Letters from Spain

At the period which I have just mentioned, the Nacimientos were made a pretext for collecting a large party, and passing several nights in dancing, and some of the national amusements described in the article of Carnival. The rooms being illuminated after sunset, not only the friends of the family were entitled to enjoy the festivities of the evening, but any gentleman giving his name at the door, might introduce one or more ladies, who, if but known by sight to the master of the house, would be requested to join in the amusements which followed. These were singing, dancing, and not unfrequently, speeches, taken from the old Spanish plays, and known by the name of Relaciones. Recitation was considered till lately as an accomplishment both in males and females; and persons who were known to be skilled in that art, stood up at the request of the company to deliver a speech with all the gesticulation of our old school of acting, just as others gratified their friends by performing upon an instrument. A slight refreshment of the Christmas cakes, called Oxaldres, and sweet wines or home-made liqueurs, was enough to free the house from the imputation of meanness: thus mirth and society were obtained at a moderate expense. But the present Nacimientos seldom afford amusement to strangers; and with the exception of singing carols to the sound of the zambomba, little remains of the old festivities.

I must not, however, omit a description of the noisy instrument whose no less sounding name I have just mentioned. It is general in most parts of Spain at this season, though never used at any other. A slender shoot of reed (Arundo Donax) is fixed in the centre of a piece of parchment, without perforating the skin, which, softened by moisture, is tied, like a drum-head, round the mouth of a large earthen jar. The parchment, when dry, acquires a great tension, and the reed being slightly covered with wax, allows the clenched hand to glide up and down, producing a deep hollow sound of the same kind as that which proceeds from the tambourine when rubbed with the middle finger.

The church service on Christmas Eve begins at ten in the night, and lasts till five in the morning. This custom is observed at every church in the town; nor does their number, or the unseasonableness of the hour, leave the service unattended in any. The music at the Cathedral is excellent. It is at present confined to part of the Latin prayers, but was, till within a few years, used in a species of dramatic interludes in the vulgar tongue, which were sung, not acted, at certain intervals of the service. These pieces had the name of Villancicos, from Villano, a clown; shepherds and shepherdesses being the interlocutors in these pastorals. The words, printed at the expense of the Chapter, were distributed to the public, who still regret the loss of the wit and humour of the Swains of Bethlehem.

The custom of the country requires a formal call between Christmas and Twelfth-day, on all one’s acquaintance; and tables are placed in the house squares, or Patios, to receive the cards of the visiters. Presents of sweetmeats are common between friends; and patients send to their medical attendants the established acknowledgment of a turkey; so that Doctors in great practice open a kind of public market for the disposal of their poultry. These turkeys are driven in flocks by gipseys, who patiently walk in the rear of the ungovernable phalanxes, from several parts of Old Castile, and chiefly from Salamanca. The march which they perform is of no less than four hundred miles, and lasts about one half of the year. The turkeys, which are bought from the farmers mere chickens, acquire their full growth, like your fashionables, in travelling, and seeing the world.

LETTER X

Madrid, 1807.

My removal to this capital has been sudden and unexpected. My friend Leandro, from whom I am become inseparable, was advised by his physicians to seek relief from a growing melancholy—the effect of a mortal aversion to his professional duties, and to the intolerant religious system with which they are connected—in the freedom and dissipation of the court; and I found it impossible to tear myself from him.

The journey from Seville to Madrid, a distance of about two hundred and sixty English miles, is usually performed in heavy carriages drawn by six mules, in the space of from ten to eleven days. A party of four persons is formed by the coachman, (Mayoral) who fixes the day and hour for setting out, arranges the length of the stages, prescribes the time for getting up in the morning, and even takes care that every passenger attends mass on a Sunday, or any other church festival during the journey. As it was, however, of importance not to delay my friend’s removal from Seville, we chose the more expensive conveyance by posting, and having obtained a passport, set off in an open and half foundered chaise—the usual vehicles till within thirty miles of Madrid.

