Then the peace of
Basilia was signed, and, as one of the conditions of that peace, Spain
ceded to France the part she still held of Santo Domingo.
From this period Charles, in the terror inspired by the excesses of
the Revolution and the probable fear for his own safety, forgot that
he was a Bourbon and began to seek an alliance with the executioners
of his family. As a result, the treaty of San Ildefonso was signed
(1796). Spain became the enemy of England, and the first effects
thereof which she experienced were the bombardment of Cadiz by an
English fleet, the loss of the island of Trinidad, and the siege of
Puerto Rico by Abercrombie.
Spain also became the willing vassal, rather than the ally, of the
military genius whom the French Revolution had revealed, and obeyed
his mandates without a murmur. In 1803 Napoleon demanded a subsidy of
6,000,000 francs per month as the price of Spain's neutrality, but in
the following year he insisted on the renewal of the alliance against
England (treaty of Paris, 1804). The total destruction of the Spanish
fleet at the battles of Saint Vincent and Trafalgar was the result.
Godoy, who in his ambitious dreams had seen a crown and a throne
somewhere in Portugal to be bestowed on him by the man to whose
triumphal car he had attached his king and his country, began to
suspect Napoleon's intentions.
Seeing the war-clouds gather in the north of Europe, he thought that
the coalition of the powers against the tyrant was the presage of his
downfall, and he now hastened to send an emissary to England.
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