The attempt to remove the last members of the royal family from Madrid on May 2 produced a furious popular outbreak, in which many French soldiers were killed, but which Murat suppressed with stern energy, and avenged by many executions.

On May 20 the Madrid Gazette announced that both Ferdinand and his father had abdicated in favour of Napoleon.

This was the signal for a popular outbreak that swept like a tempest over Spain. Madrid was not to Spain what Berlin was to Prussia, or Vienna to Austria, or Paris to France-the single nerve,centre of the whole nation. Spain had half a hundred independent nerve-centres. It was more indeed, like a cluster of tiny, but jealous and independent, republics than a single kingdom Each province had its own local horizon, beyond which it never looked, and its own local administration, which remained quite unaffected by what might happen elsewhere. And underneath all provincial jealousies, and all varieties of local character, there was, as a basis, the common Spanish nature, superstitious to the point of childishness, but proud as with the pride of ancient Rome, and fierce alike in hate and revenge as only Southern nations can be.

At a hundred independent points over Spain revolt awoke. There was no waiting for signal from elsewhere, for common plans or concerted movements. Spain exploded in independent patches. Each city acted as if it were a self-governed republic; each province was as though it were itself Spain.

On May 22 Carthagena was in arms ; on the 23rd Valencia proclaimed Ferdinand king, Then all the hill-tops in the Asturias flamed with signal-fires. On the 26th Seville sounded the tocsin. Within ten days from the announcement that the crown of Spain had been pawned, like a second-hand coat, to Napoleon, the French authority in Spain had shrunk to the limits of the French camps. Yet there were 180,000 French troops in Spain!

The outbreak everywhere took a common form. The wrathful crowds crystallised into juntas; the juntas acted as independent powers. The Junta of the Asturias calmly clothed itself with sovereign functions, issued a declaration of war against Napoleon, -and despatched envoys to England-then at war with Spain-to demand help.

The Junta of Seville mistook itself for the nation, and adorned itself with the magnificent title of the Snpreme Junta of Spain and the Indies. Spanish enthusiasm easily effervesces into gorgeous syllables!

The Spanish rising against Napoleon was, of course, a very mixed product. A leaven of cruelty ran through it. It often lacked sanity. It knew nothing of method. It was intoxicated with pride. It waltzed with breathless speed from the, opposite extreme of fiery heroism to one of mere shivering cowardice. It was never less soldierly than when organised into martial shape. The story of the siege of Saragossa is one of the most kindling tales of human courage and suffering in all literature.

Yet Wellington, with his chilly common sense, was able to say of his Spanish auxiliaries, "They did nothing that ought to be done, with the exception of running away, and assembling again in a state of nature."

"Did you ever see the Spanish troops stand to their work?" he was once asked. "No," was his reply, "the best would fire a volley while the enemy was out of reach, and then all run away."

They would fight after their own fashion, in a word, but that fashion was not in formal line of battle. Yet Napoleon was accustomed to say, "The Spanish ulcer destroyed me."

And the scale and waste of that "ulcer" are not easily realised. The chief mischief of the Spanish revolt lay in the fact that it uave England its fatal' opportunity. It taught the Continental nations, too, that Napoleon was to be defeated.

"We ought not," said Blucher, "to count ourselves less brave than Spaniards." But Spain revealed, also, where Napoleon was vulnerable. The march of Napoleon's ambition was to be checked only by the strength and depths of a national uprising; and Spain was the first example of the outbreak, not of a government, but of a people against Napoleon.

What Spain cost Napoleon in direct losses can, in a rough way, be measured. Wellington, the least exaggerative of men, translates it into a bit of almost horrifying arithmetic.

"I entertain no doubt," he says, " that, from first to last, Napoleon sent 600,000 men into Spain, and I know that not more than 100,000 went out in the shape of an army; and, with the exception of Suchet's corps, these were without cannon or baggage, or anything to enable them to act as an army."

Of course this huge loss was due to Wellington's campaigns in Spain more than to the spluttering guerilla warfare of the Spaniards themselves. Nevertheless, Spain gave to England a battlefield, a cause, and the alliance of a nation.

Napoleon summoned a phantom Parliament of Spanish notables at Bayonne. On June 6, 1808, the crown of Spain was presented to Joseph, and accepted by him. But the war which the French troops in Spain had now to wage was one of a new character, planless, sporadic, inextinguishable; and on July 19 a great disaster befell the French arms. Dupont, who with 23,000 men held Andalusia, was surrounded and with his whole corps laid down his arms. A French army was suddenly blotted out, and the prestige of France, not merely in Spain itself, but far beyond its borders, reeled from the shock. Joseph had to abandon his new capital within a week of his triumphal entrance into it.

Napoleon punished Dupont by long years of imprisonment without trial; but time brings strange revenges, and it brought to Dupont a revenge of which neither Napoleon nor his unlucky marshal could have dreamed. Dupont was the first Bourbon Minister of War after the fall of Napoleon, and it fell to him to sign the formal order for the transport of "Napoleon Bonaparte, ci- devant Empereur des Francais," to the island of Elba!

