The Valley of the Fallen

by Carlos Rojas

  In September 1802 the Desired One married Princess María Antonia of Naples. Each of the illustrious consorts was barely eighteen years old, but they were far apart in their education and human profile. María Antonia was not beautiful, though she was much taller than her husband, with a good appearance, blond hair, and penetrating blue eyes. In addition to Italian, she spoke Spanish, French, English, and German. Her mother, Queen Carolina, would never forgive the French for the public execution of her sister, María Antonieta. Her hatred then centered on Napoleon, whom she believed was the legitimate heir of the Terror and all the revolutionaries. Austrian by birth, Carolina would always support England in the face of French ambitions. She was also a great admirer of Lady Hamilton, the wife of the English ambassador and soon to be known as the mistress of Admiral Nelson. She wrote her the letters of a schoolgirl with a crush. She called her to her chambers at any hour of the day or night so that she could sing for her the verses of Ophelia in her madness (“. . . before you tumbled me, / You promised me to wed. / So would I ha’ done, by yonder sun, / An thou hadst not come to my bed”) or perform for her the dance of the seven veils. María Antonia participated in her mother’s politics and intrigues. From Spain she maintained a secret correspondence with her, which French spies soon intercepted and deciphered. Napoleon delighted in all those secrets of state and of the bedroom, and then sent copies of the letters to the Prince of Peace and María Luisa.

  “I shall never forget who Godoy is and who I am,” María Antonia wrote to her mother, furiously underlining certain words. She thought Carlos IV too naïve and the queen endowed with every defect. With even greater wrath, María Luisa hated her daughter-in-law when she read her confidential exchange of letters with Carolina of Naples. “This bloodless little beast, all bitterness and poison, a half-dead frog, a diabolical serpent,” the queen offered Godoy her graphic sketch of her daughter-in-law. She wrote these notes in bed while the king gave her light, holding a candelabrum. At times she apologized for concluding them in haste. The king dozed off and María Luisa decided to extinguish the candles so they wouldn’t set fire to the counterpane. For an entire year she and María Antonia shared at least their contempt for the Desired One. As soon as she disembarked in Barcelona, the princess wrote to her mother that she almost fainted when she saw her fiancé. His ugliness far exceeded that shown in his portraits. Besides, he was crude, uneducated, and completely different from her. It took an entire year to consummate the marriage, to the delight of María Luisa. The Desired One had genitals of gigantic proportions but suffered from psychological impotence, punctually reported by his confessor, Father Fernando, who was a paid confidant of the queen. Besides, the prince infuriated María Antonia, constantly harassing her with his irritating company.

  When the Desired One at last managed to perform, the tone of María Antonia’s letters to the queen of Naples would change radically. In her euphoria she fell completely into treason. “I do everything I can to hinder the alliance of the Spanish government with the emperor of the French, and my dearly beloved Fernando helps me in this enterprise, which is also Your Majesty’s.” Napoleon was delighted to have achieved his intention of separating the Bourbons in Spain from those in Naples. The Desired One and María Antonia, now insatiable lovers, were for all practical purposes the captives of María Luisa and Godoy in the palace. The princess contracted tuberculosis, but even strolls through the gardens were forbidden to her. María Luisa’s rage increased when the Neapolitan ambassador expressed the anguish his queen felt over María Antonia, and she repudiated the diplomat. Twice her daughter-in-law miscarried premature children, tiny and dead, an ironic comfort to María Luisa. After a long agony filled with coughing up blood and aggravated by dropsy, the first wife of the Desired One passed away in Aranjuez, at the age of twenty-two, on May 21, 1806. Her husband watched over her until the last moment, with a dedication and devotion he would not show again for any other human being.

  As soon as the Desired One was widowed, his August Parents proposed that he marry again, this time the sister of the countess of Chinchón. Which is to say, Godoy’s sister-in-law. They chose a bad moment to oblige him, for sorrow had humanized him to the point that he forgot his habitual intrigue and cowardice. “I prefer to become a monk or remain a widower for the rest of my life before marrying into the family of that swine,” he responded with dignity. Then he left without kissing the hands of the monarchs or asking for his father’s blessing, so enraged that he almost didn’t give the servants time to announce him when he walked through the doors in a rush. That same week the marquise of Perijáa, another of the queen’s spies, told the monarchs that their son was spending night after night writing like one possessed. The queen was alarmed but Carlos IV laughed at her fears, believing that the prince was busy with a translation of Condillac’s Course d’Études, which His Majesty recommended to him as a way to distract his widower’s grief in a Christian manner.

