When therefore Escoiquiz broached the matter to the ambassador in June, 1807, the latter only asked that he should be given full assurance that the Prince of the Asturias would carry out his design. No private interview could be managed between them in the existing state of Spanish court etiquette, and with the spies of Godoy lurking in every corner. But by a prearranged code of signals Ferdinand certified to Beauharnais, at one of the royal levées, that he had given all his confidence to Escoiquiz, and that the latter was really acting in his name. The ambassador therefore undertook to transmit to his master at Paris any document which the prince might entrust to him. Hence there came to be written the celebrated letter of October 11, 1807, in which Ferdinand implored the pity of ‘the hero sent by providence to save Europe from anarchy, to strengthen tottering thrones, and to give to the nations peace and felicity.’ His father, he said, was surrounded by malignant and astute intriguers who had estranged him from his son. But one word from Paris would suffice to discomfit such persons, and to open the eyes of his loved parents to the just grievances of their child. As a token of amity and protection he ventured to ask Bonaparte for the hand of some lady of his august house. He does not seem to have had any particular one in his eye, as the demand is made in the most general terms. The choice would really have lain between the eldest daughter of Lucien Bonaparte, who was then (as usual) on strained terms with his brother, and one of the numerous kinswomen of the Empress Josephine. Godoy was so well served by his numerous spies that the news of the letter addressed to Bonaparte was soon conveyed to him. He resolved to take advantage to the full of the mistake which the prince had made in opening a correspondence with a foreign power behind the back of his father. He contrived an odious scene. He induced the old king to make a sudden descent on his son’s apartments on the night of October 27, with an armed guard at his back, to accuse him publicly of aiming at dethroning or even murdering his parents, and to throw him into solitary confinement. Ferdinand’s papers were sequestrated, but there was found among them nothing of importance except the two documents denouncing Godoy, which the prince had composed or copied out under the direction of his adviser Escoiquiz, and a cypher code which was discovered to have belonged to the prince’s late wife, and to have been used by her in her private letters to her mother, the Queen of Naples.