Note 28 — Chapter IV · (continued 2)

These bitter expressions of the father have never transpired, and this very concealment seems to confirm what all other circumstances render probable, that his abdication at Aranjuez was produced by fear and compulsion. The Queen is said (with an effrontery scarcely credible even when the greatest criminality derives boldness from the highest rank) to have told her son in the presence of the King her husband that he had no right to the crown, for that Charles was not his father. Buonaparte, in his letter to Ferdinand, had indirectly told him he was the child of an adulterous intercourse: and it is more probable that this story of the Queen’s avowal should have been invented and promulgated by him or his agents, for the sake of blackening the royal family, and weakening the popularity of Ferdinand, by destroying his hereditary right, than that so flagitious a declaration should really have been made. I know not whether there be likeness enough of family features to disprove the aspersion of his spurious birth, but I am sure, that in conduct and temper Ferdinand has sufficiently proved himself a Spanish Bourbon.