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By Root 2746 0

he had cut the guard’s size by half. Meanwhile, the population of Aranjuez was wholly dependent on the court for its prosperity, and was currently much swelled by the hordes of courtiers and retainers who travelled with the royal family on their migrations from one royal palace to the next. At the same time, many of the villages around Madrid happened to be fiefs of the leading fernandinos and could thus be galvanized into action by economic means. Yet bribery was probably barely needed. For all their discontent, the populace retained a touching faith in the protection supposedly afforded them by the monarch. The news that the king intended to leave them to their fate therefore caused as much fear as the possibility that Godoy might evade his doom caused fury. Disguised as one ‘Uncle Joe’, Montijo had within a very few days succeeded in massing a large crowd around the palace at Aranjuez and whipping the Guard’s hatred of Godoy to fever pitch. Initially it seems that the plan was for the revolt to be sparked off by the departure of the royal family, but, thanks to Charles’s vacillation, this did not happen. In the event, however, no catalyst was needed. As the Secretary of State, Pedro Cevallos, informed the Secretary of the Council of Castile: ‘About one o’clock in the morning [of 18 March] there occurred a clash between some hussars and Guardias de Corps, and this was followed by the assembly of many soldiers and civilians who had taken fright at rumours that the king and queen and royal family were leaving.’40

What followed was a frightening affair. The hussars referred to were members of Godoy’s recently formed personal bodyguard - ‘a troop of brilliantly uniformed soldiers who were regarded by their fellows with envy and hated by the people’41 - and the violence with which they were assaulted set the scene for three days of mayhem. Nor was the trouble confined to Aranjuez. In Madrid, for example:

Hardly had night fallen than a furious crowd invaded the house of Don Diego, the younger brother of the favourite. Having smashed in the doors and discovered that the building was empty, they began to throw all its rich furniture out of the windows . . . until they had made an enormous pile of tables, beds, wardrobes and pianos, to which they set fire . . . When the plebe had finished enjoying this . . . costly bonfire, they . . . headed for the house of the Príncipe de Branciforte, Godoy’s brother-in-law. However, a notice had been put on the door . . . announcing that the property of the favourite and his close relatives had been confiscated . . . This was enough to calm down the rioters, and they spent the rest of the night processing through the streets . . . and drinking at the cost of the taverners . . . [The next day] the whole garrison . . . were called out of their barracks by bands of women bearing pitchers of wine in their hands, and . . . the soldiers, mixing with the people, bore in their firelocks the palm branches which, as a precaution against lightning, are commonly hung at the windows.42

In Toledo a bust of Godoy was hung from a gibbet; in San Lucar de Barrameda a botanical garden he had established was wrecked, and in Zaragoza, radicalized by recent regulations that had extended the academic year by three months, the students of the university forced their lecturers to barricade themselves into the building’s cloister and seized the portrait of the favourite that hung in the main lecture hall. Placed on a makeshift hurdle, it was then dragged through the streets to the city centre. There, wrote one of the leaders, ‘We made a bonfire whose flames leapt higher than the roofs, whereupon, having been well kicked and spat upon, His Excellency . . . was thrown upon the fire.’43

Back in Aranjuez, the king and queen were terrified. With the bulk of the guard in a state of rebellion and the favourite himself hiding in the attic of his palace, whence he had fled as the mob poured through the main door, Charles IV quickly agreed to have Godoy arrested, but, under Montijo’s orchestration, the disturbances