Читать книгу Juan Carlos: Steering Spain from Dictatorship to Democracy - Paul Preston - Страница 7

Despite Franco’s readiness to excuse Juan Carlos the entry examinations for the Zaragoza military academy, General Martínez Campos insisted that he undergo the test just like any other prospective cadet. Having passed, Juan Carlos joined the academy in December 1955. As his companions from the academy would later recall, the exams were very difficult and they believed that, although the Prince was usually treated like any other candidate by the examiners, the mathematics test he sat must have been easier than the one they took: indeed, Juan Carlos would soon be shown to be well below average in this subject.¹

Although Juan Carlos, in his public declarations at least, would later recall his years as a cadet with nostalgic fondness, his time at the military academies did not always go smoothly. When he took his oath of loyalty to the colours on 15 December 1955, the ceremony was chaired by the brusque General Agustín Muñoz Grandes, the Minister for the Army, who was much more inclined to the Falangist than to the monarchist cause. Accordingly, in his speech, he made no mention of the Prince.² In addition, Juan Carlos was saddened on this occasion by the fact that Franco had not permitted his father to attend the ceremony.³ On 10 December, Don Juan wrote to him, reminding him of the tremendous responsibilities he would be undertaking when he swore his loyalty to Spain: ‘15 December will be a great day because it is the day on which you will knowingly consecrate the rest of your life to the service of Spain.’ Juan Carlos sent his father a telegram: ‘Before the flag I have promised Spain to be a perfect soldier and with tremendous feeling I swear to you that I will fulfil that oath.’⁴

It was Juan Carlos’s fervent wish to be allowed to get on with life as an ordinary cadet. ‘You can avoid a lot of problems by getting lost in the crowd.’ That was rendered impossible because the campaign against Don Juan in the Movimiento press remained intense during this period. Juan Carlos found these constant attacks on his father upsetting. Some of his fellow cadets would derive a malicious pleasure from quoting the insinuations of the press. On several occasions, Juan Carlos was sufficiently provoked by remarks that his father was a freemason or a bad patriot (for serving in the Royal Navy) to get involved in fights. These were organized furtively in the stables at night, possibly even with the complicity of the teaching staff. When Juan Carlos eventually complained to Franco about the media’s attacks on his father, the Caudillo replied, with his habitual cynicism, that the Spanish press was independent and that he had no influence over it. He stated that, ‘it was impossible to do anything, since the press was free to express its opinions.’ As Juan Carlos commented, ‘it was such an outrageous lie that all I could do was laugh.’

Recounting this later, Juan Carlos was rather benevolent with regard to Franco. Reflecting on the fact that the Caudillo saw in Don Juan a dangerous liberal, he commented, ‘When my father said “I want to be King of all Spaniards,” Franco must have translated this as “I want to be King of the victors and of the vanquished.”’ This puzzled Juan Carlos, because of the fact that Franco knew full well that Don Juan had tried to join the Nationalist forces against the ‘reds’. Referring to the cunning letter with which Franco had refused Don Juan’s offer, Juan Carlos commented rather uncritically, ‘On that occasion, the General wrote my father a very beautiful letter to thank him for his gesture. In it, he told him that his life was too precious for the future of Spain and that he forbade him to risk it at the battle front. Why was my father’s life precious if not because he was the heir to the crown? But, what can you say … that was the General for you. At times, putting up with him was very difficult. But, as you know, I had totally convinced myself that to achieve my objectives I had to put up with a lot. The objective was worth the trouble.’ The objective was the re-establishment of the Borbón family on the throne.⁵

Despite these occasional outbursts of hostility towards his father, Juan Carlos would later recall his years in the military academies as amongst the happiest in his life. In a brief letter to the readers of a Spanish magazine which published, in 1981, a feature on this period, he wrote: ‘I remember my years at the military academies with genuine satisfaction and nostalgia … Now that my post and occupations leave me hardly any time or freedom, I often think back to that distant period in which my life evolved in a way so different from the current one.’

Above and beyond the special status, of which none of his fellow students could remain ignorant, Juan Carlos soon became a genuinely popular cadet. His contemporaries at the academies would later describe him as a ‘sensational companion’, outgoing, generous, particularly gifted at sports and endowed with an extraordinary memory. His ability to remember people’s names and faces would later enable him to recognize and greet comrades and teachers whom he had not seen in years. He had a good sense of humour and enjoyed playing practical jokes on his friends. He often participated, for instance, in the food fights that occasionally erupted at lunch times in the refectory. Academically, he was said to be of ‘average intelligence’, but above average in ‘general knowledge’, foreign languages, tactical thinking and military ethics. He struggled with mathematics, which was ‘the subject dreaded by all’. Juan Carlos was also perceived as being deeply religious: every day, he would get up before reveille in order to attend the voluntary, early morning mass.

When it came to friendships, the Prince necessarily had to be careful, making every effort to avoid the creation of a circle of admirers or sycophants who wanted to be with him only out of self-interest. He tried to get to know as many people as possible, which was made easier by the fact that the class groups changed every term. He was aware of the dangers of nepotism: indeed, at the end of his military training, he refused to use his influence in order to get plumb postings for his friends from the academies. He did, however, strive to keep in touch with his old companions, attending and often even organizing reunions.⁶ Not all of his contemporaries were keen to flatter him: ‘Some thought that I was a spoilt brat, spoiled by destiny, a daddy’s boy, the inhabitant of another planet. I had to use my fists to become one of them.’⁷ To this end, he encouraged his peers to treat him with considerable informality. His close friends called him ‘Juan’ or ‘Juanito’, or even ‘Carlos’, whilst his other companions addressed him with the informal ‘tú’ and jokingly called him SAR, an abbreviation of ‘Su Alteza Reaf’ (His Royal Highness).⁸

This easy-going informality outraged General Martínez Campos who visited the academy each weekend to review the Prince’s progress and have lunch with him. On one occasion, Martínez Campos allowed his tutee to invite a couple of his academy friends to join them for lunch. During the meal, when he heard one of these friends call the Prince ‘Juan’, he exploded. Red-faced with fury, he leapt to his feet, knocking his chair out of the way and shouted at the culprit: ‘Gentleman cadet! On your feet and stand to attention! How dare you, gentleman cadet, address informally and by his first name someone that I, a Lieutenant-General, address as His Royal Highness!’ Unsurprisingly, Juan Carlos was never again able to convince his friends to join him for lunch with Martínez Campos.⁹ Juan Carlos soon came to dread these visits from his supervisor, turning pale and trembling as the meeting time came closer.¹⁰

The teaching staff at the academy addressed Juan Carlos as ‘Your Highness’ and, at roll-call, he was referred to by his full title – ‘His Royal Highness Juan Carlos de Borbón’. That aside, in so far as it could be put aside, Juan Carlos was, according to his contemporaries, treated by the teaching staff just like any other student. He was disciplined like any other cadet when he broke the rules. Once, for instance, he was put under house arrest for being caught smoking indoors. The Prince was subject to the same timetable as the other students, which left them very little free time. Reveille was at 6.15 a.m., although Juan Carlos rose earlier in order to attend mass. By 6.30 a.m., all cadets had to be standing to attention in the corridors, where roll-call took place. The young men were then allowed to take their showers – in water usually either freezing or so hot as to be almost unbearable. Individual study time followed, then lessons, lunch, a half-hour break, further lessons, another half-hour break and dinner. According to his contemporaries, no one was ever asked by the teaching staff to make allowances for the Prince or to treat him with special deference. In his first year at Zaragoza, Juan Carlos was thus subjected to the same ‘novatadas’ (initiation tests) and other pranks as the other newly arrived students. Years later, he remembered not only many of the pranks played on him on his arrival at Zaragoza, but also their names: ‘I had to undergo everything. I had to do the “reptile” on the bedroom floor. I slept with the “nun” [with a sabre resting on his chest]. They “X-rayed” me [they made him sleep between two planks from the bedside table]. I also had to let them “clay pigeon shoot” me [he was left in a room blindfolded and, when he attempted to leave, he was battered with pillows].’¹¹

Juan Carlos enjoyed being an ordinary cadet and even made an effort to prevent the teaching staff giving him preferential treatment. He once complained, for instance, that the mathematics tutor gave him an undeserved grade. According to his fellow students, the Prince had a ‘natural sense of justice’. Prudently, he used his special status only in order to help others. For instance, when a companion had been punished for some misdemeanour by being deprived of pudding, Juan Carlos would complain that there was something wrong with his helping in order to get an extra one to pass to the friend.¹²

Nevertheless, it was inevitable that there would be differences in the way that Juan Carlos was treated at the Zaragoza military academy. He travelled into the centre of Zaragoza by car, a black SEAT 1500, whereas his contemporaries did so by tram. Although, while out on manoeuvres, he slept on the floor of a tent like everyone else, in the academy, he had an independent, though small, bedroom, while the others slept in communal dormitories. According to one of his Zaragoza companions, Juan Carlos’s bedroom, which was situated above the infirmary, was Spartan. The only objects in it, besides a bed and a desk, were a multiple photograph frame displaying the pictures of all of the Borbón kings of Spain – including his father. He had pictures of his mother, his brother and his two sisters and a girlfriend, María Gabriella di Savoia. His book collection was small – a few textbooks and next to his bed usually was a novel by Marcial Lafuente Estefanía, from the ‘Rodeo’ collection of western stories popular at the time. Juan Carlos enjoyed less freedom than the others. He was obliged to have extra lessons and saw his private tutors during the morning period that should have been for individual study, during the afternoon breaks and sometimes at weekends. On the occasions when it was possible to go out for drinks in Zaragoza with his friends, they were delighted to be able to use his status and his unusual blond good looks as a ploy to get to know girls. When the cadets were on trains en route to camp, at each station women would come out to say hello to him. His ability to pick up girls was as unlimited as a capacity for falling briefly in love.¹³

In March 1956, there occurred an incident which totally diverted Juan Carlos from any thoughts of girls or even of the crown. He and his 14-year-old brother had travelled from Spain on the Lusitania Express to spend the Easter holidays in Estoril with their parents and sisters. It was the first time for some months that Don Juan and Doña María de las Mercedes had had all four of their children together. Alfonsito was a pupil at the lycée in Madrid and was about to become a cadet at the Spanish naval college at Marín near Pontevedra. Alfonsito was regarded as the family favourite, witty, intelligent and more simpático than his rather introspective elder brother. His passion for golf and sailing had brought him particularly close to Don Juan.¹⁴

On 29 March, Maundy Thursday, the entire family, dressed in black, attended morning mass and took communion at the small church of San Antonio de Estoril near the sea front. The principal Maundy Thursday service, which they also intended to attend, would not take place until the evening. In those days, Catholics still had to prepare for communion by fasting from midnight of the previous day. Rather than fast for 24 hours, the family had taken communion at the early mass. After a frugal lunch, Don Juan and Juan Carlos accompanied Alfonsito to the Estoril golf club where he was taking part in a competition (the Taça Visconde Pereira de Machado). Despite the cold blustery weather, Alfonsito won the semi-final and was looking forward to playing in the final on Easter Saturday. With no sign of a let-up in the cold wind and showers, the Spanish royal family went home. At 6 p.m. they attended the evening mass in the church of San Antonio and then returned home. At 8.30 p.m., the car of the family doctor, Joaquín Abreu Loureiro, screeched to a halt outside the Villa Giralda. Apparently, Juan Carlos and Alfonsito had been in the games room on the first floor of the house, engaged in target practice with a small calibre. 22 revolver, while waiting for dinner. A recent gift, the pistol was, at any reasonable distance, relatively innocuous. Nevertheless, there had been an accident in which Alfonso was shot and died almost immediately.

