Charles II of Spain

Charles II of Spain.

Charles II (Carlos Segundo) of Spain (November 6, 1661 – November 1, 1700) was king of Spain, Naples, and Sicily, nearly all of Italy (except Piedmont, the Papal States and Venice), and Spain's overseas Empire, stretching from Mexico to the Philippines. Charles was the only surviving son of his Habsburg predecessor, King Philip IV of Spain and his second Queen (and niece), Mariana of Austria, another Habsburg. His birth was greeted with joy by the Spaniards, who feared the disputed succession which could have ensued if Philip IV had left no male heir.

Carlos Segundo is known in Spanish history as El Hechizado ("The Bewitched") from the popular belief — to which Charles himself subscribed — that his physical and mental disabilities were caused by "sorcery" rather than the much more likely cause: centuries of inbreeding within European families (in which first cousin and uncle/niece matches were commonly used to preserve a prosperous family's hold on its multifarious territories. Charles' own immediate pedigree was exceptionally loaded with nieces giving birth to children of their uncles: Charles' mother Maria Anna was niece of Charles' father, being daughter of Maria Ana of Spain (1606-46) and Emperor Ferdinand III - Thus, Empress Maria Anna was simultaneously his aunt and grandmother) — especially the Spanish Habsburgs. Still, the king was exorcised, and the exorcists of the kingdom were called upon to put straight questions to the devils they cast out. His great-great-great grandmother, Juana I, La Loca, mother of the greatest of the Habsburgs — the Spanish King Charles I who was also Holy Roman Emperor Charles V — became completely insane early in life; the fear of a taint of insanity ran through the Habsburgs.

Charles II was the last of the Spanish Habsburg dynasty, physically disabled, mentally retarded and disfigured (possibly through affliction with mandibular prognathism). His tongue was so large that his speech could barely be understood, and he frequently drooled. He may also have suffered from the bone disease acromegaly. Charles was sadly weak in mind and body, barely able to walk and speak. He was treated as virtually an infant in arms until he was ten years old. Fearing the frail child would be overtaxed, he was left entirely uneducated, and his indolence was indulged to such an extent that he was not even expected to be clean. When his brother John of Austria the Younger, a natural son of Philip IV, obtained power by exiling the queen mother from court, he insisted that at least the king's hair should be combed.

The only touch of manhood shown by Charles was a taste for shooting, which he occasionally indulged in the preserves of the Escorial.

Reign

Charles II in his twenties

The years of Charles II were agonizing for Spain. The economy was stagnant, there was hunger in the land, and the power of the monarchy over the various Spanish provinces was extremely weak. Charles' unfitness for rule meant he was often ignored and power during his reign became the subject of court intrigues and foreign, particularly French, influence.

His mother was his regent during much of his reign. Though she was exiled by the king's illegitimate brother John of Austria the Younger, she returned to the regency after John's death in 1679.

During Charles' reign, the decline of Spanish power and prestige that had begun under his incompetent father and grandfather accelerated. Although a peace treaty with Portugal in 1668 ceded the North African enclave of Ceuta to Spain, it was little solace for the loss of Portugal and the Portuguese colonies by Philip IV to the Duke of Braganza's successful revolt against more than 60 years of Habsburg rule.

Charles also presided over the greatest auto de fe in the history of the Spanish Inquisition in 1680, in which one hundred twenty prisoners were judged and twenty-one burnt to death. A large, richly adorned book was published celebrating the event. Toward the end of his life, in one of his few independent acts as King, Charles created a Junta Magna (Great Council) to examine and investigate the Spanish Inquisition. The report was so damning to the "Holy Office" (as the Spanish Inquisition was commonly known) that the Inquisitor General convinced the decrepit monarch to "consign the 'terrible indictment' to the flames" (Durants, 1963). When Philip V took the throne, he called for the report; no copy could be found.

The Succession: Failure and Aftermath

In 1679, the 18-year-old Charles II married Marie Louise of Orleans (1662-1689), daughter of Philippe I of Orléans, the only brother of Louis XIV, and at that time a comely young woman. He proved impotent and no children were born. Marie Louise became deeply depressed and morbidly obese and died at age 27, ten years after her marriage, leaving a distraught 28-year-old Charles. Still in desperate need of a male heir, the next year he married 23-year-old Maria Anna of Pfalz-Neuburg, a daughter of Philipp Wilhelm, Elector Palatine and sister-in-law of his uncle Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor. However, this marriage was no more successful than the first in producing the much desired heir.

Towards the end of his life Charles became increasingly hypersensitive and strange, at one point demanding that the bodies of his family be exhumed so he could look upon the corpses. He reportedly wept upon viewing the body of his first wife, Marie Louise.

As the American historians Will and Ariel Durant put it, "[Charles II] was [s]hort, lame, epileptic, senile, and completely bald before thirty-five, he was always on the verge of death, but repeatedly baffled Christendom by continuing to live."

When Charles II died in 1700 the line of the Spanish Habsburgs died with him. He had named a grand nephew of his first wife, Philippe de Bourbon, Duke of Anjou (a grandson of the reigning French king Louis XIV, the latter himself an heir to the Spanish throne through his mother, daughter of Phillip III, and his wife, daughter of Phillip IV, also father of Charles II), as his successor. He had named his blood cousin Charles (from the Austrian branch of the Habsburg dynasty) as alternate successor.

The spector of the multi-continental empire of Spain passing under the effective control of Louis XIV provoked a massive coalition of powers to oppose the Duc d'Anjou's succession. The actions of Louis heightened the fears of the English, the Dutch and the Austrians, among others. In February of 1701, the French King caused the Parlement of Paris (the French Supreme Court) to register a decree that should Louis himself have no heir that the Duc d'Anjou--Phillip V of Spain--would surrender the Spanish throne for that of the French, ensuring dynastic continuity in Europe's greatest land power.

However, a second act of the French King "justified a hostile interpretation": pursuant to a treaty with Spain, Louis occupied several towns in the then "Spanish Netherlands" (modern Belgium). This was the spark that ignited the power keg created by the unresolved issues of the War of the League of Augsburg (1689-98) and the acceptance of the Spanish inheritance by Louis XIV for his grandson.

Almost immediately the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-1713) began. After eleven years of bloody, global warfare, fought on four continents and three oceans, the Duc d'Anjou, as Phillip V, was confirmed as King of Spain on substaintially the same terms which the powers of Europe had agreed to before the war. Thus the Treaties of Utrecht and Rastadt ended the war and "achieved little more than...diplomacy might have peacefull achieve in 1701. A proviso of the peace perpetually forbade the union of the Spanish and French thrones.

The Bourbon dynasty (see House of Bourbon) founded by Philip V has intermittantly occupied the Spanish throne ever since. And today, sits on the Spanish throne in the person of Juan Carlos I of Spain (1975-present).

References

• Will Durant The Reformation (1957)
• Will and Ariel Durant, The Age of Louis XIV (1963)
• Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition (1997)
• NNDB: Charles II