The Prince of Peace, before he listened to the advice of Duke of Montemar, had consulted Beurnonville, who dissuaded all violence, and as much as possible all noise.  This accounts for the favourite’s pretended moderation on this occasion.  But though he was externally reconciled, and, as was reported at Madrid, had sworn his reconciliation even by taking the sacrament, all the undertakings of the Prince and Princess of Asturias were strictly observed and reported by the spies whom he had placed round Their Royal Highnesses.  Vain of his success and victory, he even lost that respectful demeanour which a good, nay, a well-bred subject always shows to the heir to the throne, and the Princes related to his Sovereign.  He sometimes behaved with a premeditated familiarity, and with an insolence provoking or defying resentment.  It was on the days of great festivities, when the Court was most brilliant, and the courtiers most numerous, that he took occasion to be most arrogant to those whom he traitorously and audaciously dared to call his rivals.  On the 9th of last December, at the celebration of the Queen’s birthday, his conduct towards Their Royal Highnesses excited such general indignation that the remembrance of the occasion of the fete, and the presence of their Sovereigns, could not repress a murmur, which made the favourite tremble.  A signal from the Prince of Asturias would then have been sufficient to have caused the insolent upstart to be seized and thrown out of the window.  I am told that some of the Spanish grandees even laid their hands on their swords, fixing their eyes on the heir to the throne, as if to say:  “Command, and your unworthy enemy shall exist no more.”

To prepare, perhaps, the royal and paternal mind for deeds which contemporaries always condemn, and posterity will always reprobate, the Prince of Peace procured a history to be written in his own way and manner, of Don Carlos, the unfortunate son of the barbarous and unnatural Philip II.; but the Queen’s confessor, though, like all her other domestics, a tool of the favourite, threw it into the fire with reproof, saying that Spain did not remember in Philip II. the grand and powerful Monarch, but abhorred in him the royal assassin; adding that no laws, human or divine, no institutions, no supremacy whatever, could authorize a parent to stain his hands in the blood of his children.  These anecdotes are sufficient both to elucidate the inveteracy of the favourite, the abject state of the heir to the throne, and the incomprehensible infatuation of the King and Queen.

Our Ambassador, in the meantime, dissembled always with the Prince and Princess of Asturias; and even made them understand that he disapproved of those occurrences so disagreeable to them; but he neither offered to put an end to them nor to be a mediator for a perfect reconciliation with their Sovereigns.  He was guided by no other motive but to keep the favourite in subjection and alarm by preserving a correspondence with his rivals.  That this was the case and the motive cannot be doubted from the financial intrigue he carried on in the beginning of last month.