♦Charles complains to the French.♦
These circumstances tallied well with Buonaparte’s designs, and they were dexterously improved by Murat. Even before he entered Madrid, General Mouthion was dispatched to Aranjuez with a letter to the Queen of Etruria, which contained assurances to the deposed King of Buonaparte’s support. A snare was laid for the imbecile Charles, and he rushed into it. However compulsory the act of abdication might have been, it was now as much his interest as that of his family, that he should acquiesce in it. But actuated by a sense of his wrongs, and still more perhaps by the Queen, who, trembling for her paramour, hated her son with all the virulence of an adulterous mother, he committed his last and consummating folly, by appealing to the very tyrant, whose open and undisguised aggressions had driven him, not a week before, to the resolution of abandoning his throne and seeking refuge in America. He assured Mouthion that the revolution had been preconcerted and brought about by money; that his son and Caballero were the chief agents; that he had signed the act of abdication only to save the Queen’s life and his own, knowing that if he had refused they would both have been murdered in the course of the night. The conduct of the Prince of Asturias was more shocking, he added, inasmuch as having perceived his desire to reign, and being himself near threescore years of age, he had agreed to surrender the crown to him on his marriage with a French princess, an event which he, the King, ardently desired. The Prince, he added, chose that he and the Queen should retire to Badajoz, though he had remonstrated against the climate as injurious to his health, and entreated permission to choose another place, his wish being to obtain leave of the Emperor to purchase an estate where he might end his days. The Queen said she had begged her son at least to postpone their departure for Badajoz, but even this was refused, and they were to set out on the following Monday. This fact alone would evince how little the inclinations of Charles were consulted throughout these transactions. The part of Spain where Badajoz stands is notoriously unhealthy during the summer months; and to have fixed upon that place for the residence of the deposed monarch, and persisted in the choice after he had objected to it on the score of his health, implied in the new government an equal want of feeling and of sense.
♦He writes to Buonaparte, entreating him to interfere.♦
Having made these complaints, Charles delivered into Mouthion’s hands a formal protest, declaring that the decree of abdication was compulsory, and therefore invalid. He charged him also with a letter for the Emperor. “Sir, my brother,” he said, “you will not without some interest behold a King, who having been forced to resign his crown, throws himself into the arms of a great monarch his ally, placing every thing at the disposal of him who alone can make his happiness and that of all his family, and of his faithful and beloved subjects. I abdicated in favour of my son only under the pressure of circumstances, when the noise of arms and the clamours of a rebellious guard made me sufficiently understand that my choice was between life and death, and that my death would have been followed by the Queen’s. ♦1808. April.♦ I have been compelled to resign; but taking hope this day, and full of confidence in the magnanimity and genius of the great man who has already shown himself my friend, I have resolved to remit myself in every thing to him, that he may dispose as he thinks good both of us and our fate, that of the Queen and of the Prince of the Peace.” Having consigned this letter to Mouthion, who may be suspected of having dictated the latter expressions, he renewed his complaints. His situation, he said, was one of the most deplorable. They had seized the Prince of the Peace and would put him to death, for no other crime than that of having been at all times attached to his sovereign. There were no solicitations which he had not made to save the life of his unhappy friend, but he found every one deaf to his prayers and bent upon vengeance; and the death of Godoy would draw after it his own, for he should not survive him.
♦Letters of the Queen to Murat.♦
No King ever placed his favour more unworthily than Charles, but there was a sincerity in his friendship which almost amounts to virtue, and would have done honour to a better monarch. The Queen’s attachment also, which is more easily explained, had a character of enduring passion and self-abandonment seldom to be found in one at once so vicious and so weak. From this time she wearied Murat with letters, written in the most barbarous French and most confused manner, wherein she expressed her fears and her resentments. Ferdinand, she said, was the enemy of the French, though he declared the contrary. Infantado was very wicked; the priest Escoiquiz one of the most wicked; and San Carlos, the most crafty of all, had received all that he had from the King at the solicitation of the poor Prince of the Peace, whom he called his relation. She had no other support than the Grand Duke and the Emperor, those two sacred and incomparable persons.... But the Prince of the Peace made the burthen of every letter. “Nothing interests us,” she said, “but the safe condition of our only and innocent friend the Prince of the Peace, the friend of the Grand Duke; even in his prison when he exclaimed on the horrid treatment they were giving him, he called always upon his friend the Grand Duke. Before this conspiracy he wished for his arrival, and that he would deign to accept of his house as a residence.... He had presents to make him.... We are in constant fear of their killing or poisoning him. Let the Grand Duke cause troops to go without telling why, and without giving a moment of time to fire a pistol at him separate the guard that is set over him, which has no other glory in view, no other desire but to kill him, ... that innocent friend, so devoted to the French, to the Grand Duke and the Emperor, the poor Prince of the Peace. They heap crimes on this innocent Prince, our common and only friend, to inflame the public the more, and make them believe it is right to inflict on him all possible infamy. Afterwards they will come to me; ... they will make his head be cut off in public, and afterwards mine, for they say so.... He suffers because he is a friend of the Grand Duke, of the Emperor, and of the French; the Grand Duke and the Emperor are they alone who can save him, and if he be not saved and given to us, the King my husband and I will die.” Every letter was filled with these anxious solicitations: of the throne there seemed to be neither care nor thought; with the mob at Aranjuez before her eyes, and the recollection of Marie Antoinette in her heart, this wretched woman was sick of royalty; she asked only an allowance for the King, herself, and Godoy, upon which they might live all three together, in a situation suiting their health; ... a corner wherein they might quietly finish their days; ... some place near France, to be within reach of help against the bloody hands of his enemies. Her feelings toward Ferdinand were not less strongly expressed than her attachment to Godoy. “My son,” she says, “has a very bad heart: his character is bloody; his counsellors are bloody; they take pleasure only in making wretchedness, and his heart has no feeling for father or mother. He will make his enmity to the French appear when he thinks he can see occasion.... I fear they will make some attempt against them; ... the people are gained with money. When the Grand Duke shall have placed the poor Prince of the Peace in safety, let rather strong measures be taken, for otherwise intrigues will go on increasing, above all, against the poor friend of the Grand Duke and me; and the King my husband is not secure.”
