by Jon Kukla
The new king inherited his father’s passion for shooting, but little of his father’s energy or self-discipline. Trim and athletic, Carlos III had loved to stalk wolves through the countryside, matching his wits against a wily predator that threatened his subjects’ livestock. His sluggish son preferred blasting away from a platform as retainers drove captive deer and wild boar into range for the slaughter, or on one occasion, according to a dyspeptic Englishman, firing six small cannon into a herd of “two thousand deer cooped up in an enclosure.” Carlos III promoted the applied sciences by founding the Royal Clock-Making School in 1771 and a royal clock factory in 1788. His successor collected thousands of pocket watches and hundreds of mantel clocks and spent the better part of rainy days repairing them, tinkering with carpentry and plumbing, or wrestling with stable hands. On evenings when Carlos IV indulged his love of music by playing with a string quartet, a successful concert depended on the other players’ ability to anticipate the erratic tempo of the royal violinist. One musician who pointed out that their sheet music called for three bars of rest was informed that “Kings never wait.” More frequently Carlos IV closed his day with a huge evening meal and “a game of cards in which he invariably fell asleep.”8
All too aware of his father’s disappointment in him, and cursed with “just enough intelligence to realize his mediocrity,” according to biographer Sir Charles Petrie, Carlos IV sought “refuge in a state of mental inactivity.” Personal tranquillity became his sole objective, “and anyone who would relieve him of the necessity of taking a decision was his friend.” In exchange for his repose, Carlos IV eventually sacrificed “his authority as a prince, his dignity as a husband, the interests of his country, and, finally, his crown.”9
Maria Luisa of Parma, the new queen of Spain, had been beautiful as a girl and was always decisive if not headstrong. Married to her first cousin on her fourteenth birthday in December 1765, the young Princess of Asturias at first impressed the French ambassador as a girl of “courtesy, wit, and graces … [who] spends her whole time in her suite of rooms, her only pleasures being conversation and music.” Soon enough, however, her father-in-law and the Spanish court learned that a third pleasure frequented Maria Luisa’s suite of rooms. The princess was “a woman of excessive temperament,” wrote one courtier, “whose appetites were not satisfied by her lovers, and whose ardor was not slaked by the passage of years.” She was born “with special aptitudes and robust appetites, which marriage aroused but could not satisfy because … her veins demanded more than the conjugal duty of a gentle husband.”10
While her father-in-law was still alive, a pattern developed in Maria Luisa’s dalliances with aristocrats and courtiers. Her first lover was a marquis who, when discovered, found himself appointed by Carlos III to a post in the Canary Islands and ordered to leave Madrid within twenty-four hours. Her second, the count of Lancaster, was also sent to the Canaries. Next came the count Pignatelli, promptly dispatched to the Spanish legation in Paris, and then a courtier named Ortiz, who was banished to a far corner of Spain. Maria Luisa’s husband remained oblivious to it all. On one occasion he astonished his father by observing that princes were more fortunate than other men because their wives would never be unfaithful with a man of lower rank. “Carlos, Carlos,” replied the king wearily, “¡qué tonto tú eres!”—How foolish you are!11
After the banishment of Ortiz, the princess preyed on the easier ranks of the royal guard—whether to evade her father-in-law’s watchful eye, or to exploit her husband’s pomposity, or perhaps, more cruelly, as her physical beauty faded. “Many confinements [and] several illnesses,” the Russian ambassador wrote, “have completely wrecked her. Her skin is greenish and the loss of several teeth, replaced by false ones, has given the coup de grace to her outward appearance.” The radiant young lady gazing out of Anton Rafael Mengs’s 1765 engagement portrait was gone. Francisco Goya’s portraits after 1789 depict a woman ridden hard by life. “Maria Luisa has her past and her character written on her face,” Napoleon would soon remark. “It surpasses anything you can imagine.”12
Luis Godoy, a sturdy captain from the rugged province of Extremadura on the Portuguese border—birthplace of the conquistadors Cortés, Pizarro, and Balboa—was the first member of the royal guard who attracted Maria Luisa’s attention. Inevitably, however, Carlos III learned of the affair and had the guardsman transferred to a distant province so quickly that Godoy had no chance to say good-bye to the princess. Entrusting a note of farewell to his younger brother and handsome comrade, Manuel Godoy, the departing guardsman thereby introduced Maria Luisa to her next lover, who ruled Spain as privado, or royal favorite, until 1808.13
At seventeen, Manuel Godoy had followed his brother into the first brigade of the royal guards in 1784, and at twenty-one into the bedroom of Maria Luisa. After Carlos III died and Maria Luisa was queen, his rise was meteoric: colonel and knight of the Order of Santiago in 1789 at twenty-two, field marshal at twenty-four, duke of Alcudia, grandee of Spain, and first secretary of state at twenty-five. Despite Godoy’s provincial education, the English ambassador Lord Holland found his conversation “elegant, and equally exempt from vulgarity and affectation,” and his disposition “somewhat indolent, or as the French term it nonchalant.” More than any other “untravelled Spaniard,” Holland thought, Manuel Godoy displayed
a mixture of dignity and politeness, of propriety and ease. He seemed born for a high station. Without effort he would have passed in any mixed society for the first man in it.14
Lady Holland described Godoy as a “large, coarse, ruddy-complexioned” man “with a heavy sleepy voluptuous look.” His countrymen were less charitable. The nickname Choricero (sausage-maker, a sneer at the staple in the diet of his native Extremadura) was one of their gentler insults. As an upstart and a favorite, wrote one Spanish observer, “the noblemen hated him for his improvisations [and] the people because they preferred to suffer under a deified lord rather than under one of their own number raised to the nobility”15
To Spaniards and foreigner alike, however, Godoy’s influence at the court of Carlos IV and Maria Luisa was astonishing and offensive. “It is hardly conceivable that a young man without experience … could be appointed to the most important ministry,” the French ambassador, Jean-François Bourgoing, reported, “a man, moreover, whose attentiveness toward the queen leaves him so little free time.” Despite Godoy’s accumulation of “lofty titles, unbounded wealth, solid power, and dazzling magnificence,” one English visitor wrote, he was “treated by the first class with silent contempt.” Another English traveler described Godoy as “a foul beast of prey,” and a third Englishman translated the common gossip of Spain into English literature. “How carols now the lusty muleteer?” asked Lord Byron in the first canto of Childe Harold (written after Napoleon had sent Godoy and his royal patrons into exile),
As he speeds, he chants “Viva el Rey!”
And checks his song to execrate Godoy,
The royal wittol* Charles, and curse the day
When first Spain’s queen beheld the black-eyed boy
And gore-faced treason sprung from her adulterous joy.16
“The thing that must strike those most who watch Charles IV in the bosom of his Court is his blindness where the conduct of the Queen is concerned,” the next French ambassador reported.
He knows nothing, sees nothing, suspects nothing of the irregularities … going on all around him … nor the attentions which violate all usage and decency, nor even the existence of two children who bear, as is obvious to all, a striking resemblance to the Prince of the Peace [Godoy’s title after 1795].17
Carlos IV’s passions for hunting and tranquillity (and his utter dependence upon Godoy and Maria Luisa) made this possible—as did the fact that Manuel Godoy maintained an office and bedroom directly below the royal apartments, in addition to his own sumptuous house in Madrid. “Every day, wet or fine, winter or summer,” the imprudent king confided to Napoleon of all people,
“I would go out after breakfast, and after hearing mass, go hunting up to one o’clock.” Then, immediately after the midday meal,
I would return to the hunting field and stay there until dusk. In the evening Manuel would never fail to tell me whether things were going well or ill, and I would go to bed to start again the next day.
As a gentleman of the household, Godoy attended Carlos and Maria Luisa at their one o’clock dinner, and then retired to his apartments for his own meal. Here, each afternoon, he was “joined by the Queen, who, once the King has gone off hunting, arrives by a secret stair,” explained the Russian ambassador. “It is in the course of these secret talks”—and whatever else might have gone on—“that the Queen and Godoy decide what proposals to lay before the King.”18
Soon after the death of Carlos III, the queen described the emerging new regime with a phrase that offended Spanish Catholics as badly as the near blasphemy of her favorite’s eventual title, Prince of the Peace. Ménage à trois might have been more accurate, but the queen suggested that she and her husband and Manuel Godoy comprised “la santa trinidade en la tierra”—a holy trinity on earth. The royal couple, Godoy wrote in his Memoirs, “needed a vigilant, active, and self-sacrificing person, who, without making it obvious, would lead them by the hand in their actions.” Dismissing both of Carlos Ill’s capable ministers in 1792—the master bureaucrat José Moñino y Redondo, count of Floridablanca, and the Aragonese nobleman Pedro Pablo Abarca de Bolea, count of Aranda—the new king and queen “found the right man in the lowly guardsman, whom they placed in the necessary surroundings, so that he could provide them the services they needed.”19
In less perilous times the world’s largest empire might have survived the rule of another privado. In less dangerous times the dirty linen of these Spanish Bourbons might have stayed within their palaces to fuel malicious gossip and petty intrigue and add a few salacious footnotes to Iberian history. With the fall of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, however, and with thousands of Americans moving past the Appalachian Mountains into the valley of the Ohio River and clamoring for access to the Mississippi River and New Orleans, the times demanded statesmanship far beyond the capacity of a sluggish monarch, his promiscuous queen, and their sleepy voluptuous favorite.
• • •
In December 1783, a few months after Great Britain acknowledged American independence in the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Revolution, Elizabeth House Trist, of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, set out toward Natchez, where she intended to meet her husband, a former British officer and naturalized American citizen who had bought a plantation along Bayou Manchac, between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Riding on horseback to Pittsburgh, she spent the winter with friends and waited for the spring thaw. In May, when the Upper Ohio was clear of ice, Mrs. Trist and her traveling companion, Polly, joined the procession of American families boarding flatboats for the trip downriver. “People seem to have caught the infection of the country,” she noted in her travel diary: “a desire for the Kentucki.”20
Another traveler on the Ohio River, the French-born essayist known as “An American Farmer,” put the dreams of his adopted compatriots into eloquent words. “Never before had I felt so disposed to meditation and revery,” wrote Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur as he gazed at the passing banks of the Ohio River in 1789. “My imagination darted into the future,” and
I saw in fancy these beautiful shores ornamented with handsome houses, covered with crops, the fields well cultivated…. What an immense chain of plantations! What a great career of activity, of industry, of culture and commerce is offered to the Americans.
Crèvecoeur regarded the settling of the Ohio River Valley as “one of the greatest enterprises ever presented to man,” and thought the region itself was “destined to become the foundation of the power, wealth and future glory of the United States.” These dreams of the American Farmer were contagious, and every new inhabitant of Kentucky helped spread “the infection of the country.”21
The pastoral dreams of an American Farmer represented a looming imperial nightmare for the Spanish monarchy and its officials in Pensacola, New Orleans, and Natchez. The first shadows were hunters and explorers like Daniel Boone, men enthralled with “the diversity and beauties of nature” and comfortable in the solitude of the great American forest. Spain was not immediately threatened by a man in buckskin who, according to his contemporary Timothy Flint, “saw the country only with the eye of a hunter, with very little forecast of its future value and destiny.” Spanish interests were not at risk when Boone climbed to “the summit of a commanding ridge, and, looking round with astonishing delight, beheld … the famous river Ohio that rolled in silent dignity, marking the western boundary of Kentucke with inconceivable grandeur”—and then “kindled a fire near a fountain of sweet water, and feasted on the loin of a buck, which a few hours before I had killed.” The danger arose from American men and women who did recognize “its future value and destiny”—settlers who gazed at the riverbanks with the American Farmer and readily imagined “these beautiful shores ornamented with handsome houses, covered with crops … [and] an immense chain of plantations!”22
