The Late Queen Christina of Spain.

Thames Star, Volume IX, Issue 3059, 4 December 1878, Page 1

The Late Queen Christina of Spain.

The youngest of the Queens of Spain has been fol'ovred to the grave, after a Very short interval, by t|e oldest—by that Dowager who wai for many years Queen before her. Queen Christina is dead., Married in her youth to a King advanced in age, and left a widow only four years later, she ruled for. a considerable period as Reina Gubernadora, or Queen Regent, over a country in which she was a stranger, yet where her nattier was for all that time the rallying cry of a party which looked tip to her as the representative of national freedom, and in opposition to those who stood up in defence of the sacred rights of throne and alter. Victorious over her adversaries, Queen"CnrisMnrftlWrom the height of her power when Spain sank exhausted after a long and vain contest, and she was again and again driven into an exile from which she was ultimately seldom allowed to return ; but she never quitted the country without leaving behind her some mark of the influence which she exercised on the daughter whom she had reared to the throne, yet scarcely fitted for it. Maria Christina was born at Naples on the 27th, of April, 1806, and was the' daughter of Francis I. of Bourbon, -King of i the Two Sicilies, and of his second wife, Maria Isabella, daughter of King Charles IV. of Spain, being thus own sister of King Ferdinand 11. (Bomba), and half sister of the Dachesse de Berri, Com'te de Chambord's mother. She >was brought up'with loving care, and gave proof of considerable talent, especially in, drawing and painting, while excelling in those more masculine .sports of hunting and shooting to which the Royal Family I of Naples was particularly addicted, her freelile in the air and rude exercise contributing to impart to her, and through, her to her daughter, that robust health and stout courage which availed them in many emergencies. On the 11th of December, 1829, Christina was conveyed to Madrid a betrothed bride, and became the fourth wife of . Ferdinand VII., King of Spain,'who was then.ss years old, and more worn and feeble' than is usual at that age even in Spain. She found at the Spanish Court her elder sister, Louisa .Charlotte, previously married to the King's brother, Don Francisco de Paula, and it was chiefly to the manoeuvres of this sister that Maria Christina owed her own preferment. But besides her sister and her husband, the young Queen had none but enemies at the Palace, for the King's eldest brother, Don ' Carlos, already reckoned on the succession to the throne, to which, in the absence of any children of Ferdinand, his title was indisputable. In the Infante himself and in the whole family Christina had determined ill-wishers, and their bitterness increased when the King, who doatcd on his wife, and was resolved upon insuring his inheritance to any child who might be born of her, promulgated on the 19th of March, 1830,' that decree by which, in default of male offspring, a King's daughter might be raised to the throne, thus abolishing the Salic Law which the Bourbons had brought into Spain 'upon the extinction of the male Austrian line. On the 10th of the following October, the Queen's eldest daughter, Maria Isabel!;], was born, and soon after- proclaimed Princess of Asturias. But between that date and that of the King's death. (Sept. 23, 1833), King Ferdinand, being ill and. yielding.to the pressure of his relatives and even of his wife, who, from some compunction about the salvation of his soul, warned him against the con-' sequences of the injustice of which he had been guilty towards his brother, revoked the decree of March, 1830. The arrival of the Queen's sister at Madrid, however, and the unexpected temporary recovery of the King, again caused him to waver in his resolution, and induced him to intrust the management of Slate affairs to his wife ; and later, his health permitting, he again took the reins of government into his hands, and repealed the decree by which he had revoked time of March, 1830, thus with hislast breath confirming the act by which he had called his daughter to the throne to the prejudice of his brother. Ferdinand died, Isabella, his eldest eldest daughter then 1.-ss than two years old, was proclaimed Queen, the Queen Dowager, Christina, being by tfie deceased King's * last will and Testament appointed Regent til her daughter had completed her 18th year. She lived for a few months in retirement, but whon she reappeared before the worid'she was attended by Don Fernando Mufiozi a native of Tarnncon, in the province of Cuenca. who had been a private in the ■ King's Life Guards, but whom she now raised to the rank of Chamberlain and trusty counsellor, bestowing upon him every nrirk of signal faror. It was understood that she .vas privately- marr ed to him at an early period (December 23, 1833), three months after Fe'rdinund's death ; but the union was only solemnly consecrated on the 13th of Oetdber,'lßl4, in obedience to a Royii decree of the llili of the sam'o month. Munoz, then created Duke of Kian&arcs, died ou the J2t!i of September, 1873. The assumption of the Regency by Maria Christina'was the signal lor a frcsli outbreak of ths struggle between the Absolutist and the Constitutionalist parties. They had already engaged in many a trial of >trength in the early part of tho reign of Ferdinand, at which period the Liberals carried the victory and a-bused it, till their adversaries found a powerful ally in the French array, which overran the Peninsula in 1823, counten.inoed the King in his wors! reactionary instincts, and ushered in half a score of jears of unmitigated obscurantism. The Queen Regent, a shrewd woman, who had.durinf* her s'iort ascendency over her husband's mind had already been instrumental in softening the harshness of his arbitrary

