Charles IV of Spain

• 1. Introduction

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  Charles IV of Spain was born on the 11th of November 1748 in Naples, where his father was then ruling as King of Naples and Sicily. He would go on to inherit the Spanish throne in 1788 and lose it twenty years later in one of the most humiliating collapses in royal European history. How does a king surrender not one but two abdications, hand his empire to a foreign conqueror, and watch his own son betray him? Those are the questions that run through the life of a man his contemporaries called, not affectionately, despotic, sluggish, and stupid. The historian Stanley G. Payne offered a slightly kinder verdict: good-hearted but weak and simple-minded. His subjects knew him by another name entirely: El Cazador, the Hunter, because he preferred sport and game to the burdens of governance. By the time Napoleon Bonaparte summoned him to Bayonne in 1808, Charles had already signed away his throne once. He was about to do it again.

• 2. A King Who Refused to Govern

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  Charles III died in 1788 having left Spain in reasonably stable condition. His son possessed a profound belief in the sanctity of monarchy and kept up the outward appearance of absolute power. Behind closed doors, he took only a passive part in his own government. The real decisions fell to two people: his wife Maria Luisa, and the man he appointed as first minister, Manuel de Godoy. While the French Revolution erupted across the border, while his Bourbon cousin Louis XVI was executed along with Queen Marie Antoinette, Charles went hunting. The contrast with his father was stark. Charles III had been an active, working monarch with experienced first ministers around him. Charles IV paired his own disengagement with a domineering wife and an inexperienced but fiercely ambitious first minister. Godoy was widely believed to be Maria Luisa's lover, a rumor that corroded the monarchy's standing with its subjects. The combination of royal incompetence, a queen perceived to take lovers, and a first minister pursuing his own agenda earned the crown a steady drift of alienation from the Spanish people. When Charles first took the throne he had tried to maintain continuity, retaining his father's prime minister, the Count of Floridablanca, but by 1792 political and personal enemies had forced Floridablanca out, replaced briefly by the Count of Aranda, and then by Godoy.

• 3. Science at the Edges of Empire

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  Despite the chaos at court, the crown continued to fund ambitious scientific expeditions into its overseas territories. The Royal Botanical Expedition to New Granada ran from 1783 to 1816, and the Royal Botanical Expedition to New Spain from 1787 to 1803. The Malaspina Expedition, launched in 1789 and completed in 1794, was led by Spanish naval commander Alejandro Malaspina; it carried naturalists and botanical illustrators gathering data across the empire. In 1799, Charles IV extended a remarkable privilege to the Prussian aristocrat and scientist Alexander von Humboldt, authorizing him to travel freely throughout Spanish America. Royal officials were instructed to assist Humboldt's investigation of key areas of the empire. The result, among other works, was Humboldt's Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, drawn from five years of travel. In 1803, Charles authorized the Balmis Expedition, a mission specifically aimed at vaccinating Spain's overseas territories against smallpox. These were not trivial undertakings. They represent a version of Charles's reign that often gets overshadowed by political disaster: a monarchy that could still project scientific curiosity and state resources outward into the world, even as its foundations cracked at home.

• 4. The Economic Fractures

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  Spain's financial problems pre-dated Charles IV, but they deepened sharply as the country became entangled in France's wars. Revenue needs shaped nearly every domestic and foreign decision the crown made. The reformist thinker Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos proposed a sweeping structural answer in his 1795 work Informe en el expediente de ley agraria, arguing that concentrated land ownership, entrenched traditions, and institutional barriers were strangling Spanish agriculture. Jovellanos called for the sale of public lands held by villages, the breakup of grazing territories controlled by the Mesta (the powerful organization of livestock owners), the abolition of entailed estates known as mayorazgos that passed aristocratic land undivided through generations, and the sale of church-held land. The goal was to create a class of yeoman farmers who would make the land more productive. The political cost was a direct assault on the Church and the nobility. In 1804, the crown pushed that assault in a particularly blunt direction: it ordered the church to call in immediately all the mortgages it had extended on a long-term basis in the overseas empire. The landowning elites of New Spain had no way to make full payment on their mortgaged properties. They faced financial ruin. That ill-considered decree has since been identified as a significant factor driving elite support toward the independence movement in New Spain, the territory that would become Mexico. The decree lapsed once both Charles and Ferdinand abdicated, but the damage to elite loyalty had already been done.

• 5. Alliances, Defeats, and the Road to Bayonne

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  Foreign policy under Godoy lurched from one dangerous alignment to the next. After Spain formally protested the execution of Louis XVI in 1793, France declared war on Spain. Spain and Portugal responded by signing a treaty of mutual protection. By 1796, France had forced Godoy to flip Spain into an alliance against Britain instead, dragging the country into the French Revolutionary War on the wrong side of its own interests. Spain lost against the British at Trafalgar, backed Napoleon's Continental Blockade, and after Napoleon's victory over Prussia in 1807, Godoy kept Spain aligned with the French. Each switch eroded trust. The supporters of Crown Prince Ferdinand, called the fernandistas, pushed for an alliance with Britain instead. Ferdinand himself was impatient and jealous. He attempted an outright coup against his father in 1807, failed, and tried again. The Tumult of Aranjuez in March 1808, a popular revolt at the winter palace, finally forced Charles to abdicate on the 19th of March in favor of his son. Ferdinand took the throne as Ferdinand VII. But Napoleon, who already had a hundred thousand soldiers stationed in Spain, did not trust the new king. He summoned both Charles and Ferdinand to Bayonne in April 1808. There, Napoleon forced both of them to abdicate, declared the Bourbon dynasty deposed, and placed his elder brother Joseph Bonaparte on the Spanish throne as King Joseph I, igniting the Peninsular War.

• 6. Exile, Portraits, and a Quiet Death

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  After Napoleon removed the Bourbon dynasty, Charles, his wife Maria Luisa, and the former first minister Godoy were held captive in France, first at the chateau de Compiegne and then for three years in Marseille, where a neighborhood was eventually named after the former king. Charles drifted about Europe after that, and the collapse of Napoleon's regime allowed Ferdinand VII to be restored to the Spanish throne. Charles finally settled in Rome in 1812, taking up residence in the Palazzo Barberini. Maria Luisa died on the 2nd of January 1819. Charles followed her on the 19th of January of the same year, while visiting his brother Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies in Naples. The traveler Sir Francis Ronalds recorded a detailed account of the funeral in his travel journal. Francisco Goya painted Charles in a number of official court portraits, and art critics have repeatedly read those paintings as something more cutting than ceremonial flattery. Many have seen them as satires on the king's stout vacuity. That Goya, a court painter, could hang such images in the palace and have them accepted as honorific portraits says something about how little Charles grasped his own public image. Charles had married his first cousin Maria Louisa, daughter of Philip, Duke of Parma, in 1765. The couple had fourteen children. Among those who survived, his daughter Carlota Joaquina became Queen of Portugal and the Algarves, and his son Ferdinand VII would rule Spain repeatedly across a turbulent career. His son Carlos Maria Isidro Benito became the first Carlist pretender to the Spanish throne, claiming it after Ferdinand VII's death as 'Carlos V' and sparking a dynastic conflict that would outlast the century.