In my dispatch of the 28th of June,çoisRené No. 35, the dispositions of England are faithfully stated:
"It has been more difficult for me to tell you what Lord Londonderry thinks, relative to Spain, than it will be easy for me to penetrate the secret of the instructions given to Sir W. A'Court[214]; however, I will leave nothing undone to procure you the information for which you ask me in your last dispatch, No. 18. If I have correctly estimated the policy of the English Cabinet and the character of Lord Londonderry, I am persuaded that Sir W. A'Court has taken with him scarcely anything in writing. They will have charged him verbally to observe the parties without mixing in their quarrels. The Cabinet of St. James does not love the Cortes, but it despises Ferdinand. It will certainly do nothing for the Royalists. Besides, it will be enough that our influence should be exercised in favour of one opinion for the English influence to support the other. Our reviving prosperity inspires a lively jealousy. It is true that there is here, among the statesmen, a certain vague fear of the revolutionary passions which are agitating Spain; but this fear is silent in the presence of private interests: so much so that if, on the one hand, Great Britain could exclude our wares from the Peninsula and if, on the other, she could recognise the independence of the Spanish Colonies, she would easily resign herself to events and console herself for the misfortunes which might overwhelm the Continental monarchies anew. The same principle that prevents England from withdrawing her ambassador from Constantinople makes her send an ambassador to Madrid: she severs herself from the common destinies and attends only to what she may be able to make out of the revolutions of the empires.
Reverting to the news from Spain in my dispatch of the 16th of July, No. 40, I said to M. de Montmorency:
"The English newspapers, copying from the French newspapers, this morning give news from Madrid up to and including the 8th. I never expected better from the King of Spain, and I was not surprised. If that unhappy Prince is doomed to perish, the manner of the catastrophe is not a matter of indifference to the rest of the world: the dagger would lay low only the Monarch, the scaffold might kill the Monarchy. Already the judgments on Charles I. and Louis XVI. are a great deal too much: Heaven preserve us from a third judgment which would appear to establish, through the authority of crimes, a sort of right of peoples and a body of jurisprudence against the kings! We can now expect anything: a declaration of war on the part of the Spanish Government is one of the chances which the French Government must have foreseen. In any case, we shall soon be obliged to put an end to the sanitary cordon, for, once the month of September is past and the plague not reappearing at Barcelona, it would be a real mockery still to speak of a _sanitary cordon_; we should therefore quite frankly confess to an _army_ and give the reason which obliges us to maintain that army. Would not that be equivalent to a declaration of war against the Cortes? On the other hand, shall we break up the sanitary cordon? That act of weakness would compromise the safety of France, disgrace the ministry and revive the hopes of the revolutionary faction in our midst.