The war was popular.  All classes contended to make the greatest sacrifices to aid the Government.  Men and money came in abundantly, and before long three army corps crossed the Pyrenees into French territory ...  They had to recross the next year, followed by the victorious soldiers of the Republic, who planted the tricolor on some of the principal Spanish frontier fortresses.  Then the peace of Basilia was signed, and, as one of the conditions of that peace, Spain ceded to France the part she still held of Santo Domingo.

From this period Charles, in the terror inspired by the excesses of the Revolution and the probable fear for his own safety, forgot that he was a Bourbon and began to seek an alliance with the executioners of his family.  As a result, the treaty of San Ildefonso was signed (1796).  Spain became the enemy of England, and the first effects thereof which she experienced were the bombardment of Cadiz by an English fleet, the loss of the island of Trinidad, and the siege of Puerto Rico by Abercrombie.

Spain also became the willing vassal, rather than the ally, of the military genius whom the French Revolution had revealed, and obeyed his mandates without a murmur.  In 1803 Napoleon demanded a subsidy of 6,000,000 francs per month as the price of Spain’s neutrality, but in the following year he insisted on the renewal of the alliance against England (treaty of Paris, 1804).  The total destruction of the Spanish fleet at the battles of Saint Vincent and Trafalgar was the result.

Godoy, who in his ambitious dreams had seen a crown and a throne somewhere in Portugal to be bestowed on him by the man to whose triumphal car he had attached his king and his country, began to suspect Napoleon’s intentions.

Seeing the war-clouds gather in the north of Europe, he thought that the coalition of the powers against the tyrant was the presage of his downfall, and he now hastened to send an emissary to England.

The war-clouds burst, and from amid the thunder and smoke of battle at Jena, Eylau, and Friedland, the victor’s figure arose more imperious than ever.  All the crowned heads of Europe but one[47] hastened to do him homage, among them Charles IV of Spain and the Prince of Asturias, his son.

The next step in the grand drama that was being enacted was the occupation of Spanish territory by what Bonaparte was pleased to call an army of observation.  This time Godoy’s suspicions became confirmed, and to save the royal family he counsels the king to withdraw to Andalusia.  Ferdinand conspires to dethrone his father, the people become excited, riots take place, Godoy’s residence in Aranguez is attacked by the mob, and the king abdicates in favor of his son.  Napoleon himself now lands at Bayona.  Charles and his son hasten thither to salute Europe’s master, and, after declaring that his abdication was imposed on him by violence, the king resumes his crown and humbly lays it at the feet of the arbiter of the fate of kings, who stoops to pick it up only to offer it to his brother Louis, who refuses it.  Then he places it on the head of his younger brother Joseph.