When, in 1833, at the death of the king, the infanta, Maria Isabella II, was held up for the adoration of the people, most of them fell down and blindly worshipped. The Cortes assembled at Madrid and swore loyalty to the three–year–old queen and her mother, the regent, while the unthinking people went wild in their fervent declarations of devotedness to the heiress of the most corrupt, most intolerant sovereign that had disgraced the throne in many years. But there was an instant protest from a minor portion of the people, led by the late king’s brother, Don Maria Isidor Carlos de Bourbon; not because of the silly spectacle afforded by placing the reins of power in the hands of a puling infant, but because Don Maria Isidor Carlos de Bourbon wanted the throne for himself! In truth, but for King Ferdinand’s “pragmatic sanction,” abrogating the existing “Salic law” (excluding females from the succession), Don Carlos had every reason to believe he would himself be king. He was born in 1788, or a year before the “pragmatic sanction” was put forth, he was next in line of the male successors, and he meant to “succeed.” So he started a revolution, and thus began, in 1833, the first of that long series of battles, massacres, outrages, known collectively as the “Carlist Wars.” Don Carlos had been banished by Ferdinand to Portugal for venturing to protest against the very thing that happened later, and after the king’s death he came over the frontier between France and Spain with a small army. His chief adherents were found in the country of the Basques, those brave, peculiar, liberty–loving but bigoted people in the north of Spain, who have dwelt from time immemorial in their beautiful mountain valleys, and whom we have noted at the very beginnings of Spanish history as strenuous opponents of oppression and defenders of their rights, real or imaginary.