Six weeks after the capitulation of Baylen a yet more ominous event took place. On August 1, 1808, Wellesley, with 12,000 men, landed at Figueras. England, in a word, had stepped on to the great stage of the Peninsula.

Spain represents the fatal blunder of Napoleon's career. Popular belief credits Napoleon with almost supernatural genius, an insight that was never deceived, and a wisdom that never blundered. But the belief is a mere superstition, and as independent of evidence as a superstition. Into this business of Spain he crowded blunders enough to wreck a dozen reputations. Under Charles or Ferdinand Spain was the obedient and costless tool of Napoleon. Her fleets and colonies were but pawns on the chessboard of his plans. It is a proof of Napoleon's contemptuous way of treating Spain-as a mere willless counter in the game of his politics-that in 1807, while Spain was still a sovereign state and his ally, he had calmly offered the Balearic Isles -- a Spanish possession -- to Great Britain in exchange for Sicily!

Napoleon was able to treat his ally as a mere subject for experiments in political vivisection. But when, for the sake of thrusting a Bonaparte on the Spanish throne, he affronted the national pride, Spain became his deadly enemy, and 180,000 French troops were at once entangled in its confused guerilla warfare. Napoleon thus lost Spain when he snatched the Spanish crown.

He utterly misread, too, the forces with which he was dealing. Himself the offspring of the Revolution, he could not understand that behind the mean and corrupt figures that formed the court of Spainthe complaisant husband, the vile wife, the plotting son, the disgraceful favourite -- there was a nation of 11 million people, and that the uprising of a nation was the entrance of a new factor into the strife a force mightier than the lies of diplomatists or the intrigues of politicians. The latest theory about Charles I of England is that he was essentially a Celt, and, as a consequence of possessing the Celtic temperament, could neither understand Englishmen nor govern them. If in mental type they had not been obstinately Celtic, the Stuarts, it is said, might still have sat on the English throne. Their failure is but an incident in the secular struggle betwixt the Celt and the Saxon; an illustration of the enduring intellectual incompatibility of the two types.

But Napoleon had not any similar excuse for failure in Spain. The Corsican in him ought to have understood the Basque better than any pure Frenchman, he might have realised what hot-blooded Iberian passion meant when kindled in 11 million Spaniards. But this is exactly what Napoleon failed to realise. He, the representative and heir of the Revolution, thought an entire nation was disposed of by the signature of the most contemptible member of it, because he happened to be a king! He actually believed that a drop of ink on a pen held by Charles IV's trembling fingers settled the Spanish trouble! The religion of Spain, too, he imagined, was like that of Italy, a servile and strengthless thing.

"Those countries where there are the greatest number of monks," he wrote, "are easy to subdue. I have had experience of it." But the monks in this case were of the Spanish variety-who could kill or be killed!

Betwixt Spain and France, too, rose the Pyrenees, and Napoleon had to fight far from his base. On the other hand, round three faces of the Peninsula rolled the sea, and the sea was the natural field and base of England. A duller brain than that of Napoleon might well have understood the scale of the blunder that was being committed. But Napoleon's otherwise keen intellect was intoxicated with success. His genius was drugged with pride; it was ruled by a superstitious belief in his "star."

Meanwhile, Napoleon, utterly blind as to the future, found a childish delight in his new kingdom. He was busy reckoning up how much gold Mexico would yield him, what tribute Spain. He saw, with the eye of fancy, new fleets coming into existence. France had, even after Trafalgar, forty-two line-of-battle ships; the Baltic Powers, Napoleon reckoned, would give him fifty-four; Spain, thirty-five. Here was a fleet of 131 ships of the line, as he explained to his somewhat sceptical Minister of Marine. "England is mine!" he wrote. The true road to London, he was persuaded, lay through Madrid.

But Napoleon's picture of Spain under a Bonaparte was as unreal as Sancho Panza's kingdom of Barataria. Everything went by contraries. Each sanguine expectation turned to ashes in his hands. He found the Spanish treasury empty, and had to pawn the crown jewels to raise £ 1 million. He sent to Cuesta the appointment of Viceroy of Mexico, and Cuesta, by way of reply, took command of the insurgent forces against him in Leon. Napoleon would reap a new harvest of victories; he found the capitulation of Baylen and of Cintra. He thought he had gained a subject nation; it proved to be a new and most ferocious enemy.

He gave to Joseph a throne and 11 million subjects, and the unhappy Joseph found himself absolutely alone. "I have not one single partisan here," he wrote to his brother.

"Neither the honest men nor the rogues," reported the disgusted Joseph, "are on my side."

"There is nothing to fear," Napoleon wrote on July 21 ; and on that very day Dupont was surrendering with his entire army!

"In one month," says Lanfrey, "from July 15 to August 20, Napoleon had experienced more checks than he ever sustained in his whole career."

The magic spell of his fortune seemed, at last, to be shattered.

Chapter III: The Appeal to England