ng man.
The new premier trusted to his energies and talents to make head against
the Camarilla; but he had underrated the ingenuity and cunning of the
latter; and, still more, the hatred borne to him by Queen Christina. This
hatred he had excited to a deadly extent, when ambassador at Paris in the
time of Espartero, by demanding the expulsion of Ferdinand's widow from
the French capital, on the ground of her plottings and attempts to
revolutionize Spain. As will be remembered, no attention was paid to these
demands by Louis Philippe, who was far better affected to Christina than
to Espartero; and the cunning dowager remained snug at the Hotel de
Courcelles, hatching plots against the existing government of Spain--plots
in the carrying out of which she was largely aided by French gold and
French counsels. But she neither forgot nor forgave Olozaga's
interference; and no sooner did he assume the reins of government, than
her adherents opened their batteries upon him with unusual vigour. So
effectual was their fire, that Olozaga, who took office on the
twenty-first of November, was dismissed from it on the twenty-ninth;--one
week's tenure. The absurd history of the violence employed by him to
obtain the Queen's signature to a decree for the dissolution of the Cortes
is well known, as are also the efforts that were made to crush him, even
after his expulsion from the ministry had been obtained by this pitiful
pretext--a pretext at once disgraceful to the artful and unprincipled
framers, and injurious in the highest degree to Queen Isabel, one of whose
first acts, after her majority had been declared, was thus made to be the
attestation of a gross and shameless falsehood. In the long and stormy
debate that ensued in the Cortes, Olozaga amply confirmed all parties of
the absurdity of the charge brought against him, and utterly confounded
his enemies. What they could not accomplish by public means, the latter
now attempted to bring about by underhand ones--namely, Olozaga's
destruction in a literal as well as a political sense; and after one or
two narrow escapes from assassination, the ex-premier was advised by his
friends to withdraw from Spain. "Portugal presented the readiest asylum;
and following very nearly the course of the Tagus, the exile, escorted by
twenty well-armed contrabandists, came by way of Talavera and Coria on the
back of a mule, in the disguise of a trader, with copious saddle-bags, and
crossing the little r