A Wilderness So Immense (5 page)

Jefferson and his colleagues had grappled successfully with the political challenge of translating their plan for the new capitol of Virginia into reality. They tracked the changing political situation accurately, finessed conflicting interests, built a sound foundation, and saw Jefferson’s vision through to completion, brick by brick. Having assessed the situation of Spain and the west in a letter written to Archibald Stuart from Paris on January 25, 1786, Thomas Jefferson would do the same with his vision for the Mississippi River and the territory of Louisiana, “peice by peice” if necessary.

C
ARLOS III
hunted nearly every afternoon from one o’clock till dusk, roaming the countryside in pursuit of wolves and foxes that preyed on his subjects’ farms and livestock. He loved the outdoors and enjoyed the chase as much as the kill. “I believe there are but three days in the whole year that he spends without going out a-shooting,” an English traveler wrote, and “were they to occur often his health would be in danger.” No less an expert in such matters than Casanova thought that his passion for the hunt relieved decades of celibacy after the death in 1760 of his beloved queen, Maria Amalia of Saxony, a few months after Carlos III had ascended the throne of Spain. “No storm, heat, or cold can keep him at home,” the English traveler continued, “and when he hears of a wolf, distance is counted for nothing.” Carlos would traverse “half the kingdom rather than miss an opportunity of firing upon that favourite game.”
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For some of the crowned heads of Europe, hunting meant little more than revelries conducted on the stand of a deer park. Not so for Carlos,
who had tracked predators through the Spanish countryside and told a foreign diplomat that in nearly three decades he had shot 5,323 foxes and 539 wolves. “You see,” he added, “my diversion is not useless to my country.”
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Up before six, he dressed himself without retainers and prayed until 6:40, when his doctors and chamberlain entered the room. A cup of chocolate at eight, then two hours attending to his papers, interrupted only by visits with his younger children. At eleven he spoke with foreign ambassadors, giving precedence to the representatives of Naples and of France. Carlos dined at noon in public, chatted with guests, and then (unless the heat of summer warranted a brief nap) he was off to hunt until dusk. Between sunset and dinner there was time to consult further with his ministers, or perhaps for a game of cards or billiards. He dined alone, and was always in bed by eleven—alone.

The more popular of Francisco Goya’s two portraits of Carlos III shows the king in hunting attire about 1787. Rifle in his left hand, gloves in his right, a hunting dog asleep at his feet, he stands outside Madrid, perhaps at San Lorenzo de El Escorial with its wooded hills and the Guadarrama Mountains rising in the distance. An unruly clump of snow-white hair protrudes beneath his black tricorn hat. He wears black breeches and shoes, lace at his neck, a beige vest, a short sword in his belt, and a coat in the soft blue of worn denim. His only overt symbol of royalty is the Bourbon
cordon bleu
—a sash of blue fabric and gold trim worn across the chest from right shoulder to left hip.
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After ruling for half a century—two decades as duke of Parma and king of the Two Sicilies and three decades as king of Spain—Carlos had weathered insurrections as near as the cobblestones of Madrid and as far away as the muddy streets of New Orleans and the mountain passes of Peru. He chose and kept able ministers—Squillaci in Naples, Aranda and Floridablanca in Madrid—and, with some notable lapses, he had also learned whenever possible to avoid war.

His domestic policies promoted learning, manufacturing, and crafts: the tanning of fine leathers at Seville and Córdoba, glass at La Granja, porcelain at Buen Retiro, velvets at Avila, clocks, watches, and optical lenses in Madrid. He curtailed church censorship, eased restrictions on the press, welcomed the practical mind of the Enlightenment, suppressed the Inquisition, and expelled the Jesuits. He built public credit with the national Bank of San Carlos, abolished a tax system that had stifled industry, and revived silver production in Mexico and Peru. His reign brought the people of Spain hospitals and free schools, savings banks and philanthropic institutions, asylums and poorhouses. While in Naples and
for years thereafter, Carlos was the chief patron of the archaeological discoveries at Pompeii and Herculaneum, and he built the national museum to house the artifacts there as well as his mothers accumulation of art, the Farnese collection. He also embellished the Caserta Palace, founded the San Carlo Opera House, and created the palace of Capodimonte with its porcelain and tapestry works outside Naples. In Madrid Carlos III completed the Royal Palace above the ruins of the Alcázar (the place of his birth on January 20, 1716), and expanded the Prado, the Customhouse, and the Puerta de Alcalá. At the main entrance to the city, the man whom
historians recognize as “one of the best, greatest, and most patriotic monarchs that Spain has ever known,” erected a statue of Cybele, Roman goddess of nature.
⁵

Carlos III
by Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, about 1787. Painted within two years of the monarch’s death in 1788, Goya’s portrait of Carlos III depicts the avid hunter whose dynastic empire extended from Italy to the Philippines. A reformer, patron of the arts and sciences, statesman, and devout Catholic, Carlos III presided over the final glory of the Spanish empire
—
which began its fatal decline during the reign of his indolent son Carlos IV and his queen, Maria Luisa of Parma.
(Prado Museum, Madrid)

The hunter with his gun and his dog also was a monarch who had learned to wear, and uphold, his authority both firmly and gracefully. In 1786, as Goya began his portrait of Carlos III in hunting garb, that authority reached the far corners of the western world. Spain’s empire had never been larger, even in the heyday of Philip II—across the Atlantic to California and on to the Philippines, north beyond the Missouri River, and south to the tip of Chile.

