None of this might have mattered or even have been remembered were it not for the fact that Fernando was also a vile human being, at once vengeful, petty, treacherous, cowardly, deceitful, ungrateful and self-obsessed. A later Spanish historian described him as ‘utterly lacking any aptitude to be king’.
Despite this, at the beginning of his reign most Spanish people loved him. Fernando was, in their eyes, el Deseado, the one they had longed for during the cruel years of the Peninsular War, their exiled king in whose name they had fought and died in their many thousands against the French. Unknown to the Spanish, however, during his ‘exile’ Fernando had been trying to ingratiate himself with Napoleon the entire time, and had even written letters to the emperor congratulating him when French troops defeated the Spanish in battle. His subjects could not have read their ‘saviour’ any more wrongly.
Further examples of his duplicity were not long in coming once he returned triumphantly to Spain in the wake of the French defeat. The liberals who had drawn up the 1812 Constitution insisted that he could only be king if he accepted their document. Of course, said Fernando, anything you say. But before he had even reached Madrid he turned on the very people who gave him his crown, rejected La Pepa, and had as many of its authors rounded up as possible. Spain might have changed dramatically during his absence, but Fernando would do his best to pretend that nothing had happened and revert to the ancien regime ways of before.
His task was made easier by displays of mass support for an absolutist monarchy: as his train passed through Valencia, bystanders surged forwards to unhitch his horses and pull the royal carriage themselves. ¡Vivan las cadenas! went the cry – ‘Long live our chains!’1 Ordinary people were, on the face of it, happy and willing to be subjugated. And so Fernando destroyed the infant liberal state and ushered in a new period of paranoia and repression in Spanish history. With echoes of Philip II’s reign, censorship was imposed and the universities were closed. Thinking was once again deemed dangerous in the police state which was effectively ushered in. The ‘other’ Spain had to be annihilated, a task Fernando saw to himself on many occasions by arresting suspects in person.2
And in the most visible statement that the old order was back, he reinstated the Inquisition, briefly suppressed during his absence. It comes as a shock to many to learn that the Spanish Inquisition was still persecuting people over their beliefs as late as the 1830s. What’s even more striking, perhaps, is that in general the Spanish people at the time applauded the ‘Holy Inquisition’, seeing in it a symbol of national identity and difference: one of the other cries to greet Fernando’s return to Spain was ‘Long live the king! Long live the Inquisition!’
Fernando’s reign was an unmitigated disaster. The country had suffered badly during the war. Agriculture and infrastructure were damaged and the economy was in a mess: prices dropped by 50 per cent in only six years as a deflationary cycle started. What made things worse was that the Latin American colonies now started to break away and became independent, cutting Spain off from its sources of wealth across the Atlantic. A token force was all that Madrid could afford to try to halt the independence movements, and it proved ineffective. By the end of the 1820s all that was left of Spain’s mighty empire was Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, with former colonies from Mexico to Argentina having separated from the mother country. As other European empires were still expanding, Spain, as so often, preceded its neighbours by already entering a ‘post-colonial’ phase, well over a hundred years before them.
And as if further confirmation was needed that Spain was no longer a major player in Europe, the French invaded again in 1823. Liberals within the army had rebelled and forced Fernando to swear loyalty to the 1812 Constitution. Fernando, conniving as ever, played along, and for three years Spain moved to become the liberal country that the authors of La Pepa had dreamt of. But the liberals themselves were divided, while royalists (secretly supported by Fernando) formed guerrilla forces and fought back. The conflict turned into another civil war largely between the progressive urban middle class and rural artisans and farm labourers of more conservative views. The clash only came to an end with the arrival of the French – the ‘Hundred Thousand Sons of St Louis’ – troops sent from Louis XVIII’s now conservative France, who marched in and restored ‘order’ once more. This time the crowds cheered the foreigners where only a decade before they had fought them to the death. ‘Long live the absolutist king!’ came the cry again. ‘Long live religion and the Inquisition!’
As if economic disaster, loss of empire and inviting the French in again wasn’t enough, Fernando’s greatest disaster lay in his failures in the bedroom. Without an heir, his crown would pass to his younger brother Carlos, who, amazingly, was even more conservative and absolutist than Fernando, and was already stirring up trouble. Desperate to avoid such an eventuality, and beginning to feel his age, Fernando married for the fourth time in the hope of producing offspring. The lucky bride, María Josefa Amalia of Saxony, promptly produced a child – a daughter, Isabella. Earlier in Spanish history this wouldn’t have been a problem, as the accession of Isabella the Catholic to the crown of Castile shows. But the Bourbons had imported the Salic Law from France, as well as absolutism, which meant that only a male could succeed to the throne.
Fernando’s solution was to promulgate a law overriding the Salic one, making Isabella next in line to the throne. It could have worked, but brother Carlos was already preparing himself to lead the country. In 1833 Fernando died aged only forty-eight. Little Isabella was a month shy of turning three. Spain stood on the brink.
The response was a new civil war.
