ISABELLA II, queen of SPAIN. – B. on 10 Oct. 1830 in Madrid, d. on 9 Apr. 1904 in Paris. Daughter of Ferdinando VII and Maria Cristina, she lost her father at the age of three. Before his death, Ferdinando VII had promulgated the “Pragmatic Sanction,” securing the succession for his daughter, an act that encountered the hostility of his brother Carlo, who, upon the King’s death (19 Sept. 1833), considered himself deprived of his legitimate rights. Maria Cristina, who had been appointed regent, was consequently drawn into a civil war that lasted almost seven years (from 1833 to 1839). When I. came of age in 1843, Spain’s internal situation did not improve.
The personal ambitions of politicians and generals prevented the formation of any stable government, nor had the Carlists’ hopes of seizing the throne definitively vanished. A solution to the dynastic problem, following the renunciation of Don Carlos in favor of his son Don Carlos Luis, count of Montemolin, who assumed the name Carlo VI, appeared imminent; but the proposed marriage between the latter and I. met with the opposition not only of the liberals but also of certain foreign powers (France, England), so that peace between the two factions could not be achieved. I.’s marriage in 1846 to the duke of Cadiz, a union favored and desired by the courts of London and Paris, further embittered the dynastic dispute. Relations with the Holy See and with the Catholic Church deteriorated markedly immediately after the death of Ferdinando VII, although the Spanish government and the Queen worked zealously for the restoration of the Papal States in Rome after the events of 1848–49, and although I. became a devoted advocate with Pio IX both of the definition of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception and of that of the Assumption of Mary. Nor did relations improve with the Concordat of 16 March 1851, because, three years later, the appointment of General Espartero as president of the council of ministers marked the beginning of new measures against the Church. When a revolution broke out in Sept. 1868, I. was forced to leave the country; she settled in Paris and abdicated in 1870 in favor of her son Alfonso XII.