On Friday 30 March, the Portuguese press carried a laconic official communiqué about Alfonso’s death issued by the Spanish Embassy in Lisbon. ‘Whilst his Highness the Infante Alfonso was cleaning a revolver last evening with his brother, a shot was fired hitting his forehead and killing him in a few minutes. The accident took place at 20.30 hours, after the Infante’s return from the Maundy Thursday religious service, during which he had received holy communion.’ The decision to make this anodyne statement and to impose a blanket of silence over the details was taken personally by Franco.¹⁵

Inevitably, however, there were rumours that the gun had been in Juan Carlos’s hands at the time of the fatal shot. Within three weeks, these rumours were being stated as undisputed fact in the Italian press.¹⁶ They were not denied by Don Juan at the time nor have they ever been denied by Juan Carlos since. Shortly after tire accident, Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora, a monarchist and member of Opus Dei on Don Juan’s Privy Council who later served Franco as Minister of Public Works, met Pedro Sainz Rodríguez and commented later: ‘His short and portly figure was woebegone because a pistol had gone off in Prince Juan Carlos’s hand and killed his brother Alfonso.’ It is now widely accepted that Juan Carlos’s finger was on the trigger when the fatal shot was fired.¹⁷

In her autobiography, Doña María de las Mercedes neither denied nor confirmed that it was Juan Carlos who was holding the gun when it went off. On the other hand, she directly contradicted the official statement. Doña María explained that, on the previous day, the boys had been fooling around with the gun, shooting at streetlamps. Because of this, Don Juan had forbidden them to play with the weapon. While waiting for the evening service, the two boys became bored and went upstairs to play with the gun again. They were getting ready to shoot at a target when the gun went off shortly after 8 p.m.¹⁸ One possibility, later suggested by Doña María to her dressmaker, Josefina Carolo, is that Juan Carlos playfully pointed it at Alfonsito and, unaware that the gun was loaded, pulled the trigger. In similar terms, Juan Carlos apparently told a Portuguese friend, Bernardo Arnoso, that he pulled the trigger not knowing that the gun was loaded, and that it went off and the bullet ricocheted off a wall and hit Alfonsito in the face. The most plausible suggestion, possibly made by the boys’ sister Pilar to the Greek author Helena Matheopoulos, is that Alfonsito left the room to get a snack for himself and Juan Carlos. Returning with his hands full, he pushed the door open with his shoulder. The door knocked into his brother’s arm. Juan Carlos involuntarily pulled the trigger just as Alfonsito’s head appeared around the door.¹⁹

Doña María de las Mercedes later recalled: ‘I was reading in my drawing room, and Don Juan was in his study, next door. Suddenly, I heard Juanito coming down the stairs telling the girl who worked for us: “No, I must tell them myself”. My heart stood still.’²⁰ Both parents ran upstairs to the games room where they found their son lying in a pool of blood. Don Juan tried to revive him but the boy died in his arms. He placed a Spanish flag over him and, according to Antonio Eraso, a friend of Alfonsito, turned to Juan Carlos and said, ‘Swear to me that you didn’t do it on purpose.’²¹

Don Alfonso was buried in the cemetery at Cascais at midday on Saturday 31 March 1956. The funeral service was conducted by the Papal Nuncio to Portugal, and was attended by prominent Spanish monarchists and royal figures from several European countries. The desolate Don Juan could barely contain his distress, his eyes full of uncomprehending sorrow. Yet he greeted them all with grace and dignity. The Portuguese government was represented by the President of the Republic. In contrast, the Caudillo was represented merely by the Minister Plenipotentiary of the Spanish Embassy, Ignacio de Muguiro. The Ambassador, Franco’s brother Nicolás, was in bed, recovering from a car accident.²² There were messages of sympathy from all over the world, including one each from General Franco and Doña Carmen Polo.

Juan Carlos attended in the uniform of a Zaragoza officer cadet. His look of vacant desolation masked his inner agony of guilt. After the ceremony, Don Juan took the pistol that had killed Alfonsito and threw it into the sea. There was considerable speculation about the gun’s origins. It has been variously claimed that the weapon had been a present to Alfonsito from Franco or from the Conde de los Andes, or that someone in the Zaragoza military academy had given it to Juan Carlos. The autobiography of Juan Carlos’s mother states discreetly that: The two brothers had brought from Madrid the small six-millimetre pistol and it has never been revealed who gave it to them.’²³

Unable to support the presence of his elder son, Don Juan ordered Juan Carlos to return immediately to the Zaragoza academy. General Martínez Campos and Major Emilio García Conde arrived in a Spanish military aircraft in which the Prince was taken back to Zaragoza. The incident affected the Prince dramatically. The rather extrovert figure, so popular with his comrades in the academy for his participation in high jinks and chasing the local girls, now seemed afflicted by a tendency to introspection. Relations with his father were never the same again. Although he would return, superficially at least, to being a fun-loving young man, he was profoundly changed by the event. More alone than ever, he became morose and guarded in his speech and actions.²⁴

The death of her younger son profoundly affected Doña María de las Mercedes who fell into a deep depression, began to drink, and turned ever more for company to her friend Amalín López-Dóriga. Doña María was held partly responsible for the accident by her husband because she had given in to her sons’ repeated requests and allowed them to play with the gun despite their father’s prohibition. According to one such report, by the French journalist Françoise Laot on the basis of interviews with Doña María, she personally unlocked the secreter (writing bureau) where the gun was kept and handed it to Juan Carlos. Françoise Laot would later state that, 30 years after the accident, María de las Mercedes told her, ‘I have never been truly wretched except when my son died.’²⁵ So affected was Doña María that she had to spend some time at a clinic near Frankfurt.

His personal devastation aside, the death of Alfonso significantly weakened the political position of Don Juan. Henceforth, he would be more dependent on the vagaries of the situation of Juan Carlos in Spain. In the words of Rafael Borràs, the distinguished publisher and author of a major biography of Don Juan, the death of Alfonso: ‘deprived the Conde de Barcelona, from the point of view of dynastic legitimacy, of a possible substitute in the event of the Príncipe de Asturias agreeing, against his father’s will, and outside the normal line of succession, to be General Franco’s successor within the terms of the Ley de Sucesión’. Borràs speculates that, had Alfonso lived, his very existence might have conditioned the subsequent behaviour of Juan Carlos in the struggle between his father and Franco.²⁶

The Prince’s uncle, Don Jaime, endeavoured to derive political advantage from the tragedy. His first reaction had been to send a message of sympathy. However, on 17 April 1956 when the Italian newspaper II Settimo Giorno published an account of the accident which pointed the finger at Juan Carlos, he told his secretary Ramón de Alderete: ‘I am distraught to see the tragedy of Estoril dealt with in this way by a journalist who has been used in good faith, because I refuse to doubt the veracity of my unfortunate nephew’s version, as published by my brother. In this situation, and in my position as head of the Borbón family, I can only deeply disagree with the stance of my brother Juan who, in order to prevent future speculation, has neither demanded the opening of an official enquiry into the accident nor called for an autopsy on the body of my nephew, as is normal in such cases.’ These words were reproduced in the French press, presumably via Alderete and with the permission of Don Jaime.

Given that neither Don Juan nor Juan Carlos responded to Don Jaime’s demand, on 16 January 1957, he took the matter further and gave his secretary the following letter:

‘Reuil-Malmaison 16–1–1957.

Dear Ramón,

Several friends have recently confirmed that it was my nephew Juan Carlos who accidentally killed his brother Alfonso. This confirms something of which I have been certain ever since my brother Juan failed to sue those who had spoken publicly of this terrible situation. It obliges me to ask that you request in my name, when you feel that the time is right, that the appropriate national or international courts undertake a judicial enquiry in order to clarify officially the circumstances of the death of my nephew Alfonso (RIP). I demand that this judicial enquiry take place because it is my duty as Head of the House of Borbón, and because I cannot accept that someone who is incapable of accepting his own responsibilities should aspire to the throne of Spain. With a warm embrace.

Jaime de Borbón.’²⁷

There is no evidence to suggest that Alderete acted on the letter or, if he did, that a court showed an interest in the case. Nevertheless, the combination of insensitivity and ambition demonstrated by Don Jaime was breathtaking.

The Madrid authorities were shaken by the news of the accident. Rumours started to circulate in the capital to the effect that Juan Carlos had been so overcome by grief that he was thinking of renouncing his rights to the throne and joining a friary as penance. In fact, as his father had ordered, Juan Carlos was back in Zaragoza within 48 hours of the accident. Franco’s relative silence on this issue was eloquent. Commenting on the tragedy to one of Don Juan’s supporters, he said with a total lack of sympathy ‘people do not like princes who are out of luck’. It was a recurrent theme. Two years later, he explained why he did not favour press references to Alfonsito: )‘The memory could cast shadows over his brother for the accident and make simple folk dwell on the bad luck of the family when people like their Princes to have lucky stars.’²⁸ Perhaps most cruelly of all, within a year of the accident, Franco had permitted the Ministry of Education to sanction the publication and use in secondary schools of a textbook entitled La moral católica (Catholic Morality) which used the incident to explore the limits of personal culpability.²⁹ Years later, Don Juan himself related that, when they met in 1960, Franco had justified keeping him off the throne by saying that the Borbón family was doomed: ‘Just look at yourself, Your Highness: two haemophiliac brothers; another deaf and dumb; one daughter blind; one son shot dead. Such an accumulation of disasters in a single family is not something that could possibly appeal to the Spanish people.’³⁰

Franco’s lack of sympathy was a reflection of his hostility to Don Juan, of his own lack of humanity and perhaps too of the fact that, in March 1956, he was cooling on the idea of a monarchist succession. The scale of Falangist discontent that had been evident since the meeting at Las Cabezas seems to have led to him mulling over the mutual dependence between Caudillo and single party. This was manifested in the cabinet reshuffle of 16 February 1956. The liberal Christian Democrat Minister of Education, Joaquín Ruiz Giménez, was dropped, a punishment for his failure to control unrest in the universities. He was replaced by a conservative Falangist academic, Jesús Rubio García-Mina. Raimundo Fernández Cuesta, the Secretary-General of the Movimiento, was also removed for his failure to control Falangist indiscipline. He had been engaged in preparations to tighten up the Francoist laws lest any future king try to free himself from the ideals of the Movimiento. He was replaced by the sycophantic Falangist zealot, José Luis de Arrese. Alarmingly, for both Don Juan and for those who were looking forward to the eventual creation of a Francoist monarchy, the Caudillo commissioned Arrese to take over the programme of constitutional preparations for the post-Franco future.³¹

Arrese took his commission to be the preparation of an entirely Falangist future for the regime – one that would have no room for Don Juan nor even for Juan Carlos. The enthusiasm with which he went about his ambitious task would soon provoke a significant polarization of the Francoist coalition. Franco’s cabinet changes were ill-considered reactions to a deep-rooted split at the heart of his coalition. The Ley de Sucesión had been a cunning way of neutralizing regime monarchists and outmanoeuvring Don Juan. However, the prospect of a future monarchy, even a Francoist one, alienated the Falange. And Franco had few options but to cling to the Falange. If the Falange were weakened, the Caudillo’s fate would lie less in his own hands than in those of the senior Army officers who wanted an earlier rather than a later restoration of the monarchy. The situation required a complex balancing act and Arrese was more human cannonball than tightrope walker. The violent protests of Falangist students in February 1956 had been a symptom of a long death agony rather than of youthful vitality. With his mind elsewhere, occupied by the inexorable rise of Moroccan nationalism, and thus underestimating the seriousness of the crisis, Franco had responded instinctively by reasserting Falangist pre-eminence within his coalition. He was not controlling events but letting himself be driven by them.³²

Some months earlier, prominent Falangists had presented Franco with a memorandum demanding the swift implementation of their ‘unfinished revolution’. It was effectively a blueprint for a more totalitarian one-party State structure with no place for the monarchy of Don Juan.³³ Franco now seemed to be giving the green light for his new Secretary-General to implement the memorandum’s recommendations. Arrese’s plans were seen by Traditionalists, monarchists and Catholics as a totalitarian scheme which would block even limited pluralism under a restored monarchy.³⁴

With the help of Rafael Calvo Serer, the Conde de Ruiseñada, at the time Don Juan’s representative in Spain, elaborated a scheme to block Arrese’s plans by hastening the restoration of the monarchy. Ruiseñada was equally devoted to both Don Juan and to Franco. For some time, he had been in contact with General Juan Bautista Sánchez, the Captain-General of Barcelona, an austere and eminently decent man who was appalled at what he saw as the corruption of the regime. Now, the so-called ‘Operación Ruiseñada’ envisaged a bloodless, negotiated pronunciamiento, rather like that of General Miguel Primo de Rivera in 1923. The lead would be taken by the Barcelona garrison, with the agreement of the other Captains-General, and Franco would be persuaded to withdraw from active politics to the decorative position of ‘regent’. While the restoration of the monarchy was implemented, day-to-day running of the government would be assumed by Bautista Sánchez. The involvement of Bautista Sánchez – the most respected professional in the Armed Forces – helped secure the support of other monarchist generals against Arrese. Don Juan had considerable doubts as to whether this wildly optimistic scheme had any hopes of success but, concerned by Arrese’s plans, agreed to let it go ahead.³⁵

Needless to say, Franco’s intelligence services, which bugged most of Don Juan’s telephone conversations with Spain, were aware of what was being plotted. It was thus all the easier for Arrese, on a tour of the south with the Caudillo, to persuade him that a Falangist future rather than a monarchist one would be truer to his legacy. Franco gave vent to his impatience with Ruiseñada and Don Juan in speeches to which he gave, according to a delighted Arrese, ‘a twist of superfalangism and aggression that seemed to many to be announcing the beginning of the final triumphant era’. In Huelva on 25 April 1956, the Caudillo delighted his audience with an unmistakable and insulting reference to the monarchists and to Juan Carlos. He declared that: ‘We take no notice of the clumsy plotting of several dozen political intriguers nor their kids. Because if they got in the way of the fulfilment of our historic destiny, if anything got in our way, just as we did in our Crusade, we would unleash the flood of blueshirts and red berets which would crush them.’³⁶ At a huge meeting of Falangists in Seville on 1 May, he passionately denounced the enemies of the Falangist revolution. In a passage of his speech that seemed to be directed at Don Juan personally, he referred openly to his own near-monarchical status. Describing the Movimiento with himself at the pinnacle, he said: ‘We are a monarchy without royalty, but a monarchy all the same.’ Stating that national life had to be based on the ideals of the Falange, he declared that: ‘the Falange can live without the monarchy but what could not survive is a monarchy without the Falange.’³⁷ Many Francoists were happy enough to go along with the Movimiento as long as it remained a vague umbrella institution, but defining it so closely to Falangist terms led many to re-evaluate their own preferences.

