The decree, by which the Regents were declared responsible, produced a memorial from them, requesting to know what were the obligations annexed to that responsibility, and what the specific powers which were given them; “unless these things,” they said, “were clearly and distinctly determined, the Regency would not know how to act, inasmuch as the ancient laws had drawn no line of distinction between the two powers; and thus they must be continually in danger, on the one hand, of exerting an authority, which, in the opinion of the Cortes, might not be included in the attributes of the executive, or, on the other, of omitting to exert the powers which it involves, and which at this time were more necessary than ever.” The reply of the Cortes proved with how little forethought they had passed their decree. “They had not limited,” they said, “the proper faculties of the executive, and the Regency was to use all the power necessary for the defence, security, and administration of the state, till the Cortes should mark out the precise bounds of its authority. The responsibility,” they added, “to which the Regents were subjected, was only meant to exclude that absolute inviolability which appertained to the sacred person of the king.” The whole of a night-session was occupied in forming this answer.
Among the many erroneous opinions which prevailed in this country respecting the affairs of Spain, the most plausible and the most general was that which expected great immediate benefit from the convocation of the Cortes; an error from which, perhaps, no person was entirely free, except the few, who, like Mr. Frere, looked to the assembly rather with apprehensions of evil than with hope. But any great immediate advantage, any rapid acceleration of the deliverance of Spain, ought not to have been expected, unless it was supposed that the Spanish deputies would proceed like the French national convention, and that a revolutionary delirium might have produced a preternatural and overpowering strength. There was as little reason to look for this, as there could be for desiring it. The Spaniards, more than any other Europeans, are attached to the laws and customs of their country. Spain is to them literally a holy land; and its history, being composed for many ages of a tissue of connected miracles, to the greater part of the people sanctifies its institutions. But unless the Cortes took the executive power into its own hands, and gave the nation a revolutionary impulse, which all circumstances forbade, it might have been known that the benefits to be expected would produce little or no immediate effect upon the operations of the war: if that assembly acted wisely they would be slow, certain, and permanent.
The mode of election secured a fair representation. Some of the members were of the French School of philosophy, and were sufficiently disposed to have followed the Brissotines, both in matters of state and church-policy. Having become converts to republicanism in their youth, and in the season of enthusiasm, they had imbibed a prejudice against England, which did not even now give way, though they hated Buonaparte and the present system of France as bitterly as the great majority of their colleagues. On this point there was but one feeling.
♦First measures of the Cortes.♦
The first measures of the Cortes indicated a sense of their power, and a determination to assert it. Want of precedents, and of experience in the business of a deliberative assembly, were great impediments at their outset; they had hardly decreed the separation of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, before they confounded them in their own practice. Nevertheless this decree was important, for it was a great object to secure the judicial authority from the interference of government: that, breaking, they said, the chains with which the arbitrary power of some centuries had bound the hands of the most respectable ministers, justice might now be administered for the happiness of the people. A commission was appointed to prepare a report upon the best means of speedily terminating ♦Oct. 11.♦ criminal causes. The result was, a decree that an extraordinary visitation of all the prisoners should be made by the respective judicial authorities, and the accused brought to trial with as little delay as possible; and that for the future, the tribunals should transmit, through the Regency, to the Cortes, at intervals of two months, accounts of all the ♦Dec. 14.♦ causes pendent, and the persons in confinement. Llano, a supplementary member for Guatemala, proposed a more effectual remedy; that a committee should be appointed to frame a law to the same effect as the Habeas Corpus of the English.
♦The Duke of Orleans offers his services.