  In a few days the sovereign himself almost swooned when he discovered an anonymous sheet of paper on the desk in his office. “Prince Fernando is preparing an uprising in the Palace. Your Majesty’s crown is in danger. The Queen risks being poisoned. It is urgent to stop these attempts without a moment’s delay. The loyal vassal who sends this warning is not in a position or in circumstances to carry out his duties in any other way.” Still doubting the veracity of the letter, but at the insistence of María Luisa, on October 28, 1807, the king personally entered the rooms of the Desired One in a way as abrupt as it was unexpected. On his personal writing desk and under a stone paperweight of green talc, he found the principal documents of the conspiracy. The monarch handed over the worrisome writings to the marquis de Caballero, minister of justice, instead of Godoy, sick in Madrid with autumnal dengue fever.

  The pages of the charge in what was called the El Escorial lawsuit were as diverse as they were scandalous. A request to the king, dictated by Escoiquiz and written in his own hand by the Desired One, asked Carlos IV for the immediate detention of Godoy, accusing him of conspiring against the throne, without filing a complaint or subjecting his crimes to judicial trials “because of the dishonor to our Royal House that will result from juridical knowledge of the excesses of a man so closely joined to our house. Once Godoy has been arrested, it is absolutely necessary that Your Majesty permit me to remain at his side constantly so that my mother cannot speak to him alone.” Another document, also the work of Escoiquiz, brought formal variants to the intrigue. A letter from the Desired One, dated the day of the proceedings but with no heading or signature, decided to entrust delivery of the accusations to a cleric and placed Fernando under the example and protection of Saint Hermenegild, even though the former confessed quite openly his scant talent for martyrdom. With the rebellion quashed, the proclamations would undoubtedly draw the entire storm down on the heads of Godoy and María Luisa, and exonerate the king, to cheers and applause.

  Seized by panic, the Desired One denounced his associates and sent the king the most shameful of his letters on the third of November of that year. “My dear papa: I have transgressed. I have failed Your Majesty as King and as father; but I repent and offer my most humble obedience. I should not have done anything without notifying Your Majesty; but I was taken by surprise. I have informed on the guilty ones and beg Your Majesty to forgive me for having lied the other night, permitting your acknowledged son to kiss your royal feet.” Heeding the pleas and petitions “of my beloved wife,” the king pardoned the Desired One and returned him to his good graces, in the hope that his conduct would show proofs of true reformation in his loose behavior. The trial of his accomplices having been initiated, the Justice Ministry requested the death penalty for Escoiquiz and the duke del Infantado, and prison sentences for the count of Orgaz and the marquis de Ayerbe, as well as various sanctions for the servants and messengers of the prince. In the end, on January 25, 1808, the judges absolved everyone who had been tried. The king, perhaps surprised by so base a farce, banished the duke del
Infantado to exile and Escoiquiz to a monastery.

  The Desired One’s vengeance, brief but complete, would come on March 18, when the Aranjuez insurrection brought down Godoy and dragged him to the feet of the Desired One. Slashed with knives and terrified, the Prince of Peace pleaded for pardon from Fernando, who allowed himself a touch of irony: “My dear Manuel, have you perhaps forgotten that my father is still king?” The next morning Carlos IV abdicated the crown in favor of the Desired One and left with the queen for Bayonne, where Napoleon had summoned the entire Royal Family. That first reign of Fernando VII, born in Aranjuez, would not last very long and ended in blood, but no other surpassed it in popular fervor. On March 23, Murat made his entrance into Madrid at the head of the Garde Imperiale and the Legion de Réserve. On the pretext of preparing for the invasion of Portugal, the emperor now had more than thirty thousand men in Spain; his intention was to take over the entire Peninsula in a rapid coup d’état. On March 24, the Desired One arrived in Madrid through the Puerta de Atocha. In a kind of collective frenzy, a human tide rushed into the street as his horse passed, and they kissed the stirrups and covered him with early flowers. It took him three hours to reach the Palacio de Oriente, and from the balcony he greeted the people again, sobbing with happiness.

