Upon the accession of Ferdinand VII., Jovellanos was, by royal order, released from his confinement, and subsequently elected a Member of the Central Junta. When the French entered Seville in 1810, and the Regency of Cadiz superseded the Junta, he wished to retire to his native place, Gijon, in Asturias. The popular feeling, exasperated by national misfortunes, was now venting itself against the abdicated Government, to whose want of energy the advantages of the French were indiscriminately attributed; and Jovellanos, accidentally detained in the Bay of Cadiz, had the mortification of learning that he was involved in the absurd and shameful suspicion of having shared in the spoil of the Spanish treasury, with which the Central Junta was charged. A dignified appeal to the candour of the nation, which he sent to the Cadiz papers for insertion, was not permitted to see the light--so narrow and illiberal were the views of the Regency--and the feeling and high-minded Castilian had to sail under the intolerable apprehension that some of his countrymen might look upon him as a felon endeavouring to abscond from justice. If any one circumstance could add to the painfulness of Jovellanos’s situation, it was that, while the thoughtlessness or the ingratitude of his countrymen thus involved him in a suspicion of peculation, the state of his finances was such as to have obliged him to accept the sum of little more than one hundred pounds, the savings of many year’s service, which his trusty valet pressed upon him, with tears, that he might defray the expenses of their removal from Seville. After being almost wrecked on the coast of Galicia, Jovellanos was obliged to land at the small town of Muros. Here he had to endure a fresh insult from the petty Junta of that province, by whose orders his papers were minutely searched, and copies taken at the option of an officer sent for that purpose with a military detachment. A temporary retreat of the French from Gijon enabled Jovellanos to revisit his native town; but an unexpected return of the invaders obliged him soon after to take ship with the utmost precipitation. His flight was so sudden that he was actually at sea without having determined upon a place of refuge. Had the venerable and unhappy fugitive listened to the repeated invitations which his intimate friend Lord Holland sent him after the first appearance of danger from the progress of the French, his life might have been prolonged under the hospitable roof of Holland House. But Jovellanos’s notions of public duty were too exalted and romantic: and he would not quit Spain while there was a single spot in the possession of her patriots.