194 Royal Intrigue ; or, AuG. 



Antorcha!"* was buzzed from box to box. The cavalier blushed as he 

 saw himself the object of such general attention, yet secretly exulted in 

 the triumph ; while his still more gratified mistress bestowed new marks 

 of freedom on her minion. 



. That tender intimacy which had for years subsisted between Godoy 

 and the Queen, had long since yielded to other feelings : jealous control 

 on his side over her conduct, and an impatient dependence on his power 

 (the parent of hatred) on that of her majesty. It has often been insin- 

 uated, but, perhaps, on no just foundation, that he held her majesty's 

 life in his hands, by the possession of some documents which she would 

 have given worlds to recal ; be that as it may, he knew her majesty's 

 temperament too well to look with too scrupulous an eye on the minions 

 of her depravity ; so long as they were his obsequious slaves, every new 

 favourite added an additional link to the chain in which he held his 

 royal victim. Charles IV., himself a man of coarse and violent animal 

 passions, was little observant of those domestic decorums, which alone 

 could entitle him to the right of complaint, or the sympathy of his 

 subjects; never were the king and queen of any country more univers- 

 ally unpopular out of that vicious circle by which they surrounded 

 themselves. 



Don Manoel had now been seven years in Spain, and nearly five at 

 the court of Madrid; he arrived with the sentence of the Inquisition 

 hanging over his head, which doomed him to a cruel and ignominious 

 death ; yet was his very crime the means of his salvation ! and instead 

 of being burned at the stake, (the death so mercifully assigned to him 

 by the holy office,) the first week after his arrival he found himself 

 not only pardoned, but under the fond, especial favour of the Queen of 

 the Two Worlds ! It is time, however, to indulge the reader's curiosity. 



Don Manoel Maldonado, the only son of the chief secretary to the 

 viceroy of Peru, was born at Lima in the year 1778 ; his mother was a 

 European. The youth was intended for the service of the church, but 

 from his earliest years betrayed such a spirit of gallantry, and attach- 

 ment to the gaieties of life, as destroyed the hopes of his bigotted 

 parents of ever binding him down to the rigours of monastic discipline. 

 At the age of fourteen he was placed under the charge of his uncle the 

 Patriarch of Peru, and grand prior of the convent of the Iglesia Alto,t 

 also at Lima ; for nearly two years the wild impatient boy was doomed 

 to rigid seclusion from all the pleasures of youth,,; on the Easter and 

 Christmas visitations of his ecclesiastical superior and relative to the 

 various convents of nuns, the young Manoel was one of his attendants, 

 and marched in procession, swinging the incense vase, and chaunting 

 with the choir ; on one of these occasions, a dart from Cupid's bow 

 (shot from the dark eye of a lovely Limana, as it peeped through the 

 close grating which adjoins the elevated altar) banished for ever from 

 his amorous heart the thoughts of monkish life. Having found means 

 to communicate, first by signs and then by billet, with the object of his 

 half-defined attachment, he formed the desperate scheme of eloping 

 from his sacred prison, and effecting an entrance into that which held 

 the nun in equally-detested bondage. He was then scarcely sixteen, 



* " The Prisoner !" " The handsome American of the Antorcha!" 

 -f- High-Church. 