For the three decades that he ruled Spain, Carlos’s annual calendar was as predictable as his daily schedule. The yearlong pilgrimage through the circuit of royal residences began each January when Carlos III and his court left the Royal Palace in Madrid and traveled six miles north of the city to El Pardo (the residence of his descendants even today) and its hunting park. For Easter, Carlos went twenty-five miles south of Madrid to enjoy the mild spring weather of Aranjuez, now a museum and park, into July. He spent his summers in the mountains at San Ildefonso, forty miles northwest of Madrid and four thousand feet above sea level. October brought Carlos back to the monumental Escorial, twenty miles west of Madrid—Philip II’s equivalent of the pyramids, an imposing palace mausoleum, severely built of granite, slate, and sheet lead, with spartan rooms for living royalty and majestic tombs for the dead. Each December, Carlos and his court returned to the Royal Palace in Madrid, where the circuit began anew. For courtiers and ambassadors—not to mention the king’s thirteen children and their various spouses and offspring—the schedule was as regular as the seasons.

Still vigorous at seventy-one in Goya’s painting, completed in 1787, Carlos III was unusually conscientious about his final imperial responsibility of providing an able successor to rule an empire that nearly encircled the globe. Like Philip II a century earlier, Carlos III quietly lamented that while God had given him many kingdoms, he had denied him a son fully capable of ruling them. Of his thirteen children with Maria Amalia of Saxony, three were long dead. On the eve of his own accession to the throne of Spain in 1759, he had been compelled by “the notorious imbecility” of their eldest child, Felipe, to exclude him from the succession and place their third son, Ferdinand, on the throne of Naples.

The future Carlos IV, their second child, was now the Prince of Asturias, the customary title of the heir apparent (like the Prince of Wales in the house of Windsor). Carlos knew well, however, that their most talented son was not the Prince of Asturias but Gabriel, his fourth and favorite child, whose marriage to Maria Ana of Portugal was a sign of amity between the two kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula—one traditionally allied with France and the other with England.

As Carlos pondered the situation of his empire and his dynasty, the rules of succession laid down by his father were never quite as immutable as they seemed to those who lived outside their sway. Courtiers and ambassadors who knew both couples—thirty-nine-year-old Carlos, Prince of Asturias, and his lascivious Maria Luisa of Parma, on the one hand, and thirty-five-year-old Gabriel Antonio and his attractive Maria Ana of Portugal, on the other—had no difficulty supposing that, for the good of all, Carlos III might seriously contemplate altering the succession in favor of his fourth and favorite son.

He never got the chance. In the autumn of 1787—while Americans began pondering the merits of a new constitution to govern five million people along the Atlantic Coast of North America, and while James Wilkinson was returning from his first sojourn among the eight thousand residents of New Orleans—smallpox decided which Bourbon prince would rule the ten and a half million people of Spain and thirteen and a half million residents of an empire that stretched three quarters of the way around the globe.
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It was mid-November and the court was at El Escorial when Maria Ana of Portugal and her newborn infant died, followed days later by Gabriel Antonio himself. Carlos III was despondent. “With Gabriel gone,” he lamented, “I hardly care to live.”
⁷
A monarch’s crown is often said to
descend
from father to son. With Gabriel Antonio dead, the crown of Spain would soon plummet from one of the country’s greatest monarchs, Carlos III, to his bumbling heir and namesake. Nevertheless, it was time for the court to move again to the Royal Palace that Carlos III had rebuilt over the ruins of the Alcázar, his birthplace in Madrid.

For thirty years the annual pilgrimage of the royal court had never varied. It seemed part of the natural order of things. And as always, regardless of the weather, Carlos III found solace by hunting most every afternoon. “Rain breaks no bones,” he had often said, but now perhaps the sorrow in his heart let the chill and damp take hold.
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For the first time since his coronation, Carlos III was sick in bed when his chief minister, José Moñino y Redondo, count of Floridablanca, reminded him that December was near and it was time to go to Madrid.
Carlos suggested he might stay longer at El Escorial. Floridablanca objected. “Have no fear, Moñino,” Carlos replied, “isn’t it obvious that in a few days I’ll be taken on a much longer journey from these four walls?”
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On December 9, after the ailing king and his court had returned to the city of his birth, a cold omen came when death summoned his confessor and longtime confidant, Father Joaquín Eleta, as though sending him ahead to open the gates at the next royal residence. Carlos remained lucid and composed in his bed—a great monarch to the last. When advisors and family gathered to witness the reading of his will, grief was visible on Floridablanca’s face. “Did you think I was going to live forever?” Carlos asked him gently. Priests brought the reliquary of San Isidore to the palace, administered the last rites of the Church, and read a papal blessing. A bishop asked whether he had pardoned his enemies. “Why should I wait for this pass before forgiving them?” Carlos asked. “They were all forgiven the moment after the offense.” Finally, five weeks short of his seventy-third birthday, Carlos III died shortly after midnight in the dark morning hours of Sunday, December 14, 1788.
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The body of Carlos III lay in state in Madrid through the day. Sunday evening, royal Spanish and Walloon guards, with arms reversed in mourning, marched by torchlight at either side of his coffin some twenty miles to El Escorial, where the bodies of Queen Maria Amalia of Saxony and his favorite son, Gabriel, lay with his Habsburg and Bourbon predecessors. Chanting the
Miserere,
the monks of San Lorenzo greeted the cortege and carried the body to a temporary tomb. While the great penitential psalm echoed through the monastery—“Have mercy on us, O God, in your goodness”—soldiers fired three salvos in salute and bells rang in mourning at the passing of one of Spain’s greatest monarchs. Finally, the captain of the guard approached the vault and called out, “Señor, Señor, Señor.” Hearing only silence, the officer broke his baton in accordance with custom, and departed.
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