![]() Don Valentin has an audience of the king for no king can be more accessible than Ferdinand. The day at length comes, but the money comes not with it. These claims were readily admitted, and an early day appointed for their liquidation. “ He now presented his various claims to government, for damages suffered by loss of trade, and for the expenses of the journey, including the subsistence of the foot-soldiers who had served as escort, which he had defrayed from his own purse. Still, things go well and Valentin returns to Madrid with the booty which is then returned to the king. He’s left with no option but to sell up all his stock and close up shop, losing his small remaining source of income. If he goes to recover the loot, he’ll need to leave his shop in the hands of his employees, who, he suspects will fleece him of all his possessions in the wink of an eye, but he cannot deny the king. Valentin is in a bit of a no win situation here. Would he go and recover this for the king? He’s heard that Don Valentin knows where some retreating French soldiers hid a horde of “plate and other valuables” stolen from the royal palace. He then opens up a shop selling fabric, until the king calls him in for a chat. First off Don Valentin, a pretty hardy entrepreneurial type, opens a reading room in the downstairs of his residence of Puerta del Sol, but this quickly gets stomped on as the free press is closed down. ![]() Take, for instance, the case of MacKenzie’s landlord, Don Valentin, a nobleman from Rioja who, has fallen on increasingly hard times as Ferdinand’s rule progresses. ![]() Pretty standard for a royal, you might think, but he goes on to be so outrageously mendacious in his treatment of them that you’re left completely gobsmacked. This sums up his attitude to Spaniards beautifully: in all the accounts I’ve read of Ferdinand, it’s clear that he was totally lacking in empathy for his own subjects. “ The Catholic king … glances round on the multitude with a look of mingled apathy and good-humour, and salutes them mechanically by putting his hand up towards his nose and taking it down again, as though he were brushing the flies away.” Lets kick off with a royal procession down the Prado in the winter of 1828 in which MacKenzie gets his first glimpse of the king: MacKenzie witnessed firsthand the horrifying atmosphere in the capital during Ferdinand’s rule and his intimate account really conjures up the oppressive atmosphere of the day. What followed was a horribly repressive rule which saw the reinstatement of the Inquisition, the closure of the free press and a witch hunt for liberal sympathisers.įerdinand’s utter despicableness has always been pretty obvious to me, but it really came vividly to life after reading A Year in Spain by American naval officer Alexander Slidell MacKenzie. Appearing to capitulate he then called in foreign troops to finally crush Spain’s hopes of ever having a parliament. This unsurprisingly provoked democratically-minded liberals to rise up against him. He then went on to screw over the loyal subjects who had fought and died for him by ripping up the Constitution of Cadiz written in his absence and demanding a return to old-fashioned absolutist rule. While his subjects suffered terribly, this slug of a man managed to slither unscathed in and out of Napoleon’s conquest of Spain agreeing to whatever was asked of him in exchange for a gilded imprisonment in a French palace. Grandson to Spain’s most awesome king Charles III, Ferdinand VII, was without a shadow of a doubt Spain’s worst ever king.
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