after the first steps were taken in the affair, it was impossible for me to recede. When I saw those imbeciles quarreling and trying to dethrone each other, I thought I might as well take advantage of it to dispossess a hostile family; but I was not the contriver of their disputes."

Says Napier, "There are many reasons why Napoleon should have meddled with the interior affairs of Spain: there seems to be no good one for his manner of doing it. His great error was that he looked only to the court, and treated the people with contempt. Had he taken care to bring the people and their old government into hostile contact first, instead of appearing as the treacherous arbitrator of a domestic quarrel, he would have been hailed as the deliverer of a great people."

King Joseph reached Madrid on the 20th of July, having lingered for several days at Burgos and Vittoria, and received there the oaths of allegiance from the Council of State, the Council of the Indies, and that of the finances. Eye-witnesses relate that his reception at the capital was melancholy in the extreme: orders had been given that the houses of the inhabitants should be decked out to receive their new sovereign, but very few obeyed the injunction. A crowd assembled to see the brilliant cortège and splendid guards which accompanied the King, but no cheers or applauses were heard. Every countenance bore a mournful expression; hardly any ladies appeared at the windows, notwithstanding the passionate fondness of the Spanish women for such displays. The bells of all the churches rang together, but they resembled rather the dismal toll at the interment of the dead than the merry chime which announces a joyful event to the living.

Finally, on the 24th of July, he was in his own capital

once more proclaimed King of Spain and the Indies, with all the solemnities and the magnificence of display customary upon such occasions, and thus was brought the intrusive monarch and his new subjects into direct

contact.

The new constitution he offered them was admirably calculated to draw forth all the rich resources of the kingdom; compared to the old system it was a blessing, and it would have been received as such under different circumstances, but now arms were to decide its fate, for in every province the cry of war had been raised. In Catalonia, in Valencia, in Andalusia, Estremadura, Aragon, Gallicia, and the Asturias even, through which Joseph had just passed, the people were gathering and fiercely declaring their determination to resist French intrusion.

On his side the French emperor had already sent upwards of 80,000 troops into the northern and central parts of Spain, consisting, unfortunately for his designs, in great part of raw young conscripts, altogether too weak for the arduous work ahead of them, 17,000 already encumbering the hospitals, and totally unable to check the great insurrectionary movements in their initial stages, when, if ever, it might have been possible to repress war.

Charles IV. and Ferdinand VII. having renounced their rights to the throne, and the government, the court and the nobility having declared in favour of the new dynasty, Joseph indulged the hope that the agitation among the masses having neither organization nor intelligent leadership, as he supposed, would soon die out and that the influence of the classes supporting him would have its natural weight upon the lower, ignorant order

of the people. But the new dynasty lacked one element of strength and support, which, in a country like Spain in that day, was vital, and this was THE CHURCH, the inveterate enemy in every country of revolutionary innovation.

The Church in Spain remembering the banishment of the clergy and the confiscation of all ecclesiastical property in France under the decrees of the Revolutionary Convention, and fearing that the success of the new French dynasty, with its new constitution abolishing special rights, privileges and exemptions from taxation, of which the Church enjoyed so large a share, would occasion immense loss to it, instantly resolved to resist it by every means in its power.

The ecclesiastics in Spain were very numerous, amounting, according to the census taken in 1787, to 22,480 parish priests, 43,149 mendicant friars, and 47,710 regular clergy belonging to monasteries or other public religious establishments. The classification of the population was as follows: