NAPOLEON IN HIS STUDY.
From the painting by Paul Hippolyte Delaroche.
Meantime that intriguer had been making for himself a tortuous approach to royalty. Nothing could more hasten the progress of events than a riot in Madrid. The sensibility of the inhabitants of that city had been rasped by the French occupation; they had seen the departure of their idol with irritation, and had been further exasperated by Godoy's liberation. Murat set fire to the train of their passions first by a new disposition of his forces, which so menaced the place as to make it clear that he was no longer an ally, but a conqueror, and then by the announcement that the infante Don Francisco was to be despatched to Bayonne with his uncle and all the remaining members of the royal family, including the Queen of Etruria and her children. On May second the entire population rose to resist this insolent tyranny. Murat was ready for the move; the conflict was short, but it was sharp, for he lost several hundred soldiers, perhaps half as many as the patriots, in whose ranks some eight hundred fell. The aspirant to royal honors yielded with ostentatious grace to the first representations of the junta, and promised a general amnesty; but he also thought it best to make an example before the eyes of his future subjects, and in spite of his plighted word two hundred of the insurgent patriots were seized and shot. This very day, however, there was pronounced a decree of rude disenchantment for him. It was on May second that Napoleon definitely wrote to him that the kingdom of Spain could not be his; he might have Naples or Portugal. The Emperor was tired of Bayonne, and longed to be back in Paris, where he could be active about the business of perpetuating his empire and his dynasty. The stubborn Ferdinand was therefore summoned once more, and charged with having instigated the upheaval of Madrid. He remained mute for some minutes, and with downcast eyes. "If before midnight," came the cold words of the Emperor, "you have not recognized your father as legitimate king, and notified the fact at Madrid, you will be treated as a rebel." Some declare that there was besides a menace of death.
This ended all resistance. Ferdinand resigned his rights as king into his father's hands, his rights as heir into those of Napoleon. Charles had already assigned his rights as king to the same suzerain.[23] The complacent old man was actually cheerful and joyous, as his entertainer desired he should be; but Ferdinand, in spite of the fact that he was to have the château of Navarre with an income of a million francs, in spite of promises that all the royal family would be liberally pensioned, remained silent and gloomy. Napoleon was not pleased by this behavior, and in commending him to the hospitality of Talleyrand, at the splendid castle of Valençay, declared that his whole character could be summed up in a single word—sullen. Poor Talleyrand! he saw himself condemned to the "honorable mission" of turnkey to a dispossessed monarch whose guard of honor was a troop of eighty mounted police. By the Emperor's grace the young culprit was not to be committed to jail, for he had voluntarily surrendered himself; but Talleyrand was to watch and amuse him, and discover, if possible, some charming and marriageable girl to entangle his affections, so that in her society he might forget the delights of power, while time should weaken the promptings of ambition and revenge. In a few days Charles, Louisa, and Godoy were comfortably installed at Compiègne, while Ferdinand, with his brother, went sullenly away to "visit" at Valençay. The prisoner's character was soon displayed. The day of his arrival at his destination he wrote a cringing letter to Napoleon, and soon after not only congratulated the Emperor on the accession of the King of Naples to the throne he had claimed for his own, but even felicitated Joseph himself on his coronation as Catholic Majesty.
Napoleon knew the mysterious power throughout Europe of that charmed word "legitimacy." He despised the concept that it expressed, while he meant to make the most of its power. Having misunderstood the strength of Spanish patriotism, he now made the blunder of supposing that the Spaniards would receive as a legitimate prince whomsoever he chose to appoint as heir to the "legitimacy" which the Spanish Bourbons had just put into his hands. Louis, moreover, had but recently illustrated the force of a new environment under the notion of legitimacy. Replying to Napoleon's letter of March twenty-fifth, he had flatly refused the Spanish crown, on the ground that he had sworn a solemn oath to the Dutch. Joseph was immediately restored to favor and ordered to Bayonne. He came with apparent alacrity, due, as he claimed, to his desire to free his beloved brother Napoleon from embarrassment. Soon all was apparently ready for his inauguration.