One of them, the Minister of Justice, the Traditionalist Antonio Iturmendi, was sufficiently alarmed to commission one of his brightest collaborators to produce a critical analysis of Arrese’s preliminary sketches for constitutional change. It was a decision that would have considerable impact on the later trajectory of Juan Carlos. The man given the job was the Catalan monarchist and professor of administrative law, Laureano López Rodó. His report was to be a blueprint of his growing commitment to the cause of Juan Carlos.³⁸ The deeply religious and austere López Rodó, who would quickly rise to a discreet but considerable eminence, was a typical senior member of Opus Dei, quietly confident, hard-working and efficient.

More immediately significant, at the beginning of July 1956, General Antonio Barroso Sánchez-Guerra protested to the Caudillo about Arrese’s activities. He was just about to replace Franco’s cousin Pacón as head of the Caudillo’s military household. Along with two other monarchist generals, one of whom may well have been Bautista Sánchez, he discussed with Franco a version of the Operación Ruiseñada, in which a military directory would take over and hold a plebiscite on the issue of monarchy or republic, in the confident expectation that such a consultation would produce support for the monarchy.³⁹ While hardly likely to go along with Operación Ruiseñada, Franco was sufficiently sensitive to military opinion to begin gradually to restrain Arrese. Nonetheless, when he made a speech to the Consejo Nacional de FET y de las JONS on 17 July 1956, the 20th anniversary of the military uprising, he used notes provided by Arrese, ‘to ensure that he did not say anything, either influenced by other sectors of the Movimiento or in an effort to calm liberal and monarchist anxieties, that might put us in an embarrassing situation later on’.⁴⁰ Essentially a long hymn of praise to his own achievements, although not without passing praise for Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, the speech reassured Falangists that a future monarchical successor would not be allowed to use his absolute powers to bring about a transition to democracy.⁴¹

Unaware that the tide was turning against him, Arrese went ahead with his plans, distributing a draft to members of the Consejo Nacional, the supreme consultative body in the Francoist firmament. Although his text recognized Franco’s absolute powers for life, it left the decision as to his royal successor at the mercy of the Consejo Nacional and the Secretary-General of the Falange. When the text was distributed, there was uproar in the Francoist establishment, and monarchists, Catholics, archbishops and generals joined together in outrage. There were protests from three cardinals, a government minister (the Conde de Vallellano, Minister of Public Works) and several generals, at what seemed to be an attempt to give the Movimiento totalitarian control over Spain and block the return of the monarchy.⁴² By early January 1957, Arrese had been obliged to dilute his text sufficiently to satisfy his military and clerical opponents.⁴³

Between the two poles of the proposal of Operación Ruiseñada for a negotiated transition to Don Juan and Arrese’s plans for a resurgent Falangism, there emerged a middle option favoured by Luis Carrero Blanco, who had recently been promoted to Admiral. To the detriment of Don Juan and the benefit of Juan Carlos, this would ultimately be adopted by Franco. It consisted of an attempt to build on the Ley de Sucesión by elaborating the legislative framework for an absolute monarchy, in order to guarantee the continuity of Francoism after the death of the Caudillo. The legal expert commissioned to produce a blueprint was Laureano López Rodó. Carrero Blanco had been immensely impressed by López Rodó’s critique of Arrese’s text. Recognizing his talent and capacity for hard work, at the end of 1956 Carrero Blanco asked him to set up a technical secretariat in the Presidencia del Gobierno (the office of the President of the Council of Ministers) to prepare plans for a major administrative reform.⁴⁴ As Secretary-General of the Presidencia, the doggedly loyal Carrero Blanco was Franco’s political chief of staff. As Franco began to relax his grip on day-to-day politics, Carrero Blanco was gradually metamorphosing into a Prime Minister. López Rodó, in his turn, would swiftly become Carrero’s own chief of staff.

The Opus Dei was thus well placed for the future but was still hedging its bets. Just as Rafael Calvo Serer was banking on Don Juan being Franco’s eventual successor, López Rodó was working on a long-term plan for a gradual evolution towards the monarchy in the person of Prince Juan Carlos. His plans would not come to fruition for many years. For the moment, Bautista Sánchez and other partisans of Don Juan were trying to implement the Operación Ruiseñada in order to marginalize Franco and place Don Juan upon the throne. Bautista Sánchez was under constant surveillance by Franco’s intelligence services, and therefore did not attend, in December 1956, a meeting of military and civilian monarchists involved in the scheme who gathered under the cover of a hunting party at one of the estates of Ruiseñada, El Alamin near Toledo.⁴⁵ Nevertheless, Bautista Sánchez continued to be seen by the regime as dangerous, particularly when, in mid-January 1957, another transport users’ strike broke out in Barcelona. Although not as violent as that of 1951, the coincidence of anti-regime demonstrations at the university alarmed the authorities.⁴⁶ Bautista Sánchez was highly critical of the Civil Governor of the province, General Felipe Acedo Colunga, for the brutal force with which demonstrations of workers and students were crushed. Franco perceived this as tantamount to giving moral support to the strikers.⁴⁷

Madrid was buzzing with rumours and Franco quickly jumped to the conclusion that Bautista Sánchez was fostering the strike to facilitate a coup in favour of the monarchy. After his summer-time conversation with Barroso about Operación Ruiseñada, Franco was deeply suspicious of the monarchists. In fact, there was little or no chance of military action despite the wishful thinking of Ruiseñada, Sainz Rodríguez and others. However, the conversations between the royalist plotters and Don Juan’s house in Estoril were being tapped by the Caudillo’s security services, and Franco reacted to the transcripts of these optimistic fantasies as if they were fact.⁴⁸ He sent two regiments of the Foreign Legion to Catalonia, under his own direct orders, to join in military manoeuvres being supervised by Bautista Sánchez. Franco also sent Bautista Sanchez’s friend, the Captain-General of Valencia, General Joaquín Ríos Capapé, to talk him out of his support for Operación Ruiseñada. The Minister for the Army, General Agustín Muñoz Grandes, also appeared in the course of the manoeuvres and confronted Bautista Sánchez with the news that he was being relieved of the command of Captain-General of Barcelona. On the following day, 29 January 1957, Bautista Sánchez was found dead in his room in a hotel in Puigcerdá.⁴⁹ Wild rumours proliferated that he had been murdered – possibly even shot by another general, perhaps given a fatal injection by Falangist agents.⁵⁰ A long-term sufferer of angina pectoris, it is more likely that Bautista Sánchez had died of a heart attack after the shock of his painful interview with Muñoz Grandes.⁵¹

Meanwhile, Juan Carlos was undergoing the process of getting over the tragedy of Alfonsito’s death. He seems to have adopted a forced gaiety and, understandably for a young man of nearly 19, spent as much time as his studies permitted in the company of girls. There were many of them and he had a readiness to think himself in love. He oscillated between being infatuated with, and just being very fond of, his childhood friend, Princess María Gabriella di Savoia. Neither Franco nor Don Juan approved of the relationship, among other reasons because she was the daughter of the exiled King Umberto of Italy, who had little prospect of recovering his throne.⁵² However, in December 1956, during the Christmas holidays at Estoril, Juan Carlos met Contessa Olghina Nicolis di Robilant, an extremely beautiful Italian aristocrat and minor film actress, who was friendly with María Gabriella and her sister Pia. She was four years older than him. His infatuation was instant and, before the night was over, he had told her that he loved her. They began a sporadic affair that lasted until 1960. She found him passionate and impulsive, not at all what she expected after what she had heard about the tragedy of Alfonsito. ‘Juanito,’ she later recalled, ‘did not show any signs of the slightest complex. He wore a black tie and a little black ribbon as a sign of mourning. That was all. I asked myself if it was a lack of feeling or if his behaviour was forced. Whatever the case, it seemed a little soon to be going to parties, dancing and necking.’ After responding to his advances, she asked about his relationship with María Gabriella. He allegedly replied, ‘I don’t have much freedom of choice, try to understand. And she’s the one I prefer out of the so-called eligible ones.’⁵³

In 1988, the 47 love letters that Juan Carlos wrote to Olghina between 1956 and 1959 were published in the Italian magazine Oggi and later in the Spanish magazine Interviú. One of the letters was extraordinarily revealing both of the situation in which the 19-year-old Prince found himself and of his relative maturity and sense of dynastic responsibility. He wrote: ‘At the moment, I love you more than anyone else, but I understand, because it is my obligation, that I cannot marry you and so I have to think of someone else. The only girl that I have seen so far that attracts me physically and morally, indeed in every way, is Gabriella, and she does, a lot. I hope, or rather I think it would be wise, for the moment, not to say anything about getting serious or even having an understanding with her. But I want her to know something about how I see things, but nothing more because we are both very young.’ He repeated the message in another letter to Olghina in which he pointed out that his duties to his father and to Spain would prevent him ever marrying her.⁵⁴

In her memoirs and in interviews following the publication of the letters, Olghina claimed that Don Juan had done everything possible to put obstacles in the way of the relationship. As she herself realized, Don Juan’s opposition put her in the same position as Verdi’s La Traviata, the courtesan abandoned because of the needs of her suitor’s family. In view of the innumerable lovers whose names tumble through the pages of her memoirs, Don Juan’s concern was entirely comprehensible. At one point, he stopped her being invited to the coming-out celebration in Portofino for Juan Carlos’s cousin, María Teresa Marone-Cinzano. According to Olghina, this provoked a ferocious row between Don Juan and his son, who threatened not to go to the ball. Juan Carlos eventually agreed to attend, but when he left early to go to see Olghina, there was a scuffle with his father.⁵⁵

Olghina provides an interesting testimony of the Prince’s personality and convictions as he entered his twenties. She knew a passionate young man, who liked fast cars, motorboats and girls, although he never forgot his position. He was, she said, ‘very serious albeit no saint’. She declared that ‘he wasn’t at all shy, but was rather puritanical’ and that ‘he was always very honest with me’. He disliked women whom he considered too calculating or ‘of less than stringent morals’. His puritanical streak was perhaps typical of a Spanish young man of his generation – it did not prevent him ardently pressing on her his ‘hot, dry and wise lips’ nor spending nights in hotels with her. He was also very generous, even though he didn’t have much money at the time. Interestingly, Olghina claims that Juan Carlos disliked hunting – one of Franco’s favoured pastimes – because he had no desire to kill animals.⁵⁶

When the interviewer suggested to Olghina that Juan Carlos’s letters gave the impression that he had been more attached to her than she to him, she replied that this wasn’t the case. The problem was, rather, that she was aware that he would never marry her. As a result, she tried to keep her distance from him. Juan Carlos, she said, ‘was very clear on the fact that his destiny was to give himself to Spain and that, in order to achieve this, he needed to marry into a reigning dynasty … Juan Carlos was convinced that he would be King of Spain.’⁵⁷ It was later suggested that Olghina di Robilant blackmailed Juan Carlos. She was allegedly paid ten million pesetas by Juan Carlos for the letters, at which point she sent the originals to him but kept copies, which she then sold for publication.⁵⁸

Despite his close relationship with Olghina, Juan Carlos had María Gabriella di Savoia’s photograph in his room in the Zaragoza academy. He was ordered to remove it from his bedside table on the grounds that: ‘General Franco might be annoyed if he visited the academy.’ This ridiculous intrusion of the Prince’s privacy may have been an initiative of the director of the academy rather than of Franco himself. However, Franco knew about it. That there was no respect for Juan Carlos’s privacy would be seen again in 1958. When the Prince visited the United States as a naval cadet on a Spanish training ship, he took a fancy to a beautiful Brazilian girl at one of the dances organized for the crew members. He wrote to her, only to discover later that all his letters had ended up on Franco’s desk. Again, in late January 1960, having been informed that Juan Carlos still had María Gabriella’s photograph on his bedside table, the Caudillo would call in one of the Prince’s closest aides, Major Emilio García Conde, to discuss the matter. Clearly preoccupied by the significance of the photograph, Franco said, ‘We’ve got to find a Princess for the Prince.’ He then went on to list a series of names whose unsuitability was pointed out by García Conde. When the latter suggested the daughters of the King of Greece, Franco replied categorically, ‘Don Juan Carlos will never marry a Greek princess!’ He had two objections – the fact that they were not Roman Catholics and his belief that King Paul was a freemason.⁵⁹

