Great Captain would become too independent, and watched them in the interest of the royal authority. Whether he ever boasted, as he is said to have boasted, that he had deceived Louis XII. of France twelve times, is very doubtful; but it is certain that when Ferdinand made a treaty, or came to an understanding with any one, the contract was generally found to contain implied meanings favourable to himself which the other contracting party had not expected. The worst of his character was prominently shown after the death of Isabella in 1504. He endeavoured to lay hands on the regency of Castile in the name of his insane daughter Joanna, and without regard to the claims of her husband Philip of Habsburg. The hostility of the Castilian nobles, by whom he was disliked, baffled him for a time, but on Philip’s early death he reasserted his authority. His second marriage with Germaine of Foix in 1505 was apparently contracted in the hope that by securing an heir male he might punish his Habsburg son-in-law. Aragon did not recognize the right of women to reign, and would have been detached together with Catalonia, Valencia and the Italian states if he had had a son. This was the only occasion on which Ferdinand allowed passion to obscure his political sense, and lead him into acts which tended to undo his work of national unification. As king of Aragon he abstained from inroads on the liberties of his subjects which might have provoked rebellion. A few acts of illegal violence are recorded of him—as when he invited a notorious demagogue of Saragossa to visit him in the palace, and caused the man to be executed without form of trial. Once when presiding over the Aragonese cortes he found himself sitting in a thorough draught and ordered the window to be shut, adding in a lower voice, “If it is not against the fueros.” But his ill-will did not go beyond such sneers. He was too intent on building up a great state to complicate his difficulties by internal troubles. His arrangement of the convention of Guadalupe, which ended the fierce Agrarian conflicts of Catalonia, was wise and profitable to the country, though it was probably dictated mainly by a wish to weaken the landowners by taking away their feudal rights. Ferdinand died at Madrigalejo in Estremadura on the 23rd of February 1516.
The lives of the kings of this name before Ferdinand V. are contained in the chronicles, and in the Anales de Aragon of Zurita, and the History of Spain by Mariana. Both deal at length with the life of Ferdinand V. Prescott’s History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, in any of its numerous editions, gives a full life of him with copious references to authorities.
FERDINAND VI., king of Spain (1713–1759), second son of
Philip V., founder of the Bourbon dynasty, by his first marriage
with Maria Louisa of Savoy, was born at Madrid on the 23rd
of September 1713. His youth was depressed. His father’s
second wife, Elizabeth Farnese, was a managing woman, who
had no affection except for her own children, and who looked
upon her stepson as an obstacle to their fortunes. The hypochondria
of his father left Elizabeth mistress of the palace.
Ferdinand was married in 1729 to Maria Magdalena Barbara,
daughter of John V. of Portugal. The very homely looks of his
wife were thought by observers to cause the prince a visible
shock when he was first presented to her. Yet he became deeply
attached to his wife, and proved in fact nearly as uxorious as his
father. Ferdinand was by temperament melancholy, shy and
distrustful of his own abilities. When complimented on his
shooting, he replied, “It would be hard if there were not something
I could do.” As king he followed a steady policy of neutrality
between France and England, and refused to be tempted
by the offers of either into declaring war on the other. In his
life he was orderly and retiring, averse from taking decisions,
though not incapable of acting firmly, as when he cut short the
dangerous intrigues of his able minister Ensenada by dismissing
and imprisoning him. Shooting and music were his only
pleasures, and he was the generous patron of the famous singer
Farinelli (q.v.), whose voice soothed his melancholy. The death
of his wife Barbara, who had been devoted to him, and who carefully
abstained from political intrigue, broke his heart. Between
the date of her death in 1758 and his own on the 10th of August
1759 he fell into a state of prostration in which he would not
even dress, but wandered unshaven, unwashed and in a night-gown
about his park. The memoirs of the count of Fernan
Nuñez give a shocking picture of his death-bed.
A good account of the reign and character of Ferdinand VI. will be found in vol. iv. of Coxe’s Memoirs of the Kings of Spain of the House of Bourbon (London, 1815). See also Vida de Carlos III., by the count of Fernan Nuñez, ed. M. Morel Fatio and Don A. Paz y Melia (1898).
FERDINAND VII., king of Spain (1784–1833), the eldest son
of Charles IV., king of Spain, and of his wife Maria Louisa of
Parma, was born at the palace of San Ildefonso near Balsain in
the Somosierra hills, on the 14th of October 1784. The events
with which he was connected were many, tragic and of the widest
European interest. In his youth he occupied the painful position
of an heir apparent who was carefully excluded from all share in
government by the jealousy of his parents, and the prevalence
of a royal favourite. National discontent with a feeble government
produced a revolution in 1808 by which he passed to the
throne by the forced abdication of his father. Then he spent
years as the prisoner of Napoleon, and returned in 1814 to find
that while Spain was fighting for independence in his name a new
world had been born of foreign invasion and domestic revolution.
He came back to assert the ancient doctrine that the sovereign
authority resided in his person only. Acting on this principle he
ruled frivolously, and with a wanton indulgence of whims. In
1820 his misrule provoked a revolt, and he remained in the hands
of insurgents till he was released by foreign intervention in 1823.
When free, he revenged himself with a ferocity which disgusted
his allies. In his last years he prepared a change in the order of
succession established by his dynasty in Spain, which angered
a large part of the nation, and made a civil war inevitable.
We have to distinguish the part of Ferdinand VII. in all these
transactions, in which other and better men were concerned.
It can confidently be said to have been uniformly base. He had
perhaps no right to complain that he was kept aloof from all
share in government while only heir apparent, for this was the
traditional practice of his family. But as heir to the throne
he had a right to resent the degradation of the crown he was to
inherit, and the power of a favourite who was his mother’s lover.
If he had put himself at the head of a popular rising he would
have been followed, and would have had a good excuse. His
course was to enter on dim intrigues at the instigation of his first
wife, Maria Antonietta of Naples. After her death in 1806 he
was drawn into other intrigues by flatterers, and, in October
1807, was arrested for the conspiracy of the Escorial. The
conspiracy aimed at securing the help of the emperor Napoleon.
When detected, Ferdinand betrayed his associates, and grovelled
to his parents. When his father’s abdication was extorted by a
popular riot at Aranjuez in March 1808, he ascended the throne—not
to lead his people manfully, but to throw himself into the
hands of Napoleon, in the fatuous hope that the emperor would
support him. He was in his turn forced to make an abdication
and imprisoned in France, while Spain, with the help of England,
fought for its life. At Valançay, where he was sent as a prisoner
of state, he sank contentedly into vulgar vice, and did not scruple
to applaud the French victories over the people who were suffering
unutterable misery in his cause. When restored in March
1814, on the fall of Napoleon, he had just cause to repudiate the
impracticable constitution made by the cortes without his
consent. He did so, and then governed like an evil-disposed
boy—indulging the merest animal passions, listening to a small
camarilla of low-born favourites, changing his ministers every
three months, and acting on the impulse of whims which were
sometimes mere buffoonery, but were at times lubricous, or
ferocious. The autocratic powers of the Grand Alliance, though
forced to support him as the representative of legitimacy in Spain,
watched his proceedings with disgust and alarm. “The king,”
wrote Gentz to the hospodar Caradja on the 1st of December
1814, “himself enters the houses of his first ministers, arrests
them, and hands them over to their cruel enemies”; and again,
on the 14th of January 1815, “The king has so debased himself
that he has become no more than the leading police agent and
gaoler of his country.” When at last the inevitable revolt came
