CHAPTER XXIX
On 30 September 1868, Queen Isabel II of Spain boarded a train with her children at San Sebastian and trundled off into exile. Her departure marked the end, not only of a reign, but of perhaps the most turbulent period in the entire history of her country.
The story began with her father, Ferdinand VII, who, with her grandfather Charles IV, had in 1808 abdicated his right to the throne.257 The fall of Napoleon clearly rendered these abdications null and void, and Ferdinand, having succeeded in 1814, had ruled Spain with singular ineptitude for fifteen years when, in 1829, he was widowed for the third time. None of his three wives had produced a child that survived infancy, and Ferdinand was desperate for a son. What with his crippling gout and his regular fits of apoplexy, his chances looked slim enough; but he refused to give up hope. His problem was to find a suitable wife. As it happened, his youngest brother, Francisco de Paula, was married to a daughter of King Francis I of Naples; she had been christened Maria Luisa Carlotta, but in Spain was known simply as Carlota. It was she who showed the King a miniature of her twenty-three-year-old sister, Maria Cristina, and Ferdinand looked no further. On 12 December 1829 he married the young princess at the church of Our Lady of Atocha in Madrid.
Maria Cristina was devastatingly attractive, shamelessly flirtatious, with a huge capacity for enjoyment; to the suffocating stuffiness of the Spanish court she came as an invigorating breath of fresh air. Immediately, she won all hearts. Or nearly all; for the marriage came as a severe blow to the heir apparent, the King’s younger brother Don Carlos, and even more to his wife, Maria Francisca of Braganza. They were an ill-assorted couple. Don Carlos was almost a dwarf, though fully endowed with the hideous Bourbon chin and nose; he was morbidly pious, fanatically absolutist and weak as water. To the English diarist Henry Greville he was ‘an imbecile…bigoted and perverse…a coward too, without a spark of energy or talent’. Maria Francisca by contrast was statuesque, intelligent, with a commanding presence and formidably ambitious. Heretofore she had been virtually certain of her husband’s succession; now there was a chance that it might be taken from him. And worse was to come. When, three months after the wedding, it was announced that the new Queen was pregnant, Ferdinand promulgated the old Pragmatic Sanction, whereby the even older Salic Law–barring females from the succession–was set aside. In other words, the long-awaited child, whether boy or girl, would inherit the throne of Spain.
It was a girl, born on 10 October 1830 and christened Maria Isabel Luisa. The Carlists–as the adherents of Don Carlos now came to be called–could derive little immediate comfort from the fact, but as time went on, with the King’s health steadily worsening, the prospect of a reigning queen began to cause serious concern. Then, in July 1832 on the way to his summer palace at La Granja, Ferdinand was seriously injured in a carriage accident, and two months later he still lay at the point of death. The Queen, who in those two months had seldom left his bedside, took advice from one of his chief ministers and was horrified when she was told that the whole country would immediately rally around Don Carlos. Maria Francisca, we may be sure, uttered her own dire warnings, and the King, by now barely conscious, was persuaded that the Pragmatic Sanction must be revoked if a bloodbath was to be avoided. A decree was hastily drafted, which he signed with a quavering hand. Shortly afterwards he was pronounced dead. Don Carlos, it seemed, was king.
But he was not. Suddenly, the undertakers who came to prepare the body for its lying in state detected signs of life, and slowly Ferdinand began to recover. Even so, the document which he had so recently signed, and on which the ink was scarcely dry, would probably have remained in force had it not been for his sister-in-law Carlota. The moment the astonishing news reached her in Cadiz, she ordered her carriage and set off at top speed, over 400 miles of execrable roads, for La Granja. The state of the King’s health was of relatively little interest to her, but she detested Don Carlos and his wife and had no intention of letting them deprive her niece of her rightful crown. On her arrival she went straight to the Queen, berated her for her fecklessness and demanded to see the revocation decree. When it was shown to her she snatched it out of the official’s hand and tore it to pieces.