The Caudillo felt that he had a right to interfere in the Prince’s romantic affairs. He told Pacón that he regarded María Gabriella di Savoia as altogether too free and with ‘ideas altogether too modern’. Newspaper speculation abounded about the Prince’s relationship with María Gabriella, and Juan Carlos remained keen on her for some time. It was rumoured that their engagement would be announced on 12 October 1960 at the silver wedding celebrations of Don Juan and Doña María de las Mercedes. The Prince’s choice of bride had enormous significance both for the royal family and the possible succession to Franco. The chosen candidate, irrespective of her human qualities, would have to be a royal princess, preferably of a ruling dynasty, financially comfortable and acceptable to General Franco. Sentiment would always take second place to political considerations. Some days before the anniversary party, the matter was discussed at a session of Don Juan’s Privy Council. On the basis of having enjoyed herself rather publicly at the previous spring’s Feria de Sevilla, María Gabriella was denounced as being frivolous – which José María Pemán thought ridiculous. In any case, Don Juan told Pemán: ‘I don’t think Juanito will be mature enough for at least a year or two.’⁶⁰

Olghina di Robilant’s view that, already by the late 1950s, Juan Carlos believed that he would succeed Franco and thus take his father’s place on the throne was, of course, precisely the plan of Laureano López Rodó. On the reasonable assumption that there would be a monarchical succession to Franco, the Opus Dei was consolidating its links with both of the principal potential candidates. Thus, just as Rafael Calvo Serer remained close to Don Juan, so Juan Carlos was central to the far-reaching political plans of López Rodó.

In the wake of the internal dissent provoked by Arrese’s schemes, the Barcelona strike, serious economic problems and the push for an accelerated transition to the monarchy that had culminated in the death of Bautista Sánchez, Franco reluctantly decided that the time had come to renew his ministerial team. His hesitation was not just a symptom of his lifelong caution but was also a reflection of his inability to react with any flexibility to new problems. The cabinet reshuffle of February 1957 was to be a major turning point in the road from the dictatorship to the eventual monarchy of Juan Carlos. It was to open up the process whereby Franco would abandon his commitment to economic autarky and accept Spanish integration into the Organization for European Economic Co-operation and the International Monetary Fund. The weary Caudillo was ceasing to be an active Prime Minister and turning himself into ceremonial Head of State, relying ever more on Carrero Blanco as executive head of the government. The recently promoted admiral, no more versed than Franco in the ways of governing a modern economy, relied increasingly on López Rodó who, at 37 years of age, had become technical Secretary-General of the Presidencia del Gobierno.⁶¹ The long-term implications of López Rodó’s growing influence could hardly have been anticipated by Franco or Carrero Blanco, let alone by Don Juan and his son.

The detail of the cabinet changes reflected Franco’s readiness to defer to the advice of Carrero Blanco who, in turn, drew on the views of López Rodó. Indeed, such was López Rodó’s closeness to Carrero Blanco that his own collaborators came to refer to him as ‘Carrero Negro’.⁶² Having witnessed the ferocity of internal opposition to Arrese’s proposals, Franco now went in the other direction, clipping the wings of the Falange. The Falangists he appointed could scarcely have been more docile. Other key appointments saw General Muñoz Grandes replaced as the Minister for the Army by the monarchist General Antonio Barroso. While hardly likely to become involved in conspiracy, Barroso was infinitely more sympathetic to Don Juan than the pro-Falangist Muñoz Grandes. Most important of all was the inclusion of a group of technocrats associated with the Opus Dei. Together, López Rodó, the new Minister of Commerce, Alberto Ullastres Calvo, and the new Minister of Finance, Mariano Navarro Rubio, would undertake a major project of economic and political transformation of the regime. The implications of their work for the post-Franco future would dramatically affect the position of Juan Carlos.⁶³

That was made clear in some astonishingly frank remarks made by López Rodó to the Conde de Ruiseñada shortly after the cabinet reshuffle. López Rodó claimed in effect that the marginalization of Franco was one of the long-term objectives of the technocrats. He told Ruiseñada that the ‘Tercera Fuerza’ (Third Force) plans of Opus Dei members like Rafael Calvo Serer and Florentino Pérez Embid (the editor of El Alcázar) were doomed to failure since, ‘it is impossible to talk to Franco about politics because he gets the impression that they are trying to get him out of his seat or paving the way for his replacement.’ He then made the revealing comment that ‘The only trick is to get him to accept an administrative plan to decentralize the economy. He doesn’t think of that as being directed against him personally. He will give us a free hand and, then, once inside the administration, we will see how far we can go with our political objectives, which have to be masked as far as possible.’⁶⁴

At the end of March 1957, shortly before the first anniversary of the death of Alfonsito de Borbón, the Conde de Ruiseñada had a bust of him made and placed in the grounds of El Alamín. A number of young monarchists were invited and Luis María Anson, a brilliant young journalist and leader of the monarchist university youth movement, assuming that the bust would be unveiled by Juan Carlos, expressed concern that the occasion would be too painful for him. Anson was astonished to be told by Ruiseñada that the Caudillo had already instructed him to ask Juan Carlos’s cousin, Alfonso de Borbón y Dampierre, to preside at the ceremony. ‘I want you to cultivate him, Ruiseñada. Because if the son turns out as badly for us as his father has, we’ll have to start thinking about Don Alfonso.’ Anson reported the conversation to Don Juan. Until this time, the pretensions of Don Jaime and his son had not been taken entirely seriously in Estoril. Henceforth, there would be an acute awareness of the dangers of Franco applying the Ley de Sucesión in favour of Alfonso de Borbón y Dampierre.⁶⁵

In May 1957, speaking with Dionisio Ridruejo, a Falangist poet who had broken with the regime, López Rodó revealed his concerns about the fragility of a system dependent on the mortality of Franco. López Rodó wanted to see the Caudillo’s personal dictatorship replaced by a more secure structure of governmental institutions and constitutional laws. Allegedly declaring that, in the wake of the recent cabinet changes, ‘the personal power of General Franco has come to an end’, López Rodó hoped to have Juan Carlos officially proclaimed royal successor while Franco was still alive. It was rather like Ruiseñada’s plan, except with Juan Carlos instead of Don Juan in the role of successor. Until 1968, when the Prince would reach 30, the age at which the Ley de Sucesión permitted him to assume the throne, Franco would remain as regent. To prevent the Head of State, King or Caudillo, suffering unnecessary political attrition, there would be a separation of the Headship of State and the position of Prime Minister.⁶⁶ López Rodó’s optimism in this respect would be seriously dented in November 1957. At that point, he came near to being dismissed when Franco noticed that the decrees emanating from the Presidencia del Gobierno were limiting his powers.⁶⁷ López Rodó’s plans for political change had to be introduced with extreme delicacy if the Caudillo were not to call an immediate halt to them. That, together with the hostility of the still powerful Falangists to the concept of monarchy, ensured that the realization of his programme would take another 12 years.

On 18 July 1957, Juan Carlos had passed out as Second-Lieutenant at Zaragoza. After showing off his uniform in Estoril, he went to visit his grandmother in Lausanne. While in Switzerland, he gave a press interview in which he stated that he regarded his father as King. His declaration of loyalty to Don Juan annoyed the Caudillo. Franco commented to Pacón, ‘just like Don Juan, the Prince is badly advised and he should keep quiet and not speak so much.’ Shortly afterwards, Juan Carlos visited Franco and the three military ministers of the cabinet. It may be supposed that the Caudillo’s displeasure at his comments to the Swiss press was communicated to him because it was a mistake he would never repeat.⁶⁸

On 20 August 1957, Juan Carlos entered the naval school at Marin, in the Ría de Pontevedra in Galicia, an idyllic spot marred only by the stench from the nearby paper mills. After facing initial hostility from some of his fellow cadets, his easy-going affability and capacity for physical hardship won them over.⁶⁹ While at Marín, he met Pacón, who wrote: ‘I found him an absolute delight. It is impossible to conceive of a more agreeable, straightforward and pleasant lad.’⁷⁰ The Prince was unaware of López Rodó’s schemes for his future. By now, the Catalan lawyer had been asked by Carrero Blanco to draw up a set of constitutional texts which would allow the eventual installation of the monarchy, yet still be acceptable to those who wanted the Movimiento to survive after the ‘biological fact’, as the death of Franco was coming to be called. The question of the transition from the dictator to an installed monarch, and López Rodó’s draft texts, were discussed interminably in the cabinet. However, Franco had no interest in a process that he regarded as no more than fine-tuning the Ley de Sucesión. In any case, he was in no hurry to think about death.

Throughout the summer of 1957, Ruiseñada and López Rodó both tried to arrange an interview between Franco and Don Juan. Whether their agendas in doing so coincided is difficult to say. In any case, they had not consulted Don Juan previously. From Scotland, where he was on holiday, Don Juan refused on the grounds that he could see no sign of progress or reform in the regime. Indeed, on 25 June, he had sent Franco a letter and memorandum in which he stated that there was no point in a meeting until Franco was prepared to make a major step forward in planning for the future. ‘The time for a new interview will be when Your Excellency judges that the opportune moment has arrived for a significant change. Such an interview should not be limited to a mere interchange of news and ideas but rather, unless you think otherwise, should deal with the fundamental issues of Spain’s political future and this is not something that can be improvised in the course of a conversation.’ It is not difficult to imagine how the Caudillo reacted to the suggestion that Don Juan might be in a position to negotiate about the political future. His role, if any, so far as Franco saw it, was simply to swear an oath to accept the Francoist system in toto.

A reference by Don Juan to ‘the interim status of the present regime’ might also have been designed to infuriate Franco. He was equally irritated by the suggestion that the monarchy under Don Juan would deviate from the essential bases of that regime. He replied in early September: ‘The monarchy should be born as a natural and logical evolution of the regime itself towards other institutional forms of state; from a strong, authoritarian state that safeguards the national and moral values in defence of which the Movimiento Nacional emerged, and at the same time, opens the way to those new kinds of state demanded by the needs of the country and which can assure the consolidation and survival of the monarchical regime.’

Franco took the greatest offence at the implication that the future monarchy might change anything at all about his regime. He described Don Juan’s points as ‘unacceptable’ and reminded him that while constitutional plans were in place for a monarchy, nothing had been settled about the individuals who might sit on the throne. The Caudillo made it clear that there was no question whatsoever of a different conception of the State succeeding his regime. As from on high, the all-powerful master lecturing the recalcitrant servant, he wrote: ‘Herein lies the great confusion that has prompted your memorandum, not only in regard to the needs of the country and to the opinion of great sectors of the nation but also in regard to what it means to be able to forge a new legality. Our War of Liberation, with all its sacrifices, meant that the people won with their blood the situation and the regime that we now enjoy. The Ley de Sucesión came, nearly ten years later, to give written form to the legality forged by the man who saved an entire society, re-established peace and law and order and placed the nation firmly on the road to its resurgence. To call into question this long consolidated legality, to harbour reservations about what has been constituted and to try to open a constituent period, would signify a massive suicide. It would give hope to all the ambitions and appetites of the rebellious minorities and would offer foreigners and enemies from outside a new opportunity to besiege and destroy Spain.’ Such a mixture of arrogance and paranoia left no room for dialogue.⁷¹

Don Juan had just returned from his holiday in Scotland and absorbed this thunderous rebuff when López Rodó arrived in Lisbon. He was in Portugal as part of a Spanish economic delegation. At a lunch given by the Portuguese Prime Minister, Marcelo Caetano, journalists asked the Spanish Ambassador, Nicolás Franco, if it was true that the Caudillo wished Don Juan to abdicate in favour of Juan Carlos. He replied in typical gallego (Galician) fashion, ‘I’ve never heard my brother say anything about that. But I think that if he can have two spare wheels, he wouldn’t want to make do with only one.’ There can be little doubt that the exchange was reported back to Villa Giralda and can only have caused Don Juan considerable concern.

