Spain was in a state of chaos. Joseph was not without Spanish adherents, and there was no leader, no legitimate head to give constitutional stamp to the acts of the protesting people, who without the usual formalities convoked the Cortes. But while they were groping after reforms, and while Lord Wellington was driving back the French, Napoleon had met his reverse at Moscow, and a "War of Liberation" had commenced in Germany. The grasp upon the Spanish throne relaxed. The captive King had permission to return, and the reign of Joseph was ended by his ignominious flight from the kingdom, with one gold-piece in his pocket (1814). CHAPTER XXII. The decade between 1804 and 1814 had been very barren in external benefits to Spain, with her King held in "honorable captivity" in France, and the obscure Joseph abjectly striving to please not his subjects, but his august brother Napoleon. But in this time of chaos, when there was no Bourbon King, no long-established despotism to stifle popular sentiment, the unsuspected fact developed that Spain had caught the infection of freedom. [Illustration: From the painting by C. Alvarez Dumont. Heroic Combat in the Pulpit of the Church of St. Augustine, Saragossa, 1809.] When, as we have seen, the Cortes assumed all the functions of a government, that body (in 1812) drew up a new Constitution for Spain. So completely did this remodel the whole administration, that the most despotic monarchy in Europe was transformed into the one most severely limited. Great was the surprise of Ferdinand VII. when, in 1814, he came to the throne of his ejected father Carlos IV., to find himself called upon to reign under a Constitution which made Spain almost as free as a republic. He promulgated a decree declaring the Cortes illegal and rescinding all its acts, the Constitution of 1812 included. Then when he had re-established the Inquisition, which had been abolished by the Cortes, when he had publicly burned the impertinent Constitution, and quenched conspiracies here and there, he settled himself for a comfortable reign after the good old arbitrary fashion. The Napoleonic empire having been effaced by a combined Europe, Ferdinand's Bourbon cousins were in the same way restoring the excellent methods of their fathers in France. But there was a spirit in the air which was not favorable to the peace of Kings. On the American coast there stood "Liberty Enlightening the World!" A growing, prosperous republic was a shining example of what might be done by a brave resistance to oppression and a determined spirit of independence. The pestilential leaven of freedom had been at work while monarchies slept in security. Ferdinand discovered that not only was there a seditious sentiment in his own kingdom, but every one of his American colonies was in open rebellion, and some were even daring to set up free governments in imitation of the United States.