The whole enterprise is, indeed, a masterpiece of skill, but a masterpiece marred by ineffaceable stains of treachery.  And at the close of his life, he himself said:  “I embarked very badly on the Spanish affair, I confess:  the immorality of it was too patent, the injustice too cynical, and the whole thing wears an ugly look since I have fallen; for the attempt is only seen in its hideous nakedness deprived of all majesty and of the many benefits which completed my intention.”

That he hoped to reform Spain is certain.  Political and social reforms had hitherto consolidated the work of conquest; and those which he soon offered to the Spaniards might possibly have renovated that nation, had they not been handed in at the sword’s point; but the motive was too obvious, the intervention too insulting, to render success possible with the most sensitive people in Europe.  On May 2nd he wrote to Murat that he intended King Joseph of Naples to reign at Madrid, and offered to Murat either Portugal or Naples.[193] He chose the latter.  Joseph was allowed no choice in the matter.  He was summoned from Naples to Bayonne, and, on arriving at Pau, heard with great surprise that he was King of Spain.

Napoleon’s selection was tactful.  At Naples, the eldest of the Bonapartes had effected many reforms and was generally popular; but the treachery of Bayonne blasted all hopes of his succeeding at Madrid.  Though the grandees of Spain welcomed the new monarch with courtly grace, though Charles IV. gave him his blessing, though Ferdinand demeaned himself by advising his former subjects quietly to submit, the populace willed otherwise.

Every instinct of the Spanish nature was aflame with resentment.  Loathing for Charles IV., his Queen, and their favourite, whom Napoleon richly dowered, love of the young King whom he falsely filched away, detestation of the French troops who outraged the rights of hospitality, and zeal for the Roman Catholic Church, whose chief had just been robbed of half his States, goaded the Spaniards to madness.  Their indignation rumbled hoarsely for a time, like a volcano in labour, and then burst forth in an explosion of fury.  The constitution which Napoleon presented to the Spanish Notables at Bayonne was accepted by them, only to be flung back with scorn by the people.  The men of enlightenment who counselled prudence and patience were slain by raging mobs or sought safety in flight.  The rising was at once national in its grand spontaneity and local in its intensity.  Province after province rose in arms, except the north and centre, where 80,000 French troops held the patriots in check.  In the van of the movement was the rugged little province of Asturias, long ago the forlorn hope of the Christians in their desperate conflicts with the Moors.  Intrenched behind their mountains and proud of their ancient fame, the Asturians ventured on the sublime folly of declaring war against the ruler of the West