Bulwer Lytton was constantly sending despatches to England about the shortcomings of Isabella II. as a woman, but he seemed to lay no stress on the cause of her failure as a Queen. Under proper conditions Isabella doubtless would have been a good woman and a great Queen, but choked with the weeds of intrigue she was lost. Undisciplined and uneducated, the poor Queen fell a victim to what, if properly directed, would have been virtues instead of vices.
The marriage to which Isabella was forced by intrigue was, of course, the greatest evil which could have befallen such an impulsive, warm-hearted girl, who knew no more how to turn a deaf ear to a claimant for her favour than to keep her purse shut to the plea of an unfortunate beggar.
The Right Hon. Henry Lytton Bulwer wrote a little later from the British Embassy at Madrid to the Court of St. James’s, saying that he “looked at the Queen’s conduct as the moral result of the alliance she had been more or less compelled to contract, and he regarded her rather with interest and pity than blame or reproach.”
Isabel’s natural intuition of our Queen Victoria’s good heart prompted her letters to her. They were sent by a private hand, and who knows what evils might have been prevented in the Court of Spain if the long journey, so formidable in those days, had not placed the sister-Queens so far apart?
Espartero’s plea for Isabel to marry Don Enrique de Assisi, the man of her heart, met no support in a Court torn with intrigue, and the sad, bad story of Isabel doubtless had its source in the tragedy of an unhappy marriage. At the plea of a persistent wooer, who knew that the Queen had the right of dissolving a Ministry, a Government would fall; and as the station of her favourites became lower and lower, as time went on the ill-regulated Sovereign had a Government as undependable as her friends.
Treachery was the keynote of the Court of Spain, and some of the leaders of the revolution were those who had used the Sovereign’s ignorance and foolhardiness to their own ends. In such an atmosphere of untruth and treachery such men as Espartero, Prim, etc., could play no enduring part. Hardly had Espartero swept the Court clean of the Regency of Queen Maria Cristina than his fall was encompassed by O’Donnell, his rival. The flagrant falsification of the Parliamentary election returns—which is still the cankerworm of the country—was the check to all progress. Count San Luis made a primitive effort for the reform of the elections; he suggested that the names of the candidates as deputies should be put in a bag, and drawn out by a child blindfolded, for the law of chance seemed to him better than the custom of deception.
Isabella’s acts of generosity are still quoted with admiration at the royal palace of Madrid by those who served her as Queen.
Four hundred girls owed their marriage dots to Isabella, and it was the fathers of these four hundred royally endowed brides who treacherously worked for her expulsion.
One day, hearing the story of the penury of a clever man of letters, Isabella commanded 20,000 francs to be sent to him. The administrator of her finances, thinking the Queen could hardly know how much money this sum represented, had twenty notes of 1,000 francs each changed into small money, and put out on a table by which she had to pass.
“What is all this money for?” asked Isabella, when she saw it spread out to view.