Napoleon's Wars_ An International History, 1803-1815 - Charles Esdaile [215]
6 March the French occupied the fortress of San Sebastián, with Murat receiving instructions the next day to launch the forces of Dupont and Moncey southwards towards Madrid, whose occupation, the emperor’s lieutenant was told, was to be followed by the dispatch of Godoy and the Spanish royal family to a meeting with Napoleon at either Burgos or Bayonne. Meanwhile, though half-hearted efforts were still made to convince the Spaniards that all was well - the march on Madrid was explained by talk of securing Cádiz against the British, besieging Gibraltar, or even sending troops to Africa - the French were increasingly reckoning on armed conflict. As Napoleon wrote to Murat, ‘I hope with all my heart that there will be no war, and am only taking so many precautions because it is my habit to leave nothing to chance. But if there is a war, your position will be a very good one.’34
The trap, then, was about to shut, but events were now disrupted by fresh developments. For Ferdinand and his supporters, the so-called fernandinos, war with France was unthinkable. First of all, they remained convinced that the emperor intended to place Ferdinand on the throne or, at least, get rid of Godoy, and second, they believed - quite rightly - that war would lead to defeat and the overthrow of the entire dynasty. Terrified of what might occur, Ferdinand summoned his henchman, Montijo, and ordered him to organize a rising that could present the emperor with a fait accompli in the form of a new monarch who would be only too eager to throw himself on Napoleon’s mercy and do his will in every particular. In stirring up revolt, there was little difficulty. Across the Peninsula there was a widespread conviction that the French were out to do no more than rescue Ferdinand from the clutches of Godoy. ‘Our troops’, wrote Lejeune, ‘had been welcomed in Spain . . . and the loyal populace, who . . . received us as if we were their brothers, impatiently awaited the day when the emperor . . . would remove the hated minister.’35 Acting from ignorance as much as intent, the French had done nothing to dampen such hopes: ‘The French . . . knew not what was the work which they were destined to perform, but, hearing nothing from their hosts but curses upon the authors of the misfortunes of the country, they associated themselves with the public indignation, and . . . repeated that the army was come into Spain only to execute justice upon a villain.’36 At this point, too, Napoleon had assumed none of the demon-like qualities he would soon acquire in the eyes of most Spaniards. Among the educated classes, he was widely admired - the emperor himself later remarked that the regime was ‘never afraid of him’ and ‘looked on him as a defender of royalism’.37 Influenced by vague ideas that the emperor had saved the Church from the revolutionaries, the crowd were content to follow the lead of the elites. As a French officer, Foy, wrote, ‘It was obvious that the reign of Napoleon had entirely effaced the antipathy of Catholic Spain to [the] new France.’38 Yet beneath the surface trouble was brewing. ‘The soldiers’, wrote a young seminarian named Robert Brindle whom the arrival of the French had caught at the English seminary in Valladolid, ‘were quartered in private houses and brought distress and misery into every family. Their right to anything which they chose to covet few had the hardihood to call in question. If complaint were made, it must be proffered to a French officer, and insult or an additional grievance were the result.’39
At this stage virtually the only troops actually at Aranjuez were the royal guard, whose aristocratic officer corps had never forgiven Godoy either his lowly origins or the fact that in one of the few military reforms he had succeeded in pushing through