Ferdinand VII

• 1. Introduction

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  Ferdinand VII of Spain was called "el Deseado" - the Desired One - by his people, who longed for his return while Napoleon held him captive in France. Yet the same man who inspired such yearning would earn a second nickname before his reign was done: el Rey Felón, the Criminal King. Born on the 14th of October 1784 at the palace of El Escorial near Madrid, Ferdinand lived through some of the most turbulent decades in Spanish history. He sat on the throne twice, lost nearly all of Spain's American colonies, suppressed the liberal press for nearly two decades, and died leaving a succession crisis that plunged his country into civil war. How did a king so eagerly awaited become so thoroughly despised? The answer lies in a life defined by captivity, betrayal, and a relentless hunger to rule without restraint.

• 2. A Prince Kept in the Dark

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  Charles IV and Maria Luisa of Parma, Ferdinand's parents, kept their eldest surviving son at a deliberate distance from the business of governing Spain. The man who wielded real influence was Manuel Godoy, the royal favourite and Prime Minister, whose authority Ferdinand could only resent from the sidelines. National discontent with the government had already produced a rebellion by 1805. In October 1807, Ferdinand crossed a line: he was arrested for his role in the El Escorial Conspiracy, a plot aimed at winning foreign support from Napoleon himself to undermine his own parents' regime. When the conspiracy was uncovered, he submitted to Charles and Maria Luisa. The submission was temporary. A popular riot at Aranjuez in early 1808 forced Charles IV to abdicate, and Ferdinand finally took the throne he had waited for. His first act as king was to turn to the very man his conspirators had once courted: Napoleon.

• 3. Napoleon's Houseguest

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  On the 6th of May 1808, Ferdinand abdicated - and Napoleon promptly installed his own brother, Joseph Bonaparte, as king of Spain. Ferdinand was placed under guard and held for six years at the Château de Valençay in France. The historian Charles Oman records a dark irony in that choice of location: Napoleon selected Valençay as a deliberate practical joke on Talleyrand, his former foreign minister and the château's owner, punishment for Talleyrand's lack of interest in Spanish affairs. Ferdinand thus became an unwilling pawn in a dispute between two of Europe's most calculating men. While he sat in gilded captivity, his country erupted. The Spanish people refused to accept the abdication that their aristocracy had swallowed. Uprisings spread across the peninsula, juntas formed in the provinces to resist the French king, and the Peninsular War began. After the Battle of Bailén demonstrated that the Spanish could fight back, the Council of Castile reversed its earlier position and on the 11th of August 1808 declared the abdications null and void. On the 14th of January 1809, the British government formally recognised Ferdinand VII as the rightful king.

• 4. Return and Reaction

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  Napoleon, facing serious setbacks, signed the Treaty of Valençay on the 11th of December 1813, formally restoring Ferdinand to the Spanish throne. The Spanish people who welcomed him back blamed the so-called afrancesados - those who had allied Spain too closely with France - for the Napoleonic occupation and its devastations. Ferdinand, however, returned to a country that had been fundamentally changed by revolution. In his name, juntas had governed Spanish America; in his name, Spain had fought for independence; and in his name, a new liberal constitution had been written in 1812. Liberals extracted a promise from Ferdinand that he would govern under that constitution before allowing him to set foot on Spanish soil. The promise was lukewarm from the start. On the 24th of March, the French handed Ferdinand over to the Spanish Army in Girona, and he began his procession toward Madrid. Conservative voices and the Church hierarchy pressed him throughout that journey to discard the liberals' work entirely. On the 4th of May he ordered the constitution abolished. On the 10th of May he had the liberal leaders who had drafted it arrested. Ferdinand justified all of this by arguing the constitution had been written by a Cortes assembled without his consent - a unicameral body, where tradition required three chambers representing the clergy, the nobility, and the cities. He promised to convene a traditional Cortes. He never did.

• 5. A Kingdom Unraveling

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  Friedrich von Gentz, writing in 1814, described Ferdinand's behaviour toward his own prime ministers with something close to disbelief: "The king himself enters the houses of his prime ministers, arrests them, and hands them over to their cruel enemies." A year later, on the 14th of January 1815, Gentz returned to the subject: "The king has so debased himself that he has become no more than the leading police agent and prison warden of his country." Ferdinand changed ministers every few months, his conduct described as whimsical and ferocious by turns. His government was guided by a small camarilla of personal favourites rather than any stable institution. Meanwhile, Spain was nearly bankrupt. The treasure fleets that had carried tax revenues from the American empire were being cut off by the wars of independence breaking out across the continent. In the Americas, Agustín de Iturbide and Jefe Superior Juan O'Donojú signed the Treaty of Córdoba in 1821, establishing the First Mexican Empire. The imperial constitution envisioned a Spanish prince as monarch, and both Iturbide and O'Donojú intended to offer the Mexican Imperial Crown to Ferdinand himself. Ferdinand refused: he would not recognise Mexican independence and would not be bound by a constitution. He declared the Mexican constitution void, declined the crown, and announced that no European prince could accept the Mexican throne. The crown passed instead to Iturbide, and the empire collapsed within a few years.

