The World полностью

Their opportunity arrived fast as Napoleon, having settled the east, turned westwards, determined to force Portugal and Spain to join his war against Britain. The emperor resembled a shark who had to keep feeding to stay alive. But each new conquest opened the possibility of another which he could not resist but which further stretched his resources. Spain was ruled by an inept ménage à trois of a bluff oft-cuckolded Bourbon king, Carlos IV, his impulsive queen María Luisa and her preposterous lover, Manuel Godoy, nicknamed El Chorizo – the Sausage – in a nod to his province of Extremadura, known for its meat, and to his formidable sexual equipment. The queen one day saw the Sausage strumming his guitar and fell in love. In 1792 the king jovially appointed the twenty-eight-year-old popinjay as secretary of state, later garlanded with two dukedoms and then with the preposterous title príncipe de la paz (prince of peace). Godoy was soon the most hated sausage in Spain.^*

Napoleon smelled blood in the water. When he wrote to warn Carlos of Godoy’s cuckoldry, the Sausage intercepted it but just passed it on to Carlos – who ignored it. Napoleon easily manipulated the three, along with the embittered heir, Fernando, into joining him in an invasion of Portugal that inserted French troops into Spain; next he persuaded the royal couple to abdicate their throne altogether. He appointed Joseph as king, replacing him in Naples with his brother-in-law Murat. The premier chevalier – whom Napoleon called ‘the bravest man in the world … decked out in gold and feathers that rose above his head like a church tower’ – was in Spain at the time commanding the French army. He occupied Madrid, but on 2–3 May 1808 the Madrileños rebelled. ‘French blood has spilt,’ said Murat. ‘It demands vengeance. All arrested will be shot.’ The crackdown unleashed a ferocious insurgency, its atrocities gruesomely sketched by Goya in his Disasters of War. Napoleon called this ‘my Spanish ulcer’, admitting ‘the injustice was too cynical … it remains very ugly’.

In Portugal, he had provoked something just as extraordinary. On 29 November 1807, as French troops advanced on Lisbon, the príncipe regente, João VI, a long-faced, fat-lipped, bleary-eyed, pot-bellied vacillator who lived in the palace-monastery of Mafra accompanied only by priests and a force of bats deployed to kill the raging insects, left for Brazil.

* An observer of all this, the Anglo-Irish MP Edmund Burke, predicted in his Reflections on the Revolution in France that its consequences would be very different from its intentions, forging an unfailing rule of history. ‘That which in the first instance is prejudicial maybe be excellent in its remoter operation and its excellence may arise from the ill effects it produces in the beginning,’ he wrote. ‘The reverse also happens: and very plausible schemes, with very pleasing commencements, have often shameful and lamentable conclusions.’