Chapter II: General Serrano's Regency
Chapter II, Part I: The Initial Problems
With the approval of the Constitution, Spain had to go a new route if it wanted to keep up. And now, it was time for a change in the organization of the government.
As Spain was now officially a monarchy, it was clear that a king would have to be searched for, but, meanwhile, someone would have to take the regency to represent the monarch and become the temporary Head of State. With the support of the Government Coalition, Serrano became the Regent of the Kingdom of Spain, being replaced by Minister of War Prim as the President of the Council of Ministers. This move was accepted most everyone in the government, as Serrano now found his political ambitions satisfied, as being the Regent meant holding the country's highest institutional position and, at the same time, it calmed the monarchical Democrats, who had feared that either Serrano or Prim might choose to throw everything away and become worse tyrants than Isabel had ever been.
Unfortunately, even with these changes, frictions still appeared within the Government Coalition, and even within the Progressive Party. Prim's party was now divided in two groups: one of them was led by Práxedes Mateo Sagasta, and he believed that now was the time to end the reforms, at least for the time being, as they supported the partial legislation of individual rights as Cánovas del Castillo said; the other was led by Manuel Ruiz Zorrilla, and self-styled as the Radical Progressives, who supported the continuation of reforms and maintaining the non-legislation of individual rights, as well as the transitional nature of the current monarchy towards a republic.
Manuel Becerra, new Minister of Overseas; Práxedes Mateo Sagasta, Minister of Governance, and Manuel Ruiz Zorrilla, Minister of Public Works
In an attempt to keep the coalition together and to balance it within the government, President Prim, who intended to keep the Progressive Party as the middle party between the Liberal Union and the Democrat Party, chose to replace Unionists Lorenzana and López de Ayala, then Ministers of Home Affairs and Overseas, with Democrats Cristino Martos and Manuel Becerra in July 1869. However, this move only helped in earning him the Unionists' suspicions.
Meanwhile, the Courts were asking Prim to initiate the search for the new King of Spain, arguing that each day that task was put off, was one day Spain weakened. Since things within the Coalition had partially calmed down after the reshuffling, Prim agreed to the petition and accepted the Courts choice for the members of the commission that would determine and control the Government's actions in finding the king. However, this did not help matters much, because, as some comic strip drawers joked, the Commission had ten candidates and nine members.
The first candidates to be considered were those that already had a claim by blood to the throne of Spain. Amongst them stood Antoine d'Orléans, Duke of Montpensier and one of the revolutionary cause's main financiers, who based his claim on his status as Isabel's brother-in-law and member of the French Bourbon dynasty, and was supported by a few members of the Liberal Union, including Navy Minister Topete. However, it was his ties to Isabel II, as well as the fact that he had not returned to Spain from Lisbon until the revolution triumphed, instead of coming as soon as possible since he was General Captain of the Spanish Army, that made his candidacy fall down. This was further complicated after he killed Infante Enrique de Borbón, the brother of Consort King Francisco de Asís and another rejected candidate, on March 12th 1870. Montpensier was exiled, and thus his candidacy sunk forever.
Antoine d'Orléans, Duke of Montpensier, and Infante Enrique de Borbón
The next candidate with a claim to the throne was the Carlist pretender, Carlos María de Borbón y Austria-Este, who claimed the throne of Spain as Carlos VII and was the preferred candidate of the Carlists and the Catholic fundamentalists in the Courts. However, his complete unwillingness to be a king without any actual power (in the words of Carlos de Borbón himself,
I did not fight for my rights only to become the puppet of the Parliament) naturally made him unfit for the role the Crown was to have in the new Spain.
For similar reasons was Alfonso de Borbón, Isabel II's son, rejected: everybody could see that, if he were to become the king, his main influence would be his mother and the members of the Isabeline court that had only helped to destroy the nation from within, while they became rich themselves.
The Carlist pretender, Carlos María de Borbón, and young Prince Alfonso de Borbón
Thus, it was clear that candidates would have to be looked for out of Spain. Given that the nearest nation was Portugal, a search there was initiated, and soon a candidate was found: Fernando de Coburgo, who had been Consort King several years ago until the death of his wife in 1853, and who had been Regent for his son Pedro V and then his second son Luís I when Pedro died without issue, was admired for his political impartiality and his great experience. Those who believed in the idea of an united Iberia supported his candidacy, but Fernando rejected it: the idea unifying the Spanish and Portuguese crowns against the will of the people was not pleasant to him, as he knew such a move would bring an answer from the United Kingdom and France; also, he had just married with opera singer Elisa Hensler, with whom he wished to have a quiet life, away from institutional roles.
