misery which darkened the close of George III.'s reign. FOOTNOTES: [68] Lord Londonderry in Twiss, _Life of Eldon_, ii., 432. [69] Harriet Martineau, _History of England During the Thirty Years' Peace_, i., 274. [70] _Letters to Copleston_, p. 295. [71] Cunningham, _Growth of English Industry and Commerce in Modern Times_ (edit. 1903), pp. 756-59. Compare Dicey, _Law and Opinion in England_, pp. 190-200. [72] The graphic description of this crisis in Harriet Martineau's _History of the Thirty Years' Peace_, i., 355-66, deserves to be studied and remembered as a masterpiece of social portraiture by a contemporary. [73] Cunningham, _Growth of English Industry and Commerce in Modern Times_, p. 823. [74] Walpole's _History of England_, vol. ii., p. 187. CHAPTER X. PROBLEMS IN SOUTHERN EUROPE. The events of the year 1820 subjected the European concert to a severe strain. An insurrection broke out in Spain on January 1, and on March 9 the king was forced to swear fidelity to the obsolete constitution of 1812. The result was to plunge the country into disorder, as both the clerical party and the extreme revolutionists refused to accept the constitution. Meanwhile the assassination by a working man of the Duke of Berry, who died on February 14, 1820, had occasioned a new royalist reaction in France, and had increased the general fear of the revolutionary party. The Bourbon succession had seemed to depend on his life, for his son, the Count of Chambord, was posthumous. On receiving the news of the Spanish revolution the tsar, already tiring of his liberal enthusiasm, fell back on his scheme for exercising paternal discipline over Europe. He proposed in April that the ambassadors at Paris should issue a joint remonstrance requiring the Spanish cortes to disavow the revolution, and to enact severe laws against sedition. Failing this, he proposed joint intervention, and offered for his own part to send an army of 15,000 men through North Italy and southern France to co-operate in the suppression of the revolution. To this Castlereagh replied that England would never consent to a joint intervention in Spain. Metternich was too much displeased with the Russian encouragement of secret societies in Italy to wish to see Russian troops in that country, and both Castlereagh and Metternich wished to keep Spain free from French influence. In the face of this opposition Russia could not, and France would not, do anything, and all thought of intervention was postponed. It was the last time that Castlereagh was able to assert the principle of non-intervention without breaking up the European concert. [Pageheading: _REVOLUTIONS IN SOUTHERN EUROPE._]