[19] The princes that occur in Spanish politics, e.g. Eboli or Castelfranco, were holders of Italian, generally Neapolitan, titles.
[20] Foy, _Guerre de la Péninsule_, ii. 267.
[21] See the proofs from papers in the Spanish Foreign Office, quoted in Arteche’s _Guerra de la Independencia_, i. 148.
[22] Toreño, i. 86. The story is confirmed by Savary, in his _Mémoires_, ii. 221.
The fourth individual with whose personality it is necessary to be acquainted when studying the court of Spain in 1808 is the heir to the throne, Ferdinand, Prince of the Asturias. Little was known of him, for his parents and Godoy had carefully excluded him from political life. But when a prince is getting on for thirty, and his father has begun to show signs of failing health, it is impossible that eyes should not be turned on him from all quarters. Ferdinand was not an imbecile like his father, nor a scandalous person like his mother; but (though Spain knew it not) he was coward and a cur. With such parents he had naturally been brought up very badly. He was ignominiously excluded from all public business, and kept in absolute ignorance of all subjects on which a prince should have some knowledge: history, military science, modern politics, foreign languages, were all sealed books to him. He had been educated, so far as he was trained at all, by a clever and ambitious priest, Juan Escoiquiz, a canon of Toledo. An obscure churchman was not the best tutor for a future sovereign: he could not instruct the prince in the more necessary arts of governance, but he seems to have taught him dissimulation and superstition[23]. For Ferdinand was pious with a grovelling sort of piety, which made him carry about strings of relics, spend much of his time in church ceremonies, and (as rumour said) take to embroidering petticoats for his favourite image of the Virgin in his old age.
[Illustration: MARIA LUISA _REYNA DE ESPAÑA_.]
The prince had one healthy sentiment, a deep hatred for Godoy, who had from his earliest youth excluded him from his proper place in the court and the state. But he was too timid to resent the favourite’s influence by anything but sulky rudeness. If he had chosen, he could at once have put himself at the head of the powerful body of persons whom the favourite had disobliged or offended. His few intimate friends, and above all his tutor Escoiquiz, were always spurring him on to take some active measures against the Prince of the Peace. But Ferdinand was too indolent and too cautious to move, though he was in his secret heart convinced that his enemy was plotting his destruction, and intended to exclude him from the throne at his father’s death.