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Chapter II, Part I: The Initial Problems

Serrano's appointment as the Regent of the Kingdom of Spain, and thus Head of State of the Spanish Nation until such a time that the King of Spain was finally found, was something that satisfied most everyone in the government: Serrano now found that his political ambitions had been, at least temporarily, satisfied, as being the Regent meant holding the country's highest institutional position, and, at the same time, it calmed the monarchical Democrats, who had feared that either Serrano or Prim might decide to throw it all to the wind and become worse tyrants than Isabel had been, as Serrano's position meant he lacked any actual troop command.

Unfortunately, there several problems and frictions within the Government Coalition and within the Progressive Party, divided between those led by Práxedes Mateo Sagasta who believed that reforms should now end and supported some of Cánovas del Castillo's ideas for a monarchical nation where individual rights were legislated, and those led by Manuel Ruiz Zorrilla (the Radicals) who supported the continuation of reforms, the non-legislation of individual rights and the transitional nature of the new monarchy towards a Republic. Trying to bring the balance of the Government Coalition within the Government proper, President Prim, who intended to keep the Progressives as the central party between the Unionists and the Democrats decided to replace Lorenzana and López de Ayala as Ministers of Home Affairs and Overseas with Democrats Cristino Martos and Manuel Becerra in July 1869, a move that earned him the Unionists' suspicions.


Of course, many in the Courts claimed that this was not the time to start reshuffling the government, but of looking for the new King of Spain. Now that things within the government had, at least partially, calmed down, Prim agreed to that, and accepted the Courts' choice for the members of the commission that would be in charge of determining and controlling the Government's actions. However, this was not of much help, because, as some comic strip drawers joked, the Commission had ten candidates and nine members.

The first candidate to be considered was Antoine d'Orléans, Duke of Montpensier, who had partially financed the revolutionary cause. Unfortunately for him, despite the support of part of the Unión Liberal, among them Navy Minister Topete, Prim and many others immediately rejected him because of his kinship ties to the recently dethroned Bourbons, both by marriage to Isabel II's younger sister and by blood (as he was part of the Borbon-Orléans dynasty), as well as the fact that he had not returned to Spain from his exile in Lisbon until the revolution triumphed, despite his presence being required as General Captain of the Spanish Army.

Other potential candidates considered from Spanish dynasties were the eternal Carlist pretender Carlos María de Borbón y Austria-Este, the one naturally preferred by the Carlists and the Catholic fundamentalists, who called him Carlos VII following the the Carlist line of succession, and Prince Alfonso de Borbón, son of Isabel II. Both were, naturally, rejected by the government, the former because he would never accept being a king without any actual power (in the words of Carlos de Borbón himself, I did not fight for my rights only to become the puppet of the Parliament) and the latter because he would be clearly influenced by his mother and those who had been at the former Queen's side.


Thus, it became clear that perhaps it might be better to start looking for other candidates out of Spain. Portugal, being the nearest nation, was the first place where a potential candidate was looked for and found: former Portuguese king Fernando de Coburgo, admired for his political impartiality and his already great experience in the matter, as he had been Consort King of Maria II and then Regent for his son Pedro V, who died without issue and was succeeded by his brother Luís I. His candidacy was supported by those who believed in the idea of an united Iberia, like Republican Nicolás Salmerón, but Fernando rejected it: he disliked the idea of unifying the Spanish and Portuguese crowns against the will of the people, he knew that such an attempt would immediately bring an answer from the British and, probably, the French government, and he had just married with opera singer Elisa Hensler, with whom he wished to have a quiet life, away from institutional roles.


Fernando's rejection meant that the search was continued, and the commission's eyes were cast at Italy, which had very recently been nearly unified by the Savoia dynasty. Two members of the family were sounded out: Amedeo di Savoia, second son of Italian king Vittorio Emmanuele II, and Tomasso Alberto di Savoia, Duke of Genoa. Amedeo, although somewhat tempted by the idea, rejected the throne, because the instability Spain had shown in the last decades made him wary of becoming the king of Spain: in everyone's mind was Maximilian I, Emperor of Mexico at France's behest, who had ended up shot by the Republicans when the Mexican Civil War ended. Meanwhile, the 13-year-old Duke of Genoa's candidacy was initially accepted by the Courts for 128 votes in favor and 52 against, and supported by the Duke of Montpensier as long as the pretender married one of his daughters, hoping to be able to have influence on the young man. However, in the end Tomasso's mother and the Italian government gave a refusal, arguing the Spanish instability as well, although some thought it could be revenge for Isabel's support of the Papal States in 1848 and the promises to Napoleon III to send Spanish troops to defend the Latium, the last territories held by the Pope.


