Occasionally, the Prince was taken to El Pardo where the Caudillo subjected him to interminable history lessons about the mistakes made by various kings of Spain. He also gave him sententious advice about the need to avoid aristocrats and courtiers. Believing that the Prince was extremely pleased and grateful, Franco decided to see him at least once a month, ‘to chat with him and carry on instilling my ideas in him’. The Caudillo was delighted by the severity of Martínez Campos who reported to him on 5 March 1955. When the Prince had begun to tutear (use the intimate ‘tú’ form of address to) Major Valenzuela, the general had energetically forbidden it. He had refused the Prince permission to go to Lisbon for the wedding of one of the daughters of the ex-King Umberto of Italy, informing Don Juan that it would constitute an unacceptable interruption of the boy’s studies. He insisted on speaking English with Juan Carlos. He also made every effort to ensure that no particular one of the Prince’s friendships came to take priority over the others. That Martínez Campos felt it necessary to report to Franco gives some indication of the ambience in which the Prince was being educated. He was permitted, on occasions, to invite friends to lunch. Once, he was visited by the beautiful Princess María Gabriella di Savoia, King Umberto’s other daughter, a friend and fellow-exile from Portugal, who later became his girlfriend. The Prince was usually short of cash, later recalling how Major Cotoner had to buy him a suit for the occasion.72
The tendency to high spirits that had characterized Juan Carlos as a schoolboy did not desert him despite his austere surroundings. One of the teaching staff, the Air Force Major Emilio García Conde, had a Mercedes that the Prince loved to drive, even though he did not possess a driving licence. One day, on a trip to the headquarters of the Sección Femenina (the women’s section of the Falange) at the Castillo de la Mota in the province of Valladolid, he had a minor accident involving a cyclist. Major García Conde resolved the problem by giving the cyclist some banknotes to get his wheel fixed and buy a new pair of trousers. After nearly being eaten alive by the enthusiastic women of the Sección Femenina, Juan Carlos and his party retired to lunch in a restaurant. The Prince delightedly recounted the bicycle incident and was astonished when Martínez Campos furiously ordered García Conde to find the cyclist, get the money back and oblige the unfortunate young man to report the incident to the Civil Guard. He was worried that if the young man was seriously injured, it would look as if the Prince was involved in corruptly trying to cover up his own involvement. He insisted that Juan Carlos return to Madrid in his car.73
General Martínez Campos’s loyalty and deference to the Caudillo prevented him from complaining about the fact that Franco, partly to please the Falange and partly to bring the monarchists to heel, had encouraged criticism of Don Juan in the press. In consequence, as the general knew full well, hostility to the monarchy soon began to be directed against Juan Carlos. At the beginning of February 1955, the Mayor of Madrid wrote to Franco’s cousin, Pacón. In response to the scattering of Falangist leaflets bearing the inscription ‘We want no king!’, the Mayor asked how it was possible, if Franco wanted Juan Carlos educated in Spain, that the regime’s single party should be engaged in insulting the Prince. When Pacón mentioned this to the Caudillo, he brushed it aside as ‘student antics’. However, the rumblings came from much higher in the Falange, including Pilar Primo de Rivera, the head of the Sección Femenina. Nevertheless, Franco brushed aside further reports about anti-monarchist activities from such dignitaries as the Captain-General of Valencia. The mutter-ings continued and, eventually, on 26 February, the Caudillo felt obliged to inform a concerned cabinet that ‘a King would be nominated only if there were a Prince ready for the task’.74
