1846 Isabella II Queen Spain Signed Royal Document Manuscript Autograph Royalty For Sale

When you click on links to various merchants on this site and make a purchase, this can result in this site earning a commission. Affiliate programs and affiliations include, but are not limited to, the eBay Partner Network.

---

1846 Isabella II Queen Spain Signed Royal Document Manuscript Autograph Royalty:
$749.96

LOT-B3. For your consideration is a rare and important c.1846 royal document hand-signed by Queen Isabella II of Spain, with co-signers. Signs of wormhole damage, some marks, rips, folds, and tears, as pictured. This is very common for Spanish documents from this period.

Isabella II (Spanish: Isabel; 10 October 1830 – 9 April 1904), also known as La de los Tristes Destinos (She of the Sad Destinies), was Queen of Spain from 1833 until 1868.

Shortly before her birth, the King issued a Pragmatic Sanction to ensure the succession of his firstborn. She came to the throne as an infant, but her succession was disputed by her uncle the Infante Carlos (founder of the Carlist movement), whose refusal to recognize a female sovereign led to the Carlist Wars. Under the regency of her mother, Spain transitioned from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy adopting the Royal Statute of 1834 and Constitution of 1837. After a troubled reign, she was deposed in the Glorious Revolution of 1868, and formally abdicated in 1870. Her son, Alfonso XII, became king in 1874.

Isabella was born in Royal Palace of Madrid in 1830, the eldest daughter of King Ferdinand VII of Spain, and of his fourth wife and niece, Maria Christina of the Two Sicilies. Queen Maria Christina became regent on 29 September 1833, when her three-year-old daughter Isabella was proclaimed sovereign on the death of the king.

Isabella succeeded to the throne because Ferdinand VII had induced the Cortes Generales to help him set aside the Salic law, introduced by the Bourbons in the early 18th century, and to reestablish the older succession law of Spain. The first pretender to the throne, Ferdinand\'s brother Infante Carlos, Count of Molina, fought seven years during the minority of Isabella to dispute her title. Carlos\' and his descendants\' supporters were known as Carlists, and the fight over the succession was the subject of a number of Carlist Wars in the 19th century.

Isabella\'s reign was maintained only through the support of the army. The Cortes and the Moderate Liberals and Progressives reestablished constitutional and parliamentary government, dissolved the religious orders and confiscated their property (including that of the Jesuits), and tried to restore order to Spain\'s finances. After the Carlist war, the regent, Maria Christina, resigned to make way for Baldomero Espartero, Prince of Vergara, the most successful and most popular Isabelline general. Espartero, a Progressive, remained regent for only two years.

Baldomero Espartero was turned out in 1843 by a military and political pronunciamiento led by Generals Leopoldo O\'Donnell and Ramón María Narváez. They formed a cabinet, presided over by Joaquín María López y López. This government induced the Cortes to declare Isabella of age at 13.

Three years later, on 10 October 1846, the Moderate Party (or Castilian Conservatives) made their sixteen-year-old queen marry her double-first cousin Francisco de Asís de Borbón (1822–1902), the same day that her younger sister, infanta Luisa Fernanda, married Antoine d\'Orléans, Duke of Montpensier.

Isabella II with her three youngest daughters Pilar, Paz, and Eulalia.The marriages suited France and Louis Philippe, King of the French, who as a result bitterly quarrelled with Britain.[1] However, the marriages were not happy; persistent rumour had it that few if any of Isabella\'s children were fathered by her king-consort, rumoured to be a homosexual. The Carlist party asserted that the heir-apparent to the throne, who later became Alfonso XII, had been fathered by a captain of the guard, Enrique Puigmoltó y Mayans.

Isabella had nine children, but only five reached adulthood:

* Ferdinand (1850)

* Isabel (1851–1931), Princess of Asturias, who married her mother\'s and father\'s first cousin Prince Gaetan, Count of Girgenti.

* María Cristina (1854)

* Alfonso XII (1857–1885)

* María de la Concepcion (1859–1861)

* María del Pilar (1861–1879)

* María de la Paz (1862–1946), who married her cousin Prince Ludwig Ferdinand of Bavaria.

