The First Carlist War: Origins

Abstract

Ferdinand VII described himself as a cork in a bottle of beer: as soon as that cork was removed, all the troubles of Spain would explode into the open. He is routinely considered the worst of all Spanish monarchs. Timid, mediocre and vindictive, his reign compounded such geopolitical disasters as the Peninsular War and the interconnected loss of Spain’s mainland American empire. During the Peninsular War (virtually all of which Ferdinand would sit out in the gilded captivity of France) a Liberal clique had emerged to dominate the politics of the Spanish Patriots who were fighting against France in the name of the captive King. This clique, led by such enlightened young nobles as Count Toreno, Agustin de Argüelles and Martínez de la Rosa, was besieged in Spain’s most bourgeois port-city, Cádiz, during 1810–12, crucial years in which the Liberals pointed to the repeated defeats sustained by the Patriot regular armies in the rest of Spain as evidence of the need for a ‘Great Leap Forward’ of political reform, the most iconic and advanced of which was the Constitution of 1812, also known as the Constitution of Cádiz, which would be adopted as a mascot by Spanish Radicals for much of the nineteenth century.1 During the whole of the Peninsular War the French army never conquered Cádiz, but bombarded it from afar on occasion, and this gave the Patriot Liberals the illusion that they were sharing the suffering of the rest of Spain.