FROM ISABELLA II TO ALFONSO XIII.
“A daughter of kings: if I were a man I would go to my capital!”
indignantly declared Isabella, when the appalling news reached her
that the royal army was defeated. But instead, she sought safety in
flight, leaving to the successful revolutionists the difficult task
of providing a government in place of the one they had overthrown.
Distrust and suspicion were rampant, and those who had declared the
_pronunciamiento_ were at their wits’ ends what to choose: a democratic
monarchy, a constitutional monarchy, or a republic; but during the
interregnum the patriot Serrano stepped into the breach. A thankless
task was his, as president of the provisional government, though he was
assisted by such able men as Prim, Minister of War; Topete, Minister of
Marine; Zorilla, Minister of Commerce; Figuerola, of Finance; Ortiz,
of Justice; Lopez de Ayala, of the Colonies; and Sagasta, Minister of
the Interior.
They were glad to resign, the following year, and subscribe to a
constitution which provided for the restoration of a constitutional
monarchy.
The constitutional monarchy was very beautiful, as an idea; but while
Serrano ruled as “regent for the interregnum,” the throne of Spain
“went begging about Europe,” seeking a royal occupant. General Prim
was insistent upon the candidacy of Prince Leopold, of Hohenzollern, a
relative of King William of Prussia, at which Napoleon III took alarm;
and though the prince promptly resigned his candidature, the French
emperor demanded further that Prussia should give a guarantee that she
would at no future time sanction his claims. King William refused to
give this assurance, and Napoleon made this a pretext for declaring
that war against Prussia which ended so disastrously for his empire and
for France.
Isabella’s brother–in–law, the Duke of Montpensier, as well as Fernando
of Portugal, were considered, but rejected for political reasons; and
even sturdy old Espartero refused the crown, showing the possession
of greater wisdom than the one upon whom it was finally bestowed—Don
Amadeo, Duke of Aosta, the second son of Victor Emanuel of Italy.
The reception he received was presaged by the assassination of Prim,
in December, 1870; but Amadeo was crowned a few days later, on
January 2, 1871, and entered heartily into the duties of his unsought
kingship. Two years later, after having been several times the object
of assassination and of insults innumerable, he became convinced that
modern Spain was different from that Spain which had besought a foreign
prince to rule over it in the eighteenth century, and sorrowfully
abdicated.
Monarchical rule having failed them, the Spaniards now turned to a
republic, as the ideal toward which they had striven through these
hopeless, turbulent, and chaotic years. But they did not take into
account their inborn reverence for a king, their superstitious faith in
the sanctity of the royal office; and so the “republic” had a thorny
road to travel, first under Señor Pi y Margall, the first “president
of the executive power,” lastly under the great jurist, orator, and
patriot, Emilio Castelar.
Away back in the time of the regent Christina, that queen was troubled
by the dissensions of the so–called liberals, who, split into two
parties, the _moderados_ and the _progresistas_, impeded whatever
advance might have been possible had the occupant of the throne been
inclined toward the people.
So now, the actual arrival of the republic found dissensions among the
very “patriots” who should have served it disinterestedly and with
fervour. The misnamed “republic” served but as a bridge for another
king to pass over from exile to the throne.
When Prim was dying, mortally wounded by unknown assassins, he
whispered to a friend, “I die, but your king is coming!” The king
came, and went; the “republic” came, and went out in the _coup–d’état_
of January, 1874, with militarism triumphant, and the administration
of the government in the hands of military officers. Their action in
putting down anarchy and ending the civil war—for “Don Carlos” had
again taken the field, with his Basque retainers, in support of his
inalienable “male succession”—would seem to prove that Spain, like
Mexico, needed the mailed hand of the military dictator to force it
into paths of prosperity and development.
Serrano might have been that dictator; but if he had designs, they did
not succeed, for he soon resigned in favour of one who proclaimed
himself “the first republican in Europe”—no less a personage than the
seventeen–year–old son of Isabella the exile, who was ferreted out
by the king–makers and offered the crown, that a Bourbon might again
occupy the throne of his ancestors.
The Spaniards were now content, for had they not travelled the road of
republicanism and found it a failure? tried the rule of a foreigner,
and found him wanting? At last they were in possession of their own
again! In his veins ran the blood of Isabella the corrupt; but his
reputed father was an amiable man, and so was the new king, Alfonso
XII, who was proclaimed at Madrid in January, 1875.
