Spain and Portugal (5)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1833 Excerpt: ...of the national improvement; nor was he so blind as to be ignorant that the blood and treasures of his people had been wasted for French or Austrian rather than Spanish objects. He respected the king of France as the head of his house, but he asserted his resolution not to become the viceroy of that monarch. If to this we add, that he was a prince of The same authorities. THE SPANISH COURT. 165 Honour, of integrity, of strict veracity, we shall have said all that truth will permit in his praise. He had the melancholy temperament, the incapacity, the indolence of his father; nor was he less uxorious. His queen, Maria Teresa Magdalena Barbara, daughter of Joam V., king of Portugal, to whom he had been united in 1729, was a woman of engaging manners and of mild disposition, but avaricious. In the fear of being reduced, in case she survived her husband, to dependence, --a very common fate in Spanish queens, --she rendered some offices venal, and was always eager to receive presents of money from any quarter. The same blemish attached to one of the most influential ministers, the marquis de Ensenada, a man of low origin, but of ready parts and of profuse expenditure, --an expenditure which could not assuredly be supported by the ordinary emoluments of his office. In the late reign he had been fond of war, merely because it had pleased the queen: in the present, for the same reason, he became the advocate of peace. His colleague, don Josef de Carvajal, a nobleman of illustrious descent and of unquestionable integrity, was in heart equally pacific with his minister, and was an enemy to French interests. The king's confessor, the jesuit Rovago, being a man of ambition, aspired to, and obtained from his easy master, a share in the direction of affairs. But the stranges