The treaty of Fontainebleau had produced unexpected complications and disastrous results on its political side; the apparently insignificant military clauses had so far been successfully executed. One Spanish army was far away on the Baltic, held under curb by Bernadotte; another had been despatched to western Spain, and had remained there; in the mean while the north and the center of the country were occupied by the French. General Solano had made some movement to lead back his troops into the occupied territory, but was checked in his advance by instructions from the ministers of Charles IV at Madrid. Uncertain as to their powers in a revolutionary crisis, he rendered only a half-obedience; but it was sufficient for Napoleon's object, and there was no body of Spanish troops within striking distance of the capital. Accordingly, when the Spanish notables were summoned to Bayonne, they could not well refuse, and a hundred and fifty of them responded. On June sixth, 1808, the crown of Spain was offered to Joseph by this strange Cortes, and he accepted it. At the same time the new constitution, destined by Napoleon to regenerate the country, was laid before the same body, which discussed and adopted it. In the following month his Catholic Majesty presented himself, with this document and a cabinet of able ministers, to the people of Madrid. Charles IV and his followers found Compiègne too cold, and soon moved, first to Marseilles, then to Italy. Murat became King of Naples. Ferdinand remained contentedly in France, licking the hand which had struck him down. Napoleon returned to Paris, uneasy at the attitude of the Spanish nation, but hoping that local discontent could be smothered by the strong hand, as he had seen it smothered in France, Italy, and the Orient. In this, however, he was to find himself sadly mistaken.
In the story of Spanish degradation at its worst two names must stand together as partners in political crime—those of Godoy and Escoiquiz, who sought to mask their own base ambitions behind the acts of their feeble creatures, the King and Ferdinand respectively. Throughout the whole vile complot moves also the figure of the Queen, whose counterpart must be sought in the annals of witches, furies, and hetæræ. But there were still left uncontaminated eleven millions of the Spanish people. They were indolent by nature, had been fettered both by tradition and by worn-out institutions, and had long groaned in the chains of corrupt administration. With the removal of the Bourbons all these paraphernalia were swept away. The brothers Napoleon believed, and no doubt honestly, that pure and capable administration under a modern system would soon produce order, industry, prosperity, and peace, and that a grateful nation would before long acclaim its preservers, and enroll itself as a devoted ally against the "perfidious and tyrannical" supremacy of Great Britain. It is useless to speculate how far this dream would have been realized but for the utter rottenness of the instruments with which the reformers worked. The King's senility, the Queen's lust, Godoy's greed, Escoiquiz's self-seeking, Ferdinand's unreliability, Murat's ambition, made a poor armory of weapons wherewith to accomplish a beneficent revolution. But the one vital blunder was, after all, not in the use of such tools: it was in the contempt for nationality shown first in making the treaty of Fontainebleau, then in its violation by the subsequent seizure of Portugal, and finally in the occupation of Spain by French troops. Declaring that more had been lost than gained by the events which occurred at Bayonne, Talleyrand says that on one occasion he icily observed to Napoleon that society would pardon much to a man of the world, but cheating at cards never. If this be true, it was a stinging rebuke and one which touched the heart of the whole matter.
To the bloody butchery and broken faith of May second, the day of the Madrid riots, may be attributed the turn of Napoleon's fortunes. How far he was responsible for each of Murat's successive acts cannot be known. With exaggerated conceptions of the Emperor's ubiquity, some attribute every detail in every step to the direct intervention of the master. This is unproved and highly improbable; but the spirit was his, and the use he made of each occasion as it arose is matter of history. The fires of rebellion were lighted thenceforth on every Spanish hearth. Madrid itself was dangerous enough, but Madrid was not Spain, as Paris is France, and the fine local enthusiasm of uncorrupted Spanish blood in every district was awakened into vigorous activity by the news of how faithless had been the French treatment, not only of the royal house, but of the citizens—men and women who were themselves true Spaniards, brothers and sisters of every other Spaniard. This possibility Napoleon had not foreseen, and he did not grasp the fact until long afterward, when years of bitter experience had rolled over his head. The Madrid riots, suppressed by Murat with such terrible bloodshed, were at the time, in Napoleon's mind, only a welcome leverage for moving Ferdinand to compliance, and that was all.
But the city had been full of provincials attracted from all parts of the country to swell the triumph of their idol Ferdinand on his accession to the throne. They returned to their homes inspired with hatred for the French and with bitter scorn for the pretexts on which Spain and Portugal had been torn from a commercial system that brought them considerable prosperity and many comforts, in order that they might be incorporated, under foreign princes, into another system, which not only required serious self-denial, but brought stagnation, disorganization, and the presence of an armed soldiery. One weakness of the Spanish monarchy had always been the absence of centralization, but that very fact had been the national strength in fostering local attachments. Into every city, town, and hamlet, each nourishing its own local pride by local patriotism, came the news from Madrid of how the invaders were trampling not merely upon Spanish rights, but upon every consideration of humanity and good faith. The national will was stirred as never before or since; its expression grew louder every day, until at last the conflagration of devotion to a national cause was kindled far and near. Every community formed its committees, and these organized such neighborhood resistance as was possible, while communicating with other juntas of the same sort to unite their little wars, or guerrillas, into a great combined and vigorous effort wherever the opportunity offered. Under the surface throughout all Spain the fires of resistance began to kindle; the crackling could be heard even while the assembly at Bayonne was adopting the new constitution.[Back to Contents]