Meantime the contemplated upheaval had occurred in Spain. It is impossible to conceive deeper degradation than that into which the Bourbon monarchy of that country had sunk, and the court had carried the country with it in its debasement. The population had fallen to ten millions, and of a nominal army of a hundred and twenty thousand men not fifty thousand were really effective. The host of office-holders and privileged nobility which battened like leeches on an exhausted treasury was equaled in number only by the clergy, secular and regular, with nuns, novices, and servants, who lived on the revenues of the ecclesiastical estates, and on what could be extorted from an impoverished people. By a terrible form of primogeniture the lands which did not belong to the Church had gradually fallen into the hands of a few owners, who lived in state at Madrid and never laid eyes on their farms, forests, or pastures. The peasantry had no interest to improve what might be taken from them at the death of the proprietor, or by caprice be appraised at a higher value on account of their very efforts toward the amelioration of their lot. The grandees kept gloomy state in vast palaces filled with hordes of idle servants. The remnants from their lavish but poorly served tables supported the crowds of beggars that thronged their gates. Of social life they had little; they were gloomy, lonely, and sullenly indifferent. In their stables stood herds of mules and hung stores of gaudy trappings, but these were used only a few times each year to convey the owners in proper dignity to the great public functions. On such a foundation stood the court: the King, generous-minded but deceived, and jealously attached to the crown servants, impatient of any annoyance, and always declaring a willingness to resign his throne; the Queen, clear-headed and ambitious, but self-indulgent, extravagant, and vicious; Godoy, the Prince of the Peace,--so called from the treaty which he had negotiated at Basel to conclude the French and Spanish revolutionary wars,--the real ruler, soothing the King's sensibilities and gratifying the Queen's passions. To preserve his ascendancy this trimmer had thrown in his lot with Napoleon; but, faithless and perfidious, he would gladly have rejected that or any other protection to fly to one he believed stronger. In any centralized monarchy the administrative law is the backbone; in Spain the administration was feeble and corrupt, for every member of it was engaged in humbly imitating the example of its head, whose house was a depot of plunder, whence toward the close of his career the spoils were transferred on pack-mules by night, no one knew whither. It was said, and many sober men believed it, that Godoy had all the wealth of Spain.