The Life and Times of Queen Victoria (Vol. 1-4). Robert Thomas Wilson

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ the foreign policy of Great Britain brought much anxiety to the Queen. It was the irony of fate that her Government was drifting into unfriendliness with France, though the Queen personally entertained sentiments of warm friendship and admiration for King Louis Philippe and his sons and daughters. But in Switzerland and South America the policy of England and France was antagonistic. In Portugal a French faction was striving to undermine British influence, and in Spain the question of the marriage of Queen Isabella produced a serious estrangement between the two nations.

      Among those who aspired to the hand of the Spanish Queen was the Count of Trapani, youngest brother of the King of Naples and the Queen Dowager Christina, and therefore uncle of Queen Isabella. The Queen Dowager opposed his pretensions; the young Queen herself, like the great mass of her people, was also averse from an alliance with him. Another suitor had therefore to be found. England objected to a French prince being chosen, her traditional policy being hostile to whatever might bring France and Spain under one crown. France was willing to respect this objection, provided no prince but a prince of the House of Bourbon was selected as the Queen’s consort. Here came the difficulty. Of those princes his Highness of Lucca was ineligible, because he was married already; the Count of Trapani was ineligible, because the Queen and her subjects disliked him; the sons of the Don Francisco de Paula, her Majesty’s uncle—the Duke of Cadiz and the Duke of Seville—were ineligible because they were both disagreeable to the Queen, and, according to M. Guizot, compromised by their intimacy with the Radicals;55 and Count Montemolin, the son of Don Carlos, was ineligible, first, because everybody detested him, and, secondly, because he was formally excluded from the succession by the Spanish Constitution. How, then, was the French demand that the Queen of Spain should marry one of the descendants of Philip V. to be satisfied? M. Guizot admitted, in a despatch to M. de St. Aulaire, that these difficulties were incontestable; but he added that the Court of Lisbon was the centre of an intrigue to promote a marriage between the Queen and Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, whose connection with the Royal Family of England rendered him objectionable to France. If this project were further developed, M. Guizot cunningly argued, France would be freed from the pledge she had given to England, and might then demand the hand of the Queen of Spain or her sister the Infanta, for a French prince of the House of Bourbon; in other words, for the Duc de Montpensier. It was on the perfectly gratuitous and absolutely erroneous assumption that England was promoting the candidature of the Prince Leopold, that M. Guizot made ready to play the diplomatic trick which ultimately destroyed the cordial feeling between England and France. Louis Philippe had given his Royal word to Queen Victoria at Eu in September, 1845, that in no case should the Duc de Montpensier marry the Infanta till the Queen of Spain was herself married, and had children who might assure the direct succession to her throne. But suddenly, in the autumn of 1846, it was announced that the Queen of Spain was about to marry her cousin, the Duke of Cadiz, and that her sister, the Infanta, was at the same time to marry the Duc de Montpensier. Technically, it does not appear that England had a right to complain of this double marriage as a breach of the Treaty of Utrecht. It was, no doubt, meant to evade and defeat the provisions of that instrument; but the Treaty itself had never been construed, as Lord Palmerston seemed to imagine, as a positive prohibition of all intermarriages between the Royal Families of France and Spain. For example, in 1721 King Louis I. of Spain married Louisa Elizabeth of Orleans, Mademoiselle de Montpensier and fourth daughter of the Regent of France. In 1739 Don Philip, Duke of Parma, a son of Philip V., married Louisa Elizabeth, eldest daughter of Louis XV. of France. In 1745 the Dauphin of France, as all the world knows, married Maria Theresa Antonia, Infanta of Spain, and a daughter of Philip V. In truth, it must be conceded that the Treaty of Utrecht simply stipulated that the crowns of France and Spain should not rest on the head of the same sovereign. Even if the Queen’s marriage were without issue, and a child or descendant of her sister and the Duc de Montpensier had fallen heir to the French and Spanish crowns—a somewhat problematical event—the Treaty of Utrecht would have obviously operated as a bar against his claim. It would have compelled him to elect which country he should rule over. The intrigue that ended in this double marriage was regarded by England—nay, by Europe—as a piece of diplomatic knavery, and both Louis Philippe and M. Guizot suffered in character and in prestige accordingly.