The search for the new king constrained even more the political situation, especially in the aftermath of the Duke of Genoa's rejection, because Ruiz Zorrilla started to support the possibility of starting what he called a Liberal Dictatorship, in order to develop the newest aspects of the 1869 Constitution without waiting for the new King and without Unionist support. The intra-coalition division was fostered by Treasury Minister Laureano Figuerola's economical plans, who wished to establish a free trade plan to foment industrial and commercial growth with the elimination of tariffs, but this plan was opposed by the Unionists, the Radical Progressives and the protectionist Progressives, the latter of which wished to support the Catalan industries.


The search for the new king was further complicated when, on March 12th 1870, the Duke of Montpensier dueled and killed Infante Enrique de Borbón, brother of former Consort King Francisco de Asís de Borbón and another rejected candidate for the crown. Montpensier was exiled because of this assassination, and thus his hopes to become the King of Spain were shattered.


Some deputies, angry with the failures at finding a good King for Spain, suggested that the crown was given, not to a foreign prince, but to an actual Spanish hero. Thus, Juan Prim and Pascual Madoz wrote a letter to now retired General Baldomero Fernández Espartero, who had been Regent for Isabel II and was a hero among the lower and middle classes. His advanced age and lack of issue made him the favorite candidate of the Radical Progressives and the Republicans, because, after his death, the probability of Spain becoming a Republic was a greater one. However, the general declined the offer, arguing that he had chosen to retire from politics after the events of 1856, and he did not want to leave neither his ailing wife nor his beloved Logroño.


Due to the string of failures, the ravages from the bloody Cuban guerrilla war and the brutal repression of a Carlist uprising and a Federal Republican insurrection that had brought furious criticizing by the Republican and Democrat deputies, the Liberal Union tried to pass a motion of no confidence against Prim on May 19th, but Prim survived the motion thanks to the support of his party and the Democrats.

Meanwhile, the Radicals in the Government (among them Ruiz Zorrilla, who had been Minister of Public Works until July 1869, when he was shuffled to Justice, and then in January 1870 he became President of the Courts) had started a labor that wished to modernize Spain through their advanced policies: they approved liberty of professorship, the secularization of Spain (civil marriage was legalized), the liberalization of the market and several administrative and judicial reforms. These measures, although approved by the Courts, were constantly rejected by the Isabeline nostalgic deputies and the Carlists, as well as arousing distrust in the conservative sectors of the Liberal Union and the Progressive Party.

The search of a king continued unabated, although unsuccessful (Prim himself would famously state Finding a democrat king in Europe is harder than finding an atheist in Heaven!), which was strengthening the Republican position. Prim tried to win them by offering Emilio Castelar and Francisco Pi y Margall the positions of Minister of Treasury and Public Works, but both of them rejected the offer, believing that soon the monarchical regime would fail and Prim would have no other choice than to accept the proclamation of a Spanish Republic.

Having failed in Southern Europe, the commission started to look for potential candidates in Central Europe. There were many possibilities initially in there, due to the many political changes the last years had brought, but the requirements placed by Prim's government (that the candidate was Catholic, that he accepted to swear allegiance to the 1869 Constitution and that he did not meddle in the Spanish political life beyond his constitutional duties) ruled out many candidates: the Habsburg dynasty that ruled in Austria, although it had ties with the monarchs that had preceded the Bourbons, was rejected because of their traditionalism and Neo-Catholicism, especially that of the Austrian emperor Franz Joseph I; the Wittelsbach dynasty of Bavaria was also rejected, but this time due to the congenital madness most of its members suffered; and the Prussian Hohenzollerns, who, although seen as perfect thanks to the titanic job they had done in the last years by turning Prussia into Europe's emergent great power, mostly thanks to Chancellor Otto von Bismarck's negotiations, and slowly managing to unify all of Germany in one sovereign state, were not desired due to the fact that they were Protestants.


All of this seemed to corroborate President Prim's statement, but then, on June 21st 1870, an agent of the Spanish government in Berlin informed through telegraph of the existence of a candidate that would be perfect for the Spanish Crown.