You will form some idea of our police and government, from the circumstance of our being obliged to take our passport, not for Madrid, but Salamanca, in order thus to smuggle ourselves into the capital. The minister of Gracia y Justicia, or home department, Caballero, one of the most willing and odious instruments of our arbitrary court, being annoyed by the multitude of place-hunters, whom we denominate Pretendientes, who flocked to Madrid from the provinces; has lately issued an order forbidding all persons whatever, to come to the capital, unless they previously obtain a royal license. To await the King’s pleasure would have exposed us to great inconvenience, and probably to a positive denial. But as the minister’s order was now two or three months old, a period at which our court-laws begin to grow obsolete, and we did not mean to trouble his excellency; we trusted to luck and our purse, as to any little obstacles which might arise from the interference of inferior officers.

I shall not detain you with a description of our journey—the delays at the post-houses—our diminished haste at Valdepeñas for the sake of its delicious wine just as it is drawn from the immense earthen-jars, where it is kept buried in the ground; and, finally, the ugly but close and tight post-chaises drawn by three mules a-breast, which are used from Aranjuez to Madrid. I do not love description, probably because I cannot succeed in it. You will, therefore, have the goodness to apply for a picture of this town (for I wish you to remark that it is not reckoned among our cities) in Burgoing, Townsend, or some other professed traveller. My narrative shall, as hitherto, be limited to what these gentlemen were not likely to see or understand with the accuracy and distinctness of a native.

The influence of the court being unlimited in Spain, no object deserves a closer examination from such as wish to be acquainted with the moral state of this country. I must, therefore, begin with a sketch of the main sources of that influence, carefully excluding every report which has reached me through any but the most respectable channels, or an absolute notoriety. The fountain-head of power and honours among us has, till lately, been the Queen, a daughter of the late Duke of Parma, a very ugly woman, now fast approaching old age, yet affecting youth and beauty. She had been but a short time married to the present King, then Prince of Asturias, when she discovered a strong propensity to gallantry, which the austere and jealous temper of her father-in-law Charles III. was scarcely able to check. Her husband, one of those happy beings born to derive bliss from ignorance, has ever preserved a strong and exclusive attachment to her person. This attachment, combined with a most ludicrous simplicity, closes his mind against every approach of suspicion.

The first favourite of the Princess that awakened the King’s jealousy, was a gentleman of his son’s household, named Ortíz. Concerned for the honour of the Prince, no less than for the strictness of morals, which, from religious principles, he had anxiously preserved in his court; he issued an order, banishing Ortíz to one of the most distant provinces. The Princess, unable to bear this separation, and well acquainted with the character of her husband, engaged him to obtain the recall of Ortíz from the King. Scrupulously faithful to his promise, the young Prince watched the first opportunity to entreat his father’s favour, and falling upon his knees, asked the boon of Ortíz’s return, gravely and affectingly urging that “his wife Louisa was quite unhappy without him, as he used to amuse her amazingly.” The old King, surprised and provoked by this wonderful simplicity, turned his back upon the good-natured petitioner, exclaiming: Calla, tonto! Déxalo irse: Qué simple que eres! “Hold your tongue, booby! Let him go: What a simpleton thou art!”

Louisa deprived, however, of her entertaining Ortíz, soon found a substitute in a young officer named Luis de Godoy. He was the eldest of three brothers, of an ancient but decayed family, in the province of Estremadura, who served together in the Horse-Guards, a corps exclusively composed of gentlemen, the lowest ranks being filled by commissioned officers. Scarcely had this new attachment been formed, when the old King unmercifully nipped it in the bud, by a decree of banishment against Don Luis. The royal order was, as usual, so pressing, that the distressed lover could only charge his second brother Manuel with a parting message, and obtain a promise of his being the bearer of as many tokens of constancy and despair, as could be safely transmitted by the post.

It is a part of the cumbrous etiquette of the Spanish Court to give a separate guard to every member of the royal family, though all live within the King’s palace; and to place sentinels with drawn swords at the door of every suite of apartments. This service is performed without interruption day and night, by the military corps just mentioned. Manuel Godoy did not find it difficult to be on duty in the Prince’s guard, as often as he had any letter to deliver. A certain tune played on the flute, an instrument with which that young officer used to beguile the idle hours of the guard, was the signal which drew the Princess to a private room, to which the messenger had secret, but free access.

