PROFILE Spanish Pretender Waits .. And Watches

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29189, 27 April 1960, Page 12

PROFILE Spanish Pretender Waits .. And Watches

(By

SIMON RAVANAUGH]

LONDON. In Capri, Cannes or Torquay the white villa that used to be a golf clubhouse would be called Bellavista, Bellevue or Belvedere. But this is Estoril, the beach playground of Lisbon, and the name is Belver. Belver is gay this spring with southern flowers. Its windows yawn open, inviting the tangy breeze that whips up off the long Atlantic rollers. At one of the windows leans a tall, portly Spaniard with slickedback hair and an acquiline nose. But his eyes, dark beneath brooding brows, do not see the vast seas which once bound Spain to her lost Empire and now sever her from it. It is eastwards, behind him, and of a lost kingdom that Don Juan dreams. A lost kingdom of stern and sombre pomp, of strutting majesty and, too, of sickness and tragedy. But at his window this bracing April day Don Juan de Bourbon, Count of Barcelona, Pretender to the Spanish Throne, permits himself a tiny smile. Perhaps his kingdom is not so irrevocably lost after all.

Again it was a window. But this time high on the ornate walls of a royal palace. The same acquiline face, 30 years younger, was squeezed red by the tight, braided collar of his uniform. Solemnly, the small arm was raised in salute to the waving sea of faces below.

Born to a king . . . and at 16 the handsome Don Juan Carlos Teresa Silverio Alfonso de Bourbon, third son of Alfonso XIII and great-grandson of Queen Vivtoria was a fair exhibit within his golden cage. Since his birth on June 20, 1913, to the tolling of bells and the crashing of guns, Don Juan had been prepared for his royal role with lavish care.

Not for him the hurdy-gurdy of school. His classroom was bounded by gilt walls and dark portraits; his lessons were on court ceremonial and family lineage; his teachers were generals and grandees. From the window, the boy gazed down incuriously on the crowds below. Soon he would be visiting his grandmother, Queen Cristino, at the royal palace at San Sebastian. Or perhaps they would take him first to his British Queen Ena (once Victoria Eugenie in memory of her grandmother, the Great Queen) at the royal palace at Santander. After that? Maybe they would let him continue his riding through Madrid’s Casa de Campo, or visit the royal palace of La Granja, by the sierra, his birthplace, to see Alfonso, Prince of the Asturias and his eldest brother poor Alfonso, forever white and ill with his incurable haemophilia. It was curious, the boy reflected, that he alone should be so fit and strong. Alfonso, 23 years old and cursed with the bleeding disease, transmitted through the female line that generation after generation of his inbred family had failed to shake off. Don Jomie, his second brother, deaf and dumb from birth; and Don Gonzalo, his younger brother, also down with haemophilia, lying next to death . . .

But these were, of course, matters which a royal prince could discuss with no one.

Soon it was the infinite fascination of the sea. “The traditional training of a Spanish Infante” his father told him sternly, “demands a military career.” But then, seeing the abject disappointment on his son’s face, he relented.

And the boy broke tradit'on, packed a small suitcase and enrolled at San Fernando naval school.

Several brisk, happy months, and then, on April 14, 1931, soon alter he had been transferred to

Cadiz . . . The world of pomp and damask shuddered and burst. First his father, then his mother and brothers were fleeing before the wrath of a suddenly antimonarchial Spain. The golden cage lay wrecked and empty. A Republic sprang into being and so, for a dazed Don Juan, began 29 years of exile.

When it happened, his monarchist friends bundled him into a torpedo-boat and landed him in Gib*altar. The British were sympathetic and hospitable. There he awaited the word of his father. It came almost at once. He was to continue his training at Dartmouth's Royal Naval College. The order was long, detailed and optimistic. A new and splendid world lay before him. A world of intoxicating freedom, of laughter, of friendships; and of carefree anonymity. But it was to be a brief, if unforgetable, interlude. Four years later, in 1935, came again imperious call of the House of Bourbon. He was ordered to Rome. Don Juan now found himself in a new, even richer, cage. Rome in 1935 was the Rome of the Abyssinian War, of Mussolini and his triumphs. The lust for conquest filled the air. And the exiled court of Spain watched and waited; watched the approaching crisis of the fledgling Spanish Republic, and waited for the call to return. In this new state of affairs came a new key-part for Don Juan: the only Bourbon physically eligible, he now became the official heir to an empty throne. There was little doubt that they liked him. When, a few months after his arrival in Rome, he married Spanish Princess Maria de las Mercedes Bourbon Sicilio y Orleans, the ceremony became a giant demonstration of loyalty. Spanish monarchists, politicians and dignitaries flocked to Rome; the church was sombre with black mantillas, gay with highranking Latin uniforms . . . And the 22-year-old bridegroom saw and knew: one day his time would come.

Memories . . The man at the window in Estoril let his mind wander over them on this, the 29th anniversary of his exile, settling on fragments of history. The Spanish Civil War in 1936. and his almost frantic willingness to serve the insurgent leader, General Francisco Franco Bahamonde. Twice he had tried, the first time in firm and happy belief that the insurrection had begun as a disguised monarchist move. But the second time? He wondered now why he had tried Franco had already declared himself Chief of State and Germans and Italians were fighting on his side to impose on Spain a dictatorship modelled on their own. At the end of the civil war, in 1939, Don Juan's hopes of restoration had faded. Franco wanted no part of the Bourbons. The court-in-exile in Rome had wilted with its disappointment King Alfonso had died, leaving Don Juan as the official claimant to the Spanish throne. Mussolini had expelled Queen Ena because of her English connexions. And Don Juan, thoughtful, maturing, had gathered his court and moved it to Lausanne.

But, slowly, the years had wrought changes. Dictator Franco, sure of his present powers but worried about their future, had begun to talk more and more of bringing back a king. Spanish people had begun to look expectantly towards Lausanne and, later, to his new “court" in Estoril. Grandees had begun to take it in turn, a montn at a time, to attend a king in exile with Franco’s blessing. Then the secret meetings had begun . . . and the ambiguous proclamations. And Franco’s purpose had become very clear. Franco was scared. His National Movement was in danger of spun-

tering into fighting factions of monarchists and falangists. He had to heal the cut.

There was only one answer: Promises but not action yet to restore the monarchy yet retain his dictatorial powers. And the answer lay in Don Juan's sturdy son and heir Juan Carlos (now 22), who will not come of age under Spanish law until he is 30, in 1967. If he could keep Juan Carlos in Spain, the boy’s presence would be a symbol of unity and the monarchy to come. There were, for Franco, only two stumbling blocks Don Juan, and Juan Carlos himself who said: “It is my father who is going to be king.” Tentative verbal battle was joined between dictator and pretender. Don Juan conceded that Juan Carlos should go to Spain (he is now a lieutenant in the Spanish Army), but stood firm by his claim to the throne. The world watched and wondered.

Then, at an eight-hour meeting in the isolated Las Cabeza castle, Western Spain their first since 1954 Franco and Don Juan reached agreement. The education of young Juan Carlos, said their communique, had been grossly misinterpreted; it was only natural that the Prince

should be educated in his own country, and this did not in any way “prejudice the question of succession.” For the man at the window in Estoril, the moment is indeed near:—Express Feature Service. COLDS CAN NOW BE BEATEN BEFORE THE SYMPTOMS ARF FELT Bacteriologists overseas have developed vaccines to help destroy the germs of colds and catarrh of bacterial origin before you know you have caught infection. Vaxos No. 1, now at all chemists is an oral vaccine that can make you Immune from such colds. A product of H. C Sleigh, Ltd., Melbourne. —Advt.