Isabella II of Spain - Marriage

Marriage

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.

The marriages suited France and Louis Philippe, King of the French, who as a result nearly quarrelled with Britain. 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 Puig y Moltó.

Isabella had twelve children, but only five reached adulthood:

• Ferdinand (1850)
• Maria Isabel (1851–1931), Princess of Asturias, who married her mother's and father's first cousin Prince Gaetan, Count of Girgenti.
• Maria Cristina (1854)
• Alfonso XII (1857–1885)
• Maria de la Concepcion (1859–1861)
• Maria del Pilar (1861–1879)
• María de la Paz (1862–1946), who married her cousin Prince Ludwig Ferdinand of Bavaria.
• Francisco de Asis (1863)
• Eulalia de Asis 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.’