Manuel Godoy

Manuel Godoy rose from the royal guard to run Spain for nearly two decades, and his policy of alliance with France ended with a French army occupying the country. He was a minor Extremaduran nobleman who became the favourite of Queen Maria Luisa and the confidant of Charles IV, and was first minister at twenty-five. The title Prince of the Peace came from the Treaty of Basel in 1795, which took Spain out of the war against revolutionary France; from then on Spain was France's junior partner, which meant supplying ships and money for a war against Britain that Spain had no interest in. The consequence was Trafalgar in 1805, where the Spanish fleet was destroyed alongside the French, and the effective severing of communications with the American empire. He signed the Treaty of Fontainebleau in 1807 agreeing to a joint invasion of Portugal, which put French troops on Spanish roads; by early 1808 they held the northern fortresses. The Mutiny of Aranjuez in March 1808 was directed at him personally: a crowd sacked his palace, he hid in a rolled carpet for a day and a half, and Charles IV abdicated to save him. Napoleon then summoned the whole royal family to Bayonne and installed his brother Joseph, and the Spanish rising began in May. Godoy spent the remaining forty-three years of his life in exile, mostly in Rome and Paris, on a French pension, and died poor. Goya painted him reclining after a minor victory over Portugal, and probably painted the queen with him too. Spanish historians have treated him as the villain of the catastrophe for most of two centuries.

• Lived: 1767 CE – 1851 CE
• Nationality: Spanish
• Roles: politician