Among those who aspired to the hand of the Spanish Queen was the Count of Trapani, youngest brother of the King of Naples and the Queen Dowager Christina, and therefore uncle of Queen Isabella. The Queen Dowager opposed his pretensions; the young Queen herself, like the great mass of her people, was also averse from an alliance with him. Another suitor had therefore to be found. England objected to a French prince being chosen, her traditional policy being hostile to whatever might bring France and Spain under one crown. France was willing to respect this objection, provided no prince but a prince of the House of Bourbon was selected as the Queen’s consort. Here came the difficulty. Of those princes his Highness of Lucca was ineligible, because he was married already; the Count of Trapani was ineligible, because the Queen and her subjects disliked him; the sons of the Don Francisco de Paula, her Majesty’s uncle--the Duke of Cadiz and the Duke of Seville--were ineligible because they were both disagreeable to the Queen, and, according to M. Guizot, compromised by their intimacy with the Radicals;[55] and Count Montemolin, the son of Don Carlos, was ineligible, first, because everybody detested him, and, secondly, because he was formally excluded from the succession by the Spanish Constitution. How, then, was the French demand that the Queen of Spain should marry one of the descendants of Philip V. to be satisfied? M. Guizot admitted, in a despatch to M. de St. Aulaire, that these difficulties were incontestable; but he added that the Court of Lisbon was the centre of an intrigue to promote a marriage between the Queen and Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, whose connection with the Royal Family of England rendered him objectionable to France. If this project were further developed, M. Guizot cunningly argued, France would be freed from the pledge she had given to England, and might then demand the hand of the Queen of Spain or her sister the Infanta, for a French prince of the House of Bourbon; in other words, for the Duc de Montpensier. It was on the perfectly gratuitous and absolutely erroneous assumption that England was promoting the candidature of the Prince Leopold, that M. Guizot made ready to play the diplomatic trick which ultimately destroyed the cordial feeling between England and France. Louis Philippe had given his Royal word to Queen Victoria at Eu in September, 1845, that in no case should the Duc de Montpensier marry the Infanta till the Queen of Spain was herself married, and had children who might assure the direct succession to her throne. But suddenly, in the autumn of 1846, it was announced that the Queen of Spain was about to marry her cousin, the Duke of Cadiz, and that her sister, the Infanta, was at the same time to marry the Duc de Montpensier. Technically, it does not appear that England had a right to complain of this double marriage as a breach of the Treaty of Utrecht. It was, no