Juan Carlos: Steering Spain from Dictatorship to Democracy. Paul Preston
suffered considerable personal sadness. Without the scenery of the palace and the supporting cast of courtiers, the emptiness of his relationship with Victoria Eugenia was increasingly exposed. Not long after their arrival at Fontainebleau, the King remonstrated with the Queen about her closeness to the Duke and Duchess de Lécera who had accompanied her into exile. The marriage of the Duke, Jaime de Silva Mitjans, and the lesbian Duchess, Rosario Agrelo de Silva, was a sham but they stayed together because both were in love with the Queen. Despite persistent rumours, which niggled at Alfonso XIII, the Queen always vehemently denied that she and the Duke had been lovers. Nevertheless, when the bored Alfonso XIII took a new lover in Paris and the Queen in turn remonstrated with him, he tried to divert the onslaught by throwing in her face the alleged relationship with Lécera. She denied it but, as tempers rose, he demanded that she choose between himself and Lécera. Fearful of losing their support, on which she had come to rely, she replied, by her own account, with the fateful words, ‘I choose them and never want to see your ugly face again.’5 There would be no going back.
Another reason for Alfonso’s long-deteriorating relationship with Victoria Eugenia was the fact that she had brought haemophilia into the family. The couple’s eldest son, Alfonso, was of dangerously delicate health. He was haemophilic and, according to his sister, the Infanta Doña Cristina, ‘the slightest knock caused him terrible pain and would paralyse part of his body.’ He often could not walk unaided and lived in constant fear of a fatal blow. When the recently appointed Director General of Security, Emilio Mola, made his courtesy visit to the palace in February 1930, he was shocked: ‘I also visited the Príncipe de Asturias [the Spanish equivalent of the Prince of Wales] and only then did I fully understand the intimate tragedy of the royal family and comprehend the pain in the Queen’s face. He received me standing up and had the kindness to ask me to sit. Then he tried to get up to see me out and it was impossible: a flash, of anguish and of resignation, passed across his face.’6 Alfonso formally renounced his right to the throne on n June 1933 in return for his father’s permission to contract a morganatic marriage with an attractive but frivolous girl he had met at the Lausanne clinic where he was receiving treatment. Edelmira Sampedro y Robato was the 26-year-old daughter of a rich Cuban landowner.
Immediately following his eldest son’s renunciation of his dynastic rights, Alfonso XIII arranged for a number of prominent monarchists to put pressure on his second son, Don Jaime, to follow his brother’s example. Don Jaime was deaf and dumb – the result of a botched operation when he was four. Cut off from the world, both by dint of his royal status and his deafness, he had grown into a singularly immature young man. The monarchist leader José Calvo Sotelo persuaded him that his inability to use the telephone would significantly diminish his capacity to take part in anti-Republican conspiracies.7 Alfonso married Edelmira in Lausanne, in the presence of his mother and two sisters. Neither his father nor three brothers deigned to attend. On the same day, in Fontainebleau, 21 June 1933, Don Jaime, who was single at the time, finally agreed to renounce his rights to the throne, as well as those of his future heirs. The renunciation was irrevocable and would be ratified on 23 July 1945. In spite of this, he would later contest its validity, thereby complicating Juan Carlos’s rise to power.8
In his 1933 letter to his father, Don Jaime wrote: ‘Sire. The decision of my brother to renounce, for himself and his descendants, his rights to the succession of the crown has led me to weigh the obligations that thus fall on me … I have decided on a formal and explicit renunciation, for me and for any descendants that I might have, of my rights to the throne of our fatherland.’9 Don Jaime would, in any case, have lost his rights when, in 1935, he also made a morganatic marriage, to an Italian, Emmanuela Dampierre Ruspoli, who although a minor aristocrat was not of royal blood. It was not a love match and would end unhappily.10
