Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/97



INTRODUCTORY ESSAY. 67

coadjutor. The consequence was the election of an old man, Mgr. J. Urbieta, Bishop of Corycium, in partibus.

On August 15, 1862, President Lopez I. named by a secret act (pliego de reserva) his eldest son Vice-President. He died aged sixty-nine, after a painful illness, on September 10, (Dr. Martin de Moussy says 7,) 1862 ; the body was embalmed ; a splendid service was performed over it in the cathedral of Asuncion, and in the church of La Trinidad, built by himself ; the first Paraguayan President was buried without monument.

Immediately after the death of the second '^ Supremo,^"* who had virtually ruled seventeen years, D. Francisco Solano Lopez took the usual precautions. He possessed himself of all his father^s papers, doubled the sentinels, supplied the streets with extra patrols, summoned the Ministry or Council of State, to whom he read the will appointing him Vice-President, and therefore acting Chief Magistrate, and ordered a national and electoral Congress to meet. His measures were so prudently laid that he was named, on October 16, 1862, without difficulty. President for ten years ; and he could boast that he was the chosen of the people, not an inheritor, nor one appointed by will. In 1863 the new ruler was congratulated by eleven Euro- pean Powers, and all, abroad and at home, believed that the enlightened General who had travelled in England and France would indulge Paraguay with a free Government.

There are idle tales that the elder Lopez preferred his Benjamin, Benigno, as less violent and ambitious than his eldest son : he is also reported to have predicted that if Francisco Solano ever became her ruler, Paraguay would rue the day. It is said that the preference of the old man for Benigno, whom he would gladly have seen, if he could, his successor to the Presidential chair, and heir to the bulk of his property, bred a fatal jealousy between the two brothers.

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