The feelings excited by this sight must have been so different in each of the royal couple, that one can scarcely feel surprised at the strangeness of the result. Godoy had only to deny the marriage to pacify the King, whose good nature was ready to make allowances for a mere love-intrigue of his favourite. The Queen, hopeless of ever being the exclusive object of the gallantries of a man to whom she was chained by the blindest infatuation, probably feared lest the step she had taken should tear him away from her presence. A slave to her vehement passions, and a perfect stranger to those delicate feelings which vice itself cannot smother in some hearts, she seemed satisfied with preventing her chief rival from rising above her own rank of a mistress; and, provided the place was occupied by one to whom her paramour was indifferent, wished to see him married, and be herself the match-maker.
The King’s late brother, Don Luis, who, in spite of a cardinal’s hat, and the archbishoprick of Seville, conferred on him before he was of age to take holy orders, stole a kind of left-handed marriage with a Spanish lady of the name of Vallabríga; had left two daughters and a son, under the guardianship of the archbishop of Toledo. Though not, hitherto, allowed to take their father’s name, these children were considered legitimate; and it is probable that the King had been desirous of putting them in possession of the honours due to their birth, long before the Queen proposed the eldest of her nieces both as a reward for Godoy’s services, and a means to prevent in future such sallies of youthful folly as divided his attention between pleasure and the service of the crown. These or similar reasons (for history must content herself with conjecture, when the main springs of events lie not only behind the curtain of state, but those of a four-post bed) produced in the space of a few weeks, a public recognition of Don Luis’s children, and the announcement of his eldest daughter’s intended marriage with the Prince of the Peace.
The vicious source of Godoy’s unbounded power, the temper of the Court where he enjoyed it, and the crowd of flatterers which his elevation had gathered about him, would preclude all expectation of any great or virtuous qualities in his character. Yet there are facts connected with the beginning of his government which prove that he was not void of those vague wishes of doing good, which, as they spring up, are “choked with cares and riches and pleasures of this world.” I have been assured by an acute and perfectly disinterested observer, whose high rank gave him free access to the favourite, during part of the period when with the title of Duke de la Alcúdia he was at the head of the Spanish ministry, that “there was every reason to believe him active, intelligent, and attentive in the discharge of his duty; and that he was perfectly exempt from all those airs and affectation which men who rise by fortune more than merit, are apt to be justly accused of.” Though, like all the Spanish youth brought up in the military profession, he was himself unlettered, he shewed great respect for talents and literature in the formation of the ministry which succeeded his own; when, from his new rank, and his marriage into the royal family, he was considered above the duties of office.