirits, attributed in a great measure to the Queen’s continual importunities to make him alter his will.’
At length, in September 1697, the sick man could withstand the pressure no longer; and during another grave attack,[[337]] at the instance of his wife and Harrach, tore up the will appointing the Prince of Bavaria his heir. Portocarrero had gone so far as to threaten to call the Cortes together to confirm the will, and had exhorted the King to stand firm, but he had been powerless as against the strong will of Marie Anne. For a long time, however, Charles still held out against making another will in favour of the Austrian; and only, at last, by threats and cajolery was he induced to write a letter to the Emperor asking him to send the Archduke to Spain with ten or twelve thousand men, on the pretext that they were required for the defence of Catalonia.
But the gigantic armaments needed by Louis XIV. to face all Europe victoriously, as he had done, was exhausting the resources of France, and peace was in the air. The need also for French agents to have a good chance in Madrid to push the succession claim also made Louis pliant; and when the Peace of Ryswick was signed in October 1697, the world was surprised at the generous terms accorded by the victor to Spain. With every chance of success, then, Louis having restored the territory he had conquered, he could pose as the true friend of Spain, ready to champion the rights of his descendants by Maria Theresa, the eldest daughter of Philip, against the unpopular Germans, to succeed to the Spanish throne. There was much lost ground for the French to make up; for the German factions had been in sole possession ever since the death of Marie Louise in 1690; but the death of Mariana had left some of her friends in the market, and all classes of Spaniards were sick to death of Germans; so, as soon as the peace was signed, the Marquis d’Harcourt hurried to Madrid as French ambassador, primed with instructions, and supplied with means to re-constitute the French party in Spain, and defeat, if possible, the machinations of Queen Marie Anne.
The first effect of the peace was to stop the project of bringing an Austrian army to Spain under the Archduke, and also the plan of the Elector of Bavaria to put in an appearance to counteract the Archduke’s presence. The arrival of Harcourt at Madrid soon afterwards put a new complexion on affairs there. Stanhope writes, on the 14th March 1698, when the King had fallen again dangerously ill: ‘Our Court is in great disorder: the grandees all dog and cat, Turk and Moor. The King is in a languishing condition, not in so imminent a danger as last week, but so weak and spent as to his principle of life, that all I can hear is pretended, amounts only to hopes of preserving him some weeks, without any probability of his recovery. The general inclination as to the succession is altogether French; their (i.e. the Spaniards’) aversion to the Queen having set them against all her countrymen: and if the French King will content himself that one of his younger children be King of Spain, without pretending to incorporate the two monarchies, he will find no opposition, either from grandees or common people.... The King is so very weak he can scarcely lift his hand to his head to feed himself, and so extremely melancholy, that neither his buffoons, dwarfs, nor puppet-shows, all of which have shown their abilities before him, can in the least divert him from fancying everything that is said or done is a temptation of the devil, and never thinking himself safe but with his confessor and two friars by his side, whom he makes lie in his chamber every night.’[[338]]
In such circumstances as these it was evident to the Queen’s opponents that a bold move must be made at once or she would win. Her most powerful abettor with the King was the confessor, Father Matilla; the ostensible ministers, the Admiral of Castile,[[339]] Montalto and Oropesa, after many wrangles with her, agreeing to let her have a free hand with her husband, if they were allowed to take a fair share of the national plunder; the real government behind them being the Queen and her camarilla. The only man near the King who was inclined to favour the Bavarian heir was the lord chamberlain, Count Benavente, to whom one night, late in March 1698, Charles mumbled that he was very unhappy and uneasy in his conscience, and should like to see Cardinal Portocarrero.
The Cardinal Archbishop, who had been a close friend of Mariana’s, and was a man of ability, had been carefully excluded from the King’s chamber by Marie Anne. It was eleven o’clock at night, but swift secret messengers were soon at the Cardinal’s door; and before midnight, unknown to the Queen, the primate stood by the King’s bed. Charles opened all the troubles of his terror-stricken soul to the friend of his dead mother: how the violence of his wife and the harshness of the confessor, Matilla, frightened him into adopting a course which his conscience told him was wrong, and he prayed the primate to help him with advice in this dire strait. Portocarrero was nothing loath. Hurrying from the palace, he hastily convened a meeting of his friends. Count Monterey, the Marquis of Leganés, Don Sebastian de Cotes, Don Francisco Ronquillo, the idol of the populace, and Don Juan Antonio Urraca.
What was to be done, and who should do it, before the Queen could banish them all? Monterey, in his stumbling speech, pointed out the danger of acting through the King at all, seeing that the Queen could twist him round her finger and make him alter any resolution he adopted, as she had done before. The best course, he said, would be for the Cardinal to frequent the King’s chamber, ostensibly to give spiritual consolation, and then very gradually to prepare the King’s mind for a change. Others thought that this process was too slow, since the King might slip through their hands after all, and Leganés advised that the Cardinal should immediately urge the King to order the arrest and imprisonment of the detested Admiral of Castile, the Duke of Rio Seco. ‘His only escort,’ said Leganés, ‘were four knavish poets and a couple of buffoons,’ whilst he, Leganés, had plenty of arms at home and two hundred soldiers in his pay, and could seize the most objectionable ministers at once. Then turbulent Ronquillo had his say. They must strike higher than the Admiral. The Queen as well must be seized as soon as her henchman was laid by the heels, and the Huelgas at Burgos should be her future place of confinement. Let us be practical, said Monterey, sneering at Ronquillo for a fool: if we offer violence to the Queen the excitement will kill the King before we can get a will or decree executed. We must act more cautiously than that. Then the two angry nobles clapped their hands to their swords, and were for fighting it out on the spot, until the Cardinal separated them, and wise old Cotes, with his quiet voice, calmly gave his opinion. It would be easy for the Cardinal to obtain such a decree as that required, but the Queen would get it revoked the next morning more easily still, and then, what would happen to all of us? Let us, he said, strike at the trunk by all means, if possible, and get rid of the Queen: but how? Before that can be done we should put Matilla, the confessor, out of the way. The King hated and feared him already, and only yesterday refused to speak to him: let the Cardinal and Benavente advise the King to change his confessor, and the next step will be easy. This seemed good advice; but the jealous hidalgos then fell to quarrelling as to who the new confessor should be, with the result that the choice was ultimately left to the Cardinal.
The next morning Cotes suggested to his colleagues a certain modest professor of theology at Alcalá, one Father Froilan Diaz, for the post. He was near enough to the capital to be brought thither without delay, and would be humble enough to do as he was told: and so it was decided to secure the great appointment to Father Diaz. There was no lack of messengers to carry to him from the conspirators the news of his coming elevation, for each of them, especially Ronquillo, wished to gain the credit of proposing it; and the next day the astounded professor found himself already by anticipation a person to be courted by the greatest grandees in the land.
One day, early in the morning, in the first week in April, the sick King lay in bed listening dreamily to some music being played in the ante-chamber, the door between the rooms being open. Father Matilla and a crony of his, one Dr. Parra, were quietly chatting in one of the deep window recesses of the ante-chamber; when suddenly Count Benavente entered unannounced, accompanied by a stout, fresh-coloured ecclesiastic; and, without saluting Matilla, they walked straight through into the King’s bedroom, which Benavente alone was entitled to do, as lord chamberlain. Matilla was keen-witted, and saw at a glance what it meant. Turning to his friend, he said, ‘Goodbye: this business is ending just as it ought to have begun;’ and with that he hurried out of the palace and to the monastery of his order in Madrid.