Пол Престон – Juan Carlos: Steering Spain from Dictatorship to Democracy (страница 15)

At the end of September 1949, Don Juan sent a note, drafted by Gil Robles, informing Franco that, since the agreements made during the Azor meeting had not been fulfilled, the Prince could not remain in Spain.²⁰ Franco responded threateningly in mid-October, with a lengthy note, ‘whose two principal characteristics,’ noted Gil Robles, ‘are overweening arrogance and bad grammar.’ Denying that he had made any promises on the Azor, Franco stated that the benefits of Juan Carlos’s presence in Spain were all on the side of the royal family but also made it clear that he had no plans to replace the dictatorship. His messenger, the servile Danvila, also passed on the Caudillo’s demand that, during his forthcoming State visit to Portugal, Don Juan should pay him a courtesy call at the Palacio de Queluz. Made aware by Gil Robles that this would simply lead to his public humiliation, Don Juan declined. Franco insisted, even going so far as instructing his brother Nicolás to threaten Don Juan that the Cortes would pass a law specifically excluding him from the throne. Don Juan’s snub was the only blot on a spectacular public relations success for Franco. He had arrived in Portugal on the battlecruiser Miguel de Cervantes at the head of a flotilla of 11 warships. The Caudillo’s chagrin may be imagined when he discovered that, as the Spanish fleet left the Tagus estuary, Admiral Moreno, realizing that Don Juan was wistfully watching from the shore, had ordered the ship’s company to form up and render him full honours.²¹

Don Juan felt troubled that his son would not be returning to Spain. After all, he believed that it was important that Juan Carlos should be educated as a Spaniard in the country over which, one day, he was destined to reign. At the back of his mind was the preoccupation, prompted by the insidious Danvila, that in keeping Juan Carlos in Portugal he might be ruining the family’s chance of a return to the throne. Gil Robles suspected that he was seeking any pretext to send his son back to Las Jarillas. Certainly, he had made no alternative preparations for the resumption of the child’s education in Estoril. In consequence, the 1949–1950 academic year must have been a depressing one for the nearly 12-year-old Juan Carlos. It was good to be back with his family, although Don Juan was often away travelling or hunting. Having coped with separation a year before by becoming closely attached to his classmates at Las Jarillas, he had been torn away from them and now missed them. Kept together as a cohort in the hope that he would eventually rejoin them, they had been moved, for the 1949–1950 academic year, to the ground floor of the palace belonging to the Duque and Duquesa de Montellano in Madrid’s Paseo de la Castellana.

In Portugal, Juan Carlos had to make do with work arranged by the stern Father Zulueta or sent by José Garrido and he rattled around Villa Giralda, missing the friends that he had made in Spain. He was too young to understand why he had been separated from them but not too young to resent it. The disruption to his education and his life again showed how little he mattered within the bigger diplomatic game. It is impossible to calculate how the callous exploitation of his person affected Juan Carlos’s attitude to his father. However, the frequency with which he later spoke of certain individuals being ‘like a second father’ is revealing. Such references would include, bizarrely, Franco, and, much more understandably, José Garrido, and later, the man who would run his household in Spain, Nicolás Cotoner, the Marqués de Mondéjar. Although he always spoke respectfully of Don Juan, perhaps subconsciously Juan Carlos felt that his father had not behaved towards him in the way that a ‘real father’ should.

The boy’s depressing situation at Villa Giralda was exacerbated by anxieties about his godfather and grandfather, Carlos de Borbón-Dos-Sicilias, who was gravely ill. Doña María de las Mercedes was desperate to go to Seville to be at the bedside of her dying father. However, in a gratuitously humiliating gesture, Franco denied her permission to enter Spain until the very last moment. When Don Carlos’s situation worsened, she set off anyway but arrived too late. Carlos de Borbón-Dos-Sicilias died on 11 November 1949, and Doña María would always hold a grudge against Franco. Years later, she said, ‘I can forgive anything, but Franco, whom I defended in other things to the point of falling out with my friends, I could never forgive for the way he treated my father and for what he did to prevent me arriving in time to see him before he died.’ While at Las Jarillas, Juan Carlos had often spent weekends in Seville with his grandfather. On 14 November, Juan Carlos wrote to one of his friends: ‘I’m sad because of granddad’s death and Mummy is in Seville.’ He was slightly distracted by the arrival of his electric car from Las Jarillas.²²