López Rodó took the opportunity of the trip to arrange a clandestine meeting with Don Juan in the centre of Lisbon at the home of a Portuguese friend. Unaware of Franco’s high-handed letter, he endeavoured to reassure Don Juan that things were moving within the regime, albeit slowly. Without admitting, as he had to Dionisio Ridruejo three months earlier, that he saw Juan Carlos as the better bet, López Rodó himself explained to Don Juan his scheme for gradual evolution. Their conversation on 17 September 1957 lasted more than three hours. López Rodó told Don Juan that, although Franco wanted to put an end to the uncertainty surrounding his succession, he was obsessed with the fear that, when he died, his life’s work could simply be jettisoned by his royal successor. Thus, in accordance with the Ley de Sucesión, whoever was chosen would have to accept the basic principles of the Francoist State. Don Juan made it clear that for him to take the first step would be, ‘like being forced to take a purgative. I wouldn’t want to be politically compromised.’ As delicately as possible, López Rodó hinted that such an attitude eliminated him from the game.⁷²

Later on the same day, perhaps influenced by his conversation with López Rodó, Don Juan wrote a conciliatory letter to Franco. His backtracking was a clear recognition of the fact that Franco held all the cards: ‘I am deeply distressed that the interpretation which Your Excellency has given to the paragraph in my memorandum, in which I spoke of “the monarchy as a natural and logical evolution of the regime itself”, should differ so much from the meaning that I put into my words. Evolution, for me, means perfecting, completing the present regime, but the idea of opening a constituent period, or of any discontinuity between the present regime and the monarchy, has never entered my mind.’ He ended feebly by saying that, whenever Franco wished, he would be delighted to meet him.⁷³

Revelling in the weakness revealed by this exchange, Franco twisted the knife further by fostering the claims to the throne of various Carlist pretenders. Accordingly, the ever-busy Pedro Sainz Rodríguez came up with a scheme to strengthen Don Juan’s position. This took the form of an orchestrated ceremony at Villa Giralda on 20 December 1957 involving a delegation of 44 of the most prominent members of the rival dynastic group, the Comunión Tradicionalista. After a solemn mass, Don Juan, wearing the red beret of the Carlists, accepted the principles of the medieval absolute monarchy dear to the Traditionalists. They, for their part, declared that they regarded him as the legitimate heir to the throne. The consequence was that a majority of the Carlists lined up behind Don Juan, although a significant minority of hardliners would continue to push the claims of Don Javier de Borbón Parma and his son Hugo.⁷⁴

The prize was insufficient to justify the fact that, as the paladin of a liberal monarchy, Don Juan was making two grave errors. Not only was he committing himself to principles inimical to the interplay of political parties, but he was also confirming to Franco the debility of his position. Far from being above partisan interests, he was showing that he had to wheel and deal in order to gain support. When he wrote to inform Franco officially, the Caudillo replied with a patronizing letter of considerable cunning, picking up precisely on this point. He expressed his satisfaction that Don Juan had finally linked up with the only real monarchists (by which he meant those who rejected the liberal constitutional monarchy of his father, Alfonso XIII). He then went on to point out the contradiction of this new position with Don Juan’s previously liberal stance. ‘I refer to the repeated manifestation of your desire to be King of all Spaniards. There can be no argument that the Pretender to the throne of Spain might one day wish to feel that he could be King of all Spaniards. This is normal in monarchical situations in all countries. Everyone who accepts and respects an established order must respect its supreme authorities just as they must treat all citizens with the love given to subjects. But when there are citizens who, from abroad or inside the country, betray or combat their Fatherland, or declare themselves to be agents in the service of foreign powers, such words could well be erroneously interpreted.’ The letter concluded with the condescending advice that Don Juan not make public declarations without first seeking his approval.⁷⁵

Many of Don Juan’s advisers, like Ruiseñada, believed that a rapprochement with Franco was the only route to the throne. Ruiseñada himself died in mysterious circumstances in France on 23 April 1958. His death in a sleeper compartment of a stationary train in the railway station of Tours, coming a year after the demise of his fellow conspirator Bautista Sánchez gave rise to suspicions of foul play. However, the death was almost certainly the result of natural causes.⁷⁶ Other monarchists thought that the growing unpopularity of the regime should incline the Pretender to keep his distance. In fact, their hopes were entirely misplaced. Every time that Franco spoke to his cousin Pacón about Don Juan, it was to lament his liberal connections. He muttered that if Don Juan were to accept the postulates of the Movimiento without reservations, there would be no legal impediment. However, it was clear that Franco had no confidence in Don Juan ever doing so. In early June 1958, he said to Pacón: ‘I’m already 65 and it’s only natural that I should prepare my own succession, since something might happen to me. For this, the only possible princes are Don Juan and Don Juan Carlos who are, in that order, the legal heirs. It’s such a pity about Don Juan’s English education, which is of course so liberal.’ He would reveal his lack of trust in Don Juan even more clearly in mid-March 1959 when telling Pacón that Don Juan, ‘is entirely in the hands of the enemies of the regime who want to wipe out the Crusade and the sweeping victory that we won’.⁷⁷

In May 1958, while the 20-year-old Juan Carlos was still completing his course as a naval cadet, he sailed as a midshipman in the Spanish Navy’s sailing ship, the Juan Sebastián Elcano. It was to cross the Atlantic, putting in at several US ports. At the same time, Don Juan was engaged in a dangerous adventure. In an effort to put behind him the tragedy of Alfonsito, he had decided to sail the Atlantic in his yacht, the Saltillo, following the route of Christopher Columbus. When he reached Funchal in Madeira, he was awaited by Fernando María Castiella, the Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs. Castiella had been sent by Franco to persuade Don Juan to abandon the voyage.⁷⁸ It is likely that this was motivated less by concerns for Don Juan’s safety than by fears that a successful journey might increase his prestige.

At the time, the Spanish Ambassador to the United States was José María de Areilza, the one-time Falangist who had only very recently become a partisan of Don Juan. As recently as 1955, Areilza had written to Franco protesting at the presence in Spain of Juan Carlos as a ‘Trojan horse’ whose presence delighted ‘all the reds and separatists’.⁷⁹ Now, newly converted to liberalism, he informed the authorities in Washington of the fact that the Prince was aboard the training ship and alerted the American press. The Embassy was showered with invitations for the Prince in Washington, New York and elsewhere. Serious damage to the storm-battered Saltillo gave Areilza the excuse needed to arrange to have Don Juan picked up by the US coastguard and brought to the Embassy. Once Don Juan was installed there, Areilza was able to incorporate him into the various events arranged for Juan Carlos. The Ambassador requested permission from Franco to receive Don Juan and his son at the Spanish Embassy. However, to the delight of the Americans and the embarrassment of Madrid, Areilza went beyond his instructions and the presence of the two members of the Spanish royal family was converted almost into a State visit. There were much-publicized visits to the Library of Congress, the Pentagon and Arlington Cemetery, to West Point and, in New York, to Cardinal Spellman’s residence, to the Metropolitan Opera, and to the offices of the New York Times.⁸⁰

While Juan Carlos and Don Juan were in the United States, López Rodó was continuing to beaver away at his plan for the post-Franco monarchy. The first fruit of his work as head of Carrero Blanco’s secretariat of the Presidencia was the Ley de Principios del Movimiento (Declaration of the Fundamental Principles of the Movimiento). The text was presented to the Cortes by Franco himself on 17 May 1958. It was clear that López Rodó had worked on the gradual reform to which he had referred in his conversations with Ruiseñada and Don Juan. The twelve principles were an innocuously vague and high-minded statement of the regime’s Catholicism and commitment to social justice, but within them could be discerned the formal decoupling of the regime from Falangism. The seventh principle stated that: ‘The political form of the Spanish State, within the immutable principles of the Movimiento Nacional and the Ley de Sucesión and the other fundamental laws, is the traditional, Catholic, social and representative monarchy.’⁸¹ The biggest obstacle to Don Juan, or his son, ever accepting the idea of a monarchy tied to the regime was the Falange. Now it was shifting slightly. Of the Movimiento Nacional understood as being the Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las JONS, central to schemes such as that of Arrese, there was nothing in Franco’s speech.

The text made it appear as if Franco was edging towards the idea of a monarchical restoration, and many monarchists eagerly interpreted the speech in those terms. So soon after Arrese’s aborted plans, this constituted a puzzling u-turn that can be explained largely in terms of López Rodó’s influence. Franco had left the drafting of his speech to Carrero Blanco and he in turn had left it to López Rodó. Either because he had not fully digested its implications, or else because they simply did not bother him, he had not discussed the text in cabinet before making the speech. In the Cortes, several ministers had revealed their dismay at its apparent departure from Falangism by ostentatiously failing to applaud. After a lengthy conversation with Franco in the wake of the speech, Pacón reached the conclusion that none of this mattered, since it was clear that Franco had no intention of leaving power before death or incapacity obliged him to do so. Pacón asked him if he excluded Don Juan as a possible successor in such a case. Franco replied: ‘The designation of a King is the task of the Consejo del Reino but I certainly don’t exclude him. If Don Juan accepts the principles of the Movimiento unreservedly, there is no legal reason to exclude him.’ That Pacón had got it right was revealed on 6 June 1958, when Franco made Agustín Muñoz Grandes Chief of the General Staff replacing Juan Vigón. Muñoz Grandes was to ensure that the Caudillo’s wishes would be carried out if he died or were incapacitated. The appointment made it unequivocally clear that Franco had no intention of handing over to any successor before that time.⁸²

The promulgation of the Ley de Principios del Movimiento had taken place while Juan Carlos and his father were in New York. After their visit was over, Don Juan made the hazardous trip back across the Atlantic in the Saltillo. On reaching the Portuguese port of Cascáis on 24 June, several dozen enthusiastic Spanish monarchists were waiting to congratulate him on his remarkable maritime exploits. On the quayside, Franco’s new Ambassador to Portugal, José Ibáñez Martín, was jostled. When a Portuguese journalist asked the name of the man who had replaced Nicolás Franco in the Lisbon Embassy, several voices replied in unison ‘sinvergüenza’ (scoundrel). As Don Juan posed for photographers, the Ambassador tried to insinuate himself into the frame. Ibáñez Martín was seized and dragged to one side by an ardent young monarchist who had to be restrained from throwing him into the water. When Ibáñez Martín protested to Don Juan, he was ignored. At the reception held afterwards, there was booing when someone announced that a delegation of Procuradores from the Cortes planned to ask Don Juan to accept the Ley de Principios del Movimiento. In his speech, Don Juan declared: ‘I won’t return as Franco’s puppet. I will be King of all Spaniards.’ He told the dissident General Heli Rolando de Telia that only prudence prevented him making a full public break with Franco. Full reports on the various incidents soon reached the Caudillo.⁸³

Even without these declarations, the Caudillo now had yet another reason for resenting Don Juan. Franco always claimed that his real vocation was in the Navy. Only ten years earlier, on 12 October 1948, at the monastery of La Rábida where Christopher Columbus kept vigil on the night before setting out from Palos de Moguer on his historic voyage, Franco had awarded himself the title of Gran Almirante de Castilla (Lord High Admiral of Castile). Considering himself to be the twentieth-century Christopher Columbus, he must have been deeply irritated by the adulation showered on Don Juan for his real maritime achievements.⁸⁴ Franco was even more displeased when a report from the security services about Don Juan reached him. It consisted of a transcription of a lengthy conversation with a German journalist. Don Juan denounced the illegitimacy of Franco’s tenure of power and stated categorically that the next King had to be committed to national reconciliation.⁸⁵

It was hardly surprising that the Caudillo’s determination not to hand over the baton for a very long time was reiterated in his end-of-the-year broadcast on New Year’s Eve 1958. Despite the fact that the Spanish economy was on the verge of collapse, with inflation soaring and working-class unrest on the increase, he dedicated the bulk of his lengthy speech (30 pages in its printed version) to a hymn of praise to the Movimiento. In particular, he presented it as the institutionalization of his victory in the Civil War. The underlying message of his obscure ramblings was that the future succession would take place only in accordance with the principles of the Movimiento. Denouncing the failures of the Borbón monarchy in terms of ‘frivolity, lack of foresight, neglect, clumsiness and blindness’, he claimed that anyone who did not recognize the legitimacy of his regime was suffering from ‘personal egoism and mental debility’. After these unmistakable allusions to his person, Don Juan could hardly feel secure about his position in the Caudillo’s plans for the future.⁸⁶

Franco’s words made it clear that he was keen to dampen the ardour of those monarchists who had taken the Ley de Principios del Movimiento as implying that a handover of power to Don Juan was imminent. Their optimism was exposed at a monarchist gathering in Madrid on 29 January 1959. Progressive supporters of Don Juan held a dinner at the Hotel Menfis to launch an association known as Unión Española. The days of aristocratic courtiers like Danvila or Ruiseñada were now giving way to something altogether more modern. Unión Española was the brainchild of the liberal monarchist lawyer and industrialist, Joaquín Satrústegui. Although Gil Robles was present, he did not make a speech. Those who did – including the Socialist intellectual from the University of Salamanca, Professor Enrique Tierno Galván – made it clear that the monarchy, to survive, could not be installed by a dictator but had to be re-established with the popular support of a majority of Spaniards. The hawk-like Satrústegui directly contradicted Franco’s end-of-year declaration that the Crusade was the fount of the regime’s legitimacy.

