King Spain

Adeline Horsey Recollections. It is said that few people achieve greatness, but that some have it thrust upon them. I can class myself with the latter, for I could have married a Prince of the Royal Family of Spain, the Count de Montemolin (age 26)¹, who was at one time regarded as the rightful King of Spain.

Note 1. Carlos Luis Fernando de Bourbon, Count de Montemolin, born 1818, was the eldest son of the first Don Carlos (age 29), the legitimist claimant to the Spanish throne on the death of his brother, Fernando VII (age 33), in 1833. After the ending of the first Carlist war in the defeat of the legitimists and the establishment of Isabella on the throne, the old Don Carlos retired into private life and abdicated his claims in 1845 to his eldest son Montemolin, who thus became the second Don Carlos. He was a young man of some ability but weak and unstable. There was a strong party in Spain desirous to bring about a reconciliation of the two branches of the Royal Family by a marriage between the young Queen Isabella and her first cousin, Montemolin, but political passion and personal animosity stood in the way, and all Europe took part in the intrigue known as the Spanish Marriages. This ended of course in the disastrous marriage of Isabella with her cousin Francisco, and that of her sister Fernanda with the Due de Montpensier, the son of Louis Philippe (age 44), a defeat for English diplomacy which nearly caused a war with France. The Carlists had never been favourable to the idea of a marriage of Montemolin and Isabella, whom they regarded as a usurper, and they looked out a legitimist Royal Princess for him. His younger brother, Don Juan, married Princess Beatrix of Modena, and their son was the late Don Carlos. Queen Isabella married in 1846, and dissensions very soon broke out between her and her wretched husband, who really, like most of the Royal Family, was a Carlist at heart. Montemolin had issued a manifesto at Bourges in France in 1845, when he saw that he could not marry Isabella on his own terms, and his father had abdicated in the same year, and he soon after came to London, mustered his party, and began to organise a fresh Carlist rising in Spain. English diplomacy had suffered a great defeat and he found plenty of people here to help him; he was made much of in Society and became a lion for a time, being treated with full royal honours.