From the tenth of April, the day of the King’s departure for the north, down to the twenty-ninth there was no serious cause for apprehension. The people were no doubt restless: they could not understand why the French lingered in Madrid instead of marching on Portugal or Gibraltar, according to their expressed intention. Rumours of all kinds, some of which hit off fairly well the true projects of Bonaparte, were current. Murat’s conduct was not calculated to reassure observers; he gave himself the airs of a military governor, rather than those of an officer engaged in conducting an allied army through friendly territory. Some of his acts gave terrible offence, such as that of insisting that the sword of Francis I, taken at Pavia in 1525, the pride for three centuries of the royal armoury, should be given up to him[60]. His call on the Junta for the surrender of the Prince of the Peace, whom he forwarded under French escort to Bayonne, could not fail to be unpopular. But the first real signs of danger were not seen till the twenty-second of April, when Murat, in obedience to his master, intended to publish the protest of Charles IV against his abdication. It was to be presented to the Junta in the form of a letter to its president, Don Antonio. Meanwhile French agents were set to print it: their Spanish underlings stole and circulated some of the proofs. Their appearance raised a mob, for the name of Charles IV could only suggest the reappearance of Godoy. An angry crowd broke into the printing office, destroyed the presses, and hunted away the Frenchmen. Murat at once made a great matter of the affair, and began to threaten the Junta. ‘The army which he commanded could not without dishonouring itself allow disorders to arise: there must be no more anarchy in Spain. He was not going to allow the corrupt tools of the English government to stir up troubles.’ The Junta replied with rather more spirit than might have been expected, asked why an army of 35,000 French troops had now lingered more than a month around the capital, and expressed an opinion that the riot was but an explosion of loyalty to Ferdinand. But they undertook to deal severely with factious persons, and to discourage even harmless assemblies like that of the twenty-second. [60] Napoleon, disapproving of Murat’s action on this point, committed himself to two astounding historical statements. ‘Why trouble about the sword,’ he wrote; ‘Francis I was a Bourbon [!] and he was taken by the Italians, not the Spaniards’ [!!] (_Nap. Corresp._, 13,724).