Note 15 — Chapter I

In the curious exculpatory memoirs which Godoy published in 1835-6, with the aid of d’Esménard, he endeavours to make out that he never desired the principality, and that Napoleon pressed it upon him, because he wished to remove him from about the person of Charles IV. ‘The gift of the principality of the Algarves was a banishment’ (i. 54). This plea will not stand in the face of the fact that Godoy had solicited just such preferment as far back as the spring of 1806; see Arteche, Guerra de la Independencia, i. 148. His real object was to secure a place of refuge at the death of Charles IV.