Note 110 — Chapter X

“It has been asserted” (says Lord Holland in his “Foreign Reminiscences,” p. 87) “that his (Manuel Godoy’s) marriage with the daughter of the Infant Don Luis originated in a malicious trait of jealousy of the Queen. The story goes, that she brought the King unexpectedly to the apartment of the favourite, and surprised him when supping tête-à-tête with Mademoiselle Tudo (the daughter of an artillery officer), a lady of extraordinary beauty, to whom he was clandestinely married, though some say by a contract which the laws would consider as invalid; that the King was partly shocked and partly diverted at the discovery; that he shortly afterwards, at the suggestion of the Queen, with a view of providing, without the peril of a deadly sin, for the incontinence of his favourite, insisted on matrimony, and condescended to offer his young and recently acknowledged cousin for a bride; that the Prince of the Peace, not daring to acknowledge his union with the Tudo, and still less to decline the royal alliance without alleging some such insurmountable bar, prevailed on the wife of his affections to suppress the truth, and allowed Charles, in his zeal to rescue him from more venial and ordinary vices, to involve him in the heinous and troublesome sin of bigamy. I do not vouch for the truth of the tale. Well-informed persons believed it, and related it to me. It is certain that the ostensible marriage with the Princess, which took place in 1797, never interrupted his connexion with the Tudo. During his prosperity, she was generally lodged in a royal palace, or in an adjoining apartment. After his exile and adversity, she followed him to Rome, and has always been treated by him, his friends, and even the Royal Family, as a personage in some sort legitimately entitled to the society, tenderness, and protection of the Prince of Peace.”