made his peace with his brother by repudiating his wife, an American lady of the name of Patterson, and consenting to a new alliance, more consonant with the views of the Emperor, with a daughter of the king of Wirtemberg. The Elector of Saxony was recognised as another king of Napoleon's creation; Joseph Buonaparte as king of Naples; and Louis, of Holland. Finally, Russia accepted the mediation of France for a peace with Turkey, and France that of Russia for a peace with England. There seems to be little doubt that Napoleon broached at Tilsit the dazzling scheme of dividing the European world virtually between the two great monarchs of France and Russia; and that the Czar, providing he were willing to look on, while his Imperial brother of the west subjected Spain, Portugal and England to his yoke, was induced to count on equal forbearance, whatever schemes he might venture on for his own aggrandizement, at the expense of the smaller states of the north of Europe, and, above all, of the Ottoman porte. Napoleon, having left strong garrisons in the maritime cities of Poland and Northern Germany, returned to Paris in August, and was received by the senate and other public bodies with all the triumph and excess of adulation.— The Swedish king abandoned Pomerania immediately on hearing of the treaty of Tilsit. In effect, the authority of the Emperor appeared now to be consolidated over the whole continent of Europe. The fortunes and fame of Napoleor. were, indeed, such as to excite in the highest degree the veneration with which men look upon talents and success. All opposition seemed to sink before him, and fortune seemed only to have looked doubtfully upon him during the last campaign, in order to render still brighter the auspicious aspect by which he closed it. Many of his most confirmed enemics, who, from their proved attachment to the House of Bourbon, had secretly disowned the authority of Buonaparte, and doubted the continuance of his success, when they saw Prussia lying at his feet, and Russia clasping his hand in friendship, conceived they should be struggling against the decrees of Providence, did they longer continue to resist their predestined master. Austerlitz had shaken their constancy; Tilsit destroyed it; and with few and silent exceptions, the vows, hopes and wishes of Trance, seemed turned on Buonaparte as her Heir by estiny. Perhaps he himself, only, could finally have dis appointed their expectations. But he was like the adventur ous climber of the Alps, to whom the surmounting the most tremendous precipices, and ascending to the most towering peaks, only shows yet dimer heights and higher points of elevation. CHAP. XV. Junot Relations of Napoleon with Spain. Treaty of Fontainbleau. marches to Portugal. Flight of the Royal Family to Brazil. French proceed into Spain. Murat occupies Madrid. Charles and Ferdinand abdicate at Bayonne. Joseph Buonaparte declared King of Spain. THE vast extent to which the prohibited manufactures and colonial produce of England found their way into every district of the Spanish peninsula, and especially of Portugal, and thence, through the hands of whole legions of audacious smugglers into France itself, ere long fixed the attention and resentment of Napoleon. In truth, a proclamation issued at Madrid shortly before the battle of Jena, and suddenly recalled on the intelligence of that great victory, had prepared the Emperor to regard with keen suspicion the conduct of the Spanish court, and to trace every violation of his system to its deliberate and hostile connivance. This court presented in itself the lively image of a divided and degraded nation. The king, old and almost incredibly imbecile, was ruled absolutely by his queen, a woman audaciously unprincipled, whose strong and wicked passions agair were entirely under the influence of Manuel Godoy, "Prince of the Peace," raised, by her guilty love, from the station of a private guardsman to precedence above all the grandees of Spain, a matrimonial connexion with the royal house, and the supreme conduct of affairs. She, her paramour, and the degraded king were held in contempt and hatred by a powerful party, at the head of whom were the canon Escoiquiz, the duke del Infantado, and Ferdinand, prince of Asturias, heir of the throne. The scenes of dissension which filled the palace and court were scandalous beyond all contemporary examples; and the strength of the two parties vibrating in the 2 tale, according as corrupt calculators looked to the extent of Godoy's present power, or to the probability of Ferdinand's accession, the eyes of both were turned to the hazardous facility of striking a balance by calling in support from the Tuilleries. Napoleon, on his part, regarding the rival factions with equal scorn, flattered himself that, in their common fears and baseness, he should find the means of ultimately reducing the whole peninsula to complete submission under his own yoke. The secret history of the intrigues of 1807, between the French court and the rival parties in Spain, has not yet been clearly exposed; nor is it likely to be so while most of the chief agents survive. According to Buonaparte, the first proposal for conquering Portugal by the united arms of France and Spain, and dividing that monarchy into three separate prizes, of which one should fall to the disposition of France, a second to the Spanish king, and a third reward the personal exertions of Godoy, came not from him, but from the Spanish minister. The treaty was ratified at Fontainbleau on the 29th of October, 1807, and accompanied by a convention, which provided for the immediate invasion of Portugal by a force of 28,000 French soldiers, under the orders of Junot, and of 27,000 Spaniards; while a reserve of 40,000 French troops were to be assembled at Bayonne, ready to take the field by the end of November, in case England should land an army for the defence of Portugal, or the people of that devoted country presume to meet Junot by a national insurrection.` Junot forthwith commenced his march through Spain, where the French soldiery were received every where with coldness and suspicion, but no where by any hostile movement of the people. He would have halted at Salamanca to organize his army, which consisted mostly of young conscripts, but Napoleon's policy outmarched the schemes of his general, and the troops were, in consequence of a peremptory order from Paris, poured into Portugal in the latter part of November. Godoy's contingent of Spaniards appeared there also, and placed themselves under Junot's command. Their numbers overawed the population, and they advanced, unopposed, towards the capital-Junot's most eager desire being to secure the persons of the prince-regent and the royal family. The feeble government, meantime, having made, one by one, every degrading submission which France dictated, having expelled the British factory and the British minister, confiscated all English property, and shut the ports |