Juan Carlos: Steering Spain from Dictatorship to Democracy. Paul Preston
child’s education in Estoril. In consequence, the 1949–1950 academic year must have been a depressing one for the nearly 12-year-old Juan Carlos. It was good to be back with his family, although Don Juan was often away travelling or hunting. Having coped with separation a year before by becoming closely attached to his classmates at Las Jarillas, he had been torn away from them and now missed them. Kept together as a cohort in the hope that he would eventually rejoin them, they had been moved, for the 1949–1950 academic year, to the ground floor of the palace belonging to the Duque and Duquesa de Montellano in Madrid’s Paseo de la Castellana.
In Portugal, Juan Carlos had to make do with work arranged by the stern Father Zulueta or sent by José Garrido and he rattled around Villa Giralda, missing the friends that he had made in Spain. He was too young to understand why he had been separated from them but not too young to resent it. The disruption to his education and his life again showed how little he mattered within the bigger diplomatic game. It is impossible to calculate how the callous exploitation of his person affected Juan Carlos’s attitude to his father. However, the frequency with which he later spoke of certain individuals being ‘like a second father’ is revealing. Such references would include, bizarrely, Franco, and, much more understandably, José Garrido, and later, the man who would run his household in Spain, Nicolás Cotoner, the Marqués de Mondéjar. Although he always spoke respectfully of Don Juan, perhaps subconsciously Juan Carlos felt that his father had not behaved towards him in the way that a ‘real father’ should.
The boy’s depressing situation at Villa Giralda was exacerbated by anxieties about his godfather and grandfather, Carlos de Borbón-Dos-Sicilias, who was gravely ill. Doña María de las Mercedes was desperate to go to Seville to be at the bedside of her dying father. However, in a gratuitously humiliating gesture, Franco denied her permission to enter Spain until the very last moment. When Don Carlos’s situation worsened, she set off anyway but arrived too late. Carlos de Borbón-Dos-Sicilias died on 11 November 1949, and Doña María would always hold a grudge against Franco. Years later, she said, ‘I can forgive anything, but Franco, whom I defended in other things to the point of falling out with my friends, I could never forgive for the way he treated my father and for what he did to prevent me arriving in time to see him before he died.’ While at Las Jarillas, Juan Carlos had often spent weekends in Seville with his grandfather. On 14 November, Juan Carlos wrote to one of his friends: ‘I’m sad because of granddad’s death and Mummy is in Seville.’ He was slightly distracted by the arrival of his electric car from Las Jarillas.22
Don Juan continued to waver over his son’s future. Gil Robles advised him not to send Juan Carlos back to Spain, since his presence would be exploited by Franco. Sainz Rodríguez suggested that arrangements for the 1950–1951 academic year could be proposed by the Diputación de la Grandeza (a kind of central committee of the Spanish aristocracy). To make matters worse for Juan Carlos and his father, in December 1949, Don Jaime de Borbón announced that he considered invalid his 1933 renunciation of his rights to the throne on the highly dubious grounds that his physical incapacity had been cured. He attributed this ‘miracle’ to the love of his new German ‘wife’, Carlotte Tiede-mann, a hard-drinking operetta singer. Gil Robles was convinced that Franco was behind this manoeuvre. It was believed that the Caudillo had paid Don Jaime to make his announcement, resolving his immediate debts and providing him with a substantial allowance. Certainly, Franco was looking into ways in which he could make use of Don Jaime’s ambitions.23 His claim to the throne put pressure on Don Juan now, as it would later on Juan Carlos. In the short term, it seemed to determine Don Juan – shortly before disappearing on another hunting jaunt – that his son, who was still without teachers, would continue his education at Estoril, under the alternating supervision of Father Zulueta and José Garrido.24
