Such military operations as took place in that brief time need not detain us. Espartero lost his nerve; and his men, seeing that he was losing it, deserted him. He began to besiege Seville; and some of his shells burst in the convents there, with the result that Virgins of the Lord, as they were styled in a municipal proclamation, ran out into the streets screaming that he was a shameless and sacrilegious ruffian, and exhorting all pious men to fight him furiously. He raised the siege and fled, with Concha hard upon his heels; while Espiroz and Narvaez converged upon Madrid, where the National Militia prepared to resist until Seonane and Zurbano came to their relief. Washington Irving draws us a picture of women gathering their children home, like hens gathering their chickens under their wings at the sight of a hawk," and continues :—

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"Before long there were eighteen thousand men under arms within the city; all the gates were strongly guarded; the main squares were full of troops, with cannon planted at the entrance of the streets opening into them. The shops were all shut up, and the streets, in general, deserted and silent, all those not on duty keeping as much as possible within doors. At night the whole city was illuminated, as is generally the case when any popular movement is apprehended, so that an enemy may not have darkness to favour his designs."

To Isabella and her sister, indeed, neither the assault nor the defence intended any harm. They were to be the prizes of the conflict round which the battle was to rage. But their peril nevertheless was great; and their terror must have been great also if they were made acquainted with the plans of their defenders.

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Troops (Washington Irving tells us), "were stationed in the houses along the main streets, to fire upon the enemy from the windows and balconies, should they effect an entrance; and it was resolved to dispute the ground street by street, and to make the last stand in the royal palace, where were the Queen and her sister, and where the Duchess of Victory, wife of the Regent, had taken refuge, her own palace being in one of the most exposed parts of the city."

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Nor was that all. There was also a declaration of that fanfaron Mendizabal, who had the control of affairs, that, if pushed to the utmost, he would sally forth with the Queen and her sister in each hand, put himself in the midst of the troops, and fight his way out of the city." That was indeed a cruel resolution fraught with awful possibilities—the more cruel because the fight was, after all, only a faction fight, the issue of which could make no difference worth considering to the children. The chivalry of the whole Corps diplomatique was stirred. They proposed, in a note which Washington Irving drafted, to proceed in a body to the Palace and "remain there during the time of peril,” shielding the little Queen with the ægis of their official sacro-sanctity, and challenging any one who sought to harm her to pass first over the dead bodies of all the representatives of all the powers.

The offer was declined and, happily, the need for pressing it did not arise. Once again, as at Vergara, an imminent battle ended in a cordial embrace. "We are all Spaniards. Let us all embrace,” shouted Narvaez, galloping forward, just as Espartero had once done, into the enemy's ranks; and then the shooting ceased and the hand-shaking began.

According to some accounts Seonane had been bought; according to others he had been betrayed. The story is told that he began to write a dispatch describing the shameful occurrence, and then, overcome with disgust, fell to the ground in an epileptic fit; though whether he was disgusted with himself or because he was disgusted with his subordinates is not stated. His aide-de-camp, at any rate, completed the dispatch; and the words, "Here the general fell senseless," appear in the only official record of the engagement.

And that was the end of the resistance. Espartero, whose fall has been described as "the bumps of a man descending the rugged front of an inclined precipice," settled down, for a time, in Belgrave Square-much honoured by our countrymen, for whom he personified the cause of Constitutional Liberalism in Spain, entertained at the Guildhall, and presented with the freedom of the City. Madrid refrained from fighting, and accepted the accomplished fact. Narvaez marched in, broke all the promises on the faith of which he had gained possession of it, and quickly proved that his little finger was thicker than Espartero's loins.

He had promised, in a formal convention jointly signed by himself and Espiroz, to respect the rights of the National Militia—and he instantly disarmed them all. He had promised permission to quit the service to all soldiers who deserted Espartero; and when eight men came forward and applied for that permission he had them ranged against a wall and shot. That was his first intimation that, whatever he might have pledged himself to in the hour of his necessity, he now meant to rule not as King Log, but as King Stork. His next step was to dismiss innumerable officials, and replace them with his own

nominees. Notably he sent Madame Mina and Arguelles packing, and put representatives of the old Spanish aristocracy in their places-practically reproducing Cristina's Camarilla at her daughter's Court.

Those were the first fruits of victory; and when they had been garnered the members of the coalition proceeded to divide the spoils. Their wrangles over the division belong in the main to the History of Spain rather than to Isabella's biography; but one question over which they wrangled concerned her intimatelythe question: Who should now be her guardian ?

Cristina desired to be brought back to the post; but Private Muñoz blocked the way. Her marriage to him made her legally ineligible; and it was no longer to be called a secret marriage, for Espartero had revealed the secret. Moreover there were members of the coalition who did not want Cristina back in any capacity. Carlota was equally impossible because of the objections of Cristina and her friends. The Liberal politicians, again, would not hear of the appointment of a popular soldier; while the popular soldiers opposed the choice of a Liberal politician. So how to cut the knot?

But

It was cut, at last, by the selection of a diplomatist : Don Sallustiano Olozaga, who, after being Espartero's Ambassador at the Court of Louis-Philippe, had taken part in the movement against him. that was only a provisional arrangement. A little later, Olozaga became President of the Council; and then the Cortes declared Isabella of full age and competent to reign without a guardian—just two months after her thirteenth birthday.

She was still a child, and Olozaga thought that he could safely treat her as a child; and there was trouble.

CHAPTER X

Isabella declared a major at thirteen-Olozaga Prime MinisterReconstruction of Cristina's Camarilla at Isabella's CourtIntrigues of the Camarilla against Olozaga-Attempts to make him look foolish--Accusations brought against him of treating his sovereign with disrespect and using violence to compel her to do his bidding-Dismissal of Olozaga.

EVEN at the risk of repetition, we must stop to set the stage and distribute the parts for the drama which is now to follow.

First, then, we must repeat and insist that Isabella had been declared a major by her Cortes at the age of thirteen years and two months. Our spectacle, that is to say, is of a child-one might almost say a naughty girl-badly brought up, inclined to be sullen, far from straightforward, and not particularly intelligent-placed in the nominal charge of a situation which she could not even begin to control : in theory doing what she chose, but in fact doing what she was told, and by no means absolutely clear, in her own mind, who had, and who had not, the right to tell her what to do.

In the second place we must repeat and remember that the victory over Espartero had been won by a coalition of Radicals and Reactionaries: that the coalition, having gained its end, began at once to split again into its component parts; and that the two sections, already at odds with one another, lost no time in manoeuvring for position with a view to the inevitable fray. At the moment at which the