The Queen was to show herself to the people of Madrid; she progressed no further than a gallery of her own palace. On February 2, 1852, Isabella II had just quitted the royal chapel on her way to Atocha when a priest struck her with a dagger. The hour was a quarter past one. The solemnities arranged for the day, the formal receptions, the illuminations—everything intended to bestow upon the populace its share of the festivities—were instantly suspended. Nothing remained but to await the physicians.
The blow had grazed the right forearm before entering the flank. The practitioners did not initially deem the injury mortal, yet their communiqués retained the cautious restraint of men examining a fresh wound. It was announced that the sovereign remained calm; later, they described a reaction, feverish sweat, and sleep. Each medical bulletin passed from the royal apartments to the ministry, and from the ministry to the official gazette. The body of the sovereign had its own public intelligence service.
The man apprehended was named Martín Merino y Gómez. He was indeed an ordained priest. Far from softening the alarm, this detail lent the deed an added quality of scandal. The monarchy presented itself as encircled by the Church; an ecclesiastic had just laid violent hands upon the Crown. Vehement protestations from the clergy insisted that this man represented neither his calling nor its teachings. It was imperative to isolate the culprit, even within the very habit he wore.
The courts had no need to expend time identifying the material author of the blow. They were obliged, however, to answer the question that consumed the ministry throughout the days that followed: behind him, was there someone else? A solitary assassin remains terrifying; an assassin whose confederates remain unknown leaves the danger perpetually open. Merino was under guard, yet this uncertainty continued to haunt the corridors of the palace.
The Council of Ministers sat in permanent session. Alongside the judicial process, the government instituted its own inquiry. The President of the Council and the Minister of Justice interrogated the prisoner in person. An hour of examination yielded not a single confederate. They did not, for all that, regard the search as closed. Other dignitaries, charged with approaching him together or apart, were instructed to press the question under different guises.
Merino was no cipher devoid of a past. The French press soon gathered recollections of his years of exile in the Gironde: lessons given in the Spanish tongue, in mathematics, and in Latin; a residence at La Brède; an intimacy with Horace that his former neighbours had not forgotten. These indirect accounts, published in the wake of the assault, disagreed even as to his table habits. Some depicted an austere man; others, an amateur of good cheer. The public portrait was being fabricated while the judicial inquiry was already racing toward its close.
On the very evening of the assault, the judge of the Palacio district, Pedro Nolasco Aurioles, announced at eleven o’clock that the preliminary summary examination was concluded, and that he was remitting the docket to the public prosecutor for formal indictment. The Crown had kept the cause before the ordinary courts rather than remanding it to the tribunal of the Senate. This decision preserved the outward forms of justice; it introduced scarcely any delay into their fulfillment.
On February 3, the evidence proffered on the accused’s behalf was examined in the presence of his counsel and the representative of the prosecution. At seven o’clock that evening, the judge announced that he had pronounced sentence of death by the garrote. Prior to this, the condemned man was to undergo ecclesiastical degradation. The docket was dispatched post-haste to the Audiencia of Madrid. The Queen had been struck only the day before; her assailant had already received his initial sentence.
Meanwhile, at the palace, the royal fever abated and the Queen’s appetite returned. The two dispatches advanced side by side within the columns of the Gaceta: the convalescence of the victim and the condemnation of her attacker.
On the 5th, a public hearing was convened before this second jurisdiction. The reading of the depositions, the observations of the advocate, the requisitions of the state: the sitting concluded before noon. The sentence was upheld. Word was sent to the Archbishop of Toledo so that the sacred ceremony preceding the execution might be solemnized. The Bishop of Málaga proceeded to the Saladero prison, attended by the ecclesiastics designated to assist him.
At two o’clock in the afternoon, in a hall of the prison with balconies flung open, Merino was degraded. The official register stresses the great concourse of witnesses and the solemnity of the rite. The priest was publicly severed from the estate whose members he had scandalized. Thereupon, the judicial decree was read aloud; the condemned man entered the period of preparation for death. The execution was appointed for Saturday, at a quarter past one: the precise hour of the assault.
Yet the search for accomplices continued unabated. The President of the Supreme Court succeeded in gaining a measure of the prisoner’s trust. Merino confided to him his last will and testament, together with the location of a concealed sum of money and instructions for its distribution. He gave him not a single name. This contrast must have proved profoundly frustrating to those awaiting a political disclosure: the man was willing to reveal where his coin lay hidden, yet persisted in affirming that he had no associates.
On February 6, he delivered a paper addressed to Isabella II. He demanded that it be conveyed only after his death, lest his démarche be ascribed to the hope of securing some earthly clemency. He begged for pardon and reiterated that he left behind no one charged with attempting the life of the Queen. Another instrument, signed before the witnesses gathered about him, reaffirmed this declaration. The spiritual visitants gleaned no more names than had the ministers.
On the 7th, Merino was executed. Upon the scaffold, in the very moment of his agony, he still maintained that he had acted without an accomplice. The Crown now possessed a dead convict and an unyielding affirmation; it sought to obtain something far more definitive than either. It set about erasing every material trace of the man.
Orders were given prescribing the total destruction of the dagger and its sheath, as well as the weapons discovered at his lodging. His books and papers were to be committed to the flames, with certain reservations touching upon private and familial interests. As for his notebook of political musings, it was to be joined to the docket dispatched to the ministry, closed and sealed. In this manner, the state segregated that which had to be preserved for the sovereign authority from that which must never again circulate among men.
The corpse was conveyed to the cemetery. Fearing lest some part of the remains be purloined, whether to be sold or submitted to alleged scientific study, the authorities commanded that it be cremated and the ashes scattered across the common grave. An official proces-verbal recorded the attendees and the exact hours. At twenty minutes past seven, the operation was complete.
On the morrow, the Gaceta published the measures taken to expunge even the memory of Merino. It set in print his name, his declarations, the warrants, and the signatures appended thereto. The erasure had been scrupulously accomplished; yet, to render a full account of it, the state had been obliged to rear in his name a monument of paper.