Ferdinand lived for another year, during which he presided over an elaborate ceremony in the ancient church of Los Jeronimos in Madrid, designed to strengthen yet further the claim of his little daughter to the succession. One by one all the grandees of Spain–with one significant exception–filed past, kissing the hands of the King, the Queen and the two-year-old Infanta. Then, on 29 September 1833, Ferdinand suffered an apoplectic stroke. This time there was no resuscitation. The Infanta was proclaimed Isabel II, with her mother as regent. She was recognised by Britain, France and Portugal; Don Carlos, on the other hand, who had proclaimed himself King Charles V, was favoured by Russia, Austria, the Pope and–most surprisingly of all–Maria Cristina’s brother, Ferdinand II of Naples. As for Spain itself, it was split across the middle. Madrid and the south were overwhelmingly in favour of Isabel; many of the cities and towns of the north, however, immediately rose in support of Don Carlos. The Carlist Wars–the last in European history in which two rival claimants fought for a crown–had begun. They were to continue, on and off, for the best part of half a century.
Or perhaps even longer: it could be argued that the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War were Carlists at heart. For Carlism came to mean something a great deal more than loyalty to Don Carlos and the unwavering conviction that he was the legitimate ruler of Spain. It also represented all the old reactionary Spanish traditions: devout Catholicism, with unquestioning obedience to the Church and even nostalgia for the Inquisition (‘that most august tribune, brought down by angels from heaven to earth’); political absolutism under an authoritarian and all-powerful king (never, in any circumstances, a queen); and that unbending austerity which was for so long a feature of the Spanish character. Set against all this was the great wave of liberalism which swept across Europe throughout the nineteenth century and was now improbably represented by little Isabel and her loyal subjects. The Spanish royal family had never, heaven knows, been known for their left-wing views; compared with the Carlists, however, they were rabid revolutionaries. Anyway, they desperately needed liberal support, so liberals they reluctantly became–proving it by reinstating the remarkably liberal constitution of 1812.258
Spain was now rent by civil war–and of all forms of warfare civil war is the most cruel. Fighting was fierce throughout the north, with hideous atrocities committed on men, women and children by both sides. Finally, in August 1839, the Carlists secretly negotiated a surrender agreement. Don Carlos sadly crossed the border into France, where he, his second wife259 and his three sons were to maintain a mildly ridiculous little court at Bourges. He lived another fifteen years, but never returned to Spain.
Towards the end of August 1840, the Regent Maria Cristina set off for Barcelona, ostensibly to take the waters at Caldas but in fact to meet the country’s leading general, Baldomero Espartero, and to ask his advice. The constitution of 1812 had conferred a considerable degree of independence on the country’s municipalities, many of which had taken what she considered unwarranted advantage of their new privileges during the recent war. The more conservative members of the government were now keen to cut them once again down to size by what was known as the Municipal Bill, and Maria Cristina wholeheartedly agreed with them; the liberals, on the other hand, were determined that they should do no such thing. It was obvious that serious trouble was brewing. Considering that Catalonia had never had much love for the royal family, Maria Cristina was surprised and gratified by the warmth of her reception; it proved, however, to be nothing like the rapturous welcome accorded to Espartero a day or two later, and when the general informed her of his strong opposition to the bill, such was her irritation that–just to spite him–she signed it on the spot.
That night Barcelona erupted in protest. The palace was surrounded by a furious mob, cheering the General and the constitution and threatening death to the Regent and her ministers. At 1 a.m. a terrified Maria Cristina begged Espartero to bid the crowds disperse, but he refused to do so until she had revoked her signature to the bill. She did so, then a few days later attempted to change her mind; once again, chaos resulted. She fled to Valencia, but the fuse had been lit: on 1 September Madrid rose in revolt and denounced the government, and other cities quickly followed its example. Only when she swallowed what was left of her pride and invited Espartero to form a government did a semblance of order return. It was then that Maria Cristina dropped her bombshell. She announced her abdication as Regent. Espartero begged her to reconsider, but she was adamant. Her last words to him are said to have been, ‘I made you a Duke [of Morella], but I could not make you a gentleman.’ She then said goodbye to the two little Infantas, now aged ten and eight respectively–the younger, Maria Luisa Fernanda, had been born in 1832–and on 17 October, with her second, semi-secret family,260 a vast amount of money and virtually all the jewels, silver and linen in the palace,261 boarded a ship for France.