Juan Carlos’s presence in Spain and its possible implications were highlighted by the publication in ABC on 15 April 1955 of his interview with José Antonio Giménez-Arnau – the first press interview published since his arrival in Spain in 1948. A few days later, violence broke out between Falangists and monarchists at the end of a lecture on European monarchies given by Roberto Cantalupo, once Mussolini’s Ambassador to Franco, at the Madrid Ateneo, the capital’s leading liberal intellectual centre. In response to Cantalupo’s enthusiastic advocacy of monarchy, Rafael Sánchez Mazas, a former minister of Franco, cried ‘¡Viva la Falange!’ in reply to which shouts of ‘¡Viva el Rey!’ or ‘¡Viva Don ]uan III!’ were heard from monarchists present. Falangists then showered the hall with leaflets ridiculing Juan Carlos and the police had to be called to put a stop to the fight that erupted. The Prince also faced the increasingly overt hostility of the then Minister for the Army, General Agustín Muñoz Grandes, whose sympathies lay with the Falange. Later on that spring, young Falangists roamed the streets of Madrid shouting: ‘We don’t want idiot kings!’ Juan Carlos was also booed while he was giving out the prizes at some horse trials, and, in the summer, he was insulted during a visit to a Falangist summer camp.75
The noises coming from Falangists were the dying agony of a wounded beast. In reality, their organization could not have been more domesticated. On 19 June 1955, the Secretary-General of the Movimiento, Raimundo Fernández Cuesta, declared in a speech made in Bilbao that to ensure the survival of the regime after Franco’s death, judicial, political and institutional guarantees would be necessary. The role of the Movimiento would be to sustain the monarchy that succeeded Franco and to keep it on the straight and narrow path of Francoism. It was the formal recognition by the Falange of the inevitability of a monarchical succession.76 For their part, the monarchists had to accept that the monarchy would be restored only within the Movimiento. To hammer this home, Franco exploited the anxiety of the sycophantic Julio Danvila, the most Francoist of Don Juan’s advisers, to further the establishment of a Francoist monarchy. At Franco’s behest, the willing Danvila concocted the text of an ‘interview’ with Don Juan in which he apparently gave royal approval to Fernández Cuesta’s speech. Franco agreed the text, which Danvila then took to Estoril where an indignant Don Juan refused to agree to its publication. Danvila then told the Caudillo that the Pretender had accepted the ‘interview’, at which point Franco amended the text to bring it even more into line with his own thinking and obliged ABC and Ya to publish it on 24 June 1955. Although outraged, Don Juan did not protest, since a public break between himself and Franco would have encouraged the anti-monarchical machinations of the extremist elements of the Falange. It might also have led to the termination of Juan Carlos’s education in Spain.77
Franco was unconcerned about the Falangist rejection of his apparent choice of conservative monarchism as the future of the regime. At the November 1955 rally in El Escorial to commemorate the anniversary of the death of the Falange’s founder, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, Franco rekindled Falangist anxieties about his Las Cabezas meeting with Don Juan and the presence of Juan Carlos in Spain. He had arrived for the ceremony in the uniform of a Captain-General instead of the usual black uniform and blue shirt of the Jefe Nacional (National Chief of the Movimiento). There was some nervous shuffling in the ranks of the assembled Falangists. As Franco walked across the square towards his car, a voice called out: ‘We want no idiot kings.’ It has also been alleged that a cry of ‘Franco traitor’ was heard. There were other minor incidents reflecting Falangist discontent with the complacency of the regime that Franco dismissed as of little consequence.78
The constant running down of the Borbón monarchy, together with Franco’s assumption of royal airs, deeply annoyed Don Juan and his family. This was reflected in the indiscreet comments of Alfonso de Borbón, the second son of Don Juan. When he was 14 years old, Alfonsito was wont to refer to Franco as ‘the dwarf or ‘the toad’. He said, ‘That fellow won’t leave. He has to be kicked out … Having to visit him makes me vomit and la Señora, always showing her teeth, kills my appetite.’ It was an indication both of Don Juan’s deteriorating relations with Franco and the fact that Alfonsito was such a favourite that his outbursts were tolerated and praised. Not many years before, Don Juan had smacked his daughter Margarita for repeating a joke about Franco. Things had changed and there can be little doubt that critical remarks about Franco or his wife would quickly have been relayed to El Pardo by the many monarchist visitors who maintained a dual ‘loyalty’.79
