Landmarks of Recent History 17701883 Author:Charlotte Mary Yonge General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1883 Original Publisher: Walter Smith Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can se... more »lect from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: In the meantime Napoleon was using his despotic power at home to enrich Paris with the most beautiful public buildings; and to connect his kingdom of Italy more closely with France, he caused the Alps to be traversed by magnificent military roads. PART X. -- THE FRENCH IN SPAIN. 1807-1809. England alone was still at war with Napoleon, but her force had hitherto been chiefly shown by sea, and his by land; nor did they come into constant contact until his ambition occasioned the war which he himself described as his ruin. Fallen from the great days of the House of Avis, Portugal, under the House of Braganza, was, as Napoleon described it, little more than a dependency of England. It was at that time under the imbecile Maria I., in whose name her son Joao, Prince of Brazil, acted as regent, and tried to avoid offending the French, or breaking with his old allies. Napoleon proposed to the Court of Spain to take advantage of his weakness, and to seize and divide the kingdom. Spain was at this time in a wretched state. Carlos rv. was old, feeble, and totally in the hands of his wife, Maria Luisa, a wicked and shameless woman, who had raised Manuel de Godoy, a handsome guardsman, to the highest offices in the state, and was blinded by his flattery into implicitly following his measures, and hating her eldest son, Fernando Prince of the Asturias, because he was impatient of the disgraceful thraldom of the favourite. To Godoy, whose title was Principe de la Paz, Napoleon sent an offer of the principality of Algarva, provided he would allow his troops to pass the Pyrenees toPo...« less