• 6. Pronunciamientos and the Liberal Triennium

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  Military uprisings against Ferdinand's rule began almost immediately after his return. General Espoz y Mina led the first in Pamplona in September 1814, just three months after the Peninsular War ended. Juan Díaz Porlier revolted at La Coruña the following year. General Luis Lacy rose in Barcelona in 1817. General Juan Van Halen did the same in Valencia in 1818. None of these succeeded. The one that did came in 1820, when Rafael del Riego led a mutiny of the troops under his command. The king was quickly taken prisoner. The three years that followed - known as the Trienio Liberal - saw the Constitution of 1812 restored. Ferdinand, who had reinstated the Jesuits upon his return from France, now watched as liberals who identified the Jesuits with repression and absolutism attacked them directly; twenty-five Jesuits were killed in Madrid in 1822. Ferdinand's campaign against Freemasonry was equally ferocious. He regarded it as a vehicle for secular liberal revolution, an enemy of the Crown and the Catholic faith, and an instrument of foreign interests - primarily the Grand Orient of France. On the 4th of May 1814 he publicly declared all Spanish Freemasons to be traitors. Pope Pius VII issued a decree against Freemasonry that same year, which Ferdinand endorsed and made an edict of the Spanish Inquisition. Freemasons of high standing were arrested and their lodges suppressed. During the so-called Ominous Decade that followed the Liberal Triennium, members who refused to renounce Freemasonry were hanged. The liberal press was suppressed from 1814 to 1833, with editors and writers jailed throughout that period.

• 7. French Rescue and Ominous Decade

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  In the spring of 1823, Louis XVIII of France sent his army into Spain, invoking, in the language of the declaration, "the God of St. Louis, for the sake of preserving the throne of Spain to a fellow descendant of Henry IV of France, and of reconciling that fine kingdom with Europe." Ferdinand was moved to Cádiz by the revolutionary party in May 1823, where he continued making promises of constitutional reform until he was free. After the Battle of Trocadero and the fall of Cádiz, Ferdinand was freed - and the reprisals followed immediately. The Duc d'Angoulême, who had commanded the French forces, was so disgusted by Ferdinand's refusal to honour his amnesty promises to the people of Cádiz that he refused the Spanish decorations Ferdinand offered him for his military service. Absolute power was restored for the second time. The last ten years of Ferdinand's reign saw the suppression of all opposition, the re-establishment of traditional university programs, and a reactionary revolt in 1827 - known as the War of the Agraviados - breaking out in Catalonia and other regions. Ferdinand made the Duke of Wellington the first Protestant member of the Spanish Order of the Golden Fleece, an acknowledgment of British support during the Peninsular War that stood as one of the more unusual decisions of his reign.

• 8. Succession and Aftermath

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  In May 1830, Ferdinand published the Pragmatic Sanction, restoring daughters to the Spanish line of succession alongside sons. The decree had originally been approved by the Cortes in 1789 but had never been officially promulgated. On the 10th of October 1830, his wife Maria Christina gave birth to a daughter, Isabella, who immediately displaced Ferdinand's brother, the Infante Carlos María Isidro, in the succession. Ferdinand had married four times: his first wife died of tuberculosis, his second died in childbirth, his third died of a fever, and his fourth, Maria Christina, outlived him by 45 years. Ferdinand VII died on the 29th of September 1833. Carlos revolted at once, claiming the throne was rightfully his. Maria Christina, now regent for the infant Isabella, turned to the liberals for support. She issued a decree of amnesty on the 23rd of October 1833. Liberals who had spent years in exile returned and came to dominate Spanish politics for decades. The historian Stanley G. Payne wrote that Ferdinand was "in many ways the basest king in Spanish history. Cowardly, selfish, grasping, suspicious, and vengeful, D. Fernando seemed almost incapable of any perception of the commonwealth." The Carlist Wars that erupted after his death were the direct inheritance of his refusal to see Spain as anything other than his personal possession - and the liberals his daughter's regency now depended on were the very people he had spent two decades jailing.