There is every reason to believe that Luis’s amorous dispatches had their due effect for some weeks, and that his royal mistress lived almost exclusively upon their contents. Yet time was working a sad revolution in the fortunes of the banished lover. Manuel grew every day more interesting, and the letters less so, till the faithless confidant became the most amusing of mortals to the Princess, and consequently a favourite with her good-natured husband.

The death of the old King had now removed every obstacle to the Queen’s gallantries, and Manuel Godoy was rapidly advanced to the highest honours of the state, and the first ranks of the army. But the new sovereign did not yet feel quite easy upon the throne; and the dying King’s recommendation of his favourite Floridablanca, by prolonging that minister’s power, still set some bounds to the Queen’s caprices. Charles IV., though perfectly under his wife’s control, could not be prevailed upon to dismiss an old servant of his father without any assignable reason; and some respect for public opinion, a feeling which seldom fails to cast a transient gleam of hope on the first days of every reign, obliged the Queen herself to employ other means than a mere act of her will in the ruin of the premier. He might, however, have preserved his place for some time, and been allowed to retire with his honours, had not his jealousy of the rising Godoy induced him to oppose the tide of favour which was now about to raise that young man to a Grandeeship of the first class. To provide for the splendour of that elevated rank, the Queen had induced her husband to bestow upon Godoy a princely estate, belonging to the crown, from which he was to take the title of the Duke de la Alcúdia. Floridablanca, either from principle, or some less honourable motive, thought it necessary to oppose this grant as illegal; and having induced the King to consult the Council of Castille upon that point, endeavoured to secure an answer agreeable to his wishes, by means of a letter to his friend the Count Cifuentes. Most unluckily for the minister, before this letter arrived from San Ildefonso, where the court was at that time, the president was seized with a mortal complaint, and the dispatches falling into the hands of his substitute Cañada, were secretly transmitted to the Queen. It is needless to add, that the report of the council was favourable, that Godoy was made Duke de la Alcúdia, and that both he and the Queen were now wholly bent upon their opposer’s ruin.

During Floridablanca’s influence with the King, a manuscript satire had been circulated against that minister, in which he was charged with having defrauded one Salucci, an Italian banker connected with the Spanish Government. Too conscious, it should seem, of the truth of the accusation, Floridablanca suspected none but the injured party of being the contriver and circulator of the lampoon. The obnoxious composition was, however, written in better Spanish than Salucci could command, and the smarting minister could not be satisfied without punishing the author. His spies having informed him that the Marquis de Manca, a man of wit and talent, was intimate at Salucci’s, he had no need of farther proofs against him. The banker was immediately banished out of the kingdom, and the poet confined to the city of Burgos, under the inspection and control of the civil authorities.

But the time was now arrived when these men, who were too well acquainted with the state of Spain to look for redress at the hands of justice, were to obtain satisfaction from the spirit of revenge which urged the Queen to seek the ruin of her husband’s minister. Charles IV. being informed of Floridablanca’s conduct towards Salucci and Manca, the last was recalled to Court. His enemy’s papers, including a large collection of billets-doux, were seized and put into the Marquis’s hands, to be used as documents in a secret process instituted against the minister: who, according to his own rules of justice, was, in the mean time, sent a prisoner to the fortress of Pamplona. His confinement, however, was not prolonged beyond the necessary time to ruin him in the King’s opinion; and upon the marriage of two of the Royal Princesses, an indulto, or pardon, was issued, by which, though declared guilty of embezzling forty-two millions of reals, he was enlarged from his close confinement, and allowed to reside at Murcia, his native town.

