The Queen was about the most unfit person in Europe to be placed on the throne at the side of such an imbecile husband. She was his first cousin, the daughter of his uncle Don Philip, Duke of Parma-Bourbon on the mother’s side also, for she was the child of the daughter of Louis XV of France. Maria Luisa was self-confident, flighty, reckless, and utterly destitute of conscience of any sort. Her celebrated portrait by Goya gives us at once an idea of the woman, bold, shameless, pleasure-loving, and as corrupt as Southern court morality allows--which is saying a good deal. She had from the first taken the measure of her imbecile husband: she dominated him by her superior force of will, made him her mere mouthpiece, and practically ruled the realm, turning him out to hunt while she managed ministers and ambassadors. For the last twenty years her scandalous partiality for Don Manuel Godoy had been public property. When Charles IV came to the throne Godoy was a mere private in the bodyguard--a sort of ornamental corps of gentlemen-at-arms. He was son of a decayed noble family, a big handsome showy young man of twenty-one--barely able to read and write, say his detractors--but a good singer and musician. Within four years after he caught the Queen’s eye he was a grandee of Spain, a duke, and prime minister! He was married to a royal princess, the Infanta Teresa, a cousin of the King, a mésalliance unparalleled in the whole history of the house of Bourbon. Three years later, to commemorate his part in concluding the disgraceful peace of Basle, he was given the odd title of ‘Prince of the Peace,’ ‘Principe de la Paz’: no Spanish subject had ever before been decorated with any title higher than that of duke[19]. In 1808 he was a man of forty, beginning to get a little plump and bald after so many years of good (or evil) living, but still a fine personable figure. He had stowed away enormous riches, not only from the gifts of the King and Queen, but by the sale of offices and commissions, the taking of all sorts of illicit percentages, and (perhaps the worst symptom of all) by colossal speculations on the stock exchange. A French ambassador recorded the fact that he had to keep the treaty of peace of 1802 quiet for three days after it was signed, in order that Godoy might complete his purchases ‘for a rise’ before the news got about[20]. Godoy was corrupt and licentious, but not cruel or even tyrannical: though profoundly ignorant, he had the vanity to pose as a patron of art and science. His foible was to be hailed as a universal benefactor, and as the introducer of modern civilization into Spain. He endeavoured to popularize the practice of vaccination, waged a mild and intermittent war with the Inquisition, and (a most astonishing piece of courage) tried to suppress the custom of bull-fighting. The last two acts were by far the most creditable items that can be put down to his account: unfortunately they were also