Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 1.djvu/359

346 of the American Union; but if court intrigues had little to do with actual results, they had, at least in Spain, everything to do with the way in which results were reached. At the court of Madrid the Queen was, in some respects, more influential than the King, and a man who was supposed to be one of the Queen's old lovers exercised the real authority of both.

In the year 1792 King Charles, then in his forty-fifth year, suddenly raised to the post of his prime minister a simple gentleman of his guard, Don Manuel Godoy, barely twenty-five years old. The scandalous chronicle of the court averred that two of the Queen's children bore on their faces incontrovertible evidence of their relation to Godoy. From 1792 until 1798 he was prime minister; he conducted a war with France, and made a treaty which procured for him the remarkable title of the Principe de la Paz,—the Prince of Peace. In 1798 he retired from office, but retained his personal favor. In 1800 he was not a minister, nor did even the scandal-mongers then charge him improper relations with the Queen, for all were agreed that the Queen had found another lover. The stories of the palace were worthy of Saint-Simon. The King himself was far from refined in manners or conversation, and gave even to his favors some of the roughness of insults. If a servant suffered from any personal infirmity, he was forced to hear cruel derision from the King's lips; while the commonest of royal jokes was to slap courtiers