1833
The testimony of Ferdinand to Maria Cristina’s fidelity and devotion was indeed true, and, as the Queen said afterwards to her daughter Isabel, when pleading with her not to sacrifice duty to inclination, she herself had never wavered an instant in her loyalty to the King, in spite of the difference of their ages, and the tax upon her time and temper from his bad health and exacting ways. Even a Court bristling with intrigue could find no word of complaint against the Queen in her matrimonial relations with the King; and her grief was very genuine when she found herself a widow, with her two little girls. When General Cordova came to pay his respects to the Queen, he found her weeping bitterly, and the sight of the poor woman’s tears did more to win him over to her side than any arguments of policy, so he roundly declared that as he had been loyal to the father, so he would be faithful to the daughters.
When General Prim was invested as a grandee, on his return to Spain after his glorious campaign, he declared it was his first duty to do homage to his Queen and her Ministers for having raised him to such rank that he could consort with the noblest in the land. “It is the duty of a general,” he added, “as that of every soldier, to serve his Queen and country with all possible loyalty, and therefore I will defend your rights to the throne to the last drop of my blood and the last breath of my body.”
MARSHAL PRIM
But Maria Cristina was not always surrounded by loyal subjects, for the clerical partisans of Don Carlos made her position very precarious. Men who had declared themselves Liberals became lax in their allegiance, and her only hope of saving the crown for her child was to bend to the widespread desire for the Constitution of 1812.
The Marquis of Miraflores, who was Ambassador of Spain in England at the time of the coronation of Queen Victoria, writes:
“Hardly was the corpse of the monarch cold when the Queen-Regent did me the honour of seeing me; and it was at this critical moment that I heard her say, amid her tears and sobs: ‘Nobody desires more than I do the welfare of the Spaniards, and for that I will do all that I can; and where I do not, it will be because I cannot.’”
And Miraflores also says, in his “Contemporaneous History,” that he had himself heard the King, referring to the codicil to his will by which the throne would have gone to Don Carlos, say that, both as a King and a father, he would have done wrong had this act not been abrogated.
The outbreak of cholera in the city soon after the King’s death cast additional gloom on the capital. Cristina’s partisans declared that the clerical party had poisoned the water, and a young man who was said to have been seen throwing powder into the fountain which was then in the Puerta del Sol was assassinated on the spot. Such animosity was stirred up against the clerics that the monasteries were invaded, and the friars killed at the very altars; and these deeds were not limited to the capital. Indignation against these attacks on the clerics added force to the Carlists in the north.