The loot that Maria Cristina had taken with her was probably enough to have kept her and her family in comfort for the rest of their lives; in fact, her abdication proved to be short-lived. She and her family received the warmest of welcomes in Paris, King Louis-Philippe travelling out as far as Fontainebleau to meet them, and were given a splendid apartment at the Palais-Royal. In December they paid a visit to Rome, where she signed a written act of repentance for the anticlerical laws to which she had given her approval, receiving a full absolution from Pope Gregory XVI before returning to Paris. But then, on 8 November 1843, at the age of thirteen, Queen Isabel II was declared to be legally of age. There was now no political obstacle to her mother’s return to Spain; such problems as existed were chiefly financial. The liberals demanded that Maria Cristina should first pay compensation for all that she had taken away at the time of her departure. This resulted in endless legal wrangling, particularly after she had lodged an enormous counterclaim in respect of an unpaid pension, but by the time matters were finally settled she was substantially richer than ever. At last she was ready for her homecoming.
At every stage of her journey through Spain she received a tumultuous welcome. She showed, too, that after fifteen years–and despite a formidable increase in weight–she had lost none of her youthful exuberance and charm. On her return to Madrid the court recovered, almost overnight, all its old brilliance. Balls, banquets and dazzling receptions followed thick and fast, at all of which Maria Cristina completely overshadowed her somewhat surly daughter who, realising that she was outclassed, grew surlier still. Such moods, however, are not uncommon in teenage girls, and Isabel too was soon to change.
On 3 April 1846 the Comte de Bresson, French ambassador to the Court of Spain, sent his Foreign Minister, François Guizot, a terse message. ‘La Reine,’ he reported blandly, ‘est nubile depuis deux heures.’262 Few ambassadors have ever been quicker off the mark, but Maria Cristina, it need hardly be said, had not waited for this happy moment. For months already, she had devoted most of her waking hours to the question of her daughter’s marriage. No one, of course, thought of consulting Isabel herself. Away in Bourges, Don Carlos was intriguing hard on behalf of his son, the Count of Montemolin, even going so far as to abdicate in his favour. Such a marriage would obviously have eliminated the Carlist question once and for all; it would, however, have relegated Isabel to the status of Queen Consort–a position which her mother refused absolutely to contemplate. In Paris, Louis-Philippe favoured his own son, the Duc de Montpensier, while in London–where the thought of a royal union between France and Spain was anathema–Queen Victoria and Lord Palmerston were pressing for the Prince Consort’s cousin, Prince Leopold of Coburg. This in turn was unacceptable to Louis-Philippe, who politely pointed out that there were already Coburg princes in Brussels, London and Lisbon and that four would be really too many. The King of Naples proposed his brother the Count of Trapani, but as he was studying in Rome with the Jesuits, who were at that time banned in Spain, his claim was not even seriously considered.
Eventually Maria Cristina was obliged to lower her sights and to look within her own family, it being finally agreed that the unfortunate Isabel should marry her own first cousin Francisco de Asís,263 son of her now deceased aunt Carlota. It was not a pleasing prospect: her intended husband was short and unprepossessing, with a high-pitched voice and a manner which would nowadays be described as distinctly camp. He was generally believed to be homosexual and probably impotent as well. All this would have been bad enough, but it was made still more unbearable by the decision that the Queen’s younger (and much prettier) sister, Luisa, should simultaneously marry the sophisticated, charming and pleasingly virile Duc de Montpensier.
The dual marriage took place on 10 October 1846, Isabel’s sixteenth birthday. When Francisco de Asís–who looked, we are told, ‘like a young girl dressed up as a general’–and Isabel were declared man and wife, they both burst into tears. Years later a close friend asked the Queen about her wedding night. ‘What shall I say,’ she answered, ‘of a man who was wearing more lace than I was?’ In fact, there is good reason to believe that even before the marriage she had taken the first of her innumerable lovers. He was General Francisco Serrano, ‘the handsomest man in Spain’, but when in the late summer of 1847 Her Majesty showed signs of pregnancy and an official rapprochement with her husband became essential, Serrano was packed off to Granada with the rank of captain-general. Isabel did not–even privately–mourn his departure, since she had by now taken up with a young singer from the opera.
