A Wilderness So Immense (19 page)

After the banishment of Ortiz, the princess preyed on the easier ranks of the royal guard—whether to evade her father-in-law’s watchful eye, or to exploit her husband’s pomposity, or perhaps, more cruelly, as her physical beauty faded. “Many confinements [and] several illnesses,” the Russian ambassador wrote, “have completely wrecked her. Her skin is greenish and the loss of several teeth, replaced by false ones, has given the coup de grace to her outward appearance.” The radiant young lady gazing out of Anton Rafael Mengs’s 1765 engagement portrait was gone. Francisco Goya’s portraits after 1789 depict a woman ridden hard by life. “Maria Luisa has her past and her character written on her face,” Napoleon would soon remark. “It surpasses anything you can imagine.”
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Luis Godoy, a sturdy captain from the rugged province of Extremadura on the Portuguese border—birthplace of the conquistadors Cortés, Pizarro, and Balboa—was the first member of the royal guard who attracted Maria Luisa’s attention. Inevitably, however, Carlos III learned of the affair and had the guardsman transferred to a distant province so quickly that Godoy had no chance to say good-bye to the princess. Entrusting a note of farewell to his younger brother and handsome comrade, Manuel Godoy, the departing guardsman thereby introduced Maria Luisa to her next lover, who ruled Spain as
privado,
or royal favorite, until 1808.
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At seventeen, Manuel Godoy had followed his brother into the first brigade of the royal guards in 1784, and at twenty-one into the bedroom of Maria Luisa. After Carlos III died and Maria Luisa was queen, his rise was meteoric: colonel and knight of the Order of Santiago in 1789 at twenty-two, field marshal at twenty-four, duke of Alcudia, grandee of Spain, and first secretary of state at twenty-five. Despite Godoy’s provincial education, the English ambassador Lord Holland found his conversation “elegant, and equally exempt from vulgarity and affectation,” and his disposition “somewhat indolent, or as the French term it nonchalant.” More than any other “untravelled Spaniard,” Holland thought, Manuel Godoy displayed

Lady Holland described Godoy as a “large, coarse, ruddy-complexioned” man “with a heavy sleepy voluptuous look.” His countrymen were less
charitable. The nickname Choricero (sausage-maker, a sneer at the staple in the diet of his native Extremadura) was one of their gentler insults. As an upstart and a favorite, wrote one Spanish observer, “the noblemen hated him for his improvisations [and] the people because they preferred to suffer under a deified lord rather than under one of their own number raised to the nobility”
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To Spaniards and foreigner alike, however, Godoy’s influence at the court of Carlos IV and Maria Luisa was astonishing and offensive. “It is hardly conceivable that a young man without experience … could be appointed to the most important ministry,” the French ambassador, Jean-François Bourgoing, reported, “a man, moreover, whose attentiveness toward the queen leaves him so little free time.” Despite Godoy’s accumulation of “lofty titles, unbounded wealth, solid power, and dazzling magnificence,” one English visitor wrote, he was “treated by the first class with silent contempt.” Another English traveler described Godoy as “a foul beast of prey,” and a third Englishman translated the common gossip of Spain into English literature. “How carols now the lusty muleteer?” asked Lord Byron in the first canto of
Childe Harold
(written after Napoleon had sent Godoy and his royal patrons into exile),

“The thing that must strike those most who watch Charles IV in the bosom of his Court is his blindness where the conduct of the Queen is concerned,” the next French ambassador reported.

Carlos IV’s passions for hunting and tranquillity (and his utter dependence upon Godoy and Maria Luisa) made this possible—as did the fact that Manuel Godoy maintained an office and bedroom directly below the
royal apartments, in addition to his own sumptuous house in Madrid. “Every day, wet or fine, winter or summer,” the imprudent king confided to Napoleon of all people, “I would go out after breakfast, and after hearing mass, go hunting up to one o’clock.” Then, immediately after the midday meal,

As a gentleman of the household, Godoy attended Carlos and Maria Luisa at their one o’clock dinner, and then retired to his apartments for his own meal. Here, each afternoon, he was “joined by the Queen, who, once the King has gone off hunting, arrives by a secret stair,” explained the Russian ambassador. “It is in the course of these secret talks”—and whatever else might have gone on—“that the Queen and Godoy decide what proposals to lay before the King.”
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Soon after the death of Carlos III, the queen described the emerging new regime with a phrase that offended Spanish Catholics as badly as the near blasphemy of her favorite’s eventual title, Prince of the Peace. Ménage à trois might have been more accurate, but the queen suggested that she and her husband and Manuel Godoy comprised
“la santa trinidade en la tierra”
—a holy trinity on earth. The royal couple, Godoy wrote in his
Memoirs,
“needed a vigilant, active, and self-sacrificing person, who, without making it obvious, would lead them by the hand in their actions.” Dismissing both of Carlos Ill’s capable ministers in 1792—the master bureaucrat José Moñino y Redondo, count of Floridablanca, and the Aragonese nobleman Pedro Pablo Abarca de Bolea, count of Aranda—the new king and queen “found the right man in the lowly guardsman, whom they placed in the necessary surroundings, so that he could provide them the services they needed.”
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In less perilous times the world’s largest empire might have survived the rule of another
privado.
In less dangerous times the dirty linen of these Spanish Bourbons might have stayed within their palaces to fuel malicious gossip and petty intrigue and add a few salacious footnotes to Iberian history. With the fall of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, however, and with thousands of Americans moving past the Appalachian Mountains into the valley of the Ohio River and clamoring for access to the Mississippi River and New Orleans, the times demanded statesmanship far beyond the capacity of a sluggish monarch, his promiscuous queen, and their sleepy voluptuous favorite.