rule, and had during the King's illness signed her name to a decree of amnesty and to other popular measures, now made open profession of Liberal ideas, and threw herself into the hands of the Cortes, t which shortly before Ferdinand's death had sworn allegiance to the infant Isabella as heiress to the throne. On the other hand, the partisans of Don Carlos rose in many of the provinces, and acknowledged no-act of the deceased King by which either the claims of the legitimate heir or the principles of absolute monarchic government could be impaired. There ensued.a five years' civil war; that war between Carlistas and Christinos, the horrors of which were so startling that they would now be looked upon as a fable, had not the same outrages and excesses been perpetrated in'the same country and by the same factions in time ve.ry near to us- The war was ended by the victories of the Queen Regent's General, Espartero, and by the treachery of Maroto, the Carlist Chief. The Peace of Vergara, Augfrst 31,1839, was followed by the defeat and flight of Cabrera, July 6,1840. :. Throughout this long stormy period the friends of the Queen Regent were hardly less dangerous to her thaYi her enemies. [Bound as she was by her own interest, and impelled by the influence ot. France, England, and Portugal, who had hastened to recognise her Government, had fought her battles against Don Carlos, and had contracted with her the quadruple alliance, Queen Christina professed to rule by the Constitution; but she was bewildered, frightened, and angered the excesses of the extreme Liberals, into whose hands she and her daughter fell in more than one untoward instance, and had to "ransom themselves by giving in to their captor's exorbitant demands. She was disgusted by the schemes of some of her Ministers, whose radical measures, both concerning State and Church, clashed with the imperious instincts and bigoted scruples of her Bourbon nature. She was a woman of rare subtlety and infinite resources bringing the mind of a Catherine de Medici to bear on a position analogous to that of-the French Queen Regent. - She skirmished with the varisus factions, pitted, her statesmen against'one another, tried Martinez de la Rosa, Mendizabal, Isturiz, and others, determined incessant Ministerial' crises, and promulgated endless neW statutes and charters,- making of Spanish public law that chaos through which -daylight will, perhaps, never penetrate.' The Christino -party had no sooner .insured their triumph than they split into Moderados and Exaltados or Progresistas, and as the Queen Regent, bent on favouring the Church, declared against this latter party these broke through all restraint. Their leader, Espartero, was forced upon phsistina as her Prime Minister, and into his hands she had soon to resign the Regency, October 12, 1840, only ..three months after Spain was rid of Cabrera and the last Carlists. She then withdrew into France, taking with her large sums of money and the execration of the people. Espartero's Regency, at first a lull of comparative peace and order in that long stormy season: of Spanish troubles, became towards the end as tempestuous as that of Queen Christina had been; and three years later, July 30, .1843, overcome by the ceaseless intrigues of Christina's party, backed" by the French Government, he had to ( embark for England, followed, however, not by heavy bags of gold like most other Spanish rulers, but by,the .respect of all honorable Spaniards,, not excepting some of his most inveterate adversaries. . 'Espartero's fall -led, .not to. Christina's restoration to the Regency, but to the installation of her daughter Isabella at the head of the Government, the Cortes declaring her to be oil. age on November 8,1843, when she had only just attained her thirteenth year. Christina came back to Spain, nevertheless, backed by the Modergdo party,-under the leadership of Narvaez and Concha, and.was Queen de facto, balancing the hostile parties one against the other as she had done during, her" Regency, turning all her skill to unnerve and corrupt the feeble mind of her daughter, and showing favour to those Ministers who showed themselves the most amenable to her authority and most subservient to her interests. Her presence'in Madrid had in so far the effect of screening ,the young Queen from unpopularity that public opinion laid whatever Vent wrong to the charge of the mother,-whom they called La Mala, or the wicked one, while they only pitied Isabella as La Tonta, or the stupid one. All intent on propitiating the French Government, by whose lavor and' in antagonism to England she had been reinstated in power, Christina labored with Guizot and the other Ministers of Louis Philippe to bring about those Spanish marriages which caused so bitter a dissension between France and England, and the effect of which in Spain was.to to destroy the happiness and the character of Queen Isabella, and eventually to lead to her downfall. , On the 10th of October, 1846, the young Queen was wedded to her first cousin, Don Francisco de Asiz, and her young sister to the Duke of Montspensier, Louis Pbillippe's fifth son. It is not easy to jmagine by what motives the mother was actuated as she thus gave in to the dark scheme of the crafty French King and his .statesmen, who hoped by that matrimonial scheme eventually to bring the two kingdoms under the sway of one and the same dynasty. The original project was to marry Queen Isabella herself to Montpensier; but, being thwarted in this design by England's opposition, they looked to the union of Montpensier with the younger - Princess as the probable means of insuring the reversion of the throne to the French Princess heir. Strangely enough, , tbeir calculations, defeated as tfiey were at this juncture, were almost justified by subsequent events. Queen Isabella fell • inlß6B. overpowered by a revolution to which Montpensier was more than probably privy, of which he in a great measure defrayed the costs, and of which, with a little more courage and resolution, he could have reaped all the profit. The Duke, having at the restoration of Isabella's son Alfonso made his peace with the head of the Spanish family, brought about that marriage • between Alfonso and his daughter, Mercedes, which gave him fair hopes of seeing a grandson of his seated on the .throne of Aragon and Castile, though long after the progeny of Louis Philippe had forfeited or renounced their claims to the throne of France, At the wedding ot that young Royal puir, more thau 30 years after the " Spanish Marriages " of her own contrivance, ihe Queen grandmother was present,' though Queen Isabella absented herself, protested against the union of her son with- the daughter of one who