Already by the time of her marriage, the introduction of love into her life had transformed her. The surliness was gone. She was never beautiful, but she was now seen to have inherited much of her mother’s warmth. Despite her sexual voraciousness she was genuinely pious, kind and considerate–and generous to a fault. In the first years of her reign, therefore, she seems to have been loved by her subjects. But gradually, as a constant succession of soldiers, sailors, singers, dancers, composers and a dentist beat a path to her bedroom, the rumours spread until the Queen’s behaviour was the talk not only of Spain but of all western Europe.
The family reputation was not improved by her mother. Since her second marriage Maria Cristina’s domestic life had been irreproachable, but her name had now become a byword for corruption. Though the Spanish industrial revolution was still but a poor reflection of the British, this was an age of commercial rights and concessions, particularly in the roads and railways; she was always happy to use her considerable influence in return for cuts and kickbacks, and was famous for her insider dealings on the Bourse. Corruption, infectious as it always is, had now spread through the government and administration, until by the summer of 1854 Spain was ripe for revolt. The serious disturbances began on the evening of 17 July, when the mob launched a concerted attack on Maria Cristina’s palace, looting whatever they could carry away and wantonly destroying everything else. Had the old queen not in the nick of time taken refuge with her daughter, she would not have survived the night.
Desperate, Isabel took the only course open to her: she sent for General Espartero. There had been no love lost between them since her mother’s abdication; she recognised, however, that, if she herself were to remain queen, he represented the only hope of restoring order. The condition on which he now insisted–that she should reform her private life–roused her to a fury, but she was forced to accept it. On 28 July the General entered Madrid. Dead wood was swept away from government and court alike, and there seemed a good chance that Isabel could keep her throne. Maria Cristina, on the other hand, remained a liability. On 28 August, in the small hours of the morning, accompanied by Muñoz and their children, she left Madrid for her second–and this time permanent–exile.
Isabel had been badly frightened, but somehow she clung on. The undertaking that she had reluctantly given to Espartero was soon forgotten; before long she had taken up with Carlos Marfori, the middle-aged, paunchy son of an Italian pastry-cook, whom she appointed Chief of the Royal Household. By the beginning of the 1860s the writing was once more on the wall. Her final downfall came at the hands of one of her former supporters, a general named Juan Prim. Prim’s first idea was to replace her with her sister Luisa and Luisa’s husband the Duc de Montpensier, and Montpensier paid him several thousand pounds to help finance a rising in their favour; unfortunately for him, the general made the fatal mistake of informing Napoleon III, from whom he also hoped for financial support. Napoleon–who had by now supplanted Louis-Philippe on the French throne–had no intention of allowing his predecessor’s son and daughter-in-law to occupy that of Spain, and the Duke’s hopes were dashed.
Meanwhile, another challenge came from a different source, an admiral by the name of Juan Bautista Topete, commander of the squadron at Cadiz. With him was the Queen’s old lover General Serrano; soon the two were joined by Prim. A new revolution broke out on 18 September 1864 and quickly spread across the country. Isabel was at San Sebastian, only a few miles from the French border. Her first instinct was to return at once to Madrid, but before she could do so there came the news that Serrano had marched on the capital, which had risen in revolt against her. She did not abdicate as her mother had done; she simply went quietly to the railway station with her husband, lover and children and, on 29 September 1868, took the next train for France. Still only thirty-eight, she had reigned for thirty-five years and was to live for another thirty-six. Apart from her nymphomania she was not a bad woman, but she had been a hopeless queen and her country was better without her.
Or promised to be–but much depended on her successor. Of her four daughters and one son all, we may be pretty sure, had different fathers, but she had remained married to Francisco so there were no doubts as to their legitimacy. Her son Alfonso, born in 1858, is thought to have been the result of his mother’s brief affair with an American dentist’s assistant named McKeon, but from his birth he had been recognised as heir to the throne and had been accorded the traditional title of Prince of Asturias. Inevitably, however, Isabel’s abrupt departure had given new hope to the Carlists.
