Queens of old Spain

by Martin A. S. Hume

Philip was still a young man; but the dependence upon his wife, and his long fits of apathy that afterwards led to lunacy, had made him unfit to fulfil the duties of his position without a clever helpmeet by his side. The first result of the death of Maria Louisa was enormously to increase the influence of the old Princess of Ursinos. She was the only person allowed to see the King in his heartbroken grief; and whilst he was in seclusion in the Medina Celi palace, the monks were turned out of a neighbouring monastery that the Princess might stay there and have free access to the King through a passage made for the purpose through the walls that separated the buildings. The gossips very soon began to say that the King was going to marry the Princess, though she was old enough to be his grandmother. But, as usual, the scandalmongers were wrong. The Princess of Ursinos was far too clever for such a stroke as that; but she and others saw that Philip must marry some one without loss of time, or he would lose what wits were left to him.

ISABEL FARNESE.
After a Painting by Van Loo.

The marriage-mongers of Europe were on the alert, but the problem to be solved was not an easy one. A bride must be found whom Louis XIV. would accept, and yet one not too subservient to orders from France, nor one who would interfere with the absolute paramountcy of the Princess of Ursinos. So all the suggestions coming from France were regarded coldly; and the Princess set about finding a candidate who would suit her. There was an Italian priest in Spain at the time, one Father Alberoni, a cunning rogue, who could be a buffoon when it suited him, who had wormed himself into Court circles in the suite of the Duke of Vendome. This man, a Parmese, came to the Princess of Ursinos the day after Queen Maria Louisa Gabriela died and suggested that there was a modest, submissive little princess at Parma, the niece and stepdaughter of the reigning prince, who had no male heirs, and that this girl was exactly fitted to be the new consort to Philip V. The Princess of Ursinos was inclined to regard the idea favourably, for not only was it evident that so young and humble a princess would not attempt to interfere with her, but the match seemed to offer a chance for re-establishing the lost influence of Spain in Italy. Louis XIV. had other views for his grandson, and did not take kindly to the proposal, but he was grudgingly won over by the Princess of Ursinos, whom he could not afford to offend. Philip himself was as wax in the hands of the old Princess; and on the 16th September 1714 he married by proxy Isabel Farnese, Princess of Parma.

Isabel Farnese had been represented by Alberoni as a tractable young maiden, but she was a niece, by her mother, of the Queen Dowager, Marie Anne of Neuburg, who was eating her heart out in spite in her exile at Bayonne; and Alberoni knew full well when he suggested the Parmese bride that he was taking part in a deep-laid conspiracy to overthrow the Princess of Ursinos. His part was a difficult one to play at first, for he had to keep up an appearance of adhesion to the Princess of Ursinos whilst currying favour with the coming Queen. Isabel Farnese approached her new realm with the airs of a conqueror. She was to have landed at Alicante, and thither went Alberoni and her Spanish household to receive her: but she altered her mind suddenly, and decided to go overland through the south of France and visit her aunt Marie Anne at Bayonne. Marie Anne had a long score of her own to settle with the Princess of Ursinos, who had kept her in exile, and she instructed her niece how to proceed to make herself mistress of her husband’s realm.

Isabel Farnese, girl though she was, did not need much instruction in imperious self-assertion, and began her operations as soon as she crossed the frontier. She flatly refused to dismiss her Italian suite, as had been arranged in accordance with the invariable Spanish rule, and showed from the first that she meant to have her own way in all things. She was in no hurry, moreover, to meet her husband until the Princess of Ursinos was out of the way; and when the latter, in great state, came to meet her at Jadraque, a short distance from Guadalajara, where the King was awaiting his bride, Isabel was ready for the decisive fray which should settle the question as to who should rule Spain.

The old Princess was quite aware also by this time that she had to meet a rival, and she began when she entered the presence by making some remark about the slowness of the Queen’s journey. Hardly were the words out of her mouth than the young termagant shouted: ‘Take this old fool away who dares to come and insult me:’ and then, in spite of protest and appeal, the Princess was hustled into a coach to be driven into exile through a snowstorm in the winter night over the bleakest uplands in Europe. Attired in her Court dress, with no change of garments or adequate protection against the weather, without respect, consideration or decency, the aged Princess was thus expelled from the country she had served so wisely. She saw now, as she had feared for some time before, that she had been tricked by the crafty Italian clown-cleric, and that her day was done.

The dominion of the new Queen Isabel Farnese over the spirit of Philip V. was soon more complete even than that of the Princess had been, and a letter of cold compliment from the King was all the reward or consolation that the Princess got for her protracted service to him and his cause in Spain; services without which, in all human probability, he would never have retained the crown. So long as Philip had a masterful woman always by his side to keep him in leading strings, it mattered little to him who the woman was; and Isabel Farnese, bold, ambitious, and intriguing, ruled Spain in the name of her husband thenceforward for thirty years. Her system was neither French nor Spanish, but founded upon the feline ecclesiastical methods of the smaller Italian Courts: and the object of Isabel’s life was to assert successfully the rights of her sons to the Italian principalities, she claimed in virtue of her descent. The pretext under which she cloaked her aims was the recovery of the Spanish influence in the sister Peninsula: but the wars which resulted were in no sense of Spanish national concern, but purely Italian and dynastic.

Thus, for many years to come, the progress of Spain was retarded, and her resources wasted in struggles by land and sea all over Europe, and with allies and opponents constantly changing, with the end of seating Isabel’s Bourbon sons upon Italian thrones. She succeeded, at the cost of a generation of war, and gave to Spain once more an appearance of some of her old potency, thanks to new ideas and more enlightened administration: but when the successive deaths of her two stepsons, the heirs of Philip by his first Savoyard wife, made her own eldest son Charles King of Spain, Isabel was plainly, but delicately, made to understand that the destinies of the country must in future be guided by men, and in enlightened national interests, and not by women for secondary ends.

Again, on the death of Charles III., the only strong King since Philip II., the regal mantle fell upon a weak uxorious man, whose wife, yet another Maria Louisa, led Spain by the miry path of disgraceful favouritism to the great war of Independence—the Peninsular war—which destroyed what was left of old Spain, and held up to the derision of the world the reigning family, of whom Napoleon made such cruel sport.