To the outrage of the Caudillo, Satrústegui, who had fought on the Nationalist side in 1936, argued that the tragedy of a civil war could not be the basis for the future. He specifically confronted Franco’s oft-repeated demand that Don Juan swear loyalty to the ideals of the uprising of 18 July 1936, saying ‘a civil war is something horrible in which compatriots kill one another … the monarchy cannot rest on such a basis.’ He brushed aside the idea of an ‘installed’ monarchy enshrined in the Ley de Sucesión, declaring openly that ‘Today, the legitimate King of Spain is Don Juan de Borbón y Battenberg. He is so as the son of his father, the grandson of his grandfather and heir to an entire dynasty. These, and no others, are his titles to the throne.’ Franco was livid when he read the texts of the Hotel Menfis after-dinner speeches and fined Satrústegui the not inconsiderable sum of 50,000 pesetas. That the penalties were not more severe, comparable for instance to those meted out to left-wing opponents, derived from the fact that Franco did not want to be seen to be persecuting the followers of Don Juan.⁸⁷ Given that victory in the Civil War, as he repeatedly stated, was the basis of his own ‘legitimacy’, Franco could not help but be appalled by what had been said and by the fact that Don Juan refused to disown Satrústegui. He told his cousin Pacón that the monarchy of either Don Juan or Juan Carlos, if not based on the principles of the Movimiento, would be the first step to a Communist takeover.⁸⁸

If the Menfis dinner annoyed Franco, his outrage at a report from his secret service can be imagined. On the day before the Menfis event, Don Juan had received a group of Spanish students in Estoril. If the report written by one of the students was accurate, it presented either a misplaced attempt at humour or the indiscretions of someone who had had too much to drink at lunch. Allegedly, Don Juan had outlined his conviction that, in the event of Franco’s death, all he had to do was head for the Palacio de Oriente in Madrid. Streams of monarchist generals would ensure that he was not challenged. He would abolish the Falange by decree and allow political parties, including the Socialists.⁸⁹ The report goes some way to explaining the contemptuous manner in which Franco referred to Don Juan in private.

The emergence of Unión Española was merely one symptom of unrest within the Francoist coalition. That Satrústegui could get away with such sweeping criticism of the regime suggested that Franco was losing his grip. Certainly, his inability to deal with the economic crisis other than by relinquishing control to his new team of technocrats suggested that his mind was elsewhere.⁹⁰To dampen the speculation about his future, Franco permitted Carrero Blanco and López Rodó to continue their work on the elaboration of a constitutional scheme for the post-Franco succession. It would be called the Ley Orgánica del Estado and would outline the powers of the future King. The first draft was given to Franco by Carrero Blanco on 7 March 1959 together with a sycophantic note urging the completion of the ‘constitutional process’: ‘If the King were to inherit the powers which Your Excellency has, we would find it alarming since he will change everything. We must ratify the lifetime character of the magistracy of Your Excellency who is Caudillo which is greater than King because you are founding a monarchy.’ Once the law was drafted, Carrero Blanco proposed calling a referendum. Once this was won – ‘people will vote according to the propaganda that they are fed’ – ‘we could ask Don Juan: do you accept unreservedly? If he says no, problem solved, we turn to the son. If he also says no, we seek a regent.’⁹¹

In the wake of the Hotel Menfis affair, Franco was hesitant. He reiterated to Pacón one week later that Don Juan and Prince Juan Carlos must accept that the monarchy could be re-established only within the Movimiento, because a liberal constitutional monarchy ‘would not last a year and would cause chaos in Spain, rendering the Crusade useless. In that way, the way would be open for a Kerensky and shortly thereafter for Communism or chaos in our Fatherland.’⁹² Unwilling to do anything that might hasten his own departure, he did nothing with the constitutional draft for another eight years.

To increase his freedom of action and to put pressure on Don Juan, Franco continued quietly to cultivate Alfonso de Borbón y Dampierre, the son of Don Juan’s brother Don Jaime. Through the deputy chief of his household, General Fernando Fuertes de Villavicencio, an audience was arranged. Franco liked both Alfonso and his brother Gonzalo and discussed the succession question with them. After asking Alfonso if he was familiar with the Ley de Sucesión, he said, ‘I have made no decision whatsoever regarding who will be called in the future to replace me as Head of State.’ Hearing that Alfonso had been received at El Pardo, José Solís Ruiz, Secretary-General of the Movimiento and other Falangists began to promote the idea of meeting the conditions of the Ley de Sucesión with a príncipe azul (a Falangist prince).⁹³

On 15 September 1958, Juan Carlos would move to the Air Force academy of San Javier in Murcia. He was delighted to be learning to fly and endeared himself to his fellow cadets with his pranks, ably assisted by his pet monkey, Fito, who wore Air Force uniform. Juan Carlos had taught him to salute and shake hands. The relationship with the monkey would see the Prince confined to barracks. Eventually Don Juan obliged him to part company with Fito.⁹⁴ In the course of the year, the Prince made a number of gestures aimed at consolidating his links with the regime. In the spring of 1959, while still a cadet at the academy, he took part in Franco’s annual victory parade, to celebrate the end of the Civil War. That he was not treated exactly like all the other cadets may be deduced from the fact that, while in Madrid, he stayed at the Ritz where he received many visitors. At some points of the parade, Juan Carlos was applauded. However, at the Plaza de Colón, a group of Falangists and supporters of the Carlist pretender Don Javier, having arrived from the nearby headquarters of the Falange in the Calle Alcalá, began to insult the Prince and shout ‘We don’t want idiot kings.’ The police stood by without interfering. In order to diminish the hostility of the Falange, in late May 1959, Juan Carlos laid a laurel wreath in Alicante on the spot where José Antonio Primo de Rivera had been executed on 20 November 1936. It was to no avail. The Movimiento daily, Pueblo, criticized him for not visiting the historic sites of Francoism with greater frequency.⁹⁵

On 12 December 1959, Juan Carlos’s military training came to an end and he was given the rank of Lieutenant in all three armed services. At the official ceremony at the Zaragoza military academy, the new Minister for the Army, Lieutenant-General Antonio Barroso, in a speech that he had previously submitted for Franco’s approval, paid a special tribute to Juan Carlos and to Queen Victoria Eugenia. Underlining the importance of the occasion for Juan Carlos’s future, Barroso significantly spoke of how ‘your fidelity, patriotism, sacrifice and hard work will compensate you for other sorrows and troubles’.⁹⁶ It is not clear whether this was a specific reference to the death of his brother or a more general comment on the situation of a young man separated from his family.

Juan Carlos was now 22 and he had matured during his time in the academies although his tastes were exactly what might have been expected in any young man of his age, particularly an aristocrat – girls, dancing, jazz and sports cars. One of his instructors told Benjamin Welles, a correspondent of the New York Times, ‘He is no older than his actual age.’⁹⁷ Nevertheless, Franco was happy with the progress made by Juan Carlos but ever more distrustful of his father. He told Pacón in early 1960: ‘Don Juan is beyond redemption and with every passing day he’s more untrustworthy.’ When Pacón tried to explain that the Pretender’s objective was a monarchy that would unite all Spaniards, Franco exploded. ‘Don Juan ought to understand that for things to stay as they were during the Second Republic, there was no need for the bloody Civil War … It’s a pity that Don Juan is so badly advised and is still set on the idea of a liberal monarchy. He is a very pleasant person but politically he goes along with the last person to offer him advice … In the event of Don Juan not being able to govern because of his liberalism or for some other reason, much effort has gone into the education of his son, Prince Juan Carlos, who by dint of his effort and commitment has achieved the three stars of an officer in the three services and now is ready to go to university.’⁹⁸

It is curious that while in public, Franco seemed to favour the cause of other pretenders, such as Don Jaime and his son, and the Carlists; in private, he had reduced the choice essentially to one between Don Juan and Juan Carlos. Although he harboured no hope of Don Juan accepting the principles of the Movimiento, he had little doubt in the case of Juan Carlos. The other candidates served both as reserves but also as a way of exerting pressure on Don Juan and his son. Franco’s growing fondness for Juan Carlos was leading him to assume that he could rely on Don Juan to abdicate in favour of his son. It was a vain expectation. Don Juan wrote to Franco on 16 October 1959, reporting on an interview with General de Gaulle, in which they had discussed the future of Spain. He wrote: ‘I believe that if one day, this situation were to be addressed using the present legal arrangements, it is to be hoped that a conflict will not be provoked by a rash attempt arbitrarily to alter the natural order of the succession which both the Príncipe de Asturias and myself are determined to uphold.’⁹⁹ The issue of Juan Carlos’s university education was now about to bedevil even more the relationship between his father and the Caudillo.

Don Juan had originally planned for Juan Carlos to go to the prestigious University of Salamanca. This project apparently enjoyed the approval of Franco. For more than a year, the Prince’s tutor, General Martínez Campos, had been making preparations to this end. He had discussed it with the Minister of Education, Jesús Rubio García-Mina, and the Secretary-General of the Movimiento, José Solís Ruiz. He had also been to Salamanca, for talks with the rector of the university, José Bertrán de Heredia. He had found suitable accommodation and had vetted possible teachers. Then, suddenly, without warning, Don Juan began to have doubts about his Salamanca project in late 1959. On 17 December, General Martínez Campos had travelled to Estoril to make the final arrangements. On the following day, there ensued a tense interview at Villa Giralda. The general began with a report on Juan Carlos’s visit to El Pardo on 15 December. Apparently, after Franco had chatted to the Prince about what awaited him in Salamanca, he had told him that, once he was established at the university, he hoped to see him more often. Don Juan reacted by saying that he was thinking of changing his mind about sending his son to Salamanca. A furious Martínez Campos expostulated that any change in the arrangements at this late stage – after Juan Carlos had received his commissions in the three services – would be infinitely damaging for the prestige of Don Juan and of the monarchist cause. He was appalled that it might now look that he had lied in order to ensure that Juan Carlos received his commissions. He insisted that he would not leave Estoril until the issue was settled one way or the other.

On 19 December, the day after this disagreeable encounter, there was an informal meeting of several of Don Juan’s Privy Council. One after another, the Marqués Juan Ignacio de Luca de Tena, Pedro Sainz Rodríguez and others spoke against the idea of the Prince being educated at Salamanca, implying that it was a dangerous place, full of foreign students and left-wing professors.¹⁰⁰ This was most vehemently the view of the Opus Dei members, Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora and Florentino Pérez Embid. Fernández de la Mora and Sainz Rodríguez proposed that Juan Carlos be tutored at the palace of Miramar, in San Sebastián, by teachers drawn from several universities. Martínez Campos pointed out that Salamanca had been chosen for its historic traditions and for its position midway between Madrid and Estoril. He explained that his meticulous preparations – including the nomination of military aides to accompany the Prince – obviated all of the problems now being anticipated. He was mortified when, with a silent Don Juan looking on, the others furiously dismissed his arguments. At this humiliating evidence of his declining influence over Don Juan, he resigned. This occasioned considerable distress for Juan Carlos, who had become increasingly attached to his severe tutor. Over the next three days, the Prince made great efforts to persuade him to withdraw his resignation, as did his father. However, the fiercely proud Martínez Campos was not prepared to accept an improvised scheme dreamed up by Sainz Rodríguez, Pérez Embid and Fernández de la Mora.