Since the end of the First Carlist War in 1839 they had maintained a fairly low profile. The Count of Montemolin, in whose favour Don Carlos (‘Charles V’) had abdicated in 1846, had shown himself almost as unimpressive as his father.264 Several times in his life he dramatically summoned the Spanish people to rise against the usurpers in favour of their rightful king, but nobody paid much attention and he himself was never there when he was wanted. His brother Don Juan, who most unwillingly became the pretender after Montemolin’s death in 1861 but preferred to live quietly in Brighton, was if anything even more feckless, and Carlist fortunes were at a low ebb until the appearance on the scene of Don Juan’s eldest son, Don Carlos. Tall, outstandingly good-looking, a superb horseman with a passion for soldiering, he was convinced of the justice of the Carlist cause and determined to fight for it until he himself could mount the throne which was rightfully his. He was also extremely rich, thanks to the enormous dowry brought by his wife, Princess Margaret of Parma. Small wonder that at a meeting of the Great Carlist Council, held in London in the summer of 1868, the twenty-year-old Don Carlos was formally acclaimed and cheered to the echo. A few weeks later Don Juan signed a formal act of abdication in favour of his son.
Don Carlos would almost certainly have made a splendid king, and now it seemed that he might even have the edge over young Alfonso of Asturias, who had followed his mother into exile and was still only ten years old. Two years later Queen Isabel was finally persuaded to abdicate in Alfonso’s favour; the difficulty now–for both claimants–was that an emergency junta formed after her departure from Spain had formally resolved that the Bourbons had forfeited all rights to the throne. Nonetheless, Spain was still a monarchy. All it now needed was a king.
But how was it to find one? The crown was offered in vain to the King of Portugal, to Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern–Sigmaringen265 and to the Duke of Genoa. Finally Victor Emmanuel’s second son, Amadeo, Duke of Aosta, was persuaded to accept, and triumphantly entered his new capital on 31 December 1870. The fact, however, that that very day also saw the assassination of the kingmaker, General Prim, made it all too clear that although Amadeo was happy to accept Spain, Spain was from the very start less enthusiastic about him. Dissatisfaction continued to grow, until in April 1872 Don Carlos called for a general rising. On 2 May he entered Spain from France with a handful of men, but instead of finding–as he had hoped–the whole country up in arms he was met by only a couple of thousand untrained and ill-equipped guerrillas. They had got no further than the mountain village of Oroquieta, only a few miles inside the border, when they were attacked and routed by government troops. Seven hundred were taken prisoner. Don Carlos himself, uninjured, escaped back into France.
Amadeo struggled on for a few more months, but he was opposed by both republicans and Carlists–of whom there were many in the cortes–and at last, in February 1873, was obliged to abdicate in his turn. This caused still more chaos. Eventually Spain was proclaimed a republic–and the Carlists, outraged, seized their opportunity. They had always been strong in the northern territories–Catalonia, Navarre and the Basque country–and once again they called Spain to arms in defence of the monarchy. This time they were a good deal more successful than in the previous year. The fighting on both sides was barbarous and brutal, but by midsummer virtually the whole country north of the Ebro–apart from a few towns–was in Carlist hands. Had Don Carlos now marched directly on Madrid, he would almost certainly have won the day. Unaccountably, however, he preferred to lay siege to Bilbao, leaving the southward advance to his brother Don Alfonso Carlos and to Don Alfonso’s formidable nineteen-year-old Portuguese wife, Maria de las Nieves, who wore a man’s uniform and always fought at her husband’s side. These two, at the head of an army of some 14,000, actually captured Cuenca, only some eighty miles east of the capital. Appalling bloodshed followed, doing serious harm to the Carlists’ reputation.
Now at last the tide began to turn. In May 1874 Serrano raised the siege of Bilbao. Henceforth the Carlists were on the defensive, and at the end of the year they suffered a truly disastrous blow: a young brigadier, Arsenio Martinez Campos, issued apronunciamiento calling for the return of Alfonso. The response, outside the Carlist north, was immediate and overwhelming. Alfonso set off at once from England–where he had been studying at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst–boarded a Spanish man-of-war at Marseille, landed at Barcelona and on 10 January 1875 entered Madrid as King Alfonso XII to a rapturous welcome. He had been summoned back by his own subjects, and he had been recognised by the Pope; his enemy Don Carlos no longer had a leg to stand on.
