Looking at the general situation of affairs, there can be no doubt that the wisest course for the young king to have taken would have been to concentrate his army, put his person in safety, and ask Napoleon to speak out and formulate his intentions. Instead of taking this, the only manly course, Ferdinand resolved to throw himself on the Emperor’s mercy, as if the fall of Godoy had been Napoleon’s object, and not the conquest of Spain. Although Murat had actually arrived at Madrid on March 23, with a great body of cavalry and 20,000 foot, the King entered the city next day and practically put himself in the hands of the invader. He wrote a fulsome letter to Napoleon assuring him of his devotion, and begging once more for the hand of a princess of his house. His reception in Madrid by the French ought to have undeceived him at once. The ambassador Beauharnais, alone among the foreign ministers, refrained from acknowledging him as king. Murat was equally recalcitrant, and moreover most rude and disobliging in his language and behaviour. The fact was that the Grand-Duke had supposed that he was entering Madrid in order to chase out Godoy and rule in his stead. The popular explosion which had swept away the favourite and the old king, and substituted for them a young and popular monarch, had foiled his design. He did not know how Bonaparte would take the new situation, and meanwhile was surly and discourteous. But he was determined that there should at least be grounds provided for a breach with Ferdinand, if the Emperor should resolve to go on with his original plan. Accordingly, he not only refused to acknowledge the new king’s title, but hastened to put himself in secret communication with the dethroned sovereigns. They were only too eager to meet him halfway, and Maria Luisa especially was half-mad with rage at her son’s success. At first she and her husband thought of nothing but escaping from Spain: they begged Murat to pass on to the Emperor letters in which they asked to be permitted to buy a little estate in France, where they might enjoy his protection during their declining years. But they begged also that ‘the poor Prince of the Peace, who lies in a dungeon covered with wounds and contusions and in danger of death,’ might be saved and allowed to join them, ‘so that we may all live together in some healthy spot far from intrigues and state business[40].’ [40] See the letters of March 22-7 in Toreño, Appendix, i. 436-45.