Ferdinand VI of Spain

Ferdinand VI of Spain, called "the Prudent" or "the Just" (Madrid, September 23, 1713-Villaviciosa de Odón, August 10, 1759), was King of Spain from 1746 until his death. He was the fourth son of Felipe V and his first wife María Luisa Gabriela de Saboya. He married Bárbara de Braganza in the Cathedral of San Juan Bautista in Badajoz in 1729, who was Queen of Spain until her death in 1758.

Prince of Asturias

When Fernando was born on September 23, 1713 —being baptized without great solemnity in the Franciscan church of San Gil, on December 4— he was ahead of him in succession to the throne by two older brothers Luis and Felipe Pedro, born in 1707 and 1712, respectively—a third brother, older than he, had died in 1709 shortly after birth. But when he was six years old, Felipe Pedro died, so Fernando was second in succession after the Prince of Asturias, Luis, six years older than him.

Ferdinand's childhood was marked by the fact that his mother, Queen María Luisa Gabriela of Saboya, died five months after his birth, and that his father remarried seven months after being widowed with the Princess of the Duchy of Parma, Isabella of Farnese, who bore her six children who prospered —the first was Infante Carlos, born on January 20, 1716. Thus, the new queen was more concerned about the fate and future of her own children — devoting all his efforts to getting them a state of their own in Italy over which they could reign, which largely determined the foreign policy of the Monarchy of Felipe V during the following decades—than that of his stepsons. In addition, the rigid protocol of the court prevented the direct contact of the princes with the kings —they did not eat together, nor did they attend official acts with their parents—, so Luis and Fernando communicated with their father —and with their stepmother— through through letters written in French, which was the language used by the family.

In 1721, after reaching the age of seven, the infante Fernando was endowed with «a separate room so that only men serve and assist him, and for the care of his person, his assistance and education [the king] has resolved appoint the count of Salazar, with the title of governor of the house of S.A.".

Portrait of the infant Fernando when he was ten years old, work of the camera painter Jean Ranc (1723)

What definitively changed the fate of the Infante Fernando were the events that occurred in 1724, during which he was close to becoming king at the age of ten. On January 10, 1724, King Philip V signed a decree by the one who abdicated in his seventeen-year-old son Luis, married to Luisa Isabel de Orleans, two years his junior, but Luis I of Spain reigned for only eight months since in mid-August he fell ill with smallpox and died on the 31st. Having abdicated Felipe V, his successor should have been Fernando but the rapid action of Queen Isabel de Farnesio prevented it. Isabel de Farnesio had to face certain sectors of the Castilian nobility who supported the option of Prince Ferdinand arguing that there was no room for reversing the abdication of a king and it was difficult for her to convince the king himself to reign again, but on the 7th On September 1724, a week after the death of Luis I, Felipe V once again held the Crown of the Spanish Monarchy, and Fernando was proclaimed the new Prince of Asturias and sworn in on November 25 by the Cortes of Castilla, summoned for this purpose.

For most of the twenty-two years that he was Prince of Asturias (1724-1746), Fernando and his wife, the Portuguese princess Bárbara de Braganza, whom he had married in January 1728, lived isolated from the court and with restricted visits. The 1733 order of "this kind of house arrest" of the princes, as the historian Pedro Voltes called it, came from Queen Isabel de Farnesio, who wanted to prevent them from maintaining contact with the "casticistas" and "rebellious" groups of the Castilian nobility and the court, who advocated a new abdication of Felipe, whose mental health continued to deteriorate.

Thus, the regulation of conduct of the Prince of Asturias approved in the summer of 1733 —shortly after the return of the court to Madrid after wandering around Seville and other Andalusian towns during the previous five years to try to restore health mental and physical of the king - determined that "don Fernando and doña Bárbara could each be visited by only four people, whose name and position were indicated. They could not receive other ambassadors than those of France and Portugal. Princes should not eat in public or go for a walk or go to any temple or convent. [...] The prince's attendance at the Council of Government and any office with him was also suppressed, and especially any dealings with [the "prime minister"] Patiño and the ministers, and, in short, all his visits to his parents".