Unfortunately Don Carlos did not immediately agree, and continued the fight all through the following year. Only after the fall of Estella on 19 February 1876 did he capitulate. On the 28th he crossed the French frontier. Although he threatened to return, the Second Carlist War was over. Under the benevolent reign of Alfonso XII, El Pacificador, Spain entered on a quarter of a century of stable government, the first she had known since the death of King Ferdinand forty-three years before.
With her son now firmly installed on the Spanish throne, Queen Isabel and her daughters returned to Spain. They were not, however, allowed to settle in Madrid; instead, they were given commodious apartments twenty-five miles away, in Philip II’s immense palace of the Escorial. It proved a wise precaution. All her life Isabel had been a compulsive meddler, and her years in exile had not cured her. Scarcely had she settled in than she had entered into an interminable wrangle with the Treasury over her pension, and before long she began scheming on her own behalf with the Pope, thereby provoking an unedifying public quarrel with the Prime Minister, with both sides openly attacking each other in the press. Something, it was clear, had to be done. She could hardly be exiled once again, but it was decided to send her still further away from the capital, to the old Moorish Alcazar in Seville. ‘So, within a few months,’ wrote her daughter Eulalia, ‘we went from the chilly monotony of a northern court to the oppression and ennui of an oriental harem.’
But it took more than a change of residence to stop Isabel’s intrigues. She now devoted her energies to finding a suitable bride for her son. Alfonso, however, forestalled her by himself announcing his engagement to his cousin Mercedes, the ravishing sixteen-year-old daughter of the Duc de Montpensier. His mother did everything she could to prevent him, but it was a genuine love match; realising that she was powerless, she returned in a huff to Paris, leaving her daughters behind her. The wedding took place on 23 January 1878, the couple’s obvious happiness, together with the bride’s beauty and charm, winning all hearts. Then five months later, when not yet eighteen, Mercedes died of gastric fever. Alfonso never recovered from the blow. He was remarried at the end of 1879 to another Maria Christina, daughter of Archduke Karl Ferdinand of Austria, but it was to remain a mariage de convenance. This time old Isabel approved, and returned to Spain for the ceremony.
The new Queen’s grandmother-in-law and namesake had died, in her home at Sainte-Adresse near Le Havre, less than two months after Mercedes. Her second husband, Muñoz, had already been long in his grave, so her body was brought back to Spain and buried near that of her first, Ferdinand VII, at the Escorial. And then, on 25 November 1885–just three days before his twenty-eighth birthday–King Alfonso died of tuberculosis. His little daughter, the five-year-old Infanta Mercedes, became Queen of Spain, but not for long: Queen Maria Christina, who had loved her husband dearly despite his countless infidelities and in his last days had never left his bedside, was three months pregnant, and in May 1886 she gave birth to a boy–born a reigning king, the first in five centuries. His father had wanted him to be named Fernando, but Maria Christina had determined otherwise. Five days later, with a miniature Order of the Golden Fleece around his neck, he was baptised Alfonso–inauspiciously enough, the thirteenth of that name.
Meanwhile, the baby’s grandmother, old Isabel–now the last queen but two–lived on, still interfering whenever she had the chance, and even making a determined attempt to take over the regency from her daughter-in-law. When this failed she eventually yielded to pressure and returned to Paris and the life of endless party-going and entertaining that she had always loved. Her other proclivities also remained undiminished; she had by now found a new ‘secretary-treasurer’, a man of villainous aspect by the name of Haltman, who never left her side. She remained nevertheless every inch a queen, corresponding with both Queen Victoria and her fellow exile the Empress Eugénie, widow of Napoleon III. Indeed, it was probably her insistence on waiting in a draughty corridor for the Empress’s arrival, and again to bid her farewell, that brought about her death. The resulting nasty cough turned to pneumonia, and on 9 April 1904 she died. She was seventy-three.