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By Root 2455 0

discontent with the regime, trouble was brewing for its éminence grise, Manuel de Godoy, in a variety of other ways. Not the least of these stemmed from the military policy he had followed in the wake of the war of 1793-5 . In 1795 Spain had made peace with France and in 1796 she had joined with her in an alliance against Britain. Godoy knew that this arrangement could only ever be temporary: so arrogant and aggressive was the government of the Directory that sooner or later Spain would be compelled to go to war once more. And, France was in his eyes no ally: ‘In so far as France is concerned,’ he told Queen Maria Luisa, ‘the only thing that can be counted on is that the French will never be friends of anything other than their own interests.’5 At best, the treaty of San Ildefonso was a device that might buy Spain a little time while at the same time staving off the depredations of the British. From as early as 1796, then, the favourite was preparing for war. Special reports were commissioned on the fortifications that guarded the Pyrenean frontier, while a committee of senior generals was set the task of proposing a programme of military reform. This last measure proved abortive, the determination of a variety of vested interests to resist any change ensuring that no progress was made. But Godoy pressed ahead anyway and instituted a number of measures of his own. Not the least of these, particularly in terms of its impact on the course of events in , was the decision to cut the size of the enormous royal guard by half, but even more important was the favourite’s determined efforts to extend the army’s limited conscription to the whole of the country, large parts of which had hitherto been free of the burdens which it imposed. In every province in which moves were made in this direction, there was furious resistance, and in Valencia and Vizcaya the result was outbreaks of open revolt. As Lady Holland wrote:

About a fortnight ago the peasants in a district near Bilbao assembled tumultuously, went to the señoria (or house where the magistrates meet) and demanded the decree which had been passed for enrolling men to serve between the ages of fifteen and fifty. When they obtained it, they read it aloud and to show their contempt for it, tore the paper, trampling it with their feet. They seized the corregidor, and compelled him to give up to muskets which had been deposited since the French War in the señoria. They insisted on the decree being annulled, which could not be done, but the corregidor promised that a general meeting should be convened to take it into consideration. By the last accounts it appears that the decree has been rescinded, and the corregidor, who is a gallego and abhorred by the Vizcayans, nearly murdered.6

However, popular resistance was not just fuelled by the issue of military reform. Very much a man of the Enlightenment, Godoy was much exercised by the issue of bull-fighting. Convinced that this sport was at one and the same time economically wasteful, a humiliating mark of Spain’s backwardness and a threat to public order (on account of the simple fact that it caused the populace to assemble in huge crowds), the favourite took the unprecedented and never-to-be-repeated step of banning the corrida. Nor was this the only measure that grated upon a populace wedded to what the court and its advisers saw as ‘superstition’. There was, for example, the epic battle waged by the regime to force through its insistence that on public health grounds dead bodies should no longer be interred in churches, but rather in municipal cemeteries established in open country beyond the limits of each town and village, and the attempt made to prohibit the wearing of the cloaks traditionally worn by men in many parts of Spain because they made it too easy for malefactors to hide weapons and mask their features from detection. With young men of any aspiration aping French fashions and mannerisms and even peppering their speech with snatches of French, the result for the rest of the population was a genuine fear that