The Duke was then arrested by order of his father, and he was only released at the plea of his sister, who was sorry when the quarrel assumed such a serious aspect.
When crowned Queen of Spain, in 1789, as the wife of Charles IV., twenty-four years after her marriage, Maria Luisa soon showed that her impulsive nature, which knew no check from her husband, would bring her country to grief.
Captivated by the young Godoy, she surprised and alarmed the nation by the swift way she exalted him to the highest position in the realm. As the favourite had known how to dominate the will of the King, as well as to subjugate the heart of the Queen, there was no limit to his power, and when he was given the title of “The Prince of the Peace,” for the alliance he made with the French, the animosity of the nation was so much excited that public interest was soon centred in Prince Ferdinand as one who might free the Court from the favourite, and thus save the country from the disastrous effect of an undue submission to France.
As Alcalá Galiano says in his “Memorias,” “The title of ‘Prince’ conferred on Godoy seemed to detract from the dignity of the Royal Family.” The Prince of Asturias was at this time eleven years of age.
It must be remembered that the Queen had never gained any real hold on her son’s love. She was naturally disinclined to any efforts dictated by maternal love, and she had taken no pains to overcome the constitutional defects of her son, which were repellent to her lively imagination and quick temperament.
In a letter to the Grand Duke of Berg, the Prince is described by the royal mother as peculiarly deficient in sensibility, and she remarks that his torpid nerves indeed required strong stimulants for their exercise. He spoke little, rarely smiled, and found a sardonic satisfaction in all kinds of petty acts of cruelty. He liked to crush a little bird if it fell into his hands, and, indeed, pity was a quality to which he was a stranger.
As the education of the young Prince was entrusted to Don Juan Escoiquiz, it was soon seen that he exercised a great power over the royal pupil, and he sought to use him as an instrument for thwarting the schemes of the Queen’s favourite—which boded ill for the land.
Escoiquiz was certainly clever. He had translated Young’s poems and Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” and when he was summoned to the royal palace in his capacity of tutor to the young Prince, he exclaimed: “I shall be happy if my instruction of my royal pupil leads to his being the most humane of Princes.”
However, time did not show that he guided the Prince in this direction, for the intrigue of the Queen with Godoy so aroused his malicious envy that his one idea was to instigate his pupil to courses tending to the overthrow of the favourite. Classics and mathematics were foregone by the cleric, who devoted the time to teaching the Prince that the one great secret of a ruler was to trust nobody entirely, but to oppose one man to another man and one party against the other.
This lesson of distrust the royal boy learnt to perfection, and as his cold eyes watched his mother’s deceitful conduct, and he saw how easily his father fell a prey to the artifice and design of the lovers, his heart was a fruitful soil for the poisonous words of his preceptor.