When a congressional commission suggested to the eighteen-year-old King Alfonso that he marry, he replied that he would personally look for the right candidate during his travels. The tasting had started. The Queen Mother suggested that he choose an Austrian or German woman with a shrill voice and an exuberant physique, the kind who can carry a dozen giant mugs of beer in one hand, but the monarch seemed more inclined to the British species and to be related to the one with whom he lived. was still the first world power.
The King of Spain coincided on June 4, 1905 with the very attractive Victoria Patricia de Connaught, granddaughter of Queen Victoria, at a party in London. Alfonso fell for her charms, but she, in love with another, unceremoniously rejected him invoking the lack of physical attraction. “Am I really that ugly?” asked the depressed Monarch, tasting the taste of rejection. Not that he was an Adonis, but beauty was secondary to someone with such an overwhelming personality and so many spotlights.
a romantic story
After shaking off the smell of failure, the Monarch went on that same trip to a gala dinner at Buckingham Palace, where he met another granddaughter of Victoria, Victoria Eugenie of BattenbergEven prettier, with ash-blonde hair that seemed almost white, blue eyes, and an imperial face. The young woman everyone knew as Ena was half engaged to a Russian duke and did not have the title of royal highness because her paternal grandfather had married a simple countess. Impediments that did not stop Alfonso from starting the courtship with the Englishwoman.
Ena did not hesitate to let herself be loved, although later she would confess that she did not find him handsome either. Yes «very thin, very southern, very happy, very nice». In Spain there was some opposition to the wedding, given her Protestant status, her lack of lineage and, above all, the fear that the future monarch had inherited hemophilia from her grandmother Victoria, a little-known disease that causes coagulation problems. of the blood and is manifested by persistent bleeding.
The Queen and the King photographed by Julio Duque
Alfonso XIII decided once again to swim against the current. In early January 1906 he drove to the Villa Mouriscot, the family’s summer mansion in Biarritz, and formally proposed to Victoria Eugenia, giving her a heart of rubies surrounded by diamonds. That and other details of the master of seduction, such as giving her an orange tree full of fruit in a large pot, conquered Ena’s heart of flesh, and she accepted the strict conditions for her conversion to Catholicism. Among the sentences that she was forced to read the new queen of Spain in an act in Miramar Palace (San Sebastián) there were some as harsh as these: «I am greatly sorry for having failed, considering that I have held and believed doctrines opposed to his teachings», «I detest and abjure all errors, heresies and sects contrary to what the Church says catholic”.
Ena readily agreed to this act of surrender and practiced Catholicism for the rest of her life, although, according to her own mother, she remained Protestant in her heart and maintained “the uncomfortable feeling of having betrayed the faith of her family, of her ancestors.” and friends”. the king of englandEduardo VII, granted his relative the treatment of royal highness and the title of princess of Great Britain and Ireland to circumvent the restrictive rules of Carlos III against unequal marriages. With a clear path for the wedding, it was held on May 31 of that same year in the Church of San Jerónimo in Madrid.
The entourage made up of nineteen royal carriages, twenty-two great ones from Spain and kings from all over Europe passed through number 88 of Calle Mayor when a roar was heard
The groom, dressed in the dress uniform of a captain general, waited impatiently at the altar for the bride, who was thirty-five minutes late before revealing her white satin gown embroidered in silver, dotted with lilies and orange blossoms and with a tail over four meters long. After the religious ceremony, the wedding procession headed for the Royal Palace, greeting the thousands of people who had gathered in the streets decorated to indigestion. The entourage made up of nineteen royal carriages, twenty-two great ones from Spain and kings from all over Europe passed through the number 88 of the main street when a crash was heard. Twenty-three people, including guards and onlookers, died and a hundred were injured by a bomb that an anarchist named Mateo Morral, somewhat myopic, threw from a window camouflaged in a bouquet of flowers.
The windows of the royal carriage were blown up and the shrapnel from the bomb broke the Collar of Carlos III that Alfonso wore. “It’s nothing, it’s nothing,” the king reassured everyone, while helping Victoria Eugenia, whose wedding dress was stained with blood, to get into the car of respect between the entrails of horses and humans. With great aplomb, the newlywed asked for messages to be sent to his mother and his mother-in-law that they were both well, and he instructed them to take him “slowly, very slowly, towards the palace.” In this guise they appeared at a reception, in honor of the dead, which he substituted out of respect for the banquet. Still terrified, they ate the wedding cake, a tradition imported from England by the bride, made with crème glacée and sponge cake and with weighing three hundred kilos.
The palace revolution
Adapting to Spain and her Austrian mother-in-law cost the British woman a life, who broke something with the sticky etiquette of the court and achieved small personal victories such as imposing a family meal on Sundays. Four years of crying she took to get them replaced uncomfortable fireplaces for heating.
Alfonso and Victoria Eugenia at the time of their wedding.
In the same way, Spain also had a hard time adapting to that very modern Queen of hers, who wore a fashionable skirt in front of the rancid noble fatherlands who continued to wear it down to her feet. Victoria Eugenia wore makeup, sunbathed on the beach in a bathing suit, and was educated in sports such as golf, tennis, and polo. If all these customs bristled the elders of the place, it seemed to the younger aristocrats as if a unicorn in a leather jacket had entered the scene. They did not hesitate to imitate the fashions of that so rumbera queen.
Like her husband, who had been a compulsive smoker since he was sixteen, it was rare to see Victoria Eugenia without a cigarette in his fingers during his leisure periods. She liked the small Havana or Dutch cigars, while he preferred to consume the black tobacco that was made in the Canary Islands, over the French one, which was too strong for him, and the blond American one, to which he never got used to. The Queen showed the old and the young that smoking was also a thing for ladies, and not just for loose women.
Alfonso’s unpleasant habit of swarming with women to whom he was not married broke the trust between husband and wife, but it was not an antler from the height of Big Ben what truly distanced the marriage. Illnesses made happiness incompatible in that family. The doctors discovered that the first and third sons carried the terrible hemophilia of his mother’s family.
Despite the contempt she ended up feeling towards Alfonso, the Queen fulfilled her responsibilities and only in the last years of the reign did she give up having a marital life with him.
The unfortunate Victoria Eugenia only found consolation in alcohol for the constant humiliation of seeing that her husband’s legion of bastard children enjoyed better health than her children. Despite the contempt that she ended up feeling towards Alfonso, the Queen fulfilled her responsibilities and only in the last years of her reign did she give up having a marital life with him. She took refuge in travel and charity work, especially with the Red Cross, to get away from that depressing environment. In 1926, she starred in a magazine advertisement for the cream company Pond’s, banned in Spain, whose emoluments he invested in the most needy. Not surprising, considering that her grandmother Queen Victoria was a pioneer in the commodification of royalty by allowing her image to be used on plates, mugs and business cards (carte de visite).
When the exile freed Alfonso and Victoria Eugenie to live each one in a corner of the continent, the Queen took the whim of telling her husband what he had been silent for almost thirty years. “I don’t want to see your ugly face again,” the Englishwoman let out when her presumptuous husband asked her to choose between him or her friends. However, the Queen traveled to Rome during the final agony of her husband, in February 1941, and then returned to Lausannewhere he lived the rest of his life in contact with his grandchildren and some children.