ror invited him to dinner,
and afterwards sent Savary to inform him that he must hand back the
crown to his father. To this Ferdinand returned a firm refusal; and
his advisers, Escoiquiz and Labrador, ventured to warn the Emperor
that the Spaniards would swear eternal hatred to France if he tampered
with the crown of Spain. Napoleon listened good-humouredly, pulled
Escoiquiz by the ear as a sign of his personal regard, and added: "You
are a deep fellow; but, I tell you, the Bourbons will never let me
alone." On the next day he offered Ferdinand the throne of Etruria. It
was coldly declined.[191]

Charles IV., his Queen, and Godoy, arrived at Bayonne at the close of
April. The ex-King had offered to put himself and his claim in
Napoleon's hands, which was exactly what the Emperor desired. The
feeble creature now poured forth his bile on his disobedient son, and
peevishly bade him restore the crown. Ferdinand assented, provided his
father would really reign, and would dismiss those advisers who were
hated by the nation; but the attempt to impose conditions called forth
a flash of senile wrath, along with the remark that "one ought to do
everything _for_ the people and nothing _by_ the people."

Meanwhile the men of Madrid were not acting with the passivity desired
by their philosophizing monarch. At first they had welcomed Murat as
delivering them from the detested yoke of Godoy; but the conduct of
the French in their capital, and the detention of Ferdinand at
Bayonne, aroused angry feelings, which burst forth on May the 2nd, and
long defied the grapeshot of Murat's guns and the sabres of his
troopers. The news of this so-called revolt gave Napoleon another
handle against his guests. He hurried to Charles and cowed him by
well-simulated signs of anger, which that _roi faineant_ thereupon
vented on his son, with a passion that was outdone only by the shrill
gibes of the Queen. At the close of this strange scene, the Emperor
interposed with a few stern words, threatening to treat the prince as
a rebel if he did not that very evening restore the crown to his
father. Ferdinand braved the parental taunts in stolid silence, but
before the trenchant threats of Napoleon he quailed, and broke down.

Resistance was now at an end. On that same night (May 5th) the Emperor
concluded with Godoy a convention whereby Charles IV. agreed to hand
over to Napoleon the crowns of Spain and the Indies, on consideration
that those dominions s