Don Carlos

Spanish royal pretender

• Born: March 29, 1788
• Birthplace: Aranjuez, Spain
• Died: March 10, 1855
• Place of death: Trieste, Austrian Empire (now in Italy)

The first of the Carlist claimants to the throne of Spain, Don Carlos dedicated his life to disputing the right of his niece, Doña Isabel, to Spain’s throne and upholding the principles, laws, and institutions of the Old Regime.

Early Life

Carlos María Isidro de Borbón was the second surviving son of Charles IV and Louisa María Isidro, king and queen of Spain. In 1808, with the help of French troops, Don Carlos’s older brother became Ferdinand VII , king of Spain. Later that year, however, the royal family was ordered to Bayonne where Don Carlos, his brother, and his uncle, Don Antonio, were held captive and conducted to Valençay in central France, where they lived under house arrest until 1814. Ferdinand was persuaded to abdicate the throne in favor of Napoleon’s brother, Joseph Bonaparte; however, Don Carlos, who was supposed to succeed his brother to the throne if the latter left no male heirs, refused to renounce his right to the throne, saying that he would rather be dead than betray his obligation to the Spanish people.

After his return to Spain in 1814, Don Carlos lived as a prince in Madrid. In September, 1816, he married Princess María Francesca de Asís de Braganza, daughter of King John VI of Portugal and sister of the wife (Queen Isabel) of Ferdinand VII. A loving brother and a loyal subject of Ferdinand VII, Don Carlos was rewarded with a few formal offices but with no substantial role in government. In June, 1814, Ferdinand VII made him a colonel of the Carabineros Reales, Spain’s royal cavalry corps, and two months later named him captain general and commander in chief of the army. Ferdinand VII also allowed him to preside over the Council of State and the Council of War.

Don Carlos was always known for his devout Catholicism and unswerving belief in a traditional Spain in which the monarch governed absolutely. In 1820, when soldiers supposed to go to America rioted in favor of reinstating the liberal constitution of 1812, Don Carlos, as head of the Council of State, declared that it was necessary to oppose their demand with all possible force.

A revolutionary government during the Liberal Triennium (1820-1823) expelled the royal family from Madrid and made them go to Seville, where they were deprived of their rights and accused of treason. The royal family was then garrisoned in Cádiz, only to be rescued by French intervention, which put down the revolution in 1823. Once the royal family was free, the royalists deliberately set out to destroy the liberals. The most extreme royalists were the apostólicos (Apostolics), who believed in the infallible righteousness of the Roman Catholic Church and the legitimacy of a monarchy that would represent its interest. When Ferdinand VII, under international pressure, refused to sanction the worst excesses in the persecution of liberals, the royalists began to look to Don Carlos as their true leader.

Life’s Work

If Don Carlos had been inclined to lead an insurrection against Ferdinand VII, the apostólicos would have risen against the king. Don Carlos refused to betray his brother, but his Portuguese wife and her older sister, María Teresa, the princess of Beira, had fewer scruples and actively intrigued with the apostólicos. In March, 1833, the princess of Beira, who happened to be in Madrid for the wedding of her son, Don Sebastian, was advised to leave for Portugal, and Don Carlos and his wife were authorized to accompany her. In April, the king asked Don Carlos, still in Portugal, to swear allegiance to his daughter Isabel, who had been born on October 10, 1830. In his letter of reply, Don Carlos refused to give up his claim to the throne unless Ferdinand would also bear a son.

Legal complexities exacerbated the disagreement over the right to succession. In 1789, the Cortes, Spain’s parliament, had approved the Pragmatic Sanction on the right to succession. Charles IV, not wishing to promulgate the new law, published a revised Spanish legal code in 1805 in which the 1789 law was not mentioned but the semi-Salic law of Philip V, dating back to 1713, was. The older law stated that succession to the throne was to consist of male children of the king and his male descendants; females could reign in their own right only when no such males existed. Each brother had solid arguments in his favor. Ferdinand VII could argue that the 1789 law only needed promulgation and that the right of female succession had been in force in Spain for centuries before 1713. Don Carlos could counter that the Pragmatic Sanction had lapsed during the long interval between its approval by the Cortes and its promulgation on March 29, 1830; moreover, Don Carlos was born in 1788 and thus could argue that the 1789 law, even if valid, did not apply to him.

The death of Ferdinand VII on September 29, 1833, unleashed the forces behind the First Carlist War, or the Seven Years’ War (1833-1840). The queen regent, María Cristina of Bourbon-Two Sicilies, indicated that she would favor the liberals if they supported her daughter’s claim to the throne. She also ordered Don Carlos to Italy, but he refused to leave the Iberian Peninsula and tried to slip back into Spain, where his supporters were uprising and proclaiming him Carlos V. Failing to cross the heavily patrolled border, he helped Dom Miguel, a pretender to the Portuguese throne, who promised to reciprocate later in Spain.

The dynastic quarrels and the struggle between absolutism and liberalism in the Iberian Peninsula could not fail to arouse the interest of the rest of Europe. The old Holy Alliance of Russia, Prussia, and Austria was sympathetic to Don Carlos but held back material assistance. On the other hand, the government of Isabel received the support of the Quadruple Alliance (England, France, Portugal, Spain), which was formed on April 22, 1834, to support liberal constitutional government in western Europe by driving Don Carlos and Dom Miguel out of the Iberian Peninsula.

Dom Miguel had to renounce his claim to the Portuguese throne and was expelled to Genoa. On June 1, 1834, Don Carlos was allowed to leave for England, where he refused to renounce his rights to the throne in exchange for an annual pension. He slipped away under disguise to France, which he crossed to finally join his loyal junta and troops in Navarre in July, 1834. His wife, Doña María Francesca, remained in England and died of fever on September 4.

