is private matadors, after which he spent about three
hours in the society of the Queen. He then devoted the same length of
time to the conduct of public business with the King; and the day ended
with dinner, fetes, the opera, or the consideration of requests for
patronage. This function of State generally occupied three evenings in
the week; and on these occasions a crowd of some 250 suitors filled his
meanly lit ante-room with jealous expectancy and long baffled
hopes.[384]

Certainly the representatives of monarchy at this time of acute trial
were unequal to the strain. Catharine of Russia was supremely able, but
no less corrupt. Frederick William of Prussia equalled her in vice and
in nothing else. Francis of Austria had the brain of a master of
ceremonies; George III that of a model squire; Ferdinand of Naples was
in his place in the kennel; Victor Amadeus of Sardinia, in the
confessional. It is difficult to say to what place Charles IV of Spain
and his consort can most fitly be assigned; for they could not live
apart from Godoy; and with Godoy they would have been excluded from any
residence but the royal palace of Spain. The policy of that Court
wavered under his whims and devices. Hated by the grandees, loathed by
honest people, and yet fawned on by all alike, he sought to strengthen
his power by jobbery, with results fatal to the public services. Such a
man evades difficulties instead of grappling with them. He lives for the
day. "After me the deluge" is the motto of all Godoys.

The favourite soon perceived that the war with France pleased neither
the Court, the merchants, nor the people. Charles IV had gone to war for
the restoration of royalty; but, thanks to the perfidy of Prussia and
the vacillations of Austria, that ideal had vanished; and in its place
there appeared the spectres of want and bankruptcy. By the end of 1794
the Republicans had gained a firm foothold in Catalonia and Biscay; and
the prospect of further campaigns was highly distasteful to a Court
which kept up the traditional pomp of the Spanish monarchy. Even when
the Spanish forces in Catalonia and Biscay were wellnigh starving, the
Court borrowed L160,000 to defray the expenses of the usual migration to
San Ildefonso; and the British ambassador computed that the cost of a
campaign could be saved by a sojourn in Madrid for the whole year. But
parsimony such as this was out of the question. Accordingly the only
possible alternatives were, p