had repaid her unbounded liberality with ingratitude and treachery, threw out some hints about a means she had of forbidding the bans, though all the while she went through the form of an elaborate preparation for the journey. The Spanish Marriages of 1846, by exposing the Spanish Government to the displeasure of England, aggravated the unpopularity under which the generality of her daughter's subjects. She had once more to leave Spain, February, 1847, and betook herself, with her husband and family, to France where she established her residence, alternating with Rome, where she* had thrown three palaces into one at the Quattro Fontane, but where she was not, after all, tempted to take up her permanent abode.

Queen Christina was one of those rulers:whose errors seem to cling to the throne on which they sit, and who become almost irreproachable when hurled from the height of their greatness and compelled to withdraw into private life. The days in which they have not reigned are those which, at their last moment, they remember with unmixed satisfaction. Although the ex-Regent's counsels to her daughter are supposed, not'without good reason, to hare been a chief cause of all the faults into which Isabella has fallen, the domestic and social life of Queen Christina in her retirement has been free from blame. Her time was mainly spent in attending to the education of the children (daughters) whom she bore to her second, husband, the Duke of Rianzares, and whom she married with large dowries to gentlemen of high rank in Italy. For the rest, she lived at peace with the numerous members of the Bourbon family, cultivated the friendship of the priests, and delighted in the sea air at her retreat near Havre, where her days were ended. As a sovereign, Christina was despotic ; she loved power for its own sake. It is difficult to clear her of the charge of having, like Catherine de Medici, influenced the mind and character of her daughter, with a view to render her amenable to her own moral ascendency, when, by attaining her majority, Isabella was to be withdrawn from her mother's legal authority. Though the -period of her legitimate regency came to a violent end in 1840, and Isabella reigned as Queen by the will of the Cortes when she was still a mere child, it might be proved, that the Queen mother displayed more energy, and exercised more complete control, when she had no determined place in the Government, and her position at her daughter's Court was undefined. Difficult as it must be to defend Queen Christina's public conduct as a whole, it must be allowed that she had come into power in terrible times, and had to contend with factions by which her daughter's throne would almost certainly have been overthrown, had she not, like her Medicean prototype, 'played one party against another with consummate address, and created among the soldiers of fortune of the Concha and Narvaez school a Court parjty, on whose leaders she relied, and who extended the same support to her daughter, and did, in fact, so bear her up till death removed them one by one. .