Although the uprisings in favor of Don Carlos were scattered throughout Spain and he enjoyed considerable sympathy in rural areas, the heart of his support was the Basque provinces, Navarre, Catalonia, and the mountainous area of the Maestrazgo. The Carlists could win battles from one end of Spain to another, with the exceptions of all-important Madrid and the twice-sieged Bilbao, but they could maintain control only in the countryside and small towns of the northeast. One of Don Carlos’s tactical problems was his hesitation to close decisively on strategic targets, especially Madrid, because he erroneously expected that the masses would take up arms and fight for his cause. Some historians believe that the princess of Beira unintentionally created more problems for Don Carlos after their marriage in 1838. Very much in the camp of the apostólicos, this strong-willed woman alienated Don Carlos’s more moderate supporters.

The end of Don Carlos’s hopes to win the crown came with the signing of the Convention of Vergara on August 31, 1839, when General Rafael Maroto of the Carlist northern army agreed to accept the conditions for peace offered by Captain-General Baldomero Espartero, the leader of Spain’s army. Don Carlos bitterly remarked that Maroto had sold out God, king, country, and fueros (rights and privileges of certain groups) for military rank and foreign gold. No longer able to hold out in the Basque provinces, Don Carlos and thousands of troops sought refuge in France on September 14.

Don Carlos was arrested attempting to slip back into Spain across the eastern Pyrenees to join Ramón Cabrera and his Carlist army, which continued to fight until July, 1840. Don Carlos and his family were sent to Bourges, France, where they lived under house arrest until he abdicated in favor of his oldest son, Carlos Luis, on May 18, 1845, and took on the title of the count of Molina. That year Don Carlos established residence in Trieste, where he and his wife established a Spanish royal court in exile that became a gathering place for European traditionalists. In his final years, Don Carlos was frail and semi-invalid; he died, after receiving his last rites, on March 10, 1855, comforted by his second wife, the princess of Beira, and his second son, Don Fernando. He is buried in the San Guisto Cathedral of Trieste.

Significance

To the very end, Don Carlos refused to acknowledge Queen Isabella II or accept the new liberal order, which recognized the sovereignty and will of the people. Carlists defended the dynastic claims of Don Carlos and his descendants for well over one hundred years. Carlism never prevailed in restoring an absolutist monarchy, reestablishing a traditional Spain, or regaining all the privileges and properties that the Catholic Church once had in Spain. However, Carlism has had a decided impact on Spanish life. The Second Carlist War (1846-1848) was centered in Catalonia and was spurred on by Carlos Luis (Carlos VI). Carlos Luis’s second son, Don Carlos (Carlos VII), led the Third Carlist War (1872-1876). Carlism was an important force on the nationalist side in Spain’s Civil War of 1936-1939, although Franco’s victorious Falange and the Carlists soon parted company.

In modern Spain, Carlists have no intention of starting a war to establish a Carlist monarchy. Spain’s King Juan Carlos I (r. 1975-    ) is, on his father’s side, a descendant of King Alfonso XIII of Spain and Queen Victoria of England. On his mother’s side, he is related to Don Carlos de Borbón. The two dynastic branches—those of Isabel II and the Carlist pretenders—that were separated upon the death of Ferdinand VII in 1833 have come together again in Juan Carlos, who remains a popular monarch and a symbol of national unity. However, Carlists continue to argue for the reestablishment of a traditional Spain in which there would be Catholic unity, strong regional rights to counter centralism, and a corporative Cortes in which the traditional estates of the clergy, aristocrats, and other interest groups would be represented. They would prefer a monarch who would pledge to uphold the customs, principles, and laws of traditional Spain. Above all else, they remain implacable enemies of liberalism.

Bibliography

Barahona, Renato. Vizcaya on the Eve of Carlism: Politics and Society, 1800-1833. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1989. A study of the political and social conditions in Vizcaya, a Basque province of Spain, and how these conditions led to Basque support for the Carlist movement.

Blinkhorn, Martin. Carlism and Crisis in Spain, 1931-1939. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1975. The first chapter provides a review of Carlism up until 1931. The rest of the book is a study of Carlism’s role in the fall of Spain’s Second Republic and the rise of political extremism and Franco’s Falange. Includes illustrations, maps, and bibliography.

Clarke, H. Butler. Modern Spain: 1815-1898. New York: Ames Press, 1969. Clarke treats all the major figures and critical turning points of Spain in the nineteenth century. The book contains many details forgotten in more recent studies of the period and includes a map and a bibliography.

Flynn, M. K. Ideology, Mobilization, and the Nation: The Rise of Irish, Basque, and Carlist Nationalist Movements in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Flynn recounts the general evolution of nationalism in western Europe by the nineteenth century, then describes the rise of nationalism among the Carlists and Basques in Spain as examples of this movement.

Holt, Edgar. The Carlist Wars in Spain. London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1967. This even-handed analysis of the three Carlist Wars has an epilogue covering events up to 1965, and includes illustrations, a map, and a bibliography.

Wilhelmsen, Alexandra. “Antonio Aparisi y Guijarro: A Nineteenth-Century Carlist Apologist for a Sacral Society in Spain.” In Saints, Sovereigns, and Scholars, edited by R. A. Herrera, James Lehrberger, and M. E. Bradford. New York: Peter Lang, 1993. This is a good review of what the apostólicos wanted and the effects they have had on Spanish life. Includes bibliography.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Maria Teresa of Braganza.” In Mediterranean Studies 6. Kirksville, Mo.: Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1996. The Princess of Beira, Don Carlos’s second wife, had a major influence over him even before their marriage. This article, which includes illustrations and a bibliography, is particularly good for details on Don Carlos’s later life.