CHAPTER II

It may perhaps be worth while to give, for what it is worth, a story which I find in the _Vaughan Papers_ concerning the causes of the final quarrel between Godoy and the Prince of the Asturias, ending in the arrest of the latter and the whole ‘Affair of the Escurial.’ Among Vaughan’s large collection of miscellaneous papers is a long document addressed to him by one of his Spanish friends, purporting to give the secret history of the rupture; the narrative is said by the author to have been obtained from the mouth of the minister Caballero, who would certainly have had the best means of gaining court intelligence in October, 1807. The tale runs as follows: ‘The Queen had for many years been accustomed to make secret visits to Godoy’s palace under cover of the dark, escorted only by a lady-in-waiting and a single body-servant. The sentinels round the palace had been designedly so placed that none of them covered the postern door by which her majesty was accustomed to pass in and out. One night in the autumn of 1807 the whole system of the palace-guards was suddenly changed without the Queen’s knowledge, and when she returned from her excursion she ran into the arms of a corporal’s guard placed in front of the privy entrance. The men, fortunately for Maria Luisa, did not recognize the three muffled figures who fell into their clutches, and allowed them to buy their way in for an _onza d’oro_, or gold twenty-dollar piece. But when Godoy and the Queen talked the matter over, and found that King Charles had ordered the inconvenient alterations in the sentinels, they came to the conclusion that Ferdinand had deliberately induced his father to change the posts of the guard, with the object either of stopping his mother’s exits or of making a public scandal by causing her to be arrested at this strange place and hour. The Prince chanced to have had a private conversation with his father on the previous day, and this might well have been its result.’ In high wrath, the story proceeds, the Queen and the favourite resolved to crush Ferdinand at once, and to get him excluded from the succession. They chose the very inadequate excuse of the letter of the Prince to Napoleon, of which they had perfect cognizance from the very moment of its being written. But, we are assured, they were quite wrong in their suspicions, the originator of the movement of the sentries, which had so disconcerted them, having been Baron Versage, the newly appointed colonel of the Walloon Guards. He had got the King’s leave to rearrange the watching of the palace, and going round it had spied the private door, which he had blocked with a new picquet, quite unaware of the purpose for which it had been used for so many years. This Versage, it will be remembered, served under Palafox, and was killed in Aragon during the first year of the war. I should imagine the whole tale to be an ingenious fiction, in spite of the name of Caballero cited in its support: of that personage Napoleon wrote [_Nap. Corresp._ 14,015] ‘il a une très mauvaise réputation; c’est tout dire que de dire qu’il était l’homme de confiance de la Reine.’ But the story was current in Spain very soon after the alleged adventure took place.

SECTION I: