[143] See Villa Urrutia, i. p. 13 and ii. pp. 355-9. Wellington was strongly of opinion that a royal regent at Cadiz would be most undesirable. The personal influences of a _camarilla_, surrounding an ambitious but incapable female regent, would add another difficulty to the numerous problems of the relations between England and Spain, which were already sufficiently tiresome. This deliberate humiliation of the monarchy, by clauses accentuated by phrases of insult, which angered, and were intended to anger, the _Serviles_, was only accomplished after long debate, in which protests of the most vigorous sort were made by many partisans of the old theory of Spanish absolutism. Some spoke in praise of the Salic Law, violated by the mention of Carlotta as heiress to the throne, others (ignoring rumours as to his paternity) defended Don Francisco, as having been by his youth exempted from the ignominies of Bayonne, and dwelt on the injustice of his fate. But the vote went against them by a most conclusive figure. The majority in the Cortes, which made such parade of its political liberalism, did not pursue its theories into the realm of religion. After reading its fulsome declarations in favour of freedom, it is astounding to note the black intolerance of the clause which declares not only, as might naturally be expected, that ‘the religion of the Spanish nation is, and ever shall be, the Catholic Apostolic Roman, the one true faith,’ but that ‘the nation defends it by wise laws, _forbidding the exercise of any other_.’ Schism and unorthodoxy still remained political as well as ecclesiastical crimes, no less than in the time of Philip II. The Liberals, despite of murmurs by the _Serviles_, refused to recreate the Inquisition, but this was as far as their conception of religious freedom went.