  It was his last joy before history tragically made a headlong dash forward. Beauharnais, the French ambassador, and Savary, the emperor’s personal representative, warned him to travel promptly to Bayonne, where they assured him that Napoleon was prepared to recognize him as king of Spain and the Indies. Escoiquiz, returned in triumph to royal favor, with great urgency advised him to go. At last Fernando left, filled with fears and premonitions. In Bayonne and in the Castle of Maracq, in the presence of his August Parents, the emperor treated him like a disobedient lackey and shouted his demand that he renounce the throne in favor of Carlos IV. Unexpectedly, the Desired One, in a rage, resisted the plundering. Carlos IV and María Luisa made common cause with Napoleon. In a fit of hysteria, the queen called her son a bastard. News of the events of May 2, in Madrid, had reached Maracq, and Carlos IV blamed Fernando for the bloodshed. At last the Desired One gave in and returned the crown to Carlos IV, who quickly passed it to the emperor so that he could present it to his brother Joseph. The Desired One thought that all was lost, forgetting his own capacity for survival. In the Castle of Valençay, where he spent the war, he embroidered, danced, rode horseback, and refused to read any book. With bitter fatalism he seemed to delight in his own baseness. He congratulated Joseph Bonaparte on his ascension to the throne of Spain and Napoleon on his victories over the Spanish. He even humbly solicited from the emperor the hand of his niece Lolotte. The despot did not even bother to respond. When the war ended in June 1813, with Wellington pursuing Soult into France itself, Napoleon had to sign the Treaty of Valençay and recognize Fernando as king of Spain and the Indies.

  In Spain the Desired One refused to swear allegiance to the Constitution promulgated by the Parliament in Cádiz. He pursued, imprisoned, and exiled the liberals who dared to defend it. He reneged on a promise of amnesty made in Valençay, appropriated the property of those who had supported the French, and left them in exile. Half the ministers of the first absolutist government were imprisoned or confined for embezzlement. The real masters of the country were the old plotters from El Escorial, with Escoiquiz and the duke del Infantado at their head. New characters, the most unlikely ones, also entered the cabal. It was the moment of Antonio de Ugarte, the former porter, and Pedro Collado, an old water vendor from Fuente del Berro whom they called Chamorro and who diligently took on the duties of a royal buffoon. With creatures like these, from the lowest class, Fernando felt as comfortable as the duchesses of an earlier generation had with their bullfighters. He held a public audience every day and received everyone, including paupers and prostitutes. He conversed with beggars and ambassadors, wrapped in a threadbare dressing gown and smoking incessantly. A regular visitor to brothels, he found there one of the women with whom he would feel most in harmony from that time on: Pepa de Málaga. His second wife, mortally ill, found out about their involvement and angrily criticized him. The Desired One, beside himself, insulted, punched, and slapped her. Bellowing, so there could be no doubt concerning his intentions, he said he would not tolerate anyone’s affronts to that illiterate Gypsy, whom he would esteem as much as he chose.

  With slum dwellers he shared a taste for insults, obscenity, and cruel sarcasm. When the University of Salamanca granted a degree to Prince Antonio Pascual, whose stupidity was well known, the Desired One always referred to him as “my uncle, the doctor” or “my uncle, the idiot.” Yet even when he was king, he never dared to smoke in the presence of that poor, senile, and cretinous old man. A group of Madrilenian noblemen, eager to improve their position through flattery, invited the Desired One and Don Antonio Pascual to enjoy a game of squash in the courtyard of the Royal Hospice of San Fernando. The August Persons accepted and went there, but a sudden storm drove them away in the middle of the game. They took refuge in a sitting room, where they were offered some refreshment; their hosts chatted awhile with the blue-blooded players, shirtless and with neckerchiefs tied around their heads. Suddenly the Desired One became impatient and requested that he be allowed to hide in a closet where balls and rackets were stored so he could smoke a cigar out of sight of his uncle, the idiot.