I am not certain, however, whether Floridablanca’s dismissal did not shortly precede his accusation by Manca, as the immediate consequence of his efforts to make the King join the coalition against France after the death of Louis XVI. Charles IV. was, it seems, the only sovereign in Europe, who felt no alarm at the fate of the unfortunate Louis; and had more at heart the recollection of a personal slight from his cousin, than all the ties of common interest and blood. Charles had learned that, on his accession to the throne of Spain, the usual letter of congratulation being presented for signature to Louis, that monarch humourously observed, that he thought the letter hardly necessary, “for the poor man,” he said, “is a mere cypher, completely governed and henpecked by his wife.” This joke had made such a deep impression on the King, as to draw from him, when Louis was decapitated, the unfeeling and almost brutal remark that “a gentleman so ready to find fault with others, did not seem to have managed his own affairs very well.” The Count de Aranda, who, in the cabinet councils, had constantly voted for peace with France, was appointed, in February, 1792, to succeed Floridablanca. But the turn of affairs, and the pressing remonstrances of the allied sovereigns, altered the views of Charles; and having, at the end of seven months, dismissed Aranda with all the honours of his office, Godoy, then Duke of Alcúdia, was appointed his successor to begin hostilities against France. I need not enter into a narrative of that ill-conducted and disastrous war. An appearance of success cheered up the Spaniards, always ready to fight with their neighbours on the other side of the Pyrenees. But the French armies having received reinforcements, would have soon paid a visit to Charles at Madrid, if his favourite minister, with more address than he ever discovered in his subsequent management of political affairs, had not concluded and ratified the peace of Basle.

The fears of the whole country at the progress of the French arms had been so strong, that peace was hailed with enthusiasm; and the public joy, on that occasion, would have been unalloyed but for the extravagant rewards granted to Godoy for concluding it. A new dignity above the grandeeship was created for him alone, and, under the title of Prince of the Peace, Godoy was placed next in rank to the Princes of the royal blood.

There was but one step in the scale of honours which could raise a mere subject higher than the Queen’s favour had exalted Godoy—a marriage into the royal family. But the only distinction which love seemed not blind enough to confer on the favourite, he actually owed to the jealousy of his mistress.

Among the beauties whom the hope of the young minister’s favour drew to Madrid from all parts of Spain, there was an unmarried lady of the name of Tudó, a native of Malaga, whose charms both of person and mind would have captivated a much less susceptible heart than Godoy’s. From the moment she was presented by her parents, La Tudó (we are perfectly unceremonious in naming ladies of all ranks) obtained so decided a supremacy above the numerous sharers in the favourite’s love, that the Queen, who had hitherto overlooked a crowd of occasional rivals, set her face against an attachment which bid fair to last for life. It had, indeed, subsisted long enough to produce unquestionable proof of the nature of the intimacy, in a child whose birth, though not blazoned forth as if sanctioned by public opinion, was not hidden with any consciousness of shame. A report being circulated at court, that the Prince of the Peace was secretly married to La Tudó, the Queen, in a fit of jealousy, accused him to the King as guilty of ingratitude, in thus having allied himself to a woman of no birth, without the slightest mark of deference to his royal benefactors. The King, whose fondness for Godoy had grown above his wife’s control, seemed inclined to discredit the story of the marriage; but, being at that time at one of the royal country residences called Sitios—the Escurial, I believe, where the ministers have apartments within the palace; the Queen led her husband through a secret passage, to a room where they surprised the lovers taking their supper in a comfortable tête-à-tête.

The feelings excited by this sight must have been so different in each of the royal couple, that one can scarcely feel surprised at the strangeness of the result. Godoy had only to deny the marriage to pacify the King, whose good nature was ready to make allowances for a mere love-intrigue of his favourite. The Queen, hopeless of ever being the exclusive object of the gallantries of a man to whom she was chained by the blindest infatuation, probably feared lest the step she had taken should tear him away from her presence. A slave to her vehement passions, and a perfect stranger to those delicate feelings which vice itself cannot smother in some hearts, she seemed satisfied with preventing her chief rival from rising above her own rank of a mistress; and, provided the place was occupied by one to whom her paramour was indifferent, wished to see him married, and be herself the match-maker.