The faults, the traits, of Alfonso XII were inherited. Even his death,
less than eleven years after his coronation, is said to have been
caused by constitutional ills. But, so far as he could, he nobly lived
up to his intentions to give Spain peace and renewed prosperity. Six
years before the people had shouted, “Away with the Bourbons!” yet
here again was a Bourbon on the throne. He could not forget the line
from which he descended, nor the treatment his mother, also a Bourbon,
had received; yet his reign approached what the people had so long
desired. Able ministers assisted him, according to the humour of the
hour: first under General Martinez Campos; then under the leadership of
Canovas del Castillo; again under the liberal Señor Sagasta. Through
all these changes, however, Alfonso preserved the goodwill of his
subjects; yet he was the object of the base assassin’s aim on three
different occasions.
Despite the good offices of imperial match–makers, who would have
married him to some great princess of a reigning house in Europe,
Alfonso persisted in wedding his own choice. He married his cousin,
Marie de las Mercedes, daughter of the Duke of Montpensier—a love–match
which death disrupted less than six months later.
Kings may marry, but kings may not mourn; so within another six months
he was united to the Archduchess Maria Christina, niece of the Emperor
of Austria, who, the story goes, when she had heard of Alfonso’s first
marriage, was so disappointed that she entered a convent. A child was
born and named Mercedes, after the former queen; then yet another
daughter; but no male heir to the throne before the death of the king,
which occurred on the 25th of November, 1885. Whether his death was
caused by excesses, as has been sometimes charged, or by his chivalrous
insistence upon visiting the afflicted cholera districts of his
kingdom, mattered little to the people, who mourned sincerely for their
brave young king, cut off in the flower of his manhood, with his great
schemes unaccomplished.
For the first time since the death of Ferdinand VII, more than fifty
years before, the vaults in the Escorial were opened for the reception
of another occupant. In accordance with an ancient custom, when the
funeral cortège arrived at the door of the Escorial, the keeper within
demanded, “Who would enter here?” One of the attendants answered,
“Alfonso XII would enter,” and the door was thrown open. Even then
Alfonso was not considered as officially defunct, until the lord
chamberlain, drawing back the cloth of gold covering his features,
addressed him: “Señor, señor, señor,” and, receiving no reply, said
solemnly: “His Majesty does not answer; then indeed the king is dead!”
The king was dead; to his place succeeded his elder daughter, little
Mercedes, Princess of the Asturias, during whose minority the
queen–mother reigned as regent. For the seventh time in five hundred
years a minor sat on the throne of Spain. The first of whom we have
record was Ferdinand IV, at the beginning of the fourteenth century;
he died young, and was succeeded by an infant son, Alfonso VI; at the
end of that century there was another child–king, Henry III, from
1390 to 1406; and after him John VI, who reigned from 1406 to 1454;
Charles II, who came to be king at the age of fourteen, in 1676; and
Isabella, the age of three, in 1833. Child kings and queens, babes in
arms enthroned in nurses’ laps, and unscrupulous regents during their
minorities, seem to have been a Spanish evil!
But the child queen Mercedes was not to reign long, for six months
after the death of Alfonso XII the queen gave birth to a son, and this
posthumous heir succeeded to the throne as Alfonso XIII, while yet
unable to understand the fearful dignities that were thrust upon him.
He was thus the eighth infant sovereign to rule Spain from the nursery
within the past five centuries—perhaps may be the last; for as people
grow older they are supposed to grow wiser; though all rules may have
their exceptions, and perhaps the Spaniards are exceptions to all rules!
Still, we can not withhold our admiration from a chivalrous sentiment,
however foolish it may seem to sober sense; and when it was suggested
to Emilio Castelar, the lion–hearted orator and statesman, that this
might be a good time for a re–trial of the republic, he probably
voiced the national feeling when he said: “We can not make war against
a woman and a child!” That is the unthinking, sentimental side of it;
but if the people had been brave enough to have said: “While we do not
wish to war against a woman and her child, yet we will set this infant
aside until he has shown what manner of man he becomes,” would it not
have been far less cruel to her and to him, and more to the credit of a
nation desirous of keeping pace with a progressive civilization?
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