* Francisco de Asís (1863)

* Eulalia de Asís de la Piedad (1864–1958), who married her cousin Infante Antonio, Duke of Galliera.

The couple was rather caustically described by an English contemporary thus:

… The Queen is large in stature, but rather what might be called bulky than stately. There is no dignity either in her face or figure, and the graces of majesty are altogether wanting. The countenance is cold and expressionless, with traces of an unchastened, unrefined, and impulsive character, and the indifference it betrays is not redeemed by any regularity or beauty of feature.

The King Consort is much smaller in figure than his royal two-thirds, and certainly is not a type that could be admired for its manly qualifications; but we have to remember that in Spain aristocratic birth is designated rather by a diminutive stature and sickly complexion than by those attributes of height, muscular power, open expression, and florid hue, which in England constitute the ideal of ‘race.’

Isabella ruled directly from 1843 to 1868, a period marked by palace intrigues, back-stairs and antechamber influences, barracks conspiracies, and military pronunciamientos to further the ends of the political parties; Moderados ruled from 1846 to 1854, Progressives from 1854 to 1856, and Unión Liberals from 1856 to 1863. Moderados and Unión Liberals quickly succeeded each other to keep out the Progressives, thus sowing the seeds for the Revolution of 1868.

Queen Isabella II often was active in politics. She showed favour to her reactionary generals and statesmen and to the Church and religious orders. Spain fought two wars during her reign: the war against Morocco in 1859, which ended in a treaty advantageous for Spain and cession of some Moroccan territory, and the fruitless Chincha Islands War (1864-1866) against Peru and Chile. Her reign saw tensions with the United States over the Amistad affair and over the war in the Pacific; independence revolts in Cuba and Puerto Rico; and some progress in public works, especially railways, and a slight improvement in commerce and finance. By virtue of a royal decree, she opened Iloilo in the Philippines to world trade on September 29, 1855, mainly to export sugar and other products to America, Australia and Europe.

At the end of September 1868, the defeat of Isabella\'s forces at the Battle of Alcolea led to her deposition and exile to France. The revolt against Isabella played out in the battle is known as the Glorious Revolution. In 1870, the provisional government replaced Isabella with Amadeo I, second son of Victor Emmanuel II of Italy, after much deliberation. Amadeo\'s abdication under pressure in 1873 led to the period of the First Spanish Republic (1873–74).

Isabella\'s exile helped cause the Franco-Prussian War, as Napoleon III could not accept the possibility that a German whose candidacy was supported by Prussia, Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, might replace Isabella, a dynast of the Spanish Bourbons and great-great-granddaughter of the French-born Philip V of Spain. Napoleon III\'s loss in the war led to his deposition and the permanent end of monarchical government in France.

The First Spanish Republic collapsed in December 1874. Already on 25 June 1870, Isabella had been induced to abdicate in Paris in favour of her son, Alfonso XII, a move that aided the cause of the Restoration in 1874. After the collapse of the Republic, Alfonso was placed on the throne.

A Statue of Isabella II in front of Puerta Isabel in Intramuros, ManilaIsabella had left her husband in March 1874 and continued to live in France after the Restoration surrounded by a small circle of retainers with the Marqués de Alta Villa as her secretary. On the occasion of one of her visits to Madrid during the reign of Alfonso XII, she began to intrigue with politicians in the capital and was peremptorily requested to go abroad again. She lived in Paris for the rest of her life, residing at the Palacio Castilla. She seldom travelled abroad except for a few visits to Spain. During her exile, she grew closer to her husband, with whom she maintained an ambiguous friendship until his death in 1902. Her last days were marked by the marital problems of her youngest daughter, Eulalia. She died on 10 April 1904 and is entombed in El Escorial.

1846 Isabella II Queen Spain Signed Royal Document Manuscript Autograph Royalty

$749.96

1903 Louis, Isabella, Elizabeth & Hope Eleanor St. Sure Oroville, CA Photograph

$24.00