Alfonso XIII

• 1. Introduction

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  Alfonso XIII was carried naked to the prime minister on a silver tray moments after he was born, already a king. His father, Alfonso XII, had died the previous year, making this infant born on the 17th of May 1886 the ruler of Spain from his very first breath. Five days later, a solemn court procession wound through the Royal Palace of Madrid. A Golden Fleece hung around the baby's neck. Water brought specially from the River Jordan in Palestine was used to baptise him. A French newspaper would describe the child, at age three, as "the happiest and best-loved of all the rulers of the earth."

  That description did not age well. By the time Alfonso XIII left Spain voluntarily in April 1931, he had been found guilty of high treason by his own legislature. His reign had spanned a disastrous colonial war, a self-inflicted military catastrophe in Morocco, a dictatorship he actively supported, and the complete collapse of the monarchy he was born to embody. He would die in Rome a decade later, still in exile, his rights to a defunct throne formally renounced just weeks before his death.

  How did a king who charmed European courts, attempted to save the Romanov family, and earned a Nobel Peace Prize nomination end up condemned by his own parliament? The answers lie in the choices Alfonso made across four turbulent decades.

• 2. A Soldier-King in the Making

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  Maria Christina of Austria governed Spain as regent for sixteen years while her son grew up, steering the country through the catastrophe of 1898 when Spain lost Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines to the United States after the Spanish-American War. The empire Alfonso was born to inherit was already contracting before he took his oath to the constitution before the Cortes on the 17th of May 1902.

  The education arranged for him was largely military in character. His tutors from the military clique gave him what one source describes as "a Spanish nationalism strengthened by his military vocation." A liberal also gave him political instruction, and a figure called Jose Fernandez de la Montana provided moral teaching from an integrist perspective. These three influences would pull in different directions for the rest of his life.

  When Alfonso came of age in May 1902, the week was marked by festivities, bullfights, balls, and receptions across Spain. He was also appointed captain general of both the Spanish Army and the Spanish Navy that same day, titles he would hold until the monarchy fell. The image of the soldier-king was not incidental. It was the frame through which Alfonso understood himself and through which his subjects were encouraged to understand him.

• 3. The Wedding and the Bomb

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  By 1905, Alfonso was searching for a bride, and a state visit to the United Kingdom brought him to Buckingham Palace as a guest of King Edward VII. There he met Princess Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg, daughter of Edward VII's youngest sister Princess Beatrice, and a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. The attraction was mutual, but the path to marriage was obstructed at every turn.

  Victoria was Protestant and would need to convert to Catholicism. Her brother Leopold was a haemophiliac, which meant there was a fifty percent chance Victoria was a carrier of the condition. Alfonso's mother Maria Christina wanted him to marry within the House of Habsburg-Lorraine or at least a firmly Catholic royal house, regarding the Battenbergs as non-dynastic.

  Maria Christina was eventually persuaded, and in January 1906 she wrote formally to Princess Beatrice to propose the match. Victoria met the Spanish royal family in Biarritz, converted to Catholicism in San Sebastian in March, and in May the diplomatic agreement was officially executed. The wedding took place at the Royal Monastery of San Jeronimo in Madrid on the 31st of May 1906. British royalty attended, including Victoria's cousins the Prince and Princess of Wales, later King George V and Queen Mary.

  As the procession returned to the palace, a Catalan anarchist named Mateu Morral threw a bomb from a window. Thirty bystanders and members of the procession were killed. One hundred others were wounded. Alfonso and Victoria survived because their carriage was lined with bulletproof material developed by the Polish inventor Jan Szczepanik.

  The first child, Alfonso, Prince of Asturias, was born on the 10th of May 1907. Victoria was indeed a haemophilia carrier. The prince inherited the condition, as did a later son, Gonzalo, born in 1914.

• 4. Neutrality and the Nobel

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  World War I presented Alfonso with a problem that was also an opportunity. Spanish public opinion was sharply split between pro-German and pro-Entente sympathizers, and his own family connections ran to both sides of the war. His government maintained neutrality, and Alfonso used his relationships across European royal families to reinforce that stance.

  From the Royal Palace, he established an office dedicated to assisting prisoners of war on all sides. Using Spain's diplomatic and military network abroad, the office transmitted and received letters for thousands of prisoners and provided other services. For this work, Alfonso received a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1917 - the prize that year ultimately went to the Red Cross. He remains the only monarch known to have received a Nobel nomination.

  Also during the war, Alfonso made a personal attempt to save Tsar Nicholas II and his family from the Bolsheviks, sending two telegrams offering refuge in Spain. He later learned the Romanov family had been executed, but was mistaken in believing only the Tsar and his son Alexei had died. Unaware that the Tsarina Alexandra, who was a first cousin of Victoria Eugenie, and her four daughters had also been killed, he continued pressing for their safe passage to Spain.

  Alfonso himself was struck by illness during the 1918 flu pandemic. Because Spain was neutral and had no wartime censorship, his illness and recovery were reported openly to the world, while outbreaks in belligerent countries were suppressed. This created the misleading impression that Spain was the pandemic's epicentre, which is how the disease came to be called the Spanish Flu.

• 5. Disaster in the Rif

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  After the war, Spain entered the Rif War, fighting from 1920 to 1926 to hold onto its colonial territory in northern Morocco. Alfonso's critics gave him the nickname el Africano - the African - for his enthusiastic support of the Africanist generals who believed Spain could build a new empire in Africa to replace the one lost in 1898.

  One of Alfonso's most favoured generals was Manuel Fernandez Silvestre. In 1921, as Silvestre pushed his forces into the Rif mountains and began encountering serious difficulties, Alfonso sent him a telegram whose first line read "Hurrah for real men!" - an explicit urging not to retreat.