1 It’s uncertain in which Spanish city the event actually took place, but its symbolic importance remains nonetheless.
2 Just over a hundred years later Franco insisted on ratifying in person all death penalties against his enemies.
CARLIST WARS
The conflict which spilled out over the liberal ‘triennial’ from 1820 to 1823 was repeated on a grander scale on Fernando VII’s death in 1833. This new war of Spanish succession was to dog the country over much of the rest of the century, breaking out on three different occasions. The battle lines were complex, but centred on the identity of the country: was ‘Spain’ to be built around tradition, or new ideas?
The division between the two sides was not always clear-cut, or static, but roughly speaking an urban and progressive minority went head to head with a majority living in the countryside which was unenthusiastic about change. The liberals became synonymous with the cause of the infant Queen Isabella, whose regent, the Queen Mother María Cristina, needed their support (despite not being particularly liberal herself). They were largely supported by the nobility – who were appeased by liberal ideas about property rights – by the urban Church hierarchy, who also supported Isabella’s cause, and by most of the army. On the opposite side, artisans, farm workers and the rural clergy rallied to Carlos’s side. As in all Spanish civil wars, regional identities played a significant role, becoming one of the most decisive factors in the conflict: the centre was once again at war with the periphery.
If in the War of Spanish Succession of the early 1700s the Basque Country and Navarre had largely remained on the sidelines by backing the Bourbon winners (while Catalans and Valencians supported the Habsburg ‘regionalist’ cause), now this northern corner of the country became the epicentre of the new hostilities. Unlike the territories of the old Crown of Aragon, the Basques and Navarrese had not had their local rights and traditions (fueros) taken from them . . . that is until the rise of the liberals with the 1812 Constitution, which sought to forge a united Spanish nation and ruled out any autonomy for the regions. Now these regions had much to lose. And in opposition to the liberal cause stood Don Carlos, the absolutist younger brother of Fernando, pretender to the throne who believed in the divine right of kings and in keeping everything as it was. For the Basques and Navarrese he was their man. And so they proclaimed for him. The Fi
rst Carlist War had begun.
The centre against the periphery once more: the First Carlist War
There is a sad irony in the fact that, as an absolutist, Carlos’s first act had he won the war would have been to tramp over the regional rights and privileges that many of his supporters were fighting to defend. Unluckily for him, however, he never got to exercise royal power. But he came very close: in 1837 his army reached the outskirts of Madrid, and he might have taken the capital, but at the last minute lost his nerve. It was a turning point: from then on Carlism was on the retreat, finally being defeated in 1840 by the better organised and better equipped liberals, who this time received support from both the French and the British.1 Focal points of Carlist support, however, continued to survive for decades, not least in the eastern Maestrazgo mountains, which had fallen to the Carlist leader Ramón Cabrera, nicknamed el Tigre for his cruelty. Cabrera’s merciless treatment of prisoners only worsened when the liberals captured and executed his mother. His exploits highlight the very bloody and vengeful nature of the conflict: as many as three hundred thousand Spaniards lost their lives over the course of the Carlist Wars, a figure comparable to the number killed during the Spanish Civil War. Summary executions and reprisals became the norm, one notorious incident being the shooting of one hundred and eighteen Isabeline prisoners by Carlists at the Basque town of Heredia. An agreement to limit the atrocities was brokered by the British diplomat Lord Eliot in 1835, and for a time enjoyed some success, but violence behind the lines soon resumed. One member of the British Legion wrote that prisoners were ‘mercilessly put to death, sometimes by means of tortures worthy of the North American Indians’.
El Tigre later died peacefully in exile near London, having married an English girl and moved into the country estate which in time would become Wentworth Golf Course. But the scars left by the First Carlist War were slow to heal: the war reignited twice more over the coming decades, in 1848 and then again in 1872, with the Carlist cause continuing to exist well into the twentieth century.2 The conflicts set a dangerous precedent which would be followed time and again of putting military generals at the heart of political developments. And although the Carlist wars eventually drew to a close, the basis of what they were fought over – tradition versus change, orthodoxy versus free-thinking – not only echoed the civil wars of the past, but also, in many ways, gave birth to their descendant: the Spanish Civil War itself.
1 The Spanish derogatory word for northern European, guiri, dates from this time: the foreigners fought for the cause of Isabella’s mother, María Cristina, Cristina being pronounced in Basque ‘Guiristina’, hence guiri.
2 And even to today: the current Carlist pretender to the Spanish crown is Carlos Javier de Borbón-Parma, born in 1970.
A SECOND (CLASS) ISABELLA
Fernando VII baptised his daughter and heir Isabella in the hope that his subjects would accept a sovereign queen named after the great Isabella of Castile of blessed memory. His plan was only a partial success, however, as testified by three Carlist civil wars over the following decades aimed at overthrowing the girl-queen in favour of her uncle. In addition, Isabella II’s personal failings further scuppered her father’s designs, eventually leading to the (albeit temporary) fall of the Bourbon regime and Spain’s first dalliance with republicanism.