♦The Infante D. Carlos sent to meet Buonaparte.♦
Charles’s protest and his appeal to Buonaparte were concealed from Ferdinand, and the correspondence with Murat was carried on by means of the Queen of Etruria, who having witnessed all which had passed at Aranjuez, and being therefore a competent judge how far the abdication of her father was voluntary, took part decidedly against her brother. Murat’s intention was to frighten him into the toils; an alarm that should have made him start, would have ruined the plot. The interest which this Grand Duke affected for Godoy, his refusal to acknowledge the new government, and the respect which he paid to Charles, all tended to this end. The rumour of Buonaparte’s coming was carefully spread abroad; fresh couriers were said to have arrived: ... the Emperor had left Paris, and might speedily be expected in Madrid. Packages came marked as his, his hat and his boots were shown, Murat gave minute directions concerning the Emperor’s bath, and accepted a table of twenty covers for him, and another for his suite. Preparations were made for processions to do honour to the august visitor, and for balls at the Palace of the Buen Retiro. The soldiers were told that he would lose no time in putting himself at the head of his armies in Spain; ♦April 2.♦ they were ordered to put themselves in a state to appear before him; and in this proclamation, which appeared in a Madrid gazette extraordinary, the ominous notice was given, that they would immediately be supplied with cartridge. It was hinted that it would be a delicate compliment to the Emperor, if the Infante, Don Carlos, (Ferdinand’s next brother,) would set off to receive him on the way. His Highness, Murat said, could not fail to meet him before he had proceeded two days upon his road. This was readily agreed to, and the Infante, accompanied by the Duke del Infantado, departed upon this fatal journey. ♦Ferdinand is urged to go and meet the Emperor.♦ Having secured this victim, Murat endeavoured to entice Ferdinand himself into the snare: what had at first been hinted at, and advised as a mark of attentive consideration, was now pressed upon him as a thing of importance; a measure which would be attended with the happiest consequences to himself and the kingdom. The young King hesitated; it was more than courtesy required, more than an ally was entitled to expect, and perhaps he felt that it was more than a King of Spain ought to perform. Cevallos constantly advised him not to leave his capital till he had received certain intelligence that Buonaparte had passed the Pyrenees, and was approaching Madrid; and even then he urged him to proceed so short a way, that it should not be necessary for him to sleep out of his capital more than a single night. His advice prevailed for a time against the repeated solicitations of Murat and the ambassador Beauharnois. It became necessary, therefore, to introduce a new actor in this detestable plot.
♦The sword of Francis I. restored to the French.♦
During the interval which elapsed before another agent could appear, Murat informed Cevallos that the Emperor would be gratified if the sword of Francis I. were presented to him; and he desired that this might be intimated to the new King. It might be supposed that this was designed not merely to gratify the French nation, but also to lower Ferdinand in the opinion of the Spaniards, if Buonaparte and his agents had ever taken the nobler feelings of our nature into their calculation. But it was a mere trick for the Parisians; and neither they nor the tyrant himself felt that France was far more dishonoured by the circumstances under which the sword was recovered, than by the ♦March 31.♦ manner in which it had been lost. Accordingly this trophy of Pescara’s victory, which had lain since the year 1525 in the royal armoury at Madrid, was carried in a silver basin, under a silken cloth laced and fringed with gold, to Murat’s head-quarters, in a coach and six, preceded by six running footmen, and under the charge of the superintendent of the arsenal; the grand equerry and the Duke del Parque following in a second equipage with the same state. A detachment of the guards escorted them, and the sword was presented by the Marquis of Astorga to Murat; he, it was said, having been brought up by the side of the Emperor, and in the same school, and illustrious for his military talents, was more worthy than any other person could be to be charged with so precious a deposit, and to transmit it into the hands of his Imperial Majesty. The people of Madrid passively beheld the surrender of this trophy; it was the act, however compulsory, of their lawful king, the king of their choice; the compulsion was neither avowed on the one side, nor confessed on the other; from the imputation of beholding it with indifference, they amply redeemed themselves. Murat, upon receiving it, pronounced a flattering eulogium upon the Spanish nation, ... that nation which he was in the act of plundering, and which he came to betray and to enslave.