people, for their none
too stable natures were being strongly influenced at that time by the
echo of French liberalism which was now sounding across the Pyrenees,
and restraint of any kind was becoming more and more irksome every day.
Charles IV., who ascended the throne in 1788, was weak and timid and
completely in the power of his wife, Marie Louise of Parma, a wilful
woman of little character, who was responsible for much of the
humiliation which came to Spain during the days of Napoleon's supremacy.
Charles IV., realizing his own lack of ability in affairs of state, had
decided to take a prime minister from the ranks of the people, that he
might be wholly dependent upon his sovereign's will; and his choice fell
upon a certain handsome Manuel Godoy, a member of the bodyguard of the
king, with whom the vapid Marie was madly in love, and whom she had
recommended for the position. The king, all unsuspecting, followed this
advice, and Godoy, who was wholly incompetent, went from one mistake to
another, to the utter detriment of Spanish interests. The queen's
relations with her husband's chief of state were well known to all save
Charles himself, and, on one occasion at least, Napoleon, by threatening
to reveal the whole shameful story to the king, bent Godoy to his will
and forced him to humiliating concessions. The queen supported him
blindly, however, in every measure, and put her evil pleasure above the
national welfare.

It must not be assumed that in this period of national wreckage that all
was bad, that all the women were corrupt and all the men were without
principle, for there was never perhaps such a condition of affairs in
any country; but the prevailing and long-continued licentiousness at the
court, which was in many respects a counterpart in miniature of the
wanton ways of eighteenth-century France, could not fail in the end to
react in a most disastrous way upon the moral nature of the people.
There were still pious mothers and daughters, but the moral standards of
the time were so deplorably low in a country where they had never been
of the highest, from a strictly puritan standpoint, that society in
general shows little of that high seriousness so essential to effective
morality.

CHAPTER XX

THE WOMEN OF MODERN SPAIN

Spain, in all the days of her history, has been conspicuous among all
other continental countries for the number of women who have wielded the
sovereign power, and the reasons