      The Queen was naturally more highly incensed than the nation, because from her position and her vigilant study of foreign policy she knew more than her people of the secret history of the affair. The motives of the chief conspirators in the intrigue—Louis Philippe and the Queen Dowager Christina—were rather disreputable. They utterly ignored the feelings and the interests of the young Queen, and treated her as if she were a chattel to be bartered away for their own aggrandisement. Louis Philippe’s object was simply to secure for his son a consort whose dowry would still further enrich the Orleans family, the aggrandisement of his House being the dominant idea of his diplomacy. The Dowager Queen Christina had been an unjust steward of the fortune which the Queen and her sister inherited from their father, King Ferdinand VII., and for her it was therefore a vital necessity to find husbands for her daughters, who would not be too curious as to the accuracy of her accounts. It is believed that when Ferdinand VII. died he was worth £8,000,000 sterling, and though there is reason to suppose he left a will, no such instrument was ever found. After his death, however, his property was set down as being worth only 60,000,000 francs, and by law this was divided between his daughters. The Queen Dowager was said at the time to have appropriated not only the balance, but also a considerable proportion of the rents of the Patrimonio Real, which passed through her hands during her guardianship of her daughters. Her uncle, Louis Philippe, was understood to be cognisant of the Queen Dowager’s “economies,” as they were ironically termed in Spain, and he knew how her illegitimate offspring had grown rich during the minority of the young Princesses. Louis Philippe could answer for it that if his son married one of the Royal sisters, no inconvenient questions would be asked about settlements. In the Duke of Cadiz he discerned an imbecile Prince of the House of Bourbon who would be equally pliable and accommodating. Moreover, he was supposed to be physically unfitted for matrimony, so that by arranging his marriage with the young Queen, Louis Philippe presumably calculated that the union would be without issue, which would place the children by the Queen’s sister and the Duc de Montpensier in the direct succession to the throne, almost as surely as if Louis Philippe had arranged that his son should marry Queen Isabella herself.

      The pledge which Louis Philippe had given to the Queen of England at Eu was an obstacle to this heartless project, but the pretext for violating it was

      THE ROYAL PALACE, MADRID.

      ingeniously manufactured by the Queen Dowager Christina. She addressed a letter, proposing a marriage between Queen Isabella and Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, to the Duke of Saxe-Coburg, who happened to be on a visit to the Court of Lisbon. After telling Mr. Bulwer (afterwards Lord Dalling), the British Minister at Madrid, what this letter contained, and being warned by him that the English Government could not support such a proposal, Queen Christina asked him to let her letter go in his despatch bag, by his messenger. In courtesy he could not refuse this favour, and Lord Aberdeen, when he heard what had happened, laid the facts loyally and frankly before M. Guizot. M. Guizot immediately founded on the incident his monstrous pretext that there was an Anglo-Portuguese intrigue on foot to marry the Queen of Spain to a Prince nearly related to the Royal Family of England—the pretext which released Louis Philippe from the pledge given at the Château d’Eu. Still, Louis Philippe shrank from taking steps which he was aware must compromise his reputation; M. Guizot, however, knew how to overcome his last lingering scruples. To cherish an antipathy to Lord Palmerston, who had succeeded Lord Aberdeen at the Foreign Office, was a point of honour with Louis Philippe, who had not forgotten how France was checked in Syria in 1840, and Lord Palmerston, it must be admitted, indiscreetly played into M. Guizot’s hands. He wrote on the 18th of December a despatch to Mr. Bulwer, discussing the marriage of Queen Isabella, and mentioning—without, however, specially favouring—the candidature of Prince Leopold, along with that of the various Bourbon Princes. He added a series of caustic criticisms on the absolutism which tainted the Government of Spain. A copy of this despatch was given to M. Guizot. He immediately roused Louis Philippe’s suspicions and distrust by pointing СКАЧАТЬ