  Silvestre pressed forward and led his men into the Battle of Annual, one of the worst defeats in Spanish military history. Alfonso was on holiday in the south of France at the time and was informed of what became known as the "Disaster of the Annual" while playing golf. His reported response was to shrug and say "Chicken meat is cheap" before continuing his game. He did not return to Spain to meet with the families of the soldiers killed in the battle. The Cortes opened an investigation in 1922 and found evidence that Alfonso had personally encouraged Silvestre's advance.

  By August 1923, the war's unpopularity had reached the point where Spanish soldiers embarking for Morocco were mutinying, troops in Malaga refused to board ships, and crowds in Barcelona were burning Spanish flags while waving the flag of the Rif Republic. On the 13th of September 1923, Miguel Primo de Rivera, Captain General of Catalonia, launched a military coup with the support of four Africanist generals close to Alfonso: Jose Cavalcanti, Federico Berenguer, Leopoldo Saro, and Antonio Daban. Alfonso acquiesced. Part of the coup's motivation was to shut down the parliamentary investigation into Annual before it could reach the king.

• 6. The Dictator's Patron

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  Primo de Rivera ruled Spain as a dictator with Alfonso's backing from September 1923 until January 1930. During those years, Alfonso increased his public presence and aligned himself openly with a Catholic, anti-Catalanist, militarist brand of Spanish nationalism. An assassination attempt by Catalan separatists in Barcelona in 1925 was used by Primo de Rivera to consolidate his position further.

  Alfonso appointed General Damaso Berenguer as the next prime minister. The new arrangement was nicknamed the dictablanda, a pun softening the word dictadura (dictatorship). The plan was to act as if nothing had happened since 1923 and simply restore the pre-coup political order. This rested on what proved to be a fatally incorrect assumption: that the Spanish public would accept this fiction.

  In November 1931, after Alfonso had already left Spain, the Constituent Republican Cortes debated his political responsibilities in an extended session. Prime Minister Manuel Azana closed the debate with a speech calling for unanimous condemnation. The house passed an act finding Alfonso de Borbon guilty of high treason, having determined that he had personally devised the Annual military operation without the knowledge of his Council of Ministers and then chose to launch a coup rather than face legislative scrutiny over the massacre.

• 7. Exile and the Playboy King

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  Municipal elections on the 12th of April 1931 were read by everyone, including the government itself, as a referendum on the monarchy. The Republican coalition won sweeping majorities in the major cities, though not a majority of councillors overall. Foreign minister Romanones admitted to the press an "absolute monarchist defeat." The head of the Civil Guard told government ministers that the Armed Forces could not be "absolutely" relied upon to sustain the monarchy. Alfonso left Spain voluntarily. The Second Spanish Republic was proclaimed on the 14th of April 1931.

  From exile, Alfonso was drawn into the confused politics of the monarchist right, where Alfonsist and Carlist factions competed uneasily. In January 1932 he issued a statement endorsing a manifesto by Carlist claimant Alfonso Carlos, in the same document accusing the reformist Republic of being "inspired and sponsored by communism, freemasonry and judaism." His attitude toward Jews had, in fact, reversed sharply from earlier in his reign, when he had ordered the Spanish consul in Jerusalem to protect Palestinian Jews and had personally removed a Tetuan official who had committed violence against Jews, overruling the Spanish Foreign Minister.

  Also in exile, Alfonso was associated with a very different kind of notoriety. He had commissioned pornographic films through a Barcelona production company called Royal Films, with the Count of Romanones serving as intermediary. Between forty and seventy films were produced in total; three have been preserved. They were silent, in black and white, and screened both in Barcelona's Chinatown and at Alfonso's private viewings. Most were later destroyed during the Franco regime.

  In 1933, his two eldest sons, Alfonso and Jaime, renounced their claims to the defunct throne on the same day. His youngest son Gonzalo died in 1934, leaving Juan as his only male heir. On the 15th of January 1941, Alfonso formally renounced his rights to the throne in Juan's favour. He died in Rome on the 28th of February 1941 after weeks of suffering following a severe angina pectoris attack. Francisco Franco ordered three days of national mourning. Alfonso was buried in Rome at the Church of Santa Maria in Monserrato degli Spagnoli, below the tombs of Popes Callixtus III and Alexander VI. In January 1980, his remains were transferred to El Escorial in Spain.

• 8. Marks Left Behind

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  Alfonso XIII left an unexpected trail of institutions and traditions that outlasted his reign. His wedding guests needed accommodation in Madrid, which led directly to the construction of the luxurious Hotel Palace. He also backed a network of state-run lodges, the Paradores, housed in historic buildings across Spain.

  His enthusiasm for football shaped the naming of clubs. Real Club Deportivo de La Coruna became the first club to receive his royal patronage in 1907. Real Madrid, Real Sociedad, Real Betis, Real Union, Espanyol, Real Zaragoza, and Real Racing Club followed. The prefix "Real" in each name means royal in Spanish.

  Alfonso is also embedded in an entirely different tradition. In 1894, the writer Luis Coloma composed a tale for Alfonso XIII, then eight years old and missing a milk tooth, featuring a mouse called Ratoncito Perez. The king appeared in the story as "King Buby." That tale became the origin of the Spanish-speaking world's answer to the Tooth Fairy. The tradition of Ratoncito Perez replacing lost milk teeth with a small payment or gift while the child sleeps is now followed across Spain and Hispanic America. A plaque dedicated in 2003 by the City Council of Madrid marks number eight of a street in the city as the place where the mouse was said to have lived, a monument to a tale told to comfort a young king.