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 a pronunciamiento 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.
CHAPTER XXX
Egypt and the Canal
The first Suez Canal was dug by Pharaoh Necho in the seventh century BC. So, at least, we are informed by Herodotus, who adds that 120,000 Egyptians perished during the digging, and that the finished canal was four days’ journey in length and wide enough for two armies abreast. But there was little or no trace of it two and a half millennia later, when Napoleon ordered the first detailed survey of the isthmus. His chief surveyor, Jean-Baptiste Le Père, concluded that the extremities of a canal would be at different levels–he actually estimated the southern end to be some ten metres higher–but the theory soon became academic: by the time he produced his final report the French were no longer in Egypt, and the British who had ejected them were determined to get out themselves as soon as possible. The project was once again forgotten, and remained so for another half-century.
Then, in 1854, the Ottoman Sultan’s Khedive (or viceroy)–by now Mohammed Ali’s fourth son, Saïd–granted to a young French visionary named Count Ferdinand de Lesseps, acting on behalf of his French-owned company, the right to construct a canal running almost exactly 100 miles across the isthmus, from the Mediterranea
n to the Red Sea. Work began in 1859 and took ten years instead of the six that de Lesseps had estimated; there were early labour troubles among the largely Egyptian workforce and in 1865 an outbreak of cholera which threatened to bring the whole enterprise to an end. But the difficulties were eventually overcome, Le Père’s anxieties proved unfounded–the Canal has no locks–and at half past eight on the morning of 17 November 1869 the French imperial yacht, the Aigle, with the Empress Eugénie and de Lesseps himself on board, entered it at Port Said. This was followed by forty-five more vessels bearing the Khedive–by this time Saïd had been succeeded by his nephew Ismail–and his official guests, the foreign ambassadors and other high dignitaries. On the morning of the 20th the Aigle entered the Red Sea, and the ship’s band struck up, somewhat inappropriately, with ‘Partant pour la Syrie’.
There is a popular misconception that Verdi’s Aida was written to celebrate the opening of the Canal. In fact, the historic event seems to have left him cold–so cold, indeed, that he deliberately turned down a commission to produce an inaugural hymn for the occasion. It was not until the early months of 1870 that he was sent a scenario by the French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette, based on an invented story set in Egyptian antiquity. This had an immediate appeal for him. An opera was commissioned by the Khedive Ismail, and he set to work with a will. Although the première was scheduled for Ismail’s new opera house in Cairo, it was decided that the sets and costumes should be prepared in Paris–an unfortunate decision, as it turned out, since the Franco-Prussian War and the consequent siege of the city held them up for weeks. They were freed at last, and the opera duly opened on Christmas Eve 1871. Verdi was, somewhat surprisingly, not present, though he did attend the Milan première early the following year.
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