•   •   •

In December 1783, a few months after Great Britain acknowledged American independence in the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Revolution, Elizabeth House Trist, of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, set out toward Natchez, where she intended to meet her husband, a former British officer and naturalized American citizen who had bought a plantation along Bayou Manchac, between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Riding on horseback to Pittsburgh, she spent the winter with friends and waited for the spring thaw. In May, when the Upper Ohio was clear of ice, Mrs. Trist and her traveling companion, Polly, joined the procession of American families boarding flatboats for the trip downriver. “People seem to have caught the infection of the country,” she noted in her travel diary: “a desire for the Kentucki.”
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Another traveler on the Ohio River, the French-born essayist known as “An American Farmer,” put the dreams of his adopted compatriots into eloquent words. “Never before had I felt so disposed to meditation and revery,” wrote Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur as he gazed at the passing banks of the Ohio River in 1789. “My imagination darted into the future,” and

Crèvecoeur regarded the settling of the Ohio River Valley as “one of the greatest enterprises ever presented to man,” and thought the region itself was “destined to become the foundation of the power, wealth and future glory of the United States.” These dreams of the American Farmer were contagious, and every new inhabitant of Kentucky helped spread “the infection of the country.”
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The pastoral dreams of an American Farmer represented a looming imperial nightmare for the Spanish monarchy and its officials in Pensacola, New Orleans, and Natchez. The first shadows were hunters and explorers like Daniel Boone, men enthralled with “the diversity and beauties of nature” and comfortable in the solitude of the great American forest. Spain was not immediately threatened by a man in buckskin who, according to his contemporary Timothy Flint, “saw the country only with the eye of a hunter, with very little forecast of its future value and destiny.” Spanish interests were not at risk when Boone climbed to “the summit
of a commanding ridge, and, looking round with astonishing delight, beheld … the famous river Ohio that rolled in silent dignity, marking the western boundary of Kentucke with inconceivable grandeur”—and then “kindled a fire near a fountain of sweet water, and feasted on the loin of a buck, which a few hours before I had killed.” The danger arose from American men and women who did recognize “its future value and destiny”—settlers who gazed at the riverbanks with the American Farmer and readily imagined “these beautiful shores ornamented with handsome houses, covered with crops … [and] an immense chain of plantations!”
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Virginians like Daniel Boone had been wandering in and out of Kentucky since 1750, when a group of explorers led by Jefferson’s Albemarle County neighbor Dr. Thomas Walker followed the migratory trail of bear, deer, and buffalo over a relatively low gap in the Cumberland Mountains—seventeen hundred feet above sea level—on the Virginia-North Carolina line about four hundred thirty miles inland from the Atlantic Ocean. By 1775 James Harrod had established the first English settlement in Kentucky, and a North Carolina entrepreneur had engaged Boone to blaze the Wilderness Road from the Holston River, in southwestern Virginia, through the Cumberland Gap to the bluegrass country of the Elkhorn and Kentucky Rivers—but in that year the total English population of Kentucky was only a hundred fifty settlers. As the Revolution ended, however, American settlements grew rapidly. From about eight thousand inhabitants in 1783, Kentucky jumped to thirty thousand in 1784 and then to 73,677 according to the first federal census of 1790 (which recorded another 35,691 settlers in Tennessee, mostly along the Cumberland River). Then, in the 1790s, the population of Kentucky tripled again to reach 220,955—one fifth of them slaves—in the census of 1800. From the perspective of Spanish New Orleans, the shadow of Daniel Boone had grown into the nightmare of the American Farmer.
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An American farmer with a gun. Official notices in the
Kentucky Gazette
reminded all men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five that

Even if the actual ownership of guns fell short of Kentucky’s legislated requirements, newspaper items like this one scared the hell out Spanish authorities in New Orleans.
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Off and on, soon after those earliest 1775 settlements in Kentucky, a few American flatboats began floating down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. They opened a mutually advantageous riverborne trade during America’s war against Catholic Spain’s recurrent adversary in the centuries since the Reformation and the Armada. Early in the Revolution, Spain used New Orleans as a conduit for covert shipments of money and military supplies to the American patriots. In turn, as the British navy clamped down on French and Spanish shipping through the Gulf of Mexico, the population of New Orleans became utterly dependent on upriver farmers for flour, beef, and other commodities.

Perhaps, had the populations of Louisiana and Kentucky increased at equal rates after the American Revolution, Spanish officials would have found less reason for worry. When they did the numbers, however, there was no comfort. In 1785 the non-Indian population of the entire Spanish territory from Natchitoches to the Arkansas River to Pensacola was 30,471 persons. Of every ten Spanish subjects living along the Lower Mississippi and Gulf Coast, five resided in or near New Orleans and six were slaves or free people of color.
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In 1784 Kentucky’s thirty thousand inhabitants already matched the entire population of the Lower Mississippi, and the gap was spreading at a frightening rate. By 1800 the Spanish colonial population in the Lower Mississippi had grown to fifty thousand, “including more Frenchmen, Englishmen, Americans, and Germans than Spaniards.” That same year, the population of Kentucky and Tennessee was 326,000. Starting with approximately equal populations in 1785, in fifteen years the population of the Ohio River Valley grew seven times faster than that of the Lower Mississippi—not counting the additional thousands of Americans settling the future states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.
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