Don Juan continued to waver over his son’s future. Gil Robles advised him not to send Juan Carlos back to Spain, since his presence would be exploited by Franco. Sainz Rodríguez suggested that arrangements for the 1950–1951 academic year could be proposed by the Diputación de la Grandeza (a kind of central committee of the Spanish aristocracy). To make matters worse for Juan Carlos and his father, in December 1949, Don Jaime de Borbón announced that he considered invalid his 1933 renunciation of his rights to the throne on the highly dubious grounds that his physical incapacity had been cured. He attributed this ‘miracle’ to the love of his new German ‘wife’, Carlotte Tiede-mann, a hard-drinking operetta singer. Gil Robles was convinced that Franco was behind this manoeuvre. It was believed that the Caudillo had paid Don Jaime to make his announcement, resolving his immediate debts and providing him with a substantial allowance. Certainly, Franco was looking into ways in which he could make use of Don Jaime’s ambitions.²³ His claim to the throne put pressure on Don Juan now, as it would later on Juan Carlos. In the short term, it seemed to determine Don Juan – shortly before disappearing on another hunting jaunt – that his son, who was still without teachers, would continue his education at Estoril, under the alternating supervision of Father Zulueta and José Garrido.²⁴

During a stay in Rome in March 1950, Don Juan was visited by Padre Josémaría Escrivá de Balaguer, the founder of the Opus Dei. Escrivá believed that holiness could be achieved through ordinary work and had created a corps of militant Christians who through austerity, celibacy and devotion to professional excellence lived in a kind of virtual monastery within the real world. At the time, Escrivá was residing in Italy while endeavouring to secure full recognition from the Vatican for the Opus Dei. He was also extremely keen to clinch the support of Franco, for whom he had begun to supervise spiritual retreats at El Pardo in 1944. Now, he reproached Don Juan for keeping his son in Portugal, saying that he was badly advised and ill-informed about the real situation in Spain. He urged him to return the Prince to Spain where he could get a proper patriotic education. Escrivá’s notes of the conversation were dutifully forwarded to Franco. It is probable that at this encounter were sown the seeds of the Opus Dei’s later participation in the education of Juan Carlos.²⁵ Don Juan was looking for a Catholic framework for his son’s development. Initially, he had hoped for the involvement of the Jesuits. Through Danvila, contacts were made with the Spanish province of the Society of Jesus and it was agreed in principle that Jesuits would be chosen as teachers for the Prince. However, when permission was sought from the Vicar General of the Society, the Belgian Father Jean Baptiste Janssens, he issued categoric orders that the proposal was to be rejected. When the request was repeated, he explained that in the experience of the Society of Jesus, the education of royal personages had been ‘pernicious’.²⁶

Finally, in the autumn of 1950, convinced that he had made his point with Franco, Don Juan allowed Juan Carlos to resume his education in Spain. This time, his eldest son was accompanied by his brother, Alfonsito. A new school was set up, not at Las Jarillas, but at the palace of Miramar, the old summer residence of the royal family on the bay of San Sebastián, in the Basque Country. Don Juan seemed to be hoping that distance might diminish the influence of Franco. Again, he made some effort to ensure that his two sons’ academic abilities would be evaluated impartially. The boys at Miramar were thus required to sit, at the end of each academic year, the official exams taken by other children at ordinary schools. Having said that, the ‘normality’ was relative. The examinations were oral and public. When Juan Carlos attended for examination at the Instituto San Isidro in Madrid, his answers had a large crowd breaking into enthusiastic applause. Afterwards, he was seen leaving the examination hall through a great throng of police and clapping well-wishers. The entire process was gushingly reported in the monarchist daily ABC.²⁷