Ferdinand VII of Spain (14 October 1784 – 29 September 1833), first praised as El Deseado ("The Desired") and later reviled as El Rey Felón ("The Criminal King"), was king of Spain during the early 19th century, effectively the last monarch of the Spanish Empire as a global power, as well as the prime cause of its whole fall.
He was briefly imprisoned and deposed by Napoléon Bonaparte, which turned him into a beacon of Spanish resistance during the Peninsular War - all of which got turned on its head during his triumphal reinstatement, when Ferdinand revealed himself as a bona fide incompetent despot absolutely unworthy of support. Napoleon reportedly regretted deposing him because leaving him on the throne would have probably weakened Spain more than anything Napoleon himself could have done. Under Ferdinand's mismanagement, Spain turned into a bloody absolutist tyranny, while the majority of its unattended overseas viceroyalties fell into revolt, their independence struggles led by Simón Bolívar and his compatriots.note After his death, what little was left of the empire fell into a new civil war and succession crisis.
Ferdinand has a convoluted biography, but it can be quickly summed up by acknowledging his immortal place in history as the worst King of Spain in all respects. His status is still revised and reinterpreted by historians, as wholly objective accounts are hard to find due to Ferdinand having achieved the odd feat of enraging just about every existing political faction in Spain (to say nothing of Spanish America), but in practice he was the monarch who, due to his flaws, unwise decisions and generally being a certified scumbag, destroyed not only the first empire on which the sun never set, but also the political progress and unity of all the Spanish-speaking peoples in the world. Aside from selling out Spain multiple times (both unintentionally and intentionally depending on the moment) and setting it back by decades, he rejected an offer by Agustín de Iturbide (after proclaiming himself Emperor of Mexico) to link Mexico back to Spain via a dynastic union, refused a proposition from Bolívar's inner circle to form a worldwide Hispanic Confederacy, and ultimately impeded the Spanish liberals themselves from ever reaching a peaceful agreement with their overseas counterparts. A reader might get the impression that many of the current issues troubling the modern Hispanosphere can be traced directly back to him, and regardless of additional factors, which are not few, this impression is not very far from reality.
The son of Charles IV and Mary of Parma, Ferdinand grew up as a promising heir apparent educated by the best of the Spanish Enlightenment, but his ascent soon found an apparent obstacle in Manuel Godoy, the prime minister and eminence gris of Spain, as Godoy's enemies (including Ferdinand's own wife María Antonia) convinced the prince that the minister was planning to snatch the throne from him. Ferdinand was also supported by Napoleon, who considered the shrewd Godoy an obstacle in controlling the Spanish Empire, and not without reason, as it was known that Godoy mistrusted Napoleon and was preparing Spain to switch sides in a possible turn of the tide during The Napoleonic Wars. Many Spaniards were already regretful at having supported Napoleon in the first place, a decision based on the principle of allying with the strongest side that had backfired on them from the very start due to the dubious competence of their French liaisons (the Battle of Trafalgar being an example). Ferdinand and his supporters waged a large-scale smear campaign against the already polarizing Godoy, pitting the Spanish population against him, and this ultimately concluded in the 1808 Tumult of Aranjuez, where Godoy was ousted and the overwhelmed Charles was forced to abdicate the throne to Ferdinand.
Everything seemed to be going great for the new king, who enjoyed not only his royal position, but also the support of the people and the apparent protection of the French army stationed in the peninsula... but it all turned out to be a trap by Napoleon: Ferdinand and his parents were lured to Bayonne and retained there by the French general, who claimed the succession to be invalid and, by installing his own brother Joseph Bonaparte as King of Spain, effectively hijacked the Spanish Empire. Ironically, Godoy had originally planned to pull a John VI of Portugal and strategically move the Spanish royal family to the safety of their American territories, from where they could remotely manage the warring effort against a possible French betrayal, but the chance had been destroyed by Ferdinand's own actions. Mary of Parma was so enraged with Ferdinand and his naivety that, even before Napoleon unveiled his real intentions to them in Bayonna, she reportedly asked Napoleon to declare her son officially Too Dumb to Live and execute him for having put them in such a obvious position.
Napoleon's plan to secure the untrustworthy Spain, however, backfired. With their royal family imprisoned in France, and subject to a foreign, forcefully imposed king with better intentions than capabilities, the Spaniards rose against the Bonapartist rule and declared total war on them, ultimately making the whole thing a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy for the French. None of this was remotely important to Ferdinand, who remained happily in his golden cage in France and pledged himself fully to Napoleon's good will, to the point he even intended to be legally adopted by him, all while urging Spain to do the same as him and just surrender to France. In the Spanish Empire, however, this came across as proof of blackmail, so Ferdinand became ironically idealized as a sort of Big Good Sealed in a Can who would return to reign as the legitimate king and fix everything that was broken.note This was finally realized in 1812, when the Anglo-Portuguese army of Arthur Wellesley, future Duke of Wellington, helped the Spanish guerrillas to kick the French out and force Napoleon to give Ferdinand back.
