The King of the French did not see his way to break the engagement by running counter to its first clause. He could not marry his son to the young Queen. He might marry his son to the Queen’s sister, as soon as that sister had a child. But that clause he did manage to break; and on the day on which the Queen was married, the Duke de Montpensier was married to the Princess. This was wrong, and false, and mischievous,--likely to lead to quarrels and wars, and unlikely to lead to increased power and dominion for any king or prince. But it was a trick within the compass of certain kings and certain ministers, and was not unroyal in all its bearings. Louis Philippe, however, was not contented with this. He went farther, and selected the Prince who was to marry the Queen. There was a Prince, unfortunate, as the minds of men go, but hitherto not disgraced,--a poor man who could never become the father of children. He it was whom Louis Philippe selected, with the assistance and guidance of Guizot, in the absolute ignorance, I do not hesitate to say, of Lord Aberdeen.
Such were the Spanish marriages. The fruits of them, as might have been guessed, were disastrous. The Queen, at any rate, had children, on whose royal birth no slur was openly thrown. The Duke de Montpensier lives as an unknown nobleman in a foreign land, to whose name there clings something of the flavour of his father’s deeds. M. Guizot, who was the great Minister of the day, a man of high intellect, of thoughtful habits, of religious feeling, and a Protestant, tarnished his name for ever. And Louis Philippe ran from France as an exile, taking refuge in England under the name of Mr. Smith. And here he died! The marriages were perpetrated! But with what results to all who were concerned in them! It may be doubted whether any meaner crime was ever committed in the name of policy, or one of which the end was more befitting, or better deserved.
The effect which this produced in Europe took eighteen months to show itself. The marriages were solemnized in the autumn of 1846, and Louis Philippe came to England and took up his abode at Claremont in the spring of 1848. All his fine machinations had been blown like soap-bubbles into air! The result of the marriages upon English feeling, and upon Lord Palmerston, who was the one Englishman more concerned than others, was that of distinct alienation. It afforded matter but for few speeches in the House of Commons, and not much for private correspondence, as it was done in secret, and the wickedness of the arrangements could only creep out by slow degrees. Men at the time used to whisper to each other that it was so, and men who received the whisper declined to believe the story in all its foul enormity. Now it has become a matter of history, and there is no ordinary reader who does not know of what nature were the Spanish marriages. But Guizot is said at the time to have become so lost to all decent feeling, so warped and stung by the constant interference which he had received from Lord Palmerston, as to have boasted that the political arrangement made was the one great thing which France had herself achieved, unaided, since 1830!