an action which Napoleon certainly contemplated; but on the other hand Denmark now allied herself with him; and while in Lombardy he heard of the triumphant entry of his troops into Lisbon—an event which seemed to prelude his domination in the Iberian Peninsula and thereafter in the Mediterranean.
The occupation of Lisbon, which led on to Napoleon’s intervention in Spanish affairs, resulted naturally from the treaty of Tilsit. The coercion of England’s oldest ally had long been one of Napoleon’s most cherished aims, and was expressly provided for in that compact. To this scheme he turned with a zeal whetted by consciousness of his failure respecting the Danish fleet. On the 27th of October 1807 he signed with a Spanish envoy at Fontainebleau a secret convention with a view to the partitioning of Portugal between France and Spain. Another convention of the same date allowed him to send 28,000 French troops into Spain for the occupation of Portugal, an enterprise in which a large Spanish force was to help them; 40,000 French troops were to be cantonned at Bayonne to support the first corps. Seeing that Godoy, the all-powerful minister at Madrid, had given mortal offence to Napoleon early in the Prussian campaign of 1806 by calling on Spain to arm on behalf of her independence, it passes belief how he could have placed his country at the mercy of Napoleon at the end of the year 1807. The emperor, however, successfully gilded the hook by awarding Algarve, the southern province of Portugal, to Godoy. The north of Portugal was to go to the widow of the king of Etruria (a Spanish Infanta); her realm now passing into the hands of Napoleon. Thus Portugal in 1807, like Venice in 1797, was to provide the means for widely extending the operations of his statecraft.
The natural result followed. Portugal was easily overrun by the allies; but Junot’s utmost efforts failed to secure the Portuguese fleet, which, under the protection of a British squadron, sailed away to Brazil with the royal family, the ministers and chief grandees of the realm. In other respects all went well. The French reinforcements which entered Spain managed to secure some of the strongholds of the northern provinces; and the disgraceful feuds in the royal family left the country practically at the emperor’s mercy.
The situation was such as to tempt Napoleon on to an undertaking on which he had probably set his heart in the autumn of 1806, that of dethroning the Spanish Bourbons and of replacing them by a Bonaparte. Looking at the surface of the life of Spain, he might well believe in its decay. The king, Charles IV., looked on helplessly at the ruin wrought by the subservience of his kingdom to France since 1796, and he was seemingly blind to the criminal intrigues between his queen and the prime minister Godoy. His senile spite vented itself on his son Ferdinand, whose opposition to the all-powerful favourite procured for him hatred at the palace and esteem everywhere else. Latterly the prince had fallen into disgrace for proposing, without the knowledge of Charles IV., to ally himself with a Bonaparte princess. Here, then, were all the conditions which favoured Napoleon’s intervention. He allowed the prince to hope for such a union, and thus enhanced the popularity of the French party at Madrid. Godoy, having the prospect of the Algarve before him, likewise offered no opposition to the advance of Napoleon’s troops to the capital; and so it came about that Murat, named by Napoleon his Lieutenant in Spain, was able to enter Madrid in force and without opposition from that usually clannish populace. The course of events, and especially the anger of the people, now began to terrify Charles IV., the queen and Godoy. They prepared for flight to America—a step which Napoleon took care to prevent; and a popular outbreak at Aranjuez decided the king then and there to abdicate (19th of March 1808). Murat, now acting very warily in the hope of gaining the crown of Spain for himself, refused to recognize this act as binding, still more so the accession of Ferdinand VII. Charles thereupon declared his abdication to have been made under duress and therefore null and void. The young king, still hoping for Napoleon’s favour, now responded to the suggestion, forwarded by Savary, that an interview with the emperor would clear up the situation. The same prospect was held out to Charles IV., the queen and Godoy, with the result that the rivals for the throne proceeded to the north of Spain to meet the arbiter of their destinies. Napoleon journeyed to Bayonne and remained there. The claimants, each not knowing of the movements of the other, crossed the Pyrenees, and Ferdinand on his arrival at Bayonne found himself to be virtually a prisoner in the hands of the emperor. Napoleon had little difficulty in disposing of the father, whose rage against his son blunted his senses in every other direction. As for Ferdinand, the emperor, on hearing the news of a rising in Madrid on the 2nd of May, overwhelmed him with threats, until he resigned the crown into the hands of his father, who had already bargained it away to Napoleon in return for a pension (5th of May 1808). Princely abodes in France and annuities (the latter to be paid by Spain)—such was the price at which Napoleon bought the crown of Spain and the Indies. Naturally nothing more was heard of the partition of Portugal. According to outward appearance nothing was wanting to complete the emperor’s triumph. He is said to have remarked with an oath after Jena that he would make the Spanish Bourbons pay for their recent bellicose proclamation. If the story is correct, his acts at Bayonne showed once more his custom of biding his time in order to take an overwhelming revenge. That the son of a Corsican notary should have been able to dispose of the Spanish Bourbons in this contemptuously easy way is one of the marvels of history.
But even in this crowning triumph the cramping egotism of his nature—a mental vice which now grew on him rapidly—fatally narrowed his outlook and led him to commit an irretrievable blunder. In his contempt for the rulers of Spain he forgot the Spanish people. In all the genuine letters of the spring of 1808—that of March 29th to Murat, no. 13,696 of the Correspondence, is acknowledged to be a forgery—there is not a sign that he regarded the Spaniards as of any account. On the 27th of March he offered the crown of Spain to his brother Louis, king of Holland, in these terms: “The climate of Holland does not suit you; besides Holland can never rise from its ruins. I think of you for the throne of Spain. You will be the sovereign of a generous nation of eleven millions of men and of important colonies.” On Louis declining the honour, it devolved on Joseph, king of Naples, who vacated that throne for the benefit of Murat—a source of disappointment and annoyance to both. The emperor pushed on his schemes regardless of everything. The first signs of the rising ferment in Spain were wasted on him. He believed that the arrival of so benevolent a king as Joseph, and the promulgation of a number of useful reforms based on those of the French Revolution, would soothe any passing irritation. If not, then his troops could deal with it as Murat had dealt with the men of Madrid on the 2nd of May. He, therefore, pressed on the march of a corps of French and Swiss troops under Dupont towards Cadiz, in order to take possession of the French sail of the line, five in number, which had been in that harbour since Trafalgar. The importance which he then assigned to naval affairs appears in many letters of the months May to June 1808. He intended that Spain should very soon have ready twenty-eight sail of the line—“ce qui est certes bien peu de chose”—so as to drive away the British squadrons, and then he would strike “de grands coups” in the autumn. Evidently then the Spanish dockyards and warships (when vigorously organized) were to count for much in the schemes for assuring complete supremacy in the Mediterranean and the ultimate overthrow of the British and Turkish empires, which he then had closely at heart.
The Spanish rising of May–June 1808 ruined these plans irretrievably. The men of Cadiz compelled the French warships to surrender, and the levies of Andalusia, closing around Dupont, compelled him and some 23,000 men to lay down their arms at Baylen (23rd of July). This disaster, the most serious suffered by the French since Rossbach, sent a thrill through the Napoleonic vassal states and aroused in Napoleon transports of anger against Dupont. “Everything is connected with this event,”