  Unlike his brother, Don Carlos, he did not feel the messianism of power or attribute any meaning to it other than the pragmatic. “Spain is a bottle of beer and I am the stopper,” he liked to say. “When that pops out, who knows where the spurt will land.” If he retained absolute power, at times at the cost of the greatest infamies, he did so to quiet his great fear of physical pain and death. “His despotism is a form of weakness,” Moratín wrote to Goya in the year they both died, in an unpublished letter that is now the property of Ramón Serrano Suñer. The attempts against his government began just a few months after his return to Spain. Mina rebelled in 1814; Porlier the following year; Richard, Lacy, and Milans in 1817; Joaquín Vidal in 1819. On January 1, 1820, Colonel Riego revolted in Cabezas de San Juan, at the head of the Battalion of Asturias when it was going to embark for America and put down the uprisings of the viceroyalties. Riego joined General Quiroga, and together they entered San Fernando, proclaiming the Constitution of 1812. This time the plot had been planned in the Masonic lodges of Cádiz and soon spread to El Ferrol, Vigo, Zaragoza, and Pamplona. Fernando VII entrusted the defense of Madrid to Count de La Bisbal, who quickly betrayed him, swearing his loyalty to the Constitution in Ocaña. The crowd attacked the palace and the soldiers on guard were friendly to the mob. The Desired One received a group of rebels and quickly swore his allegiance to the Constitution. “Let us march openly, and I the first, along the constitutional path.” Then he withdrew to his rooms and wept with fury and shame. A few days later, Rafael Riego entered Madrid. The welcome the crowd tendered was as delirious in its enthusiasm as the one offered to the Desired One himself upon his return from Aranjuez twelve years earlier. And yet the king was now only a hostage, and Riego indicated that the constitutional monarchy was nothing but an obligatory transition to an inevitable Republic.

  In Parliament moderate liberals like Argüelles and Martínez de la Rosa debated zealots from the ranks of Romero Alpuente. From San Lorenzo de El Escorial, the Desired One decreed the appointment of General Carvajal to lead the Captaincy of Castilla la Nueva without the countersignature of the government. It was an attempt at a coup by the monarch, which failed immediately as soon as the national militias disarmed the garrison in Madrid. When the Desired One and his family returned to the capital, the crowd insulted him and sang the anthem of Riego. Livid with terror at the passivity of his own escort, the sovereign tried to apologize through the window of his carriage. Riots ensued and the absolutists formed societies like The Exterminating Angel and Conception. In the countryside they moved on to armed conflict, with guerrilla bands like those of The Trapense and
The Bearded One. The liberals formed other societies like The Maltese Cross, The Gold Fountain, The Landaburiana, and created parties in favor of the Constitution, like the Twelveyearist, the Carbonarist, the Communard, and the Ringkeeper, where they divided into moderates, realists, and radicals. On July 7, 1821, four battalions of the Royal Guard revolted in Madrid, under the command of a second lieutenant and to the shout of “Long live the absolute king!” Members of the militias faced them, cheering the Constitution; they pursued them down Calle de Arenal and surrounded them in the Plaza de Oriente, while Fernando VII, at a window of the palace, screamed hysterically: “Get them! Get them! Finish off the rebels!” The national militia paid no attention to him and the mutiny ended as a farce in one act. The officers conferred and embraced; the rebels returned to their barracks. Civil war, however, did not take long to break out. In Navarra the realists of Santos Ladrón y Quesada rebelled. In Urgel a regency was proclaimed. Through Vargas Laguna, his ambassador in Rome, the Desired One requested the assistance of the Holy Alliance. “You can believe, Vargas my friend, that the situation is very difficult and very distressing. Everything points to an unfortunate future if God does not help us.”

  In support of the Desired One, the hundred thousand Sons of Saint Louis arrived from France, though in reality they were sixty thousand, united with forty thousand Spanish absolutists. The Holy Alliance, meeting in Verona, agreed to support the campaign led by Russia, Prussia, Austria, and France, with sixty million francs a year. England opposed the intervention in vain. Spanish peasants, who fifteen years earlier had heroically fought against Napoleon, now welcomed the invaders enthusiastically, shouting: “Long live the absolutely absolute king!” and “Long live our chains!” The priests were in their glory, and the atrocities committed by the Fernandistas against their own countrymen angered and horrified the duke de Angoulême, who commanded the expeditionary forces of the Most Christian French Monarch Louis XVIII. “Wherever our armies may be, we make great efforts to maintain peace. Where we are not, they murder, rob, and rape in the most repugnant way. In this country of savages, the Spanish soldiers who say they are monarchists dedicate themselves only to rapine and plunder. What they fear most is, in fact, order.”