The thing about blue blood is no longer carried. And it is better not to analyze the blood of the monarchies of the Old World because we can find them in all colors. Millennia ago, royalty was kept pure in that offspring had to be of the same blood lineage, with no foreign admixtures. For centuries that purpose has already been distorted no matter how much the chroniclers have tried to hide the slips of some monarchs and the consequences that this has brought. It happened with the Austrians (Felipe IV, famous for his infidelities, had more than 37 bastard children, one of them with a famous actress María Calderón « La Calderona «) and it has happened, as expected, with the Bourbons .
Several books have made reference to this mania for collecting royal lovers, but one of the latest is Bastards and Bourbons:The Unknown Sons of the Dynasty (2011) where José María Zavala breaks down the complex network of illegitimate children that the Bourbon kings have brought to the world from the time of Carlos IV until the 20th century.
Bourbon family tree
Let's start the list with Carlos IV . In reality, none of his children were fathered by him, so they were Bourbons on their mother's side, the promiscuous María Luisa de Borbón Parma , a first cousin, and it is already known that these marriages do not bring good genetic consequences. They had 14 children out of the twenty-four times the queen was pregnant, but only seven made it to adulthood. Who came to succeed him in the kingdom, Ferdinand VII , he was almost certainly the bastard son of María Luisa and her lover Manuel Godoy . And there is evidence. An envelope marked "Very Reserved" included a letter dated January 8, 1819 in which Fray Juan de Almaraz , confessor of the queen, affirmed that six days before, after hearing the last confession, in article mortis, of María Luisa, she had transmitted to him…
none, none of her sons and daughters, none, was of legitimate marriage... None of my children is of Carlos IV and, consequently, the Bourbon dynasty has become extinct in Spain.
Harsh words spoken to obtain divine forgiveness and repose of his soul. This document is kept in the archive of the Ministry of Justice. His son Ferdinand VII He married four times and only had children with the last one, María Cristina de Borbón . To allow his eldest daughter to reign, he promulgated the Pragmatic Sanction that abolished the Salic Law imposed by Felipe V that prohibited women from reigning, which caused a civil war because his brother Carlos María Isidro he did not accept it willingly and it was the beginning of the Carlist Wars .
Conclusion:if none of the children of María Luisa de Parma were her husband's children, then Fernando VII (father of Isabel II) and the infantes Carlos María Isidro (head of the Carlist branch) and Francisco de Paula, the father of Francisco de Asís, husband of Isabel I, were they authentic Bourbons?
The fornication thing does not end here. When Elizabeth II She was 16 years old, the Government arranged a marriage with her first cousin Francisco de Asís . Historians say that when the queen found out who her future husband was going to be, she exclaimed:" No, not with Paquita! ” As she told Ambassador Fernando León y Castillo during her exile in Paris, Elizabeth II said:«What could I expect from a man who on his wedding night wore more lace than me? ». Beyond such anecdotes, writers close to the facts (such as Baroja) refer that the King consort (who was as fond of rabbits as trout) was the father of several illegitimate children and was known to have various lovers. Officially, Isabel II de Borbón had twelve pregnancies, counting several abortions, of which only five children survived. One of them was fathered by the captain of engineers Enrique Puigmoltó , according to the most persistent and malicious rumors. Such was the case that the future King Alfonso XII, at a popular level, had the nickname of «Puigmoltejo «.
The licentious life of Queen Elizabeth II was not detracted at all by the escapades of her son Alfonso XII , father of two bastards who did not reign:Alfonso , born in 1880, and Ferdinand , the following year, as a result of his relationship with the opera singer Elena Sanz , to whom he passed a pension as a good father of a distant family. The king died in 1885, his widow and regent María Cristina de Habsburgo, nicknamed Doña Virtudes , she refused to continue paying those she considered children of sin. The singer knew how to assert her condition and through skillful blackmail in which she used the letters she kept from her lover, she obtained a significant sum of money, no less than 750,000 pesetas in 1886, a fortune that the State Heritage paid so that these bastard descendants became publicly known. Something she didn't get. One of her love letters read:“ IDOLED ELENA:Every minute I love you more and want to see you, although this is impossible these days. You have no idea of the memories you left in me. Tell me if you need twine and how much. To the children a kiss from your Alfonso ”.
And his legitimate successor, Alfonso XIII , nor was he behind in the feats that his grandmother or his father did. He was the introducer of porn cinema in Spain because he was deliriously fond of these little shorts from Royal Films (curious name so as not to raise suspicions, I say) and perhaps, as a result of those celluloid ardors, he gave free rein to his imagination and had several illegitimate children, three of them with the actress Carmen Ruiz Moragas . One was the famous Leandro Alfonso Ruiz de Moragas (born 1929) who obtained the judicial right to use the Bourbon surname. Fate, which is very capricious, wanted another of them, the actor Ángel Picazo , play the role of his father in the movie The Last Hours (1965).
Leandro Alfonso Ruiz de Moragas
And here we leave the Bourbon list without adding more names to it because in the end the Bécquer brothers would be right when Gustavo Adolfo wrote and Valeriano drew an album of procacious and irreverent plates, with the pseudonym of Sem , to warn of the sexual excesses of the reign of Elizabeth II and her entire court, with the expressive title of « Los Borbones en pelo «. Well, point ball and on to something else, butterfly.
Article written by Jesús Callejo.