The whole of the ‘Affair of the Escurial,’ as the arrest, imprisonment, and forgiveness of Ferdinand came to be called, took place between the twenty-seventh of October and the fifth of November, dates at which it is pretty certain that Napoleon’s unscrupulous designs against the royal house of Spain had long been matured. The open quarrel of the imbecile father and the cowardly son only helped him in his plans, by making more manifest than ever the deplorable state of the Spanish court. It served as a useful plea to justify acts of aggression which must have been planned many months before. If it had never taken place, it is still certain that Napoleon would have found some other plea for sweeping out the worthless house of Bourbon from the Peninsula. He had begun to collect armies at the roots of the Pyrenees, without any obvious military necessity, some weeks before Ferdinand was arrested. When that simple fact is taken into consideration we see at once the hollowness of his plea, elaborated during his exile at St. Helena[30], that it was the disgraceful explosion of family hatred in the Spanish royal house that first suggested to him the idea of removing the whole generation of Bourbons, and giving Spain a new king and a new dynasty. [30] Las Cases, ii. 206. NOTE TO 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