Virginians like Daniel Boone had been wandering in and out of Kentucky since 1750, when a group of explorers led by Jefferson’s Albemarle County neighbor Dr. Thomas Walker followed the migratory trail of bear, deer, and buffalo over a relatively low gap in the Cumberland Mountains—seventeen hundred feet above sea level—on the Virginia-North Carolina line about four hundred thirty miles inland from the Atlantic Ocean. By 1775 James Harrod had established the first English settlement in Kentucky, and a North Carolina entrepreneur had engaged Boone to blaze the Wilderness Road from the Holston River, in southwestern Virginia, through the Cumberland Gap to the bluegrass country of the Elkhorn and Kentucky Rivers—but in that year the total English population of Kentucky was only a hundred fifty settlers. As the Revolution ended, however, American settlements grew rapidly. From about eight thousand inhabitants in 1783, Kentucky jumped to thirty thousand in 1784 and then to 73,677 according to the first federal census of 1790 (which recorded another 35,691 settlers in Tennessee, mostly along the Cumberland River). Then, in the 1790s, the population of Kentucky tripled again to reach 220,955—one fifth of them slaves—in the census of 1800. From the perspective of Spanish New Orleans, the shadow of Daniel Boone had grown into the nightmare of the American Farmer.23
An American farmer with a gun. Official notices in the Kentucky Gazette reminded all men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five that
every non commissioned officer and private is by law directed, to furnish himself with a good clean musket, containing an ounce ball, three feet eight inches long in the barrel, with a good Bayonet and iron ramrod, well fitted thereto, a cartridge box, properly made, to contain and secure twenty cartridges fitted to his musket… and to have at every [quarterly] muster one pound of good powder, and four ounces of lead, including twenty blind cartridges; and every Serjeant to have a pair of moulds fit to cast balls, in their respective companies.24
Even if the actual ownership of guns fell short of Kentucky’s legislated requirements, newspaper items like this one scared the hell out Spanish authorities in New Orleans.25
Off and on, soon after those earliest 1775 settlements in Kentucky, a few American flatboats began floating down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. They opened a mutually advantageous riverborne trade during America’s war against Catholic Spain’s recurrent adversary in the centuries since the Reformation and the Armada. Early in the Revolution, Spain used New Orleans as a conduit for covert shipments of money and military supplies to the American patriots. In turn, as the British navy clamped down on French and Spanish shipping through the Gulf of Mexico, the population of New Orleans became utterly dependent on upriver farmers for flour, beef, and other commodities.
Perhaps, had the populations of Louisiana and Kentucky increased at equal rates after the American Revolution, Spanish officials would have found l
ess reason for worry. When they did the numbers, however, there was no comfort. In 1785 the non-Indian population of the entire Spanish territory from Natchitoches to the Arkansas River to Pensacola was 30,471 persons. Of every ten Spanish subjects living along the Lower Mississippi and Gulf Coast, five resided in or near New Orleans and six were slaves or free people of color.26 In 1784 Kentucky’s thirty thousand inhabitants already matched the entire population of the Lower Mississippi, and the gap was spreading at a frightening rate. By 1800 the Spanish colonial population in the Lower Mississippi had grown to fifty thousand, “including more Frenchmen, Englishmen, Americans, and Germans than Spaniards.” That same year, the population of Kentucky and Tennessee was 326,000. Starting with approximately equal populations in 1785, in fifteen years the population of the Ohio River Valley grew seven times faster than that of the Lower Mississippi—not counting the additional thousands of Americans settling the future states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.27
Either from the fort at Natchez or from the upper windows of his residence and office on St. Louis Street near the levee, Governor Miró and his colleagues watched with increasing resignation as the ceaseless current of the Mississippi River carried Kentucky flatboats and country produce into the heart of their capital city. Officially, by an order from imperial authorities in Havana in 1784, the river had been declared closed to English and American commerce. On March 18, 1785, however, Miró reported the arrival in Natchez of a flatboat laden with flour from Pittsburgh owned by one Benet Truly and several prospective settlers, and asked what he should do. Five weeks later, the captain-general in Havana waffled. “As regards the first matter,” he replied, “there is the insurmountable objection on our part that to allow these people … to settle there would be to multiply the enemies within our territory”—so he advised Miró to write “directly to the ministry [in Spain] in order that [a] decision may be handed down by His Majesty.” As to the flour, the captain-general was equally unhelpful, advising Miró to let Intendant Martín Navarro (an advocate of open trading on the river) “determine what he considers most conformable to the instructions of the King.”28