concluded, to convey the last of the royal family out of Spain; the traces were cut; the imprecations against the French were furious.  Colonel La Grange, Murat’s aide-de-camp, happening to appear on the spot, was cruelly maltreated.  In a moment the whole capital was in an uproar:  the French soldiery were assaulted everywhere—­about 700 were slain.  The mob attacked the hospital—­the sick and their attendants rushed out and defended it.  The French cavalry, hearing the tumult, entered the city by the gate of Alcala—­a column of 3000 infantry from the other side by the street Ancha de Bernardo.  Some Spanish officers headed the mob, and fired on the soldiery in the streets of Maravelles:  a bloody massacre ensued:  many hundreds were made prisoners:  the troops, sweeping the streets from end to end, released their comrades; and, to all appearance, tranquillity was restored ere nightfall.  During the darkness, however, the peasantry flocked in armed from the neighbouring country:  and, being met at the gates by the irritated soldiery, not a few more were killed, wounded, and made prisoners.  Murat ordered all the prisoners to be tried by a military commission, which doomed them to instant death.  It is disputed whether the more deliberate guilt of carrying the sentence into execution lies with the commander-in-chief himself, or with Grouchy; it is certain that a considerable number of Spaniards—­the English authority most friendly to the French cause admits ninety-five[58]—­were butchered in cold blood on the 3rd of May.

This commotion had been preceded by a brief insurrection, easily suppressed and not unlikely to be soon forgotten, on the 23rd of April, at Toledo.  The events in the capital were of a more decisive character, and the amount of the bloodshed, in itself great, was much exaggerated in the reports which flew, like wildfire, throughout the Peninsula—­for the French were as eager to overawe the provincial Spaniards, by conveying an overcharged impression of the consequences of resistance, as their enemies in Madrid were to rouse the general indignation, by heightened details of the ferocity of the invaders and the sternness of their own devotion.  In almost every town of Spain, and almost simultaneously, the flame of patriotic resentment broke out in the terrible form of assassination.  The French residents were slaughtered without mercy:  the supposed partisans of Napoleon and Godoy (not a few men of worth being causelessly confounded in their fate) were sacrificed in the first tumult of popular rage.  At Cadiz, Seville, Carthagena, above all in Valencia, the streets ran red with blood.  The dark and vindictive temper of the Spaniards covered the land with scenes, on the details of which it is shocking to dwell.  The French soldiery, hemmed in, insulted, and whenever they could be found separately, sacrificed—­often with every circumstance of savage torture—­retorted by equal barbarity whenever they had the means.  Popular bodies (juntas)