Kinlight · The House of Habsburg

Charles II of Spain

1661 – 1700 · Generation XV · King of Spain (r. 1665–1700) · Spanish Habsburgs

Portrait of Charles II of Spain

Charles II, the last Habsburg king of Spain, remembered as El Hechizado, “the Bewitched,” was born in Madrid on 6 November 1661, the only surviving son of Philip IV and his second wife, Mariana of Austria, who was also Philip’s niece. His birth was the product of generations of marriage within the Habsburg family, and he was a frail child. He suffered from rickets and could not walk unaided until he was about four, and the Real Academia de la Historia’s biography records that he also had epilepsy. From the start, Europe’s courts expected him to die young. The historian John Langdon-Davies wrote that they were waiting for his death from the day he was born.

He became king at not quite four, when his father died on 17 September 1665, and his mother governed as regent. Mariana ruled through favourites, first her Austrian confessor Juan Everardo Nithard and then Fernando de Valenzuela, a minor nobleman whose rise offended the grandees. Under Nithard the long wars with Portugal and France were wound up in 1668, by the treaties of Lisbon and Aix-la-Chapelle. Court politics turned on the feud between Mariana and the king’s illegitimate half-brother, Don Juan José of Austria. Charles came of age in November 1675, and within a few years Don Juan had taken control of the government. He made peace with France at Nijmegen in 1678 at the cost of Franche-Comté, and arranged the king’s marriage to Marie Louise of Orléans, a niece of Louis XIV. The wedding took place in November 1679, shortly after Don Juan’s death.

Spain in these years faced falling population, bad harvests, heavy debt and repeated French aggression, and the older view treated the reign as a byword for decline and its king as feeble in body and mind. Recent historians paint a more careful picture. His tutor, the jurist Francisco Ramos del Manzano, taught him to read and write and to know the lands he ruled, and he later took lessons in music and mathematics. Though often ill, Charles was physically active and a keen hunter. A Savoyard diplomat who saw him regularly found him kindly and open-handed, though timid and unsure of himself, an impression other envoys shared, and he received ambassadors in person. Painful currency reforms in the 1680s, after an initial collapse of trade, ended decades of monetary instability. Luis Ribot has argued that Charles was neither as bewitched nor as decadent as legend made him.

Marie Louise died in February 1689 without children, having been blamed for the failure and subjected to crude fertility treatments. Within months Charles married by proxy Maria Anna of Neuburg, chosen partly because her family was famously fertile, and the formal wedding followed in May 1690. There were still no children, almost certainly because Charles was unable to father them. The succession therefore became the central problem of European diplomacy. Through his sisters, both the French Bourbons and the Austrian Habsburgs had claims, and England, France and the Dutch Republic drew up partition treaties to divide his empire among the claimants. Charles and his ministers insisted that the monarchy must pass undivided. The Bavarian prince Joseph Ferdinand, the compromise heir, died of smallpox in 1699.

Charles fell seriously ill in September 1700. Persuaded by Luis Manuel Fernández de Portocarrero, he made a final will naming Louis XIV’s grandson Philip of Anjou heir to the whole Spanish monarchy. He died in Madrid on 1 November 1700, five days short of his thirty-ninth birthday, and was buried at El Escorial. The autopsy suggested hydrocephalus among other ailments. Philip was proclaimed king that month, but the prospect of a French prince ruling an undivided Spanish empire led to the War of the Spanish Succession, which began in 1701 and cost Spain much of its European territory.

Place in the family

  • Charles II of Spain was a great-great-grandson of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor.
  • Charles II of Spain was the younger of 2 children of Philip IV of Spain and Mariana of Austria recorded in this archive.

Images

One of 7 people of Spanish Habsburgs (1500–1700) in this archive. The Madrid line, from the division of Charles V’s inheritance to the childless Charles II.

Line of descent: Rudolf I of Germany → Albert I of Germany → Albert II, Duke of Austria → Leopold III, Duke of Austria → Ernest, Duke of Austria → Frederick III, Holy Roman Emperor → Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor → Philip I of Castile → Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor → Philip II of Spain → Philip III of Spain → Philip IV of Spain → Charles II of Spain.

Read more on Wikipedia

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Life

  • 1661 — Born
  • 1679 — Married Marie Louise
  • 1690 — Married Maria Anna
  • 1700 — Died

Sources

  1. Charles II of Spain · Wikipedia
  2. Charles II (king of Spain) · Encyclopaedia Britannica
  3. Carlos II · Real Academia de la Historia, Diccionario Biográfico electrónico

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