During the last years of his reign, Philip V's mental illness and physical deterioration worsened —“even chamber painters such as Jean Ranc and Van Loo had had to portray the king's decrepitude, bloated and clumsy, with bowed legs and a lost gaze»—, until on the night of July 9, 1746, he died of a cerebrovascular attack. Barely a week after the death of his father, the new King Fernando VI ordered his stepmother, the widowed queen Isabel de Farnesio, to leave the royal palace of Buen Retiro and go live in a house owned by the Duchess of Osuna, accompanied by her children, the infants Luis and María Antonia. The following year she was banished from Madrid and her residence was established in the palace of La Granja de San Ildefonso —when the widowed queen protested by means of a letter in which she told the king that "I would like to know if I have lacked something in order to amend it." », Fernando VI responded with another letter in which he said: «What I determine in my kingdoms does not admit consultation of anyone before being executed and obeyed».

The Reign

Great weapons of Felipe V with real mantle, royal cimera of Castile and the motto «To solis ortu usque ad occasum» (From sunrise to sunset), derived from the famous phrase attributed to Philip II: «In my domains the sun is not set», referring to the fact that the sun never stood in the Spanish territories, as they covered the two hemispheres. Also included is the word Santiagoin reference to the Holy Pattern of Spain, Santiago el Mayor, and more specifically to the traditional motto «Santiago and close Spain». Used by Fernando VI to the death of his father.

When he came to the throne, Spain was immersed in the war of the Austrian succession, which ended shortly after (Peace of Aachen, 1748) without any benefit for Spain. He began his reign by removing the influence of the Dowager Queen Isabella of Farnese and her group of Italian courtiers. Once peace was established, the king promoted a policy of neutrality and peace abroad to enable a set of internal reforms. The new protagonists of these reforms were the Francophile Marquis de la Ensenada; and José de Carvajal y Lancaster, supporter of the alliance with Great Britain. The struggle between the two ended in 1754 when Carvajal died and Ensenada fell, Ricardo Wall becoming the new strong man of the monarchy.

On August 30, 1749, Fernando VI authorized a persecution in order to arrest and extinguish the gypsies of the kingdom, known as the Great Raid.

By the ordinance of July 2, 1751, he prohibited Freemasonry.

The Ensenada projects

Fernando VI de España

Some of the most important projects during the reign were carried out by the Marquis de la Ensenada, Secretary of the Treasury, the Navy and the Indies. He raised the participation of the State for the modernization of the country. For this, it was necessary to maintain a position of strength abroad so that France and Great Britain considered Spain as an ally, without this implying a resignation from Gibraltar.

Among the projects of the Marquis de la Ensenada we find:

• The new model of the Treasury, proposed by Ensenada in 1749. It tried to replace traditional taxes with a single tax, the cadastre, which taxed in proportion to the economic capacity of each taxpayer. He also proposed the reduction of the State ' s economic subsidy to the Courts and the army. The opposition of the nobility caused the project to be abandoned.
• The creation of the Giro Real in 1752, a bank to favor transfers of public and private funds outside Spain. Thus, all foreign exchange operations were held by the Royal Treasury, which benefited the State. He can be considered the predecessor of the Bank of San Carlos, who was instituted during the reign of Carlos III.
• The impulse of American trade, which sought to end the monopoly of the Indies and eliminate the injustices of colonial trade. This was supported by registration ships in front of the fleet system. The new system consisted of replacing the fleets and gallons so that a Spanish boat, upon authorization, could freely trade with America. This increased revenue and decreased fraud. Even so, this system provoked many protests in private sector traders.
• The modernization of the marine. A powerful marine was fundamental to a power with an overseas empire and aspirations to be respected by France and Great Britain. To this end, the Marquis of the Ensenada increased the budget and expanded the capacity of the shipyards of Cadiz, Ferrol, Cartagena and Havana, which meant the starting point of the Spanish naval power in the centuryXVIII.
• The relations with the Church, which were very tense since the beginning of the reign of Philip V because of the recognition of the Archduke Carlos as king of Spain by the Pope. A royalist policy pursued both the fiscal and political objective and the decisive achievement of which was Concordat of 1753. For this reason the right of Pope Benedict XIV was obtained Universal patronagewhich brought important economic benefits to the Crown and great control over the clergy.
• Cultural flowering with the creation in 1752 of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando.
• General Gypsies Prison, an attempt to exterminate Gypsies through their arrest and subsequent separation of men and women, forcing them to work in shipyards and mines and women in factories. Children under 14 years of age were placed in religious institutions.

