This letter to Louis of Holland having been written on the first news of the events at Aranjuez, and four days before Murat began to send in his own plans and the letters of protest from the King and Queen of Spain, it is clear that the Emperor had never any intention of recognizing Ferdinand, and was only playing with him during the month that followed. It was not in mere caution that Beauharnais, the ambassador, and Murat, the military representative, of France, were bidden never to address the new sovereign as king but as Prince of the Asturias, and to act as if Charles IV were still legally reigning until they should have specific directions from Paris[46]. [46] It is scarcely necessary to say that the letter which Napoleon is said to have sent Murat on March 29, and which is printed in the _Mémorial de Ste-Hélène_, is (as Lanfrey and Count Murat have shown) a forgery composed by Napoleon himself long after. It is quite inconsistent with the offer to Louis Bonaparte, and with other letters to Murat of the same week. This state of semi-suspended relations lasted for a fortnight, from Ferdinand’s arrival in Madrid on March 24, down to his departure from it on April 10. They were very uncomfortable weeks for the new king, who grew more alarmed as each day passed without a letter from Paris ratifying his title, while French troops continued to pour into Madrid till some 35,000 were assembled in it and its suburbs. A very few days after his accession Ferdinand was informed that it was probable that Napoleon was intending a visit to Madrid, and was at any rate coming as far as Bayonne. He immediately sent off his eldest brother Don Carlos (the hero of the unhappy wars of 1833-40) to compliment his patron, and if necessary to receive him at the frontier [April 5]. Two days later there appeared in Madrid a new French emissary, General Savary--afterwards Duke of Rovigo--who purported to come as Bonaparte’s harbinger, charged with the duty of preparing Madrid for his arrival. He carried the farce so far that he asked for a palace for the Emperor’s residence, produced trunks of his private luggage[47], and began to refurnish the apartments granted him. That he bore secret orders for Murat we know from the latter’s dispatches, but this was only half his task. Napoleon had confided to him verbal instructions to lure Ferdinand to come out to meet him in the north of Spain, among the French armies massed in Biscay and Navarre--if possible even to get him to Bayonne on French soil. In his St. Helena memoirs Napoleon denies this, and Savary in his autobiography also states that he did not act the part of tempter or make any promises to the young king: the journey to Bayonne, he says, was a silly inspiration of Ferdinand’s own. But neither Bonaparte nor Savary are witnesses whom one would believe on their most solemn oath. The former we know well: the latter had been one of the persons most implicated