CHAPTER III.

Formation of Faction. Constitution of 1812.

Up to the close of the great continental war there had been a total absence of political differences; the opposition to Government had been by province, and then of a practical kind only; there had never been a Revolution. The people had met by a stubborn though isolated resistance every encroachment of the Crown, and had fortunately never been exposed to usurpations by a Parliament. Thus had been preserved less obliterated than elsewhere the footsteps of early freedom. The people were, indeed, indolent and ignorant, but there was amongst them contentment and equality, a fair distribution of the goods that they possessed, no depreciation of one class by misery, or elevation of another by pride of station or wealth; sedulous politeness linked together the classes of society, and kept open running the fountain of charity with its twofold blessings.

Madrid was not properly a metropolis. To the foreign families who had slipped into the occupation of the throne this city was as a permanent camp, to which they retired from Spain, and whence they commanded but did not govern it. A vast mass of functionaries were employed in the central government and inhabited Madrid, but Madrid contained no manufactory of laws, and the agents of the Government never took out of the hands of the locally elected magistrates the administration either of province, city, district, or village. Thus did the Government remain distinct from the people, and the people, being admitted to no share in it, preserved at least their character; they remained men of Valencia, Estremadura, of Seville or Saragosa.

This original framework was preserved by a variety of circumstances, the mighty chains of mountains to which I have referred, the absence of roads and the difficulty of communica

tion, differences of dialect and of costume, and corresponding animosities; in fact, the administrative physiognomy was of a remarkably oriental character. While the internal dissensions of the other countries of Europe invited the progress of the French revolutionary arms, or paralysed the resistance to her of the great military Governments, no more effect was produced by the new and exciting doctrines on the Spanish than on the Turkish people. Yet after these Governments had been severally discomfited and collectively reduced, Spain, which was deemed sunk in the darkest night of ignorance and superstition, rose single-handed, and astounded, without enlightening, the Europe she saved. When Spain commenced this enterprise she was without a king, an army, or a navy; her entire central administration was in the hands of the French, together with her capital, the head of her church, and the chiefs of her nobles: she was deprived of all that visibly constitutes power, and this precisely was her strength. Then reappeared the Spain of Saguntum and Numantia, and, nearer to our times, of Barcelona and Saragosa,-names which will yet be fresh when European Civilisation will have departed to the same place as the Roman sword and the Moorish scimitar.

Between the commencement and the close of the struggle, that is to say, from 1808 to 1815, the country was occupied with very different matters than politics, and under any circumstances the time was too short to allow of any marked change in doctrine or opinions, which are necessarily of slow growth; and yet shortly afterwards the Peninsula is so transformed that we find it engaged in a Revolution. It is essential to note, since we transfer to this country the notions which we entertain of others, that there never had here been a Revolution, and that it was here the people, and not the Government, who rose to resist the French. We have, therefore, a phenomenon to account for, one wholly unparalleled; it is rendered the more inexplicable by the fact, that in the short interval between the period when theoretical principles were wholly unknown and that at which a Revolution was accomplished and a Constitution introduced, the people having been engaged

in a desperate war against an enemy who was the patron of so-called liberty, in their minds must have been associated constitution with invasion, despotism with independence: but, in fact, the infection that was repelled by the braced arm and the rigid muscle in the front of the battle, penetrated from behind by the flaccid and ignoble parts.

While the Spanish people were on their rugged sierras, their smiling vegas shrivelled by the breath, and their fair cities levelled by the tread of war, a few black-coated men had assembled in a church, travestied into a theatre, in an alley of a remote city, guarded by the fleets of an Ally. This assemblage, aloof from danger and undistracted by care, was not engaged in procuring supplies, or in furnishing to their struggling countrymen clothing or ammunition,-they were framing a Constitution; in other words, they were passing a decree of annihilation upon the rights, the customs, and corporations of the Peninsula, for its separate kingdoms had their Constitutions and their several Cortes. The crime of the Burgundian and Bourbon despots had amounted to no more than this, that they did not convoke them; the selfappointed Conclave of Cadiz undertook to destroy them.

When the Parliament of London absorbed into itself that of Edinburgh and that of Dublin, not only were separate acts required from the body incorporating and the bodies incorporated, but Treaties also were entered into, and conditions established: the measures propped up by these forms were enacted in the eye of the nations themselves, but they were still held to be invalid by the lawyers of the greatest weight of their respective times, and denounced as suicidal by the patriots of highest name. What would have been said had some Chartist Convocation decreed of their own authority a new law for the three kingdoms, which was to supersede all their laws and to extinguish their three Parliaments by the erection of a new and distinct body? Such was the Constitution of Cadiz, and so absurd was it felt to be, that it fell stillborn.

If this new Constitution had been the wisest ever conceived and the justest ever possessed, no less would this character of

violence attach to it; but it was at once the most foolish and the most violent of legislative measures; it was a mere transcript of the dreams of the previous century, which had placed the enemy against whom they were struggling in the hands of a despot, who had practised against Spain the basest of felonies, and had found in the French nation the docile instruments of his malignant will.

In fact, the self-appointed gentlemen who assembled in the church of San Felipe Neri, were doing nothing more or less than preparing to impose on Spain after she should have triumphed the yoke of the enemy she had vanquished,—and worse than the yoke of that enemy, for the French would have respected, even as victors, those local privileges and general rights which the old despotic monarchs of Spain had been unable to subdue.

The king returned and swept away the idle fiction; but as the Constitution had sprung from one of the European factions, so did he call in the doctrines of the other to counterbalance it. Now no longer content with that despotic authority which had hitherto prevailed, he embodied therewith centralisation and uniformity. The failings in the character of the monarch found neither guidance nor restraint in those who surrounded him, and whose habits had ceased to be Spanish; and the people who, unlike those of Germany, had neither made conditions in supporting their monarch, nor expected advantages as a consequence of their triumph, were taught to believe that there must be some virtue in the Constitution when they discovered so much vice in those who hated it. Thus in four years was Spain, always indifferent to what passed at Madrid or which had reference to its central Government, thoroughly disgusted at the existing state of things, and prepared to accept with favour any change.

So far, the direct agency of no foreign Government appears, but now the necessary elements for foreign intrigue had been created in the engenderment by imitation of the contrarieties, which in the other countries of Europe have sprung from real causes, and required centuries for their development.

CHAPTER IV.

Revolt of the Isla de Leon.

In the course of the year 1819, troops had been collected in the arsenal of Cadiz, called Isla de Leon, destined for the re-conquest of the American colonies: they were neither recruits nor regiments, but composed of soldiers drafted from the whole army, with the view of purifying it of restless spirits engendered by the war of Independence and of dangerous opinions evolved by contact with the French. The expedition had been planned no less for the safety of old Spain than for the recovery of the new. But instead of instantly despatching this menacing corps, it was retained in a confined and inattractive cantonment, and lay for many months in an inaction that must have disorganized the best disposed and best officered troops. The principle that had dictated the drafting of the men had also been followed in the selection of the officers. What then was to be expected? In fact, it was of public notoriety that a revolt was preparing, and the views of the government were held to be a mystery solvible only by the supposition that these projects had high support. The General went to Madrid to represent the danger he was displaced. Two captains of men-of-war reported their vessels which were to transport the troops to America to be unseaworthy-they were deprived of their command. The Government then adopted a measure, the effect of which was too clear not to have been foreseen, that of granting one step in rank to each officer; every incentive to undergo the dangers and the sufferings of a transatlantic campaign in crazy vessels was thus removed. In a word, nothing was left undone to foment discontent and to encourage insurrection; the Conspiracy was perfectly public.

But who within the Government could be suspected? This