The King’s late brother, Don Luis, who, in spite of a cardinal’s hat, and the archbishoprick of Seville, conferred on him before he was of age to take holy orders, stole a kind of left-handed marriage with a Spanish lady of the name of Vallabríga; had left two daughters and a son, under the guardianship of the archbishop of Toledo. Though not, hitherto, allowed to take their father’s name, these children were considered legitimate; and it is probable that the King had been desirous of putting them in possession of the honours due to their birth, long before the Queen proposed the eldest of her nieces both as a reward for Godoy’s services, and a means to prevent in future such sallies of youthful folly as divided his attention between pleasure and the service of the crown. These or similar reasons (for history must content herself with conjecture, when the main springs of events lie not only behind the curtain of state, but those of a four-post bed) produced in the space of a few weeks, a public recognition of Don Luis’s children, and the announcement of his eldest daughter’s intended marriage with the Prince of the Peace.

The vicious source of Godoy’s unbounded power, the temper of the Court where he enjoyed it, and the crowd of flatterers which his elevation had gathered about him, would preclude all expectation of any great or virtuous qualities in his character. Yet there are facts connected with the beginning of his government which prove that he was not void of those vague wishes of doing good, which, as they spring up, are “choked with cares and riches and pleasures of this world.” I have been assured by an acute and perfectly disinterested observer, whose high rank gave him free access to the favourite, during part of the period when with the title of Duke de la Alcúdia he was at the head of the Spanish ministry, that “there was every reason to believe him active, intelligent, and attentive in the discharge of his duty; and that he was perfectly exempt from all those airs and affectation which men who rise by fortune more than merit, are apt to be justly accused of.” Though, like all the Spanish youth brought up in the military profession, he was himself unlettered, he shewed great respect for talents and literature in the formation of the ministry which succeeded his own; when, from his new rank, and his marriage into the royal family, he was considered above the duties of office.

Saavedra, whom he made first minister of state, is a man of great natural quickness, improved both by reading and the observation of real life; but so irresolute of purpose, so wavering in judgment, so incapable of decision, that, while in office, he seemed more fit to render public business interminable, than to direct its course in his own department. Jovellanos, appointed to be Saavedra’s colleague, is justly considered as one of the living ornaments of our literature. Educated at Salamanca in one of the Colegios Mayores, before the reform which stripped those bodies of their honours and influence, he was made a judge in his youth, and gradually ascended to one of the supreme councils of the nation. His upright and honourable conduct in every stage of his life, both public and private, the urbanity of his manners, and the formal elegance of his conversation, render him a striking exemplification of the old Spanish Caballero. With the virtues and agreeable qualities of that character, he unites many of the prejudices peculiar to the period to which it belongs. To a most passionate attachment to the privileges and distinctions of blood, he joins a superstitious veneration for all kinds of external forms. The strongest partialities warp his fine understanding, confining it, upon numerous subjects, to distorted or limited views. As a judge and a man of letters, he was respected and admired by all. As a chief justice in any of our provincial courts of law, he would have been a blessing to the people of his district; while the dignified leisure of that situation would have enabled him to enrich our literature with the productions of his elegant mind. As a minister, however, through whose hands all the gifts of the Crown were to be distributed to a hungry country, where two-thirds of the better classes look up to patronage for a comfortable subsistence, he disappointed the hopes of the nation. At Court, his high notions of rank converted his rather prim manner into downright stiffness; and his blind partiality for the natives of Asturias, his province—probably because he thought them the purest remnant of Gothic blood in Spain—made him the most unpopular of ministers. Instead of promoting the welfare of the nation by measures which gradually, and upon a large scale, might counteract the influence of a profligate Court, he tried to oppose the Queen’s established interference in detail. She once made a personal application to Jovellanos in favour of a certain candidate for a prebendal stall. The minister gave her a flat denial, alleging that the person in question had not qualified himself at any of the universities. “At which of them,” said the Queen, “did you receive your education?”—“At Salamanca, Madam.”—“What a pity,” rejoined she, “that they forgot to teach you manners!”