Manuel Godoy.
Manuel Godoy y Álvarez de Faria Ríos (1767 - 1851) was First Secretary of State of Spain from 1792 to 1799 under King Charles IV. Born into a noble but impoverished family, he came to power at a young age as the favorite of King Charles and Queen Maria Luisa, who was also his lover. Godoy's rapid rise to power was due to the King's awareness that he lacked a talent for statecraft and his willingness to employ a competent and trustworthy stand-in.
Godoy and Maria Luisa had little interest in Spain's colonial empire, and they allowed the settlement of Jefferson in the Tejas province of New Spain to grow rapidly in population and power. By the time of the outbreak of the Habsburg War in 1795, the settlement had a population of over 43,000 whites and 18,000 Negro slaves, dwarfing the Spanish-speaking population of Tejas, who numbered only a few thousand.
Godoy had hoped to maintain Spain's neutrality in the Habsburg War, but pressure from France's Marie Antoinette, who served as regent for her underage son King Louis XVII, led to a formal military alliance between the two countries on 12 April 1795. Queen Maria I of Portugal found the Franco-Spanish alliances alarming, and she appealed to Prime Minister Sir Charles Jenkinson of Great Britain for military assistance. Jenkinson declared war on France and Spain on 23 August, and Spain was thus drawn into the Habsburg War.
For reasons Sobel fails to mention, the Jeffersonians reacted to the outbreak of war by rebelling against Spanish rule. Under General Alexander Hamilton and Major Andrew Jackson, the Jeffersonians seized control of the province of Tejas and declared Jefferson an independent state. The leaders of the Southern Confederation of the Confederation of North America, particularly Theodorick Bland, the Governor of Virginia, responded to Jenkinson's declaration of war by mobilizing their colonial militia and invading Florida and Louisiana, annexing both to the C.N.A.
Military defeat for France and Spain in Europe in the fall of 1798 led to the negotiation of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, which was ratified by Spanish diplomats on 1 March 1799. Under the terms of the treaty, King Charles was deposed in favor of the elderly uncle of King Frederick William III of Prussia, who ruled Spain as Ferdinand VII. Although Sobel does not specifically say so, Godoy presumably fell from power following Ferdinand's accession.
Manuel Godoy does not have an entry in Sobel's index.