CARLOS MARA ISIDRO DE BORBN