The French army, as may be supposed, met with no serious opposition. Madrid was easily occupied before the end of May. Cadiz, maintaining a brief but honourable resistance, yielded to a bombardment in September; and Ferdinand VII., reinvested with absolute power over his subjects by foreign artillery and foreign bayonets in October, 1823, immediately unswore all his oaths, and restored all the old tyranny and abuses in Spain. Riego was at once put to death. All Liberals and even _moderados_ were exposed to a sanguinary and relentless persecution. The leaders and their richer and more important partisans were as a rule able to make good their flight, in many cases to England; but their humbler followers paid the penalty of their liberalism with their lives. The French army of occupation remained in Spain for four years—1823–1827—and Cadiz was not evacuated until 1828. In September, 1824, Charles X. succeeded the more liberal Louis XVIII. on the throne of France, and George Canning, unable to compel or persuade the French to leave the Spanish people to themselves in Spain, “called a new world into existence to restore the balance in the old,” and recognized the independence of the Spanish American colonies. In 1829 Ferdinand VII. married, as his fourth wife, Maria Christina of Naples, a sister of the Duchesse de Berri; {3} and on October 10, 1830, the queen gave birth to a daughter, who was christened Isabella, afterwards so well known as Isabel II. of Spain. {4a} The king, her father, immediately issued a Pragmatic Sanction, declaring the Salic law to be of no effect in Spain; and the young princess was accordingly recognized as heir-apparent to the crown. A formal protest was made by King Ferdinand’s younger brother, Don Carlos, who found himself thus excluded from the succession, against this decree, and who soon afterwards quitted Spain. On Michaelmas Day, 1833, Ferdinand VII. died, and his daughter Isabella was immediately proclaimed queen, as Isabel II., with her mother Doña Cristina as regent, {4b} of Spain throughout Spain. Don Carlos, who had taken refuge in Portugal, found himself unable to cross the frontier, and was constrained to make his way from Lisbon by sea to London, and thence by way of France into the Basque provinces, where he arrived in September, 1834. Thus were founded the Carlist and the _Cristino_ parties; and on the side of the former were at once ranged all the Basques, and the representatives of the absolutist and ultra-clerical party throughout Spain. Don Carlos himself, unable to cross the frontier, {4c} made his way from Portugal to England, and thence through France (May, 1834), where his pretensions were not unfavourably regarded, into Northern Spain (September, 1834). Mendizabal, a Cadiz Jew of much financial skill, who had acquired great experience and some consideration in England during his exile from 1823 to 1833, became Prime Minister of the Regency. PART II.