The family of Felipe V (1743) Louis-Michel van Loo. From left to right: Mariana Victoria, Princess of Brazil; Barbara, Princess of Asturias; Fernando, Prince of Asturias; King Philip V; Infante Luis (future count of Chinchón); Queen Isabel Farnesio; Infante Felipe (futuro duque de Parma); Luisa Isabel de France; Infanta María Teresa Rafaela; Infanta María Antonia Fernanda; Maria Amalia, Queen of Naples and Sicily; Carlos, The two children in the foreground are Princess Maria Isabel Ana of Naples and Sicily and Isabel de Borbón-Parma (son of the future Duke of Parma).

Carvajal's foreign policy

During the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years' War, Spain strengthened its military might.

The main conflict was the confrontation with Portugal over the Sacramento colony, from which British smuggling was facilitated through the Río de la Plata. José de Carvajal managed in 1750 through the Treaty of Madrid for Portugal to renounce such a colony and its claim to free navigation on the Río de la Plata.

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  1534
  Brazil according to the Tordesillas Treaty.

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  1750
  Brazil according to the Madrid Treaty.

The Jesuit ruins of Son Miguel, in the Rio Grande del Sur.

In exchange, Spain ceded to Portugal two areas on the Brazilian border, one in the Amazon and the other in the south, where seven of the thirty Guarani reductions of the Jesuits were located, later called Misiones Orientales or Seven Towns. The Spanish had to expel the Jesuit missionaries and when the Seven Towns and smaller reductions in the south passed into Portuguese hands, they suffered looting, massacres, and were forced to abandon and rebuild amid territorial disputes between the Portuguese and Spanish crowns, culminating in the Guaranítica War.

The conflict over the reductions caused a crisis in the Spanish Court. Ensenada, favorable to the Jesuits, and Father Rávago, the king's confessor and member of the Society of Jesus, were dismissed, accused of hindering the agreements with Portugal.

Conflict with the Holy See

The illustrated Valencian Gregorio Mayans.

After signing the "concordat of 1737" the negotiation provided for in its article 23 "to amicably end the controversy over the Board of Trustees" was launched. The conversations were initiated by Cardinal Molina himself but after his death he was replaced by Felipe V's confessor, the French Jesuit Jaime A. Fèbre, who had the support of Blas Jover, prosecutor of the Chamber of Castile. In 1745, this in turn appealed to the enlightened Valencian jurist Gregorio Mayans who wrote an Examen del Concordat de 1737 in which he denied its validity based on the defense of royalist episcopalism, and bringing up again the antecedent of the Councils of Toledo of the Visigothic period in which the royal patronage over the Church would have been approved, for which reason the Spanish kings did not need pontifical approval to exercise their power over the Church of their domains, in exercise of royalties which the sovereign could not renounce. After the death of Felipe V and the accession to the throne of Fernando VI, the negotiations with Rome began to be led by the royal confessor, the Jesuit Francisco Rábago y Noriega, and the Marquis of Ensenada, who, outside of the official conversations, entered into some secret negotiations, of which only King Ferdinand VI, Pope Benedict XIV and the Pontifical Secretary of State, Cardinal Valenti Gonzaga, were aware of, in addition to Rábago and Ensenada.

It was this secret route, of which neither the Secretary of State and Office Carvajal nor the nuncio who led the "official" negotiations were aware, that led to the signing of the Concordat of 1753. The Pope refused to recognize the universal patronage as a royalty of the Crown —the thesis supported by the Spanish Monarchy, supported by the Mayans writing—, but he accepted the dominion of the Crown over the ecclesiastical benefits —which implied the recognition of fact of universal patronage—, except for 52 that was "reserved" precisely as proof that it was a pontifical grace. In this way, according to Mestre and Pérez García, "the greatest triumph of Spanish regalism was achieved. Apart from the fact that the patronage was not accepted as a royalty, the concessions were of such a caliber that the power of the monarch over the Spanish Church was absolute and complete: appointment of bishops, canons or ecclesiastical benefits, which came to depend on the will of the monarch".

The concordat of 1753 opened a new stage in Church-State relations, but the Episcopalian and conciliarist objective pursued by some royalists and enlightened men such as Solís and Mayans, was not achieved because the Spanish Church remained under the control of the sovereign, not of the council of bishops presided over by the king as those proposed. Proof of this was that the analysis of the Concordat that the Marquis de la Ensenada commissioned Mayans, and which he titled Observations on the Concordat of 1753, was never published.

The last year: the "year without a king" (August 1758-August 1759)

The kings

On the left, the portrait of King Fernando VI of Louis-Michel van Loo. On the right, his wife Barbara of Braganza, painted in the middle of the century.