Martínez Campos pointed out the dangers inherent in what Don Juan was doing – after all, Juan Carlos was an officer in the Spanish forces and Franco could post him wherever he liked, including Salamanca. Don Juan responded by asking him to accept the formal nomination of head of the Prince’s household, effectively the job that he had done for the previous five years. Concerned above all for his own dignity, Martínez Campos categorically refused to overturn his own plan and then supervise the implementation of the scheme of three men for whom he had little or no respect. He claimed that Don Juan’s vacillations would constitute irreparable damage to the image of the monarchy within the Army and in Spain in general. Furthermore, he argued that Franco would see this as evidence that Don Juan was ‘easily swayed by outside influences and pressures’. Don Juan ignored these warnings and gave him an envelope sealed with wax to take to El Pardo. It contained a letter to Franco explaining his change of mind. On the evening of 23 December 1959, General Martínez Campos took the overnight train to Madrid. On the following morning, he went directly from the station to El Pardo. Franco received him cordially and commented only that he was not surprised, ‘bearing in mind those who were always in Estoril. But, if he received the news with a shrug, his closest collaborators were in no doubt that he was mightily displeased.¹⁰¹

The entire episode provided further proof that Juan Carlos was little more than a shuttlecock in a game being played by Don Juan and Franco. In 1948, he had been unfeelingly separated from Eugenio Vegas Latapié, the tutor of whom he was deeply fond. Having come to like, respect and rely on Martínez Campos during their six years together, the process was now repeated. Once more to lose his mentor and to be reminded that his interests were entirely subordinate to political considerations carried considerable emotional costs for Juan Carlos. He said later ‘The Duque’s [Martínez Campos’s] departure distressed me considerably, but there was nothing I could do for him. Nobody had asked for my opinion. It was as if I was on a football pitch. The ball was in the air and I had no idea where it was going to fall.’ It is indicative of the Prince’s relationship with his mentor that he made a point of spending time with him in the final days of his fatal illness in April 1975.¹⁰²

There can be no doubt that the clash between Don Juan and Martínez Campos had enormous significance for the future of both the Prince and his father. Major Alfonso Armada Cornyn, who had worked for Martínez Campos in overseeing the Prince’s secondary education, wrote later that this episode was the definitive cause of Don Juan’s elimination from Franco’s plans for the succession. Luis María Anson, a declared admirer of Don Juan’s senior adviser, claimed that the clash at Estoril had been deliberately planned by Sainz Rodríguez in order to provoke Martínez Campos’s resignation, ‘one of his most audacious and farsighted political masterstrokes’. In Anson’s interpretation, Sainz Rodríguez believed that, in tandem with Martínez Campos, Juan Carlos would be highly vulnerable to the machinations of hostile elements of the Movimiento. By engineering the departure of the general, Sainz Rodríguez was manoeuvring Juan Carlos into the orbit of Carrero Blanco and López Rodó.¹⁰³ In fact, the efforts of Don Juan and Juan Carlos himself to get Martínez Campos to withdraw his resignation make this difficult to believe. Moreover, López Rodó had already begun to throw his efforts behind the candidacy of Juan Carlos as successor. Rather than a farsighted and cunning plan on behalf of Juan Carlos, the manoeuvres of Sainz Rodríguez, Fernández de la Mora and Pérez Embid suggest a desperate attempt at preventing the Prince from eclipsing Don Juan as Franco’s successor. Sainz Rodríguez was concerned that, under the guardianship of Martínez Campos, Juan Carlos was being too smoothly integrated into Francoist plans for the future. In any case, whatever the aims of the choreographed ambush of Martínez Campos at Estoril, it merely consolidated Franco’s conviction that Don Juan was too easily influenced by advisers.

Indeed, one of the first consequences of the break with Martínez Campos was that General Alfredo Kindelán would resign as president of Don Juan’s Privy Council. A man of great dignity and prestige, Kindelán was replaced in early 1960 by the altogether more pliant and sinuous José María Pemán. The Opus Dei members Rafael Calvo Serer and Florentino Pérez Embid assumed key roles.¹⁰⁴ In the meantime, there ensued a lengthy correspondence that would give an entirely different tone to the contest between the Caudillo and Don Juan regarding Juan Carlos. If there had previously been any doubt, the interchange would make it unmistakably obvious that Franco was viewing the Prince as a direct heir while his father saw him as a pawn in his own strategy to reach the throne. The letter entrusted by Don Juan to Martínez Campos began with an expression of gratitude for Juan Carlos’s passage through the three military academies and for General Barroso’s generous speech in Zaragoza. Don Juan went on to refer to his deepening anxieties about the next stage of the Prince’s education. He repeated most of the arguments that had been put to Martínez Campos over the previous few days. What he was saying echoed the advice received from Sainz Rodríguez, Fernández de la Mora, Pérez Embid and others, including Rafael Calvo Serer. He referred to this group as ‘many people of great intellectual standing and healthy patriotism’. Alleging that Martínez Campos had hurried him into accepting the Salamanca scheme, he expressed the view that it would be better for the Prince to receive private classes from professors of many universities. Accordingly, he would prefer his son to be established in a royal residence with total independence.¹⁰⁵

On the following day, Don Juan sent the Caudillo an explanatory note together with a new plan of studies. In it, Don Juan stated somewhat implausibly, ‘I want to emphasize that the delay in making the final decision that the Prince should not follow his civilian studies in Salamanca is not in any way a sudden improvisation nor mere caprice on my part.’ In justification of this statement, he alleged that Martínez Campos had gone ahead and made concrete plans despite his orders to the contrary. The plan itself, disparaging the University of Salamanca and its professors, was covered in the fingerprints of the same men who had confronted General Martínez Campos in Estoril.¹⁰⁶

Franco’s reply in mid-January was only mildly reproachful. He began by saying that he respected the Pretender’s decision while pointing out that the grounds on which it was based were highly dubious. He went on to say that further delay would be damaging to the Prince since it would break the habit of study, ‘to which I understand he is little inclined, preferring as he does practical activities and sport’. He then suggested that the Miramar palace in San Sebastián was totally unsuitable since it was too far removed from the great university centres and its damp climate would discourage hunting. Instead he proposed a location nearer Madrid, preferably the Casa de los Peces in El Escorial. ‘This would allow me, at the same time, to be able to see the Prince more often and to keep an eye on his education, which, as far as possible, I want to look after personally.’ He then announced that he had commissioned the Minister of Education, Jesús Rubio García-Mina, to draw up a full educational plan for the Prince and a team of professors from Madrid University to undertake the task.¹⁰⁷

Don Juan discussed this letter with Pemán, who saw Franco’s desire to see the Prince frequently as ‘rather alarming’. Before talking to Pemán, Don Juan had already replied promptly at the beginning of February, accepting the idea of residence in El Escorial, suggesting a group of professors from all over Spain who might take charge of his son’s education and naming the Duque de Frías, a non-political aristocrat who was best known as president of the Madrid golf club, as head of the Prince’s household.¹⁰⁸ Franco was quick to point out that the proposed teachers were likely to provide something approaching a liberal education. While that might be fine for ‘just any Spaniard’, something altogether more specific was required for the Prince. ‘It is necessary to complete the education of the Prince in those civilian subjects that are basic to his future decisions.’ He went on to explain that the coldly abstract education provided by a group of unworldly scholars would be entirely unsuitable. What was necessary, he declared, was a plan based on the principles of the Movimiento. From this he went on to say that he had noted that Don Juan had advisers who seemed to harbour the absurd idea that the monarchy could change the nature of the regime. As far as Franco was concerned, the contrary was self-evidently the case. The Caudillo had chosen the monarchy to succeed him precisely in order to prolong, not alter, his regime.

Franco had not been concerned while the Prince was in one or other of the military academies, ‘temples of patriotic exaltation and schools of virtue, of character-building, of the exercise of command, of discipline and of the fulfilment of duty’. ‘In the light of all this, and given the age of the Prince, I believe that the education of Juan Carlos over the next few years is more a question of State rather than one concerning a father’s rights and it is the State that should have priority in deciding the overall educational plan and the necessary guarantees.’ He suggested that the Prince’s director of studies should be a history professor who had fought in the Civil War with the Requetés, the ferocious Carlist militia that had played a crucial role in Franco’s war effort, was a member of the Opus Dei and was now a priest – a reference to the deeply conservative Federico Suárez Verdeguer. Should Don Juan disagree, Franco was contemplating putting the entire matter of the Prince’s education in the hands of the Consejo del Reino. Franco closed the letter with the ominous statement that he would consider a meeting to discuss the details only after certain misunderstandings had been cleared up, given that what separated them was a major issue of principle.¹⁰⁹

Don Juan’s reply was conciliatory. This reflected the role played in its drafting by the newly installed president of his Privy Council, José María Pemán. According to Pemán himself, he had been selected for the job precisely because he had no political ambitions of his own and he got on well with Franco. Now, to Don Juan’s text, he added what he called ‘the perfume so necessary for El Pardo’.¹¹⁰ Don Juan seems not to have perceived that Franco’s growing interest in the boy was as his direct successor not as the eventual heir to his father. The letter began by recognizing that ‘it would be absurd for him not to receive an eminently patriotic education, inspired in the same loyalty to the fundamental principles of the Movimiento that he had imbibed in the military academies’. He recognized that the interests of the State should be paramount. He accepted Franco’s suggestion of Suárez Verdeguer and other professors. Regarding the issue of whether the monarchy would try to alter the Francoist State, he engaged in an extraordinary juggling act. Recognizing that some of his supporters wanted a parliamentary monarchy, while others such as the Carlists were virulently opposed to it, he still claimed that his loyalty to the principles of the Movimiento was unquestionable. He also called, rather optimistically, for Franco to make a declaration that: ‘the way in which the Prince’s education is taking place does not prejudge the question of the succession nor alter the normal transmission of dynastic obligations and responsibilities.’ Pemán had already begun some behind-the-scenes negotiations with a sympathetic Carrero Blanco. That they had borne fruit was revealed in Franco’s reply nearly four weeks later in which he offered a meeting on 21 or 22 March at the Parador of Ciudad Rodrigo near the Portuguese border.¹¹¹

News of the impending meeting stimulated rumours that major decisions about the future were imminent. Franco was now 67 and gossip was rife that his health was failing. On returning in his Rolls Royce from a hunting party in Jaén on 25 January 1960, a fault in the heating system had led to the rear of the car being filled with exhaust fumes. Noting his drowsiness, Doña Carmen had the presence of mind to order the car stopped before any serious harm was done. Wild rumours circulated within the regime, although Franco assured Pacón that he had suffered only a severe headache. Nevertheless, particularly after an announcement from the Rolls Royce Motor Car Company that exhaust gases could enter the car only if there had been deliberate tampering, the incident provoked speculation that something sinister had happened.¹¹² So, when news of the proposed meeting at Ciudad Rodrigo was broadcast on foreign radio stations and leaked in the press, gossip raced around Madrid that Franco planned to hand over power to Don Juan. Journalists, radio reporters and newsreel cameramen descended on the border town ready to flash the news to the world’s capitals. Deeply irritated, Franco postponed the meeting for seven days and changed the venue.

Franco was infuriated by the rumours that he assumed to have emanated from Estoril and the change of venue was meant as a reprimand for Don Juan. Nevertheless, given the eager talk about Franco’s mortality, enormous significance was read into Franco’s third meeting with Don Juan, their second at Las Cabezas, on 29 March 1960.¹¹³ Las Cabezas had been inherited, on the Conde de Ruiseñada’s death, by his son, the Marqués de Comillas. Talking to Pacón before the meeting, Franco made it quite clear how little he planned to offer. He stated categorically, ‘as long as I have my health and my mental and physical faculties, I will not give up the Headship of State.’¹¹⁴

Pedro Sainz Rodríguez was beginning to suspect that not only would Franco not relinquish power before his death but that he would also pick as successor someone other than Don Juan. Of the various competing candidates, Juan Carlos would be preferable, but Don Juan had no desire to lose the throne even to his son. Accordingly, in his preparatory notes for the Pretender, Sainz Rodríguez argued that he must insist that: ‘the presence of the Prince must not be used to carry out manoeuvres suggesting that there is any agreement by which the order of succession can be altered.’ This threat came to be referred to by Sainz Rodríguez as ‘balduinismo’ – a reference to King Baudouin of Belgium who had ascended the throne in 1951 after the abdication of his father, Leopold III.¹¹⁵

A grey-suited Franco arrived with a staff of 82 in a convoy of 11 Cadillacs. He was accompanied by the Ministers of Education and Public Works, as well as numerous security guards and aides, two cooks and a doctor. Apart from the driver, Don Juan was accompanied only by his private secretary, Ramón Padilla, and the Duque de Alburquerque. In contrast with their two previous meetings, the Caudillo manifested somewhat less interest in bringing Don Juan around to his point of view, having already eliminated him as a possible successor. In the event of ever needing to organize a rapid succession process, Franco had long since decided not to offer the throne to Don Juan. Rather, he would pick Juan Carlos and simultaneously ask Don Juan to abdicate, confident that he would agree rather than risk a public break with his son. For some time to come, he would astutely refrain from making that decision public, convinced that if he did so, Juan Carlos would side with his father. Nevertheless, the notion underlay his agenda at Las Cabezas which went no further than criticism of Don Juan’s collaborators and discussion of the details of the Prince’s remaining education. Don Juan, for his part, firmly expressed his concern at the way Franco was seemingly fostering the claims of other pretenders to the throne. It was no small triumph when he successfully pressed Franco to admit that some of them (certainly Don Jaime) were receiving financial support from the Secretary-General of the Movimiento.