Former King Consort of Portugal Fernando de Coburgo and his second wife, Elise Hensler
Thus, the search continued, and the Commission's eyes were cast at Italy, which was right now nearly unified by the Savoia dynasty. Two members were sounded out: Amedeo di Savoia, second son of Italian King Vittorio Emmanuele II, and Tomasso Alberto di Savoia, the 13-year-old Duke of Genoa. Amedeo rejected the throne in spite of his initial temptations, arguing Spain's instability as the reason, as he was wary of following the example of Maximilian I, Emperor of Mexico, crowned at France's behest and shot by the Republicans after the end of the Mexican Civil War. The Duke of Genoa's candidacy was initially accepted, and the Duke of Montpensier was willing to support him as long as Tomasso married one of his daughters, but in the end both Tomasso's mother and the Italian government refused the offer for the same reasons Amedeo gave, although some thought it might be revenge for Isabel's continued support of the Papal States and their control of the Latium.
Prince Amedeo di Savoia and Tomasso Alberto di Savoia, Duke of Genoa
In the aftermath of the Duke of Genoa's rejection, the political situation constrained even more: Ruiz Zorrilla suggested the idea of initiating what he called a
Liberal Dictatorship, which would develop the new aspects of the Constitution without having to wait for the King, and Treasury Minister Laureano Figuerola made public his plans to establish free trade to foment industrial and commercial growth, an idea opposed by the Unionists, the Radical Progressives and the protectionist Progressives, who wanted to support the growth of the Catalan industries.
Treasury Minister Laureano Figuerola and the first 1 peseta coin
Given the failures at finding a good King, a few deputies suggested that the crown was given to an actual Spanish hero: Joaquín Baldomero Fernández Espartero, Prince of Vergara, who had been Regent for Isabel II and was still considered a hero by the lower and middle classes. His lack of issue and advanced age made him a favored candidate by the Radical Progressives and the Republicans, as when he died he would leave Spain again without a King and the chance of Spain becoming a Republic would be greater. However, when Juan Prim and Pascual Madoz wrote him a letter, Espartero replied that he did not wish for the throne, for he had retired from politics after the events of 1856, and he did not wish to leave neither his ailing wife nor his beloved Logroño.
Retired General Joaquín Baldomero Fernández-Espartero Álvarez de Toro, former leader of the Progressive Party and Spanish war hero
The string of failures, the ravages from the bloody Cuban guerrilla war and the brutal repression of a Carlist uprising and a Federal Republican insurrection sparked furious criticizing against the government, and the Liberal Union tried to pass a motion of no confidence against Prim on May 19th, but he survived it thanks to the support of the Progressive and Democrat Parties. The Radical Progressives themselves, meanwhile, had started a labor to modernize Spain, granting further liberties and increasing the secularization of society, moves rejected by the Isabeline and Carlist deputies and earning the distrust of the conservative sectors of the Unionists and Progressives.
Despite his victory in the motion, Prim could see that his efforts to stabilize Spain were starting to fail, especially due to the unsuccessful search for a king (Prim himself would famously state
Finding a democrat king in Europe is harder than finding an atheist in Heaven!). Naturally, this failure was strengthening the Republicans, who rejected Prim's offer of two ministries (Treasury and Public Works) for Emilio Castelar and Francisco Pi y Margall, as they expected that soon Prim would have no other choice than to heed their demands for the proclamation of a Spanish Republic.
Since Southern Europe had shown lacking in good candidates, the commission started to search in Central and Northern Europe, as the many political changes that had happened in the last years had left many potential candidates in there. However, the requirements presented by Prim's government (the candidate had to be Catholic, had to accept to swear allegiance to the Constitution and had to stay out of the Spanish political life beyond his duties) ruled out many candidates: the Hapsburg dynasty, which ruled in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and had ties to the monarchs that had ruled Spain before the Bourbons, were rejected because of their traditionalism and Neo-Catholicism; the Bavarian dynasty of Wittelsbach was rejected, too, due to the congenital madness most of its members suffered; and the Prussian Hohenzollerns, who were seen as potentially great candidates due to the titanic job they had done by turning Prussia into Europe's emergent great power, and slowly managing to unify northern Germany in one sovereign state thanks to Minister President [1] Otto von Bismarck's negotiations, were rejected because they professed Protestantism.
Franz Joseph I, Emperor of Austria, and Ludwig II of Bavaria
All of these problems seemed to corroborate Prim's statement, but then, on June 21st 1870, an agent in Berlin informed, through telegraph, of the existence of a potentially perfect candidate for the Spanish Crown.
[1] This was the title held by Otto von Bismarck at the time: he didn't become Chancellor until Germany was unified.
