The United Kingdom arouses mixed feelings in the Bourbons. The attendance of Felipe VI and Queen Letizia and Juan Carlos I and Queen Sofía at the funeral of Isabel II on Monday and at the previous reception this afternoon stages the long-awaited public reunion between a father and a son. Also between a husband and a wife who have lived 7,500 kilometers apart for two years. The visit of the four kings to London is also a new chapter in the long history between the Spanish Royal Family and the island country. In the last century and a half, England has witnessed transcendental moments for the House of Bourbon: it was the training ground for Alfonso XII and Don Juan, Count of Barcelona; shelter for Alfonso XIII and his money during exile; and scene of the romance between the then princes Juan Carlos de Borbón and Sofía de Grecia.
The city of the Thames gave birth to the Bourbon restoration. In 1874, Alfonso XII, son of the dethroned Elizabeth II and great-grandfather of the King Emeritus, took advantage of his stay at the Royal Military Academy of Sandhurst, 51 kilometers from the British capital, to write a manifesto in which he showed his willingness to become King of Spain. Inspired by English constitutionalism, he presented himself to the Spanish as a liberal and democratic claimant to the throne and a supporter of a constitutional monarchy. Less than a month later, he returned to Madrid and was proclaimed.
Thirty years later, in 1905, his son, Alfonso XIII, met his wife, Princess Victoria Eugenia of Battenberg, granddaughter of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom, in London. The meeting took place at a party organized by Edward VII in honor of the Spanish king, who was making his first official trip with the idea of marrying Patricia de Connaught, another granddaughter of the British monarch. However, he eventually ended up falling in love with Victoria Eugenia. “Will she remember me?” he asked her after that first date. “A visit from a king is never forgotten,” she replied. On May 31, 1906 they were married in Madrid in a ceremony that was marred by an anarchist attack a few meters from the Royal Palace. The bride and groom were unharmed by the bomb blast, but 23 people died.
The assassination attempt was a bad omen. Victoria Eugenia brought with her from the United Kingdom hemophilia, a inherited bleeding disorder that prevents blood from clotting properly. Two of the royal couple’s children, including the Prince of Asturias, were born hemophiliacs, a reason that eroded the couple’s relationship. The queen began spending time in London with her mother, Princess Beatrice of the United Kingdom, at Kensington Palace. After the proclamation of the Second Republic, on April 14, 1931, one of the first things Alfonso XIII did was travel to London. He stayed at Claridge’s hotel, where he gave his first interview as sovereign without a throne. He also asked George V for a favor: that his son Juan be admitted to the Dartmouth Naval School, the toughest and most demanding in the world. According to Luis María Ansón in his book Don Juanpublished in 1994, the count of Barcelona, father of the emeritus king, spent difficult months there due to his bad pronunciation in English.
London also played an important role in the finances of the Bourbons. The dethroned Alfonso XIII, who was a client of the English bank London County Westminster & Parr’s Bank under the name of the Duke of Toledo, had a lawsuit with several financial entities in that country to unlock part of the inheritance of his mother, Queen María Cristina. “The litigation, in which the amounts of money made up a nice total, were won by the king”, revealed Melchor de Almagro San Martín in his book Decline and end of a reignpublished in 1946. As explained by José María Zavala in The Heritage of the Bourbonsthe monarch had the equivalent of 48 million euros currently deposited in banks in the British capital and in Paris.
The Bourbons had an opportunity to reconnect with the Windsors in those years. Prince George of England, son of George V and Duke of Kent, courted the infantas Beatriz and Cristina, daughters of Alfonso XIII, but he turned back frightened by the threat of hemophilia. His fear was not unfounded. A few years later, the two hemophiliac sons of the King and Queen of Spain died of hemorrhages. The tragedy definitively broke the marriage of Alfonso and Victoria Eugenia. He settled in Rome and she bought a house at 34 Porchester Terrace, opposite London’s Kensington Palace.
In 1961, Juan Carlos I, grandson of Alfonso XIII and Victoria Eugenia, traveled to England to attend the wedding of Prince Edward, cousin of Elizabeth II and Duke of Kent, with the aristocrat Katharine Worsley. There he met Sofia from Greece and Denmark, whom he had met on the cruise agamemnonin 1954. The grandmother of the King Emeritus organized everything so that the young princes spent time together. Juanito Y Sophie I know They stayed at Claridge’s and hit it off from the start. They went to the cinema to see Exodus, the film about the founding of the State of Israel starring Paul Newman; they had tea and dinner at the Savoy Hotel; they shopped incognito in Mayfair; they danced at a party at Hovingham Hall; and they sat together at the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Kent. “It was then that we began to feel the pull of attractiveness,” Queen Sofía confessed to the journalist Pilar Urbano in 2008. After the Kent marriage, José Ibáñez Martín, Ambassador of Spain in Portugal, sent a report to the dictator Franco with some details about the incipient romance. A year later, the Spanish prince and the Greek princess were married in Athens.
Now, six decades after saying “I do” to European royalty, the emeritus kings meet again in London, once again under the watchful eye of the crowned heads of the continent. The scenario is the same, but the circumstances are less happy.
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