Don Juan complained vigorously about the continuing anti-monarchist propaganda in Spain. In particular, he protested about a book, Anti-España 1959, published in Madrid by an obsessive regime propagandist, Mauricio Carlavilla, who was also a secret policeman. The book denounced the monarchist cause as the stooge of freemasonry and a smokescreen for Communist infiltration, as well as insinuating that Don Juan himself was a freemason. Hundreds of copies had been sent by the Movimiento to people in official positions. Don Juan knew that the censorship apparatus would not have permitted the book to be distributed while Juan Carlos was resident in Spain without the Caudillo’s connivance. Now, Franco, who could plausibly have feigned ignorance, once again claimed evasively that he had no control over the press. He asserted that patriotic journalists must have seen the book as a reply to the memoirs of the monarchist aviator Juan Antonio Ansaldo, published in Buenos Aires in 1951.¹¹⁶

This revealed that, even if Franco had not commissioned Carla-villa’s book, he certainly approved of its contents. Ansaldo’s ¿Para qué …? (For What?) had referred to Franco as ‘the usurper of El Pardo’ and attacked his failure to restore the monarchy as a betrayal of the sacrifices made in the Civil War against the Republic. Don Juan pointed out that there was little need for a reply to a book that had been banned in Spain. He went on to complain about the constant attacks to which the monarchy had been subjected by the Movimiento press over the previous 15 years. Implying again that the press was beyond his control, Franco shiftily attributed these criticisms to indignation over the 1945 Lausanne Manifesto on the part of journalists. Franco exposed his identification with Carlavilla’s views by referring bitterly to members of Don Juan’s Privy Council as ‘traitors’. He spent 25 minutes criticizing Pedro Sainz Rodríguez as a freemason, to which Don Juan replied that nothing that he had heard could persuade him that his piously Catholic adviser could be a mason. Somewhat rattled by this, Franco replied darkly that he knew of other masons in Don Juan’s circle including his uncle ‘Ali’ – General Alfonso de Orleans Borbón – and the Duque de Alba. When Don Juan burst out laughing at this, Franco finally desisted.

The remainder of the interview dealt with the education of Juan Carlos. Franco suggested that, while he would start off with a residence in El Escorial, he should soon move to the palace of La Zarzuela. Just outside Madrid, on the road to La Coruña, La Zarzuela was very near to Franco’s own residence at El Pardo. The interest shown by the Caudillo in this respect led Pemán to note in his diary, ‘La Zarzuela is being prepared for him and Franco is personally taking charge of its furnishing like a doting grandfather.’ Franco also suggested that Juan Carlos should work in Admiral Carrero Blanco’s Presidencia del Gobierno although nothing came of this suggestion. He agreed to the appointment of the Duque de Frías as the head of Juan Carlos’s household. There was then a detailed discussion of a list of members of the ‘study committee’ that was to oversee the Prince’s civilian education. Franco had brought a list with him, which included names such as that of Adolfo Muñoz Alonso, the Falangist head of the same censorship organization that had permitted the publication of Carlavilla’s book and of endless attacks on the monarchy. In this part of the conversation, Don Juan commented later, Franco was more flexible than in previous meetings: ‘he abandoned his usual dogmatic style of a schoolteacher dealing with an ignorant schoolboy.’ Franco, in contrast, told Pacón later that: ‘I said to Don Juan everything that I had to say to him and that he had to hear.’

Just before Franco rose to leave, Don Juan gave him the text of a proposed communiqué prepared by Sainz Rodríguez, in line with the notes that he had drawn up before the meeting. It stated that the talks had taken place in a cordial atmosphere and repeated once more that Juan Carlos’s education in Spain ‘does not prejudge the question of the succession nor prejudice the normal transmission of dynastic obligations and responsibilities’. It closed with the statement that ‘the interview ended with the strengthened conviction that the cordiality and good understanding between both personalities is of priceless value for the future of Spain and for the consolidation and continuation of the benefits of peace and the work carried out so far’. A visibly displeased Franco read the text and discussed it at length with Don Juan. He argued the text point by point. He protested at a reference to Juan Carlos as Príncipe de Asturias. Acceptance of that title would have signified public recognition that Don Juan was the King, so Franco slyly claimed that it was inadmissible on the grounds that it had not been ratified by the Cortes. Don Juan conceded the point.

The discussion grew more conflictive over the statement that Juan Carlos’s presence in Spain had no implications for the succession to the throne. Franco balked at this, saying it was ‘duro’ (harsh). Don Juan replied that this was, for him, the central issue and he insisted that it, or a similar sentence, must appear in the communiqué. The Caudillo continued to make objections until Don Juan said with studied weariness, ‘Well, General, if for whatever reason you find this note to be inopportune, I’m in no hurry. The academic year is well advanced, so I could keep the boy with me until October.’ At that, Franco accepted the text with alacrity.¹¹⁷ Don Juan returned to Estoril, convinced that he had scored an important victory. On the following day, his staff went ahead and issued the agreed text in good faith. However, to their astonishment, the version that every Spanish newspaper was obliged to publish contained significant variants from Don Juan’s text. On arriving at El Pardo late on 29 March, Franco had unilaterally amended the agreed communiqué.¹¹⁸

He added a reference to himself as Caudillo, a title never acknowledged by Don Juan. To the phrase which made it clear that Juan Carlos’s presence in Spain had no bearing on the transmission of dynastic responsibilities, he added ‘in accordance with the Ley de Sucesión’. He thereby gave the impression that Don Juan now accepted the law, which in fact he repudiated. In the last sentence, he removed the phrase ‘both personalities’ lest he and Don Juan should be seen to be on an equal footing. Finally, he added to the reference to ‘the work carried out so far’ the words ‘by the Movimiento Nacional’, thereby implying that Don Juan was fully committed to it and that future relations between them would take place in that context.¹¹⁹ This last phrase, and the reference to the Ley de Sucesión, were generally interpreted as clear acceptance by Don Juan of Franco’s system. According to the British Ambassador, the entire political élite was ‘scrutinising the communiqué as if it were a Dead Sea Scroll’.¹²⁰

The Spanish censorship machinery blocked all attempts from Estoril to have the correct version published. To rub salt into the wound, the Spanish press printed accusations that Don Juan had dishonestly omitted the references that in fact Franco had added. Don Juan was understandably annoyed by Franco’s underhand dealing. However, he wrote him an astute letter, drawing his attention to this apparent interference by third parties anxious to undermine the cordial relations between them. Giving Franco the perfect let-out, he wrote: ‘I imagine that Your Excellency had nothing to do with these changes to what we agreed which, like me, you must have seen for the first time in print.’ However, Franco replied quite brazenly that he had expressly authorized the changes, which he declared to be ‘tiny’ and merely clarifications of what they had agreed at Las Cabezas. Moreover, he reproached Don Juan for publishing the agreed text on the grounds that the communiqué was to be issued only in Madrid. Franco told his cousin Pacón, ‘The note published by the press was brought already drafted by Don Juan. I made some objections. When I reached Madrid and I realized that it lacked a few words about the Movimiento Nacional, I had no hesitation about adding them since Don Juan had not objected when they were mentioned in our conversation. There was no need to consult with him since I knew that he would have to agree.’¹²¹

At some level, Don Juan must have known that Franco wanted him to abdicate in favour of his son. Presumably hoping to dispel his own fears, at Las Cabezas, Don Juan had told Franco that he had been asked by Harold Macmillan, the British Prime Minister, if there was any truth in rumours that he was planning to do so. He told Franco that he had vehemently denied having any such intention but had no doubt that the gossip quoted by Macmillan had emanated from Madrid.¹²² Don Juan had every reason to be concerned. In early April, just a few days after the publication of the communiqué, Carrero Blanco spoke to Benjamin Welles, the correspondent of the New York Times. Carrero dismissed monarchist claims that the Las Cabezas meeting had reasserted Don Juan’s position. ‘Juan Carlos will be King one day. If anything suddenly happens to Franco, he will have to ascend the throne.’ The startled American journalist asked, ‘What about Don Juan? Is he not first in line?’ Carrero Blanco paused interminably before answering dismissively, ‘He is already too old.’¹²³

Juan Carlos returned to Spain in April 1960 to take up residence in the ‘Casita del Infante’, sometimes known locally as the ‘Casita de Arriba’, a small palace on the outskirts of El Escorial, which had been prepared for Franco lest he needed a refuge during the Second World War. It was also known as ‘Casa de los Peces’ (the House of the Fishes), because behind the house there was a pond full of baby carp. Once established there, it was not long before he was received in audience by the Caudillo. It was apparent that Franco’s contempt for Don Juan was matched by a growing affection for the Prince. He continually muttered to Pacón that the Pretender was surrounded by evil influences, such as Sainz Rodríguez, whom he denounced as a leftist and a freemason. ‘Don Juan lives with a coterie of enemies of the regime of whom the most dangerous is Sainz Rodríguez.’ When Pacón innocently asked if Sainz Rodríguez had not once been one of his ministers, Franco replied that he didn’t know him then and had appointed him only at the insistence of Ramón Serrano Suñer. This was a lie, since they had been friends in Oviedo when Franco was stationed there as a Major. On 27 April, he wrote to Don Juan: ‘in the last few days, I had occasion to receive the Prince and talk with him at length. I found him much more grown up than in my last interviews with him and very sensible in his judgements and opinions.’ He invited Juan Carlos to return soon for lunch. The writing on the wall for the Prince’s father was clearer than ever.¹²⁴

Sir Ivo Mallet, the British Ambassador in Madrid, was in no doubt that Franco had no intention of standing down until he had seen whether Juan Carlos was a suitable successor. It is hardly surprising that, in late May, Don Juan told Benjamin Welles of his anxiety that his son might be ‘persuaded by the atmosphere, by flattery and by propaganda into abandoning his loyalty to his father and accepting the position of Franco’s candidate for the throne’. To prevent this happening, he said, he had appointed as the head of the Prince’s household the Duque de Frías. What is extraordinary is that Don Juan appears not to have discussed his fears with his son.¹²⁵

Don Juan continued to resist his own dawning perception of the scale of Franco’s deception. In late April, he told Sir Charles Stirling, the British Ambassador in Lisbon, that, at Las Cabezas, Franco had undertaken that there would be no further public attacks on members of his family.¹²⁶ The Caudillo’s sincerity was revealed in May by a series of lengthy articles printed in Arriba, the principal Falangist newspaper. In laughably naïve terms, they blamed freemasonry for all the ills of Spain over the previous 200 years and managed to insinuate that the British royal family was responsible. Don Juan could hardly miss the implication for himself. The articles were signed by ‘Jakin-Booz’, a variant of Franco’s own pseudonym. At the beginning of the 1950s, writing as ‘Jakim Boor’, the Caudillo had written a series of articles and a book denouncing freemasonry as an evil conspiracy with Communism. On the instructions of the Ministry of Information and Tourism, this new series of articles was republished in full by the entire Spanish press. It was believed that this time the author was Admiral Carrero Blanco. An official of the Ministry told a British diplomat that, as a follow-up to accusations that Don Juan was a freemason, these articles were intended to stress the royal origins of freemasonry and bring the monarchy into disrepute.¹²⁷

The Spanish edition of Life magazine for 13 June 1960 carried an article on Don Juan in which he was quoted as saying that whatever form the restored monarchy might take, it would not be a dictatorship. Franco had thereupon communicated to Don Juan his displeasure at being called a dictator. Distribution of the magazine had been held up by the censors in Spain and Don Juan had been obliged to write and point out that he had merely stated that he himself would not be a dictator. Besides, he asked, how else could one describe Franco’s form of government? Don Juan believed that Franco eventually agreed to its release only because this was the first thing he had ever asked of him. However, according to the account given to the British Embassy by Benjamin Welles, Franco had said that if Don Juan wanted to commit political suicide, he did not see why he should do anything to stop him by holding up the article.¹²⁸ In October, Franco showed Don Juan what he really thought. The Marqués de Luca de Tena, owner of ABC, gave a lecture to a monarchist club in Seville in which he extolled the Ley de Sucesión and the Franco regime. However, because he had pointed out that monarchists must accept the hereditary principle, saying: ‘A king is king because he is the son of his father’ and that, ‘if a king comes, the only possible king is Don Juan III,’ a report of the lecture in ABC was banned.¹²⁹

In the early autumn of 1960, in his capacity as president of Don Juan’s Privy Council, José María Pemán asked Franco to reveal his plans with regard to the succession. The Caudillo replied that he would be succeeded by the ‘traditional monarchy’, whose ‘incumbent’ he told Pemán with a straight face was Don Juan. He described him as ‘a good man, a gentleman and a patriot’. Compounding this farrago of deception, he denied that Don Juan had been eliminated and claimed that the thought of choosing Juan Carlos instead had never crossed his mind. He said that the Prince, ‘because of his age, is an unknown quantity’. In any case, he then went on to reveal that he had no intention of proclaiming the monarchy for a very long time: ‘My health is good and I can still be useful to my Fatherland.’¹³⁰