Spain and the
Indies, had scarcely heard himself proclaimed as the seventh monarch of
that name, when he had resigned his kingly functions to a Regency, and
hastened into the snare which already held his father a captive on the
soil of France. The astounding intelligence arrived in different parts
of South America during the year 1808. The effect was everywhere alike.
One moment of utter bewilderment, an instant's reeling under the shock
of surprise, and then a magnificent outburst of loyalty from the
simple-hearted Creole population! _El Rey_, the King,--that almost
mythical sovereign, who was ignorantly adored as the personification of
wisdom and beneficence, no matter how cruelly Viceroys might misgovern,
or Captains-General oppress,--was it possible to conceive him a captive,
the signer of his own humiliation, the renouncer of his immemorial
rights? And Ferdinand, the young monarch of whom so little was known
and so much expected,--he, too, a voluntary prisoner, while a Frenchman
reigned in Madrid? This was news, indeed, to bewilder nations who
had hitherto remained content in infantile tutelage, unconscious,
undesirous, of the rights of men! Addresses, fervent with loyalty, were
dispatched to Spain, embodying vows of eternal affection towards the
King, and of detestation of Joseph, the usurper. French residents in
Venezuela were publicly execrated by the excited Creoles; the French
flag was insulted, and the French messengers were glad to escape with
their lives from the hands of the infuriated Colonists. No Spanish
monarch ever had a firmer hold upon the Indies than Ferdinand VII. when
Spain was lost to him in July and August, 1808.

But soon there came that inevitable question, first in the catechism of
all human society: Whom shall we obey? The King, whose hand had weighed
not over lightly these many years, an abdicated prisoner at Bayonne;
Ferdinand yielding his authority into the hand of a nameless Regency,
and his capital to the brother of the Corsican Emperor; Spain overrun
by two hundred thousand foreign troops; messengers at hand from Joseph,
from the Regency, from the Junta of the Asturias, from the Junta of
Seville, each alike asserting its right to authority over the Colonies,
as legitimate possessors of jurisdiction in Spain itself! The accession
of Joseph, in fact, gave a momentary independence to Spanish America,
and the royal governors were thrown upon their own resources for the
maintenance of the