If having a psychopath as a father wasn’t bad enough, Isabella was less than fortunate in having a corrupt and rapacious mother who quickly remarried following Fernando’s death and dedicated herself to bringing up her new, rapidly expanding family and lining her own pockets. All of which wouldn’t have been so bad except that at the same time Maria Cristina was supposed to be acting as regent for her infant daughter, as well as providing a decent education for the future monarch. So neglected was the young queen that at the age of ten she could still barely read, write or do basic sums, could only express affections towards her cuddly toys and dogs, and had non-existent table manners. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the absence of any real parenting, courtiers and others around her took advantage and initiated the queen in the only activities for which she is really remembered, namely her colourful sex life. It is said that she was deflowered by her own chief minister, Salustiano Olózaga, although various tutors were not far behind. One of them, José Vicente Ventosa, was later expelled from the palace for ‘serious’ misdemeanours. Isabella became notorious for having a string of lovers, many of whom were politicians or high-ranking military officers (she also had a penchant for opera singers), such as General O’Donnell, or Lieutenant Enrique Puigmoltó, who is generally regarded as being the father of Isabella’s son and heir, the future Alfonso XII. Rumours of her many affairs provided material for popular songs of the age, as did the sexual inclinations of her husband and consort, Francisco, who was nicknamed ‘Doña Paquita’ for his supposed lack of interest in women. A series of over one hundred caricatures were drawn at the time, not unlike those depicting the antics of Britain’s Prince Regent, in which Isabella’s erotic encounters were illustrated in full pornographic glory, including acts of group sex and bestiality (although not at the same time).
Her adulterous tendencies were so widely known of that when Pope Pius IX agreed to baptise the infant Alfonso XII voices were raised in the Vatican that the Spanish queen was a puttana.
‘A whore, yes,’ the pontiff replied, ‘but a pious one.’
And the child was embraced to the bosom of the Church.
While bed-hopping was the norm within the palace, outside in the rest of the country a curious parallel existed on the political scene, with the years of Isabella’s reign marked by a truly dizzying number of coups, revolts and changes of government. Most of them failed, but some succeeded. Changes in government, in fact, only ever came about during this period through violence, always instigated or supported by various military factions, a precedent which would have lasting repercussions for Spanish history and which can still be felt to this day. This is the period of Spanish history which gives us the word pronunciamiento, the act by which some high-ranking officer would declare umbrage with the government, and perhaps shoot a few people just to show he was serious, only to be shot down himself as his call to arms generally failed to muster the support he needed. With hindsight they can appear almost comical, but at the time they kept the country in an almost permanent state of emergency. Occasional moments of stability came, but were brief. O’Donnell was in charge of the longest of these, five years which, miraculously, managed to buck the general trend of the period.
And behind the rebelliousness lay serious questions: Spain now finally existed, but there was no consensus about the kind of country she wanted to be. So-called ‘liberals’ were often at the forefront of the political debate, but their liberalism amounted to little more than oligarchy. In addition, they themselves were deeply divided between ‘moderates’ and ‘progressives’, rivalry between the two factions very often resulting in bloodshed. With time these groups would become political formations, forerunners of the parties which have governed Spain since 1978. Meanwhile, regional identities continued to add further dimensions, and among the multiple coups and revolutions were uprisings in formerly independent states, including an insurrection in Barcelona in 1842 which only ended after the army used heavy artillery to bombard the city into submission. Regionalist sentiments, in fact, never went away, exploding brightly – if briefly – in 1873 and then feeding a new Catalan independence movement which would develop towards the end of the century.
Meanwhile, Spain was changing radically. The first railway lines were built at this time, a transformative leap in communications within a country in which numerous mountain ranges traditionally highlighted a lack of cultural cohesion. And with trains came the beginnings of industrialisation – principally in Catalonia, where textiles took off, and the Basque Country, which developed a steel industry. That the new forms of wealth would be concentrated in these fringe areas with strong cultural and historical identities would have – and stil
l has – significant consequences.
Socially these developments had a huge impact, but more importantly on a national scale was the effect of the forced sale of Church and municipal lands at this time. The Church owned a third of the Spanish land mass, and wresting it from ecclesiastic hands had long been an ambition of liberal governments, not least to weaken Church power. But while the idea was that rural communities would be strengthened by the move, the result in many ways was the reverse. Most of the land sold passed into the hands of already-wealthy landowners whose power simply increased further. Free Church-based education began to disappear as priests founded private schools in order to make up for lost revenues. The new landowners in many cases tore up the contracts of their farm workers and forced them to become jornaleros – men who were only ever employed for a day at a time, with no guarantee of future work beyond the goodwill of the manager. A similar development meant that many former skilled artisans became mere labourers.
This shift turned the political sentiments of Spain’s lower classes on their head. If in the 1830s they had supported the conservatism of Church and absolutist monarchy as the guardian of their traditions and way of life (¡Vivan las cadenas!), by the 1860s they had become highly radicalised and very open to the new anarchist and socialist ideas developing in the rest of Europe. Thirty years of Spanish history, of generals interfering in politics, of a corrupt ruling elite seemingly incapable of steering the ship of state, of violence taking centre stage in the national identity drama, of a State taking on the power of the Church, of disastrous rural reforms which ruined the lives of those they were designed to help, of one Spain and another fighting it out. This was Isabella II’s reign.
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