2,500,000 The Princes and Princesses of the house of the Emperor Napoleon shall besides retain their property, moveable and immoveable, of whatever nature it may be, which they shall possess by individual and public right, and the rents of which they shall enjoy (also as individuals) Art 7. The annual pension of the Empress Josephine shall be reduced to 1,000,000, in domains, or in inscriptions in the great book of France; she shall continue to enjoy, in full property, moveable and immoveable, with power to dispose of it conformable to the French laws. Art. 8. There shall be granted to Prince Eugene, Viceroy of Italy, a suitable establishment out of France. Art. 9. The property which his Majesty the Emperor Napoleon possesses in France, either as extraordinary domain, or as private domain, attached to the crown, the funds placed by the Emperor, either in the great book of France, in the Bank of France, in the Actions des Forets, or in any other manner, and which his Majesty abandons to the crown, shall be reVOL. LVI. served as a capital, which shall not exceed 2,000,000, to be expended in gratifications in favour of such persons, whose names shall be contained in a list to be signed by the Emperor Napoleon, and which shall be transmitted to the French government. Art. 10. All the crown diamonds shall remain in France. Art. 11. His Majesty the Emperor Napoleon shall return to the Treasury, and to the other public chests, all the sums and effects that shall have been taken out by his orders, with the exception of what has been appropriated from the Civil List. Art. 12. The debts of the Household of his Majesty the Emperor Napoleon, such as they were on the day of the signature of the present treaty, shall be immediately discharged out of the arrears due by the public Treasury to the Civil List, according to a list, which shall be signed by a Commissioner appointed for that purpose. Art. 13. The obligations of the Mont-Napoleon, of Milan, towards all the creditors, whether Frenchmen or Foreigners, shall be exactly fulfilled, unless there shall be any change made in this respect. Art. 14. There shall be given all the necessary passports for the free passage of his Majesty the Emperor Napoleon, or of the Empress, the Princes and Princesses, and all the persons of their suites who wish to accompany them, or to establish themselves out of France, as well as for the passage of all the equipages, horses, and effects belonging to them. The Allied Powers shall, in consequence, furnish officers and men for escorts. 2 D Art, Art. 15. The French Imperial guards shall furnish a detachment of from 1,200 to 1,500 men, of all arms, to serve as an escort to the Emperor Napoleon to Saint Tropes, the place of his embarka tion. Art. 16. There shall be furnish ed a corvette and the necessary transport-vessels to convey to the place of his destination his Majesty the Emperor Napoleon and his household: and the corvette shall belong, in full property, to his Majesty the Emperor. Art. 17. The Emperor Napoleon shall be allowed to take with him and retain as his guard 400 men, volunteers, as well officers, as subofficers and soldiers. Art. 18. No Frenchman who shall have followed the Emperor Napoleon or his family, shall be held to have forfeited his rights as such by not returning to France within three years; at least they shall not be comprised in the exceptions which the French Government reserves to itself to grant after the expiration of that term. Art. 19. The Polish troops of all arms, in the service of France, shall be at liberty to return home, and shall retain their arms and baggage, as a testimony of their honourable services. The officers, sub-officers, and soldiers, shall retain the decorations which have been granted to them, and the pensions annexed to those decorations. Art. 20. The High Allied Powers guarantee the execution of all the articles of the present treaty, and engage to obtain that it shall be adopted and guaranteed by France. Art. 21. The present act shall be ratified, and the ratifications ex Since the period when Divine Providence, in consequence of the spontaneous and solemn resignation of my august father, placed me on the throne of my ancestors, of which the kingdom took the oaths to me as heir by its procurators assembled in Cortes, according to the law and custom of the Spanish nation, practised in the most remote periods; and since that happy day on which I entered the capital amidst the most sincere demonstrations of affection and loyalty with which the people of Madrid came out to receive me, this display of love towards my royal person making a deep impression on the French hosts, who, under the cloak of friendship, had advanced as far as that city, being a presage of what that heroic population would one day performa for their King, and for their bonour, and giving that example which the other parts of the kingdom have nobly followed: since that that day, I determined in my royal mind to reply to sentiments so loyal, and to satisfy the great obligations which a king is under to wards his subjects, to dedicate my whole time to the discharge of such angust functions, and to repair the evils which the pernicious influence of a favourite had caused in the preceding reign. My first labours were directed to the restoration of various magistrates and other persons, who had been arbitrarily removed from their functions; but the difficult state of affairs, and the perfidy of Buonaparte, from the cruel effect of which I wished, by proceeding to Bayonne, to preserve my people, scarcely allowed time for more. The royal family being assembled there, an atrocious attack was perpetrated on the whole of it, and particularly on my person, unequalled in the history of civilised nations, both in its circumstances and in the series of events which took place there; and the sacred law of nations being there violated in the highest degree, I was deprived of my liberty, stripped of the government of my kingdoms, and conveyed to a palace with my very dear brother and uncle, which served as a sort of honourable prison for about the space of six years. Amidst this affliction, I had always present to my mind the love and loyalty of my people, and the consideration of the endless calamities to which they were exposed formed a great part of my griefs; inundated as they were with enemies, nearly destitute of all means of resistance, without King, and without a Government previously established, which might put in motion and unite at its voice the force of the nation, direct its impulse, and avail itself of the resources of the State, to combat the forces which simultaneously invaded the Peninsula, and had treacherously got possession of its principal fortresses. In this lamentable situation, as the only remedy that remained, I issued, as well as I could, while surrounded by force, the Decree of the 5th of May, 1808, addressed to the Council of Castile, and in defect of it to any other Board or audience that might be at liberty, in order that the Cortes might be convoked, who had only to employ themselves on the spur of the moment, in raising the taxes and supplies necessary for the defence of the