Queen Barbara of Braganza has not been in good health lately. "She especially suffered from a continuous cough, which sometimes forced her to suspend the cult evenings that were organized almost daily in the palace." In the spring of 1758 she was transferred to Aranjuez thinking that there she would recover from asthma, making the trip in stages to not get tired Although she seemed to improve at first, her aches and fatigue soon returned. In July her health worsened. She suffered from high fevers that increased in the afternoon and early morning. On August 25, she lost her voice. Her agony lasted two days, dying at dawn on August 27, 1758. Her corpse was taken to the Convent of the Salesas Reales in Madrid, which had been founded by her, and provisionally kept under her crypt.

Mausoleum of King Fernando VI (convention of the Royal Salesas in Madrid)

The death of the queen caused the king's health to deteriorate (the kings were deeply united), to the point of reaching a high degree of insanity.

Ferdinand VI did not participate in the funeral procession that brought the queen's corpse to Madrid, but instead left Aranjuez the same day that Doña Bárbara died to settle in the castle of Villaviciosa de Odón, accompanied by his half brother, the Infant Don Luis. It was thought that it would be a good place because nothing would remind her of the queen there and she could distract herself from her with her favorite hobby, her hunting. But after ten days the first symptoms of the disease appeared.

He felt great fears of dying or drowning and was abandoning affairs and hunting. [...] The last document he signed is one month after the death of his wife and the last office of the king with Minister Wall was in early October 1758, “on foot and in conversation”. [...] The king stopped talking, and was reducing his meals to the point that he did not feed. The manias made their appearance and soon afterwards he locked himself in a room where there was little room for a bed, where he spent his last months

Volts (1998, pp. 213-215)

During that time he was aggressive —“he has very strong impulses to bite everyone,” the infant Luis wrote to his mother Isabel de Farnesio— and to calm him down they gave him opium; he tried to commit suicide on several occasions and asked for poison from the doctors or firearms from the members of the royal guard; he danced and ran around in his underwear, pretending that he was dead or, wrapped in a sheet, that he was a ghost. Every day he was thinner and paler, which was added to the carelessness in his personal hygiene. He did not sleep in bed but on two chairs and a stool.While this was happening in the castle of Villaviciosa de Odón, by the & # 34; villa and court & # 34; Verses like these circulated in Madrid:

If this king has no cure,
What do you expect or what do you do?
Very early it will be a year
that without seeing your king,
You are subject to a law
daughter of a continual deception...

Volts (1998, p. 223)

There is a difference of opinion about the illness that Ferdinand VI suffered during his last year of life. On the one hand, there is the idea that Fernando VI was a person suffering from a serious mental disorder, probably a bipolar disorder, and that in the last year he suffered a depressive or mixed episode in the context of said disorder and the psychopathological decompensation that the death of the queen There is another current of opinion that approaches the disease as a neurological disorder, in the context of an "organic" dementia; with a clinical syndrome that responds to a rapidly progressive deficit of the right frontal lobe. This hypothesis is based especially on a progressive and characteristic clinic of a frontal syndrome, and the presence of epileptic seizures with right frontal semiology, as well as other reasons. Regardless of the cause of the disease, the medical complications derived from bedridden, malnutrition and infectious complications probably played an essential role in shortening the life of the monarch.

Ferdinand VI died on August 10, 1759, the thirteenth anniversary of his proclamation as king. His corpse was transferred to the Convent of the Salesas Reales and, as had been done with the remains of his wife, his were kept in a provisional sepulcher under the choir. The mausoleums of the king and queen were built later during the reign of his successor Carlos III and completed in 1765. Fernando's, designed by Francesco Sabatini and carved in marble by Francisco Gutiérrez Arribas, was placed on the right side of the transept of the church of the Convent and that of Doña Bárbara in the lower choir of the nuns, behind that of her husband.

He was succeeded by his half-brother, Carlos III, son of Felipe V and his second wife Isabel de Farnesio, since he had no offspring of his own.

Ferdinand VI in fiction

• In the movie Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger TidesKing Fernando VI is played by Sebastian Armesto.

Ancestors

Predecessor: Luis de Borbón	Prince of Asturias 1724-1746	Successor: Carlos de Borbón
Predecessor: Felipe V	King of Spain 1746-1759	Successor: Carlos III
Predecessor: Carlos José de Lorena archbishop and elector of Tréveris	Grand Prior of Castile and Leon in the Order of St John of Jerusalem vulgo of Malta 1715 - 1736	Successor: Infante don Felipe