The king returned to a very changed Spanish Empire, where his absence had handed the leadership to the Cortes of Cádiz, formed by Iberian, American and Asian subjects of the empire. They had established the revolutionary Constitution of 1812 or la Pepa, one of the most liberal codified constitutions of the time, entailing separation of powers, freedom of press, a parlimentary system, representation for the American territories etc. and Ferdinand was obviously required to comply with it. He initially accepted, only for this acquiescence to be revealed as the biggest betrayal yet: capitalizing on all the instability, and with the support of Spanish monarchist sectors endowed with military forces, Ferdinand declared the Constitution to be liberal garbage and appointed himself absolute monarch. Ferdinand started his second period of power by trying to rebuild Spain from the ravages of war, but he was incapable of the admittedly Herculean task, not helped by the fact that as an absolute king, most of his court was composed of sycophants and various yes-men, and everything was further muddled by the American viceroyalties's attempts to capitalize on the situation themselves to secede. Ferdinand initially showed sympathy towards them, but when they obviously didn't buy it, he just sent in the best general he had left, the brilliant but ruthless Pablo Morillo, to help the American royalists.
In 1820, a grand army meant to decisively reinforce Morillo and the royalists suddenly turned on Ferdinand and forced him to abandon his aspirations and obey the damn constitution. For a time, things seemed to be working, but the overjoyed liberals, logically inexperienced at the job of running the country, were soon locked in infighting about how to do it. As a result, feeling the liberal environment was the perfect chance, Bolívar's diplomat Francisco Antonio Zea arrived to propose both Ferdinand and the government to solve the wars of independence by turning the Spanish Empire into a democratic Hispanic Confederacy, but the king told him to get lost, while the courts, still entangled in the problems Ferdinand had caused, declined on the naive belief they would soon make their new liberal empire work well enough that the revolutions would die off by themselves. At the same time, Ferdinand also received a different offer from fellow secesionist Agustín de Iturbide, who suggested Ferdinand exile himself and become emperor of Iturbide's newly independent Mexico, or at least send a relative to form a dynastic union, but Ferdinand again refused. The latter had his own ideas: he called for help from French monarch Louis XVIII, who sent an army to invade Spain and restore his absolute power, and soon he was again ruling as an absolute monarch.
Ferdinand then unleashed such a reign of terror, the so-called Ominous Decade, that his French cronies themselves had to ask him to tone things down. With the liberals destroyed again, whether they could have solved the topic of the American independences was now irrelevant, so the wars of independence ended and the Spanish Empire disintegrated once and for all. Ferdinand cared little for this, as he was too busy oppressing the Spaniards and there were no royalists to support this time. He was also apparently convinced that the American republics were unpopular enough that their people would eventually revolt against their liberal overlords and return triumphantly to the royalist cause, and if they did not, Ferdinand was still the kind of person who thought it better to reign autocratically over a small peninsula rather than obey any law in a great empire. Now, delusional as it may sound about the republics, he was not entirely wrong in that Bolívar and company were far from enjoying unanimous popular support in their realms, but it goes without saying that by this point neither Spaniards nor Latin Americans desired Ferdinand any more than they desired the moon to crash into the Earth.
His repression over what was left of Spain was surprisingly not a total disaster all the time, as the dire need for reform forced Ferdinand and his court to try to improve the country's infrastructures with moderate measures in a late attempt to fix things,note but they found the same problem of infighting crop up much as the liberals had, namely the inability to reconcile those who supported Ferdinand's ways and those who actually wanted him to dial back the clock even more. The latter even eyed Ferdinand's brother Carlos María Isidro as a potential replacement for a king that was still not absolute enough for their liking. Token efforts to invade Mexico were undertaken from the remnant Spanish overseas territory of Cuba, alternated with liberal revolts within Spain that tried to undo Ferdinand's regime, but this time nothing seemed to work out for anybody. Only years later, with Ferdinand's health declining, did liberal hope start sparkling again with the figure of his niece and regent queen, Maria Christina, a Big Beautiful Woman who sympathized with their cause. Eventually, Ferdinand died without a male heir, having been forced to revive the Spanish tradition of reigning queens by declaring a law through which his daughter Isabella would inherit the throne, and therefore lock out Carlos María. Spain's troubles did not end there, though, as this started a civil war of succession we call the First Carlist War.
As stated above, Ferdinand went into history as a horseman of apocalypse for Spain, with plenty of anecdotes more or less gossiping about his lack of virtue (including his ugliness, obesity and health problems, as well as a mocked case of genital hipertrophy that, in an aversion of Bigger Is Better in Bed, left him almost impotent throughout his life). Even the most charitable revisions have only managed to bring out that he was just an exceptionally egotistical human being and not The Antichrist incarnate. Under his lifelong campaign of hedonistic power-grabbing, Spain deeply transformed in both positive and negative ways, usually against his will in the former case and to his great indifference and/or delight in the latter, but the final result was that it would never be again a Top 5 nation or remotely able to compete with one. The global empire built almost by accident three centuries before, still the largest in the world at the moment of its disappearance, died of untreated wounds from both inside and outside, ironically in a time where other, traditionally less globalized European countries were starting to pump up their own colonial empires, and its death throes lasted one more century before concluding with the Spanish-American War. The only consolation would be that Spain and Latin America would be left with enough inner troubles not to care too much about the rest of the world.
In fiction
Film- He is in the background of Goya's Ghosts.
- Ferdinand is featured in Juan Van Halen's Memoria secreta del hermano Leviatán.
- He's the protagonist of the historical novel El Rey Felón by José Luis Corral.
- Los desastres de la guerra casts Francisco Cecilio as him.
- He's played by Juanjo Cucalón in The Ministry of Time.
