conciliating the absolute Courts, upon which M. Thiers had embarked. He was, consequently, compelled to explain to Lord Granville that he had altogether changed his mind about the expediency of intervention, owing to the wide development of the Carlist insurrection, and to the revolutionary character which the government at Madrid had recently assumed. Louis Philippe expressed himself in more emphatic language. Never, he told the British ambassador, would he allow the French flag to be carried beyond the frontier.[381] The unsatisfactory progress of the war necessarily had a damaging effect upon the position of Mendizabal's Cabinet. Dissensions broke out among his followers, and Christina, who had only accepted him with reluctance, most unwisely decided to dismiss him. She had been prompted to take this disastrous step, Palmerston suspected, by her French advisers.[382] The dissolution of the Cortes, which the change of ministry entailed, was followed by a most suspicious inaction on the part of the Queen's generals. The Carlists, on the other hand, displayed unwonted activity. Insurgent bands penetrated to within twenty miles of La Granja, where the Queen Regent was in residence. Ramon Cabrera, "the Tiger of the Maestrargo," who, as a reprisal for the murder of his mother, refused to recognize the Eliot Convention, desolated Aragon, whilst de Lacy Evans, on July 11, 1836, suffered a reverse at Fuentarabia, on which occasion all the British prisoners were shot, in accordance with the Pretender's decree.[383] Meanwhile, the _Progressistas_ were carrying all before them at the elections, and their victories were followed by grave revolutionary outbreaks. But neither civil disorder nor military disasters could rouse M. Isturiz, the new President of the Council, or his colleagues to action. In the words of Mr. Villiers, "they appeared to consider that calmness in adversity constituted the whole duty of the responsible advisers of the crown."[384]