March 4.♦
The Cortes found it necessary also to interfere with the executive. The Duke of Orleans had offered his services to the Spaniards; the former government had not thought proper to accept his offer, but the Regency, a few weeks after their installation, invited him to take the command in Catalonia. A century ago their conduct might have been easily explained, when Lord Molesworth gravely asked, what could be done for generals, in such havoc as was then made of them, if there were not so many younger sons of princes in Germany, who all ran wherever there was a war, to get bread and reputation? But pedigrees and patents of nobility were not considered now as exclusive qualifications for command, and the conduct of the Regency, in this instance, was inconsiderate and hasty. When the duke first offered his services, the Spaniards were in the full tide of success; and he expected, with good reason, that as soon as the French armies were disheartened, they would readily forsake a tyrant, to whom they were not bound by any tie of duty. Affairs bore a very different aspect when the Regency informed him, that the obstacles which had formerly frustrated his desires were now removed; reminded him of the triumphs which his ancestors had won in Catalonia; and called upon him to preserve the verdure of their laurels. The duke was a man of too much honour and courage not to fulfil the offer which he had made in more prosperous times. Accordingly he sailed from Sicily in the beginning of June, touched at Tarragona, and having been received there with the honours due to his rank, continued his voyage to Cadiz, where he landed under a salute of artillery. The Bishop of Orense had not arrived from his diocese to take his seat in the council of Regency when the duke was invited: he therefore was not implicated in this transaction, which was in every respect exceedingly imprudent. There might have been some apparent cause for it, if the duke had been a general of great experience and celebrity, or if he could have assisted Spain either with men, money, or stores; but the Sicilian court had no means at its disposal: it had sent a present of a thousand muskets early in the year, and this was the extent of its ability. On the other hand, the presence of a prince of the Bourbon line, at the head of a Spanish army, would have certainly drawn against it a stronger French force than would otherwise have been employed, the destruction of one branch of that house being of more importance to Buonaparte than the conquest of Spain. That consideration may have had some weight with the Junta of Seville, when upon the first outburst of national feeling, Louis XVIII. wrote to the principality of Asturias, offering with his brother, his nephews, and cousins, to serve in their ranks, unite the Oriflamme with their standards, and call upon the deluded French to rally round it, and restore peace to the world. So many inconveniences were perceived in this proposal, that in conformity to Padre Gil’s advice, no reply was made to it. And though the same objections did not apply to the Duke of Orleans, there was an obvious impolicy in inviting a Frenchman to the command; the central Junta had felt this, and the Cortes also felt it; they held a private sitting upon the subject, and the result was, that the duke re-embarked for Sicily.
♦Second Regency.♦
The Regents did not hold their power many weeks after the meeting of the Cortes. A new Regency was appointed, consisting of Blake, D. Pedro Agar, a naval captain and director-general of the academies of the royal marine guards; and D. Gabriel Ciscar, governor of Carthagena. The reason assigned for this change was, that the members of the former Regency had made known their earnest desire that the weight of the administration, which they had ♦Oct. 28.♦ supported for many months, under such critical circumstances, should be consigned to other hands. Those members were now to experience in their turn the same injustice which they had shown toward the Central Junta. Like them, they had disappointed the hopes of the people; and like them, more from the inevitable course of things than by their own misconduct. They were not, however, treated with equal ♦Nov. 28.♦ cruelty. A decree was passed, that they should give in an account of their administration to the Cortes within two months, with a view to some future process. Shortly afterwards, in consequence of a secret sitting, they were ordered to retire from the ♦Dec. 17.♦ Isle of Leon, and the place where each was to reside was appointed, after the arbitrary manner of the old court. Blake and Ciscar being absent, the Marquis del Palacio and D. Jose Maria Puig were appointed to act in their place till they should arrive. When ♦Oct. 28.♦ they were called upon to take the oath, the same difficulty was found as in the case of the Bishop of Orense. The marquis being asked if he swore ♦Palacio refuses the oath.♦ to obey the decrees, laws, and constitutions of the Cortes, replied, Yes, but without prejudice to the many oaths of fidelity which he had taken to Ferdinand VII. The president informed him, that he must take the oath simply, or refuse it. The marquis requested that he might be allowed to explain himself. Upon this it was agreed that he should be heard after his colleagues had been sworn; and that business having been completed, he entered into an explanation, saying, “he was ready to take the oath in the form prescribed, provided those deputies who were versed in theological points would assure him that he might do it without scruple. All that he meant was more to ensure the purport of the oath itself, conformably to those which he had so often taken to Ferdinand; and he had never doubted the sovereignty of the nation assembled in its Cortes.”
♦Tyrannical conduct of the Cortes towards him.♦