his family, in particular for the Queen, Marie Amélie, for the
widowed Duchess of Orleans, a maternal cousin of Prince Albert, and
for the perfect Louise, the truthful, unselfish second wife of
Leopold, King of the Belgians, and daughter of the King of the
French. It was a rude shock to all the warm feelings which our Queen,
herself transparently honest, had learnt to cherish for her royal
friends when the French King and his Minister, Guizot, entered into
that fatal intrigue of theirs, "the Spanish marriages." Isabella, the
young Queen of Spain, and her sister and heiress presumptive, Louisa,
were yet unmarried at the time of the visit to the Château d'Eu; and
about that time an undertaking was given by the French to the English
Government that the Infanta Louisa should not marry a French prince
until her sister, the actual Queen, "should be married and have
children." The possible union of the crowns of France and Spain was
known for a dream of French ambition, and was equally well known to
be an object of dislike and dread to other European Powers. The
engagement which the French King had now given seemed therefore well
calculated to disarm suspicion and promote peace; but the one was
reawakened and the other endangered when it became known that he had
so used his power over the Spanish court as to procure that the royal
sisters of Spain should be married on one day--Isabella, the Queen,
to the most unfit and uncongenial of all the possible candidates for
her hand; Louisa to King Louis Philippe's son, the Duke of
Montpensier. The transaction on the face of it was far from
respectable, since the credit and happiness of the young Spanish
Queen seemed to have hardly entered into the consideration of those
who arranged for her the _mariage de convenance_ into which she was
led blindfold; but when regarded as a violation of good faith it was
additionally displeasing. Queen Victoria, to whom the scheme was
imparted only when it was ripe for execution, through her personal