The history is full of curious anecdotes than, unfortunately, end up in the wastebasket. One of them occurred during the end of the Peninsular War. This was a bizarre move that would result in nothing less than the elevation of the Duke of Wellington to the throne of Spain.
It is well known the role played by the Duke of Wellington (1769-1852) in the expulsion of the Napoleonic troops who had invaded Spain, by commanding British forces who had come to the aid of the Spanish armies in their struggle against Napoleon.
Between 1808 and 1815, Arthur Wellesley became famous fighting against Napoleon. He came to Iberian Peninsula to replace the commander of the British army, John Moore, who had been killed in the battle of La Coruña. He achieved important victories in Portugal and once defeated the French there, he went to Spain, already become lieutenant general, to follow the same victorious way.
In Spain, he besieged Badajoz and forced the surrender of its French garrison in April 1812, he won the Battle of Salamanca on 22 July 1812 and came to Madrid in August 1812. It was at this time that he was awarded with his then famous noble title, as Marquess of Wellington, but despite his new status, he continued waging war with the Spanish armies and garnering new victories, culminating in the Battle of Vitoria in 1813, which involved the expulsion of Spanish territory for the formidable armies of Napoleon.
For their invaluable help, the Duke of Wellington and his troops won the sympathies of the Spanish people, who they considered as decisive allies in their victory against the French invaders. In 1812 the Cortes of Cadiz wanted to recognize this help and spared no praise or honors for whom had commanded the British forces. He was awarded with peerages as important as the Duke of Ciudad Rodrigo, with Greatness of the First Class of Spain for him and his descendants, on January 30, 1812; was appointed Knight Grand Cross of the Military Order of Saint Ferdinand; or the delivery of the Golden Fleece, on August 7, 1812.
He was subsequently appointed General in Chief of all Spanish troops stationed in Iberian Peninsula on 22 September 1812. And if all this were not enough, the Cortes of Cadiz gave him the site and royal possession of El Soto de Roma, in the Vega of Granada, as well as an estate called Las Chanchinas. Even came to place his effigy in the Plaza Mayor of Salamanca along with other great Spanish kings.
And not forgetting the power vacuum existed in Spain after the Abdications of Bayonne (through which both Charles IV and his son Ferdinand VII left the Spanish throne to Napoleon would deliver it to his brother Joseph Bonaparte), due to the high rejection of Spaniards to recognize Joseph Bonaparte as their new king. To fill the power vacuum in the context of spontaneous Spanish insurrection against the French, a series of Provincial Juntas that momentarily assumed sovereignty were organized and, they gave way to the establishment of the Central Junta, when was created in September 1808.
In the absence of a legitimate king, the Central Junta assumed all the sovereign powers, establishing itself as the highest governing body. Based on this authority, it convoked Extraordinary and General Cortes of the Spanish Nation in Cadiz, the true starting of the Spanish revolutionary process. Finally, in January 1810 the Central Junta ceded power to a Regency that took the void left by the Spanish Bourbons.
When Joseph Bonaparte and Napoleon's armies left Spain, the Regency was in the position to provide the country with a new monarch or seek alternative solutions government. Most of the Spanish people wanted to return his former king, Ferdinand VII, whom he was already known popularly as El Deseado (The Desired); so, after the meeting of Cortes in October 1813, Napoleon again recognized as legitimate Spanish king to Ferdinand VII by the Treaty of Valençay, by which the monarch regained his throne and his possessions.
The news of the return of Ferdinand VII was greeted with great joy by the Spanish people, but this story could have been very different due to popular devotion which raised the Duke of Wellington. Amid the maelstrom of honors he received, a sector of the deputies of the Cortes of Cadiz who held the Regency came to seriously consider the possibility of appointing Arthur Wellesley as the new king of Spain.
Not much information on this unique proposal and may be nothing more than a rumor circulated by political cliques. Viable or not that proposal, the truth is that it has reached our days because the idea came to appear in the Spanish press of the time.
To do this, as published, many politicians and military had spoken with General Castaños, personal friend of the Duke of Wellington, to send him as the messenger of this proposal and convince him to accept it. To do this, Castaños apparently asked him about the main obstacle to this possibility (his conversion to Catholicism, because he was member of Anglican Church of Ireland), alluding to a very similar example: the appointment of Jean Bernadotte as heir to the Swedish throne, assuming that throne with the name Charles XIV John of Sweden (Bernadotte had been raised Catholic but, for being the proclaimed heir to the Swedish throne by his predecessor, was to convert the Lutheranist Church of Sweden).
Apparently, Wellington replied that the duty for with a nation was, in his view, something supreme over anything else, and not look like, but a reasonable acquiescence in every man to adopt the religion of a people as long as was a Christian faith when the people called him privacy to put him and his descendants on a throne.
However, Ferdinand VII returned to reign over Spain, restoring absolutism and hampering the arrival of liberalism to the country.
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