In the summer of 1933, during a royal skiing holiday in Istria, Alfonso’s fourth son, Don Gonzalo – who also suffered from haemophilia – was involved in a car crash and died as a result of an internal haemorrhage.11 His first son fared little better. After his allowance was slashed by the exiled King, Alfonso’s marriage to Edelmira did not survive. They divorced in May 1937. Two months later, he married another Cuban, Marta Rocafort y Altuzarra, a beautiful model. The marriage lasted barely six months and they were also divorced, in January 1938. Having fallen in love with Mildred Gaydon, a cigarette girl in a Miami nightclub, Alfonso was on the point of marrying for a third time when tragedy once more struck the Borbón family. On the night of 6 September 1938, after leaving the club where Mildred worked, he too was involved in a car crash and, like his brother Gonzalo, died of internal bleeding.12
As a result of the successive renunciations of Alfonso and Jaime, the title of Príncipe de Asturias fell upon Alfonso XIII’s third son, the 20-year-old Don Juan. When he received his father’s telegram informing him of this, Don Juan was a serving officer in the Royal Navy on HMS Enterprise, anchored in Bombay. Because he realized that his new role would eventually involve him leaving his beloved naval career, he accepted only after some delay. In May 1934, he was promoted to sub-lieutenant and in September, he joined the battleship HMS Iron Duke. In March 1935, he passed the examinations in naval gunnery and navigation which opened the way to his becoming a lieutenant and being eligible to command a vessel. However, that would mean renouncing his Spanish nationality, something he was not prepared to do. His uncle, King George V, granted him the rank of honorary Lieutenant RN.13
Don Juan did not emulate his elder brothers’ disastrous marriages. On 13 January 1935, at a party given by the King and Queen of Italy on the eve of the marriage of the Infanta Doña Beatriz to Prince Alessandro Torlonia, Prince di Civitella Cesi, Don Juan had met the 24-year-old María de las Mercedes Borbón Orléans. Having faced the problem of his eldest son’s unsuitable marriage, Alfonso XIII was delighted when Don Juan began to fall in love with a statuesque princess who was descended from the royal families of Spain, France, Italy and Austria. They were married on 12 October 1935 in Rome. Several thousand Spanish monarchists made the trip to the Italian capital and turned the ceremony into a demonstration against the Spanish Republic. By this time, Queen Victoria Eugenia had long since left Alfonso XIII and she refused to attend the wedding.14 The newly appointed Príncipe de Asturias and his new bride settled at the Villa Saint Blaise in Cannes in the south of France. There, he quickly made contact with the leading monarchist politicians who were involved in anti-Republican plots.
Unsurprisingly, when on the evening of 17 July 1936 units of the Spanish Army in Morocco rebelled against the Second Republic, the coup d’état was enthusiastically welcomed by both Don Juan and his father. They avidly followed the progress of the military rebels on the radio, particularly through the lurid broadcasts of General Queipo de Llano. A group of Don Juan’s followers, who had been avid conspirators against the Republic, including Eugenio Vegas Latapié, Jorge Vigón, the Conde de Ruiseñada and the Marqués de la Eliseda, felt that it would be politically prudent for him to be seen fighting on the Nationalist side. He had already discussed the matter with his aide-de-camp, Captain Juan Luis Roca de Togores, the Vizconde de Rocamora. Don Juan left his home for the front for the first time on 31 July 1936, despite the fact that only the previous day Doña María de las Mercedes had given birth to their first child, a daughter, Pilar. His mother, Queen Victoria Eugenia, was present, having come to Cannes for the birth. To the delight of Don Juan’s followers, she declared: ‘I think it is right that my son should go to war. In extreme situations, such as the present one, women must pray and men must fight.’ Pleasantly surprised by this, they were, nevertheless, worried about the possible reaction of Alfonso XIII who was holidaying in Czechoslovakia. However, when Don Juan telephoned him, he too agreed enthusiastically, saying, ‘I am delighted. Go, my son, and may God be with you!’
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