Meanwhile the men of Madrid were not acting with the passivity desired by their philosophizing monarch.  At first they had welcomed Murat as delivering them from the detested yoke of Godoy; but the conduct of the French in their capital, and the detention of Ferdinand at Bayonne, aroused angry feelings, which burst forth on May the 2nd, and long defied the grapeshot of Murat’s guns and the sabres of his troopers.  The news of this so-called revolt gave Napoleon another handle against his guests.  He hurried to Charles and cowed him by well-simulated signs of anger, which that roi faineant thereupon vented on his son, with a passion that was outdone only by the shrill gibes of the Queen.  At the close of this strange scene, the Emperor interposed with a few stern words, threatening to treat the prince as a rebel if he did not that very evening restore the crown to his father.  Ferdinand braved the parental taunts in stolid silence, but before the trenchant threats of Napoleon he quailed, and broke down.

Resistance was now at an end.  On that same night (May 5th) the Emperor concluded with Godoy a convention whereby Charles IV. agreed to hand over to Napoleon the crowns of Spain and the Indies, on consideration that those dominions should remain intact, should keep the Roman Catholic faith to the exclusion of all others, and that he himself should be pensioned off with the estates of Compiegne and Chambord, receiving a yearly income of seven and a half million francs, payable by the French treasury.  The Spanish princes were similarly treated, Ferdinand signing away his rights for a castle and a pension.  To crown the farce, Napoleon ordered Talleyrand to receive them at his estate of Valencay, and amuse them with actors and the charms of female society.  Thus the choicest humorist of the age was told off to entertain three uninteresting exiles; and the ex-Minister of Foreign Affairs, who disapproved of the treachery of Bayonne, was made to appear the Emperor’s accomplice.

Such were the means whereby Napoleon gained the crowns of Spain and the Indies, without striking a blow.

His excuse for the treachery as expressed at the time was as follows:  “My action is not good from a certain point of view, I know.  But my policy demands that I shall not leave in my rear, so near to Paris, a dynasty hostile to mine.”  From this and from other similar remarks, it would seem that his resolve to dethrone the Bourbons was taken while on his march to Jena, but was thrust down into the abyss of his inscrutable will for a whole year, until Junot’s march to Lisbon furnished a safe means for effecting the subjugation of Spain.  This end he thenceforth pursued unswervingly with no sign of remorse, or even of hesitation—­unless we accept as genuine the almost certainly spurious letter of March 29th, 1808.  That letter represents him as blaming Murat for entering Madrid, when he had repeatedly urged him to do so; as asking his advice after he had all along kept him in ignorance as to his aims; and as writing a philosophical homily on the unused energies of the Spanish people, for whom in his genuine letters he expressed a lofty contempt.[192]