During a stay in Rome in March 1950, Don Juan was visited by Padre Josémaría Escrivá de Balaguer, the founder of the Opus Dei. Escrivá believed that holiness could be achieved through ordinary work and had created a corps of militant Christians who through austerity, celibacy and devotion to professional excellence lived in a kind of virtual monastery within the real world. At the time, Escrivá was residing in Italy while endeavouring to secure full recognition from the Vatican for the Opus Dei. He was also extremely keen to clinch the support of Franco, for whom he had begun to supervise spiritual retreats at El Pardo in 1944. Now, he reproached Don Juan for keeping his son in Portugal, saying that he was badly advised and ill-informed about the real situation in Spain. He urged him to return the Prince to Spain where he could get a proper patriotic education. Escrivá’s notes of the conversation were dutifully forwarded to Franco. It is probable that at this encounter were sown the seeds of the Opus Dei’s later participation in the education of Juan Carlos.25 Don Juan was looking for a Catholic framework for his son’s development. Initially, he had hoped for the involvement of the Jesuits. Through Danvila, contacts were made with the Spanish province of the Society of Jesus and it was agreed in principle that Jesuits would be chosen as teachers for the Prince. However, when permission was sought from the Vicar General of the Society, the Belgian Father Jean Baptiste Janssens, he issued categoric orders that the proposal was to be rejected. When the request was repeated, he explained that in the experience of the Society of Jesus, the education of royal personages had been ‘pernicious’.26
Finally, in the autumn of 1950, convinced that he had made his point with Franco, Don Juan allowed Juan Carlos to resume his education in Spain. This time, his eldest son was accompanied by his brother, Alfonsito. A new school was set up, not at Las Jarillas, but at the palace of Miramar, the old summer residence of the royal family on the bay of San Sebastián, in the Basque Country. Don Juan seemed to be hoping that distance might diminish the influence of Franco. Again, he made some effort to ensure that his two sons’ academic abilities would be evaluated impartially. The boys at Miramar were thus required to sit, at the end of each academic year, the official exams taken by other children at ordinary schools. Having said that, the ‘normality’ was relative. The examinations were oral and public. When Juan Carlos attended for examination at the Instituto San Isidro in Madrid, his answers had a large crowd breaking into enthusiastic applause. Afterwards, he was seen leaving the examination hall through a great throng of police and clapping well-wishers. The entire process was gushingly reported in the monarchist daily ABC.27
The 16 boys at the school were divided into two groups, one of Juan Carlos’s age and the other of Alfonso’s contemporaries. The older group contained several of Juan Carlos’s pals from Las Jarillas – Jaime de Carvajal y Urquijo, José Luis Leal Maldonado, Alfredo Gómez Torres, Alonso Álvarez de Toledo, and Juan José Macaya. Aurora Gómez Delgado (the French tutor, nurse and housekeeper at Miramar) would later recall that the section of the Miramar palace that housed the school was very beautiful, but also extremely cold. There was no central heating, just one stove on each of the three floors. The permanent teaching staff resided with the boys at Miramar. José Garrido Casanova acted again as headmaster. The stern Father Ignacio de Zulueta taught Latin and religious education, and also organized their weekend outings. Father Zulueta said daily mass at which he would deliver a reactionary sermon. The children would later recall occasions on which Zulueta made them pray for the conversion of the Soviet Union or for the victory of the British Conservative Party in the 1950 elections. In the midst of this particular sermon, Juan Carlos stuck a needle into the bottom of one of his classmates, Carlos Benjumea, whose cry of pain secured him a ferocious dressing-down from the furious priest.
Aurora Gómez Delgado was the only woman on the full-time teaching staff. In addition, a group of non-resident part-time teachers came in a few hours a week to teach specialist subjects such as music, physics and gymnastics. Amongst them was Mrs Mary Watt, who started teaching English to the children in their third year at Miramar.28 One of the reasons for Mrs Watt’s late arrival at Miramar may well have been Juan Carlos’s self-confessed reluctance to learn English – the consequence in part of the education he had received at the