kingdom, remaining permanent for other events which might occur; but this my Royal Decree unfortunately was not known there; and although it was afterwards known, the provinces provided for the same object, as soon as the accounts reached them of the cruel tragedy perpetrated in Madrid on the memorable ed of May, by the Chief of the French troops, through the instrumentality of the Juntas which they created. Next took place the glorious battle of Baylen: the French fled as far as Vittoria, and all the provinces, with the capital, proclaimed me, anew, King of Castile and Leon, in the metropolis, with the same formalities as the Kings my august predecessors. This is a recent fact, of which the medals struck in all parts afford demonstrative proof, and which the people through whom I have passed since my return from France have confirmed by the effusion of vivas which moved the sensibility of my heart, 2 D 2 where where they are engraved never to be effaced. From the deputies nominated by the Juntas, the Central Junta was formed; who exercised in my royal name all the powers of Sovereignty from Sept. 1808, till Jan. 1810; in which month was established the first Council of Regency, in whom the exercise of that power continued till the 24th of September in the same year on which day were installed in the isle of Leon the Cortes called General and Extraordinary, when 104 Deputies took the oaths, in which they engaged to preserve for me my dominions as their Sovereign; all which appears from the act certified by the Secretary of State Don Nicolas Maria de Sierra. But these Cortes, assembled in a manner never used in Spain, even in the most arduous cases, and in the most turbulent times of the minorities of Kings, in which the Assembly of Procurators were wont to be more numerous than in the common and ordinary Cortes, were not called the States of the Nobility and Clergy, although the Central Junta had so ordered, this Decree having been artfully concealed from the Council of Regency, and also the fact that the Junta had assigned to it the Presidency of the Cortes, a prerogative of the Crown which the Regency, would not have left to the decision of the Congress, if it had been acquainted therewith. In consequence of this, every thing remained at the disposal of the Cortes: who, on the very day of their installation, and by way of commencement to their acts, despoiled me of my sovereignty, which the same deputies had only a little before acknowledged, as cribing it nominally to the nation, in order to appropriate it to themselves, and then, upon such usurpation, to dictate to the nation such laws as they pleased, imposing upon it the yoke by which it should receive them compulsorily in a new Constitution, which the deputies established without 20thority of the provinces, people, or juntas, and without the knowledge of those provinces, which were said to be represented by substitutes from Spain and the Indies. This Constitution they sanctioned and published in 1812. This first attack upon the prerogatives of the throne, abusing the name of the nation, became, as it were, the basis of many other attacks which followed it; and in spite of the repugnance of many deputies, perhaps of the majority, they were adopted and raised to the rank of laws, which they called fundamental, by means of the shouts, threats, and violence of those who attended in the galleries of the Cortes, with which they alarmed and terrified; and that which was in truth the work of a faction, was clothed with the specious mask of the general will, and for such will, that of a few seditious persons, who in Cadiz and afterwards in Madrid, occasioned affliction to all good citizens, made their own to pass. These facts are so notorious, that there is scarcely any one who is ignorant of them; and the very Diaries of the Cortes furnish ample proof of them. A mode of making laws so foreign to the Spanish nation, gave occasion to an alteration of the good laws under which, in other times, it was respected and happy. In truth, almost all the forms of the ancient constitution of the the Monarchy were innovated upon; and copying the revolutionary and democratic principles of the French constitution of 1791, they sanctioned, not the fundamental laws of a moderate Monarchy, but those of a popular Government, with a chief, or magistrate, their mere delegated executor, and not a King, although they gave him that name, to deceive and seduce the unwary and the nation. Under the same want of liberty this new Constitution was signed and sworn to; and it is known to all, not only what passed with regard to the respectable Bishop of Orense, but also the punishment with which those were threatened who refused to sign and swear to it. To prepare the public mind to receive such novelties, especially those regarding my royal person and the prerogatives of the Crown, the public newspapers were resorted to as a means, some of which the Deputies of the Cortes conducted, and abused the liberty of the press, established by them, to render the Royal power odious, giving to all the rights of Majesty the name of despotisin-making King and Despot synonimous terms, and calling Kings Tyrants: while at the same time they cruelly persecuted every one who had the firmness to contradict them, or to dissent from this revolutionary and seditious mode of thinking: and in every thing democracy was affected, the army and navy, and all other establishments which, from time immemorial, had been called royal, being stripped of that name, and national substituted, with which they flattered the people; who, however, in spite of these perverse arts retained, by their natural loyalty, the good feelings which always formed their character. Of all this, since I have happily entered the kingdom, I have been acquiring faithful information and knowledge, partly from my own observations, and partly from the public papers, in which, up to this very day, representations of my arrival and my character are impudently cironlated, so gross and infamous in themselves, that even with regard to any other individual they would constitute very heavy of fences worthy of severe notice and punishment. Circumstances so unexpected have filled my heart with bitterness, which could only be alleviated by the demonstrations of affection from all those who hoped for my arrival, in order that by my presence an end might be put to these calamities, and to the oppression in which those were, who retained in their minds the remembrance of my person, and sighed for the true happiness of their country. I swear and promise to you, true and loyal Spaniards, at the same time that I sympathise with the evils which you have suffered, you shall not be disappointed of your noble expectations. Your Sovereign wishes to be so on your account, and in this he places his glory, that he is the Sovereign of an heroic nation, who by their immortal deeds have gained the admiration of the world, and preserved their liberty and honour. I abhor and detest despotismneither the intelligence and cultivation of the nations of Europe could now endure it, nor in Spain were its kings ever despots. Neither its good laws, nor constitution, authorised |