Palmerston, whilst in opposition, appears to have known nothing of the details of the Spanish marriage question. Until informed of it by Aberdeen, with whom he had a long conversation in the first days of July, he was completely ignorant of Christina's proposal to the Coburgs.[841] From 1834 to 1841, however, he had constantly been engaged in combating the _Moderados_, and, upon his return to office in 1846, he at once reverted to his former policy of favouring the _Progressistas_. Under these circumstances, the candidature of Don Enrique, whose connection with the extreme wing of the Liberal party had been the cause of his exile and disgrace, would naturally enlist his approval and support. Nevertheless, in his first communication to Mr. Bulwer, he expressed no preference for any particular candidate. Spanish affairs, he wrote in his famous despatch of July 19, appeared to be divided into two questions--the marriage of the Queen and the condition of the country. In respect to the first, he had nothing to add to those instructions with which Bulwer had been supplied by his predecessor in office. There were three candidates in the field--Prince Leopold of Coburg and the two sons of Don Francisco de Paula--and "Her Majesty's government could only hope that the choice might fall upon the one most likely to secure the happiness of the Queen and promote the welfare of the Spanish nation." The greater part of the despatch, however, was concerned with the second question--the political condition of the country. On that point, although Lord Palmerston had no particular instructions to give, he had some very severe criticisms to offer. "After a struggle of now thirty-four years' duration for constitutional freedom, Spain," he declared, "finds herself under a system of government almost as arbitrary in practice, whatever it may be in theory, as any which has existed in any former period of her history. She has indeed a Parliament, but all freedom for discussion has been overborne by force. . . . There is, indeed, by law liberty of the press, but that liberty has, by the arbitrary acts of the government, been reduced to the liberty of publishing what may be agreeable to the executive. . . . This system of violence seems, in some degree, to have survived the fall of its author[842] and not to have been as yet entirely abandoned by the more moderate men who have succeeded him in the government. . . . It was certainly not for the purpose of subjecting the Spanish nation to a grinding tyranny that Great Britain entered into the Quadruple Alliance and gave that active assistance, which contributed so materially to the expulsion of Don Carlos from Spain. . . ."[843]