See C.V. de Saint Réal, Don Carlos, nouvelle historique (Paris, 1672). This gives the story of the attachment of Carlos and Elizabeth, which has been refuted by L. von Ranke, Zur Geschichte des don Carlos (Vienna, 1829); and J.A. Llorente, Histoire critique de l’Inquisition (French translation, Paris, 1817). See also L.P. Gachard, Don Carlos et Philippe II (Brussels, 1863); C. de Moüy, Don Carlos et Philippe II (Paris, 1863); M. Büdinger, Don Carlos, Haft und Tod (Vienna, 1891); L.A. Warnkönig, Don Carlos, Leben, Verhaftung und Tod (Stuttgart, 1864); W. Maurenbrecher, Don Carlos (Berlin, 1876); and W.H. Prescott, History of the Reign of Philip II. vol. ii. (London, 1855, 1859).
CARLOS, DON (1788-1855), the first of the Carlist claimants of the throne of Spain, was the second surviving son of King Charles IV. and his wife, Louisa Maria of Parma. He was born on the 29th of March 1788, and was christened Carlos Maria Isidro. From 1808 till 1814 he was a prisoner in France at Valençay with his brothers, who had been imprisoned by Napoleon when he seized the whole royal family of Spain at Bayonne. After his return he lived quietly as a prince at Madrid. In September 1816 he married Maria Francesca de Asis, daughter of King John VI. of Portugal, and sister of the second wife of his elder brother King Ferdinand VII. Though he took no part in the government of Spain, except to hold a few formal offices, Don Carlos was known for the rigid orthodoxy of his religious opinions, the piety of his life, and his firm belief in the divine right of kings to govern despotically. During the revolutionary troubles of 1820-1823 he was threatened by the extreme radicals, but no attack was made on him. When the revolutionary agitation was put down by French intervention in 1823, Don Carlos continued to behave as the affectionate brother and loyal subject of Ferdinand VII. The family affection between them was undoubtedly sincere, and was one of the very few amiable traits in the character of the elder brother. Towards the close of Ferdinand’s reign Don Carlos was forced against his own will into the position of a party leader, or rather into the position of a prince whom a great party was forced to take as its leader. The extreme clericals among the Spaniards, who were the partisans of despotism because they rightly considered it as most favourable to the church, began to be discontented with King Ferdinand, who seemed wanting in energy. When the king showed his intention to alter the law of succession in order to secure the crown for his daughter Isabella, the clericals (in the Spanish phrase, “apostólicos”) banded to protect the rights of Don Carlos. There can be no question that if he had been disposed to place himself at the head of an insurrection he would have been followed, and might have put Ferdinand under restraint. But Don Carlos held his principles honestly. He considered rebellion as a sin in a prince as much as in other men, and as wicked when made by “apostólicos” as by liberals. He would do no more than assert his rights, and those of his children, in words. His wife and her sister, the princess of Beira, widow of his first cousin the infante Pedro, were less scrupulous. They were actively engaged in intrigues with the “apostólicos.” In March 1833 the princess of Beira was informed by the king that her brother Don Miguel, then regent in Portugal, desired her presence, and that she must pay him a visit. On the 16th of March Don Carlos left for Portugal with his wife, in company with the princess, after an interview with his brother the king which is said to have been friendly. In the following month he was called upon by the king to swear allegiance to the infanta Isabella, afterwards queen. Don Carlos refused, in respectful terms but with great firmness, to renounce his rights and those of his sons, in a public letter dated the 29th of April. The death of his brother on the 29th of September 1833 gave him an opportunity to vindicate his claims without offence to his principles, for in his own opinion and that of his partisans he was now king. But he was entangled in the civil war of Portugal and was shut off from Spain. He did, and perhaps could do, nothing to direct the Spaniards who rose on his behalf, and had proclaimed him king as Charles V. When the Miguelite party was beaten in Portugal, Don Carlos escaped to England on the 1st of June 1834 in H.M.S. “Donegal.” His stay in England was short. On the 2nd of July he passed over to France, where he was actively aided by the legitimist party, and on the 11th he joined his partisans at Elizondo in the valley of Bastan, in the western Pyrenees. On the 27th of October of this year he was deprived of his rights as infante by a royal decree, confirmed by the Cortes on the 15th of January 1837. Don Carlos remained in Spain till the defeat of his party, and then escaped to France on the 14th of September 1839. During these years he accompanied his armies, without displaying any of the qualities of a general or even much personal courage. But he endured a good deal of hardship, and was often compelled to take to hiding in the hills. On these occasions he was often carried over difficult places on the back of a stout guide commonly known as the royal jackass (burro real). The semblance of a court which he maintained was torn by incessant personal intrigues, and by conflicts between his generals and the ecclesiastics who exercised unbounded influence over his mind. The defeat of his cause, which had many chances of success, was unquestionably due to a very large extent to his want of capacity, his apathy, and his increasing absorption in practices of puerile piety. His first wife having died in England, Don Carlos married her elder sister, the princess of Beira, in Biscay in October 1837. After his flight from Spain, Don Carlos led a life of increasing insignificance. He abdicated in May 1845, took a title of count of Molina, and died at Trieste on the 10th of March 1855.
By his first marriage, Don Carlos had three sons, Charles (1818-1861), John (1822-1887), and Ferdinand (1824-1861). Charles succeeded to the claims of his father, and was known to his partisans as Don Carlos VI., but was more commonly known as the count of Montemolin. In 1846, when the marriage of queen Isabella was being negotiated, the Austrian government endeavoured to arrange an alliance between her and the count of Montemolin. But as he insisted on the complete recognition of his rights, the Spanish government refused to hear of him as a candidate. The Carlists took up arms on his behalf between 1846 and 1848, but the count, who had been expelled from France by the police, did not join them in the field. In April 1860 he and his brother Ferdinand landed at San Carlos de la Rápita, at the mouth of the Ebro, in company with a feather-headed officer named Ortega, who held a command in the Balearic islands. They hoped to profit by the fact that the bulk of the Spanish army was absent in a war with Morocco. But no Carlist rising took place. The men who had been brought from the islands by Ortega deserted him. Montemolin and his brother, together with their devoted partisan General Elio, who had accompanied them from exile, lurked in hiding for a fortnight and were then captured. Ortega was shot, but the princes saved their lives, and that of Elio, by making an abject surrender of their claims. When he had been allowed to escape and had reached Cologne, the count of Montemolin publicly retracted his renunciation on the 15th of June, on the ignominious ground that it had been extorted by fear. Montemolin and his brother Ferdinand died within a fortnight of one another in January 1861 without issue.
The third brother, John, who had advanced his own claims before his brother’s retraction, now came forward as the representative of the legitimist and Carlist cause. As he had shown a disposition to accept liberalism, and to make concessions to the spirit of the age, he was unpopular with the party. On the 3rd of October 1868 he made a formal renunciation in favour of his son Charles (Don Carlos VII.), who is separately noticed below.
See Hermann Baumgarten, Geschichte Spaniens (Leipzig, 1861); H. Butler Clarke, Modern Spain (Cambridge, 1906), which contains a useful bibliography.
CARLOS, DON (Charles Maria de los Dolores Juan Isidore Joseph Francis Quirin Antony Michael Gabriel Raphael) (1848-1909), prince of Bourbon, claimant, as Don Carlos VII., to the throne of Spain, was born at Laibach on the 30th of March 1848, being the eldest surviving son of Don Juan (John) of Bourbon and of the archduchess Maria Beatrix, daughter of Francis IV., duke of Modena. Don Carlos was the grandson of the first pretender, noticed above. He married in February 1867, at Frohsdorf, Princess Marguerite, daughter of the duke of Parma and niece of the comte de Chambord, who was born on the 1st of January 1847, and who bore him a son, Don Jaime, in 1870, and three daughters. Don Carlos boldly asserted his pretensions to the throne of Spain two years after the revolution of 1868 had driven Queen Isabella II. and the other branch of the Bourbons into exile. His manifesto, addressed to his brother Alphonso, namesake of his rival, Alphonso XII., found an echo in the fanatical priesthood and peasantry of many provinces of the Peninsula, but little support among the more enlightened middle classes, especially in the towns. The first rising was started in Catalonia by the brother of the pretender, who himself entered Spain by way of Vera, in the Basque provinces, on the 21st of May 1872. The troops of King Amadeus under General Moriones, a progressist officer, who was one of Spain’s ablest and most popular commanders, surprised and very nearly captured the pretender at Oroquista, sending him a fugitive to France in headlong flight with a few followers. For more than a year he loitered about in the French Pyrenees, the guest of old noble houses who showed him much sympathy, while the French authorities winked at the fact that he was fomenting civil war in Spain, where his guerilla bands, many of them led by priests, committed atrocities, burning, pillaging, shooting prisoners of war, and not unfrequently ill-using even foreign residents and destroying their property. When the Federal Republic was proclaimed on the abdication of King Amadeus, the Carlists had overrun Spain to such an extent that they held all the interior of Navarre, the three Basque provinces, and a great part of Catalonia, Lower Aragon, and Valencia, and had made raids into the provinces of Old Castile and Estremadura. Don Carlos re-entered Spain on the 15th of July 1873, just before the Carlists took Estella, in Navarre, which became, with Tolosa and Durango in the Basque provinces, his favourite residence. He displayed very lax morals and an apathy which displeased his staff and partisans. Don Carlos was present at some fights around Estella, and was in the neighbourhood of Bilbao during its famous siege of three months in 1874 until its relief by Marshals Serrano and Concha on the 2nd of May. He was also present at the battle near Estella on the 27th of June 1874, in which Marshal Concha was killed and the liberals were repulsed with loss. Twice he lost golden opportunities of making a rush for the capital—in 1873, during the Federal Republic, and after Concha’s death. From the moment that his cousin Alphonso XII. was proclaimed king at Sagunto, at Valencia, in Madrid, and at Logroño, by General Campos, Daban, Jovellar, Primo de Rivera, and Laserna, the star of the pretender was on the wane. Only once, a few weeks after the Alphonsist restoration, the army of Don Carlos checked the Liberal forces in Navarre, and surprised and made prisoners half a brigade, with guns and colours, at Lacar, almost under the eyes of the new king and his headquarters. This was the last Carlist success. The tide of war set in favour of Alphonso XII., whose armies swept the Carlist bands out of central Spain and Catalonia in 1875, while Marshal Quesada, in the upper Ebro valley, Navarre, and Ulava, prepared by a series of successful operations the final advance of 180,000 men, headed by Quesada and the king, which defeated the Carlists at Estella, Peña Plata, and Elgueta, thus forcing Don Carlos with a few thousand faithful Carlists to retreat and surrender to the French frontier authorities in March 1876.
The pretender went to Pau, and there, singularly enough, issued his proclamations bidding temporary adieu to the nation and to his volunteers from the same chateau where Queen Isabella, also a refugee, had issued hers in 1868. From that date Don Carlos became an exile and a wanderer, travelling much in the Old and New World, and raising some scandal by his mode of life. He fixed his residence for a time in England, then in Paris, from which he was expelled at the request of the Madrid government, and next in Austria, before he took up his abode at Viarreggio in Italy. Like all pretenders, he never gave in, and his pretensions, haughtily reasserted, often troubled the courts and countries whose hospitality he enjoyed. His great disappointment was the coldness towards him of Pope Leo XIII., and the favour shown by that pontiff for Alphonso XII. and his godson, Alphonso XIII. Don Carlos had two splendid chances of testing the power of his party in Spain, but failed to profit by them. The first was when he was invited to unfurl his flag on the death of Alphonso XII., when the perplexities and uncertainties of Castilian politics reached a climax during the first year of a long minority under a foreign queen-regent. The second was at the close of the war with the United States and after the loss of the colonies, when the discontent was so widespread that the Carlists were able to assure their prince that many Spaniards looked upon his cause as the one untried solution of the national difficulties. Don Carlos showed his usual lack of decision; he wavered between the advice of those who told him to unfurl his standard with a view to rally all the discontented and disappointed, and of those who recommended him to wait until a great pronunciamiento, chiefly military, should be made in his favour—a day-dream founded upon the coquetting of General Weyler and other officers with the Carlist senators and deputies in Madrid. Afterwards the pretender continued to ask his partisans to go on organizing their forces for action some day, and to push their propaganda and preparations, which was easy enough in view of the indulgence shown them by all the governments of the regency and the open favour exhibited by many of the priesthood, especially in the rural districts, the religious orders, and the Jesuits, swarming all over the kingdom. After the death of his first wife in 1893, Don Carlos married in the following year Princess Marie Bertha of Rohan. He died on the 18th of July 1909. His son by his first wife, Don Jaime, was educated in Austrian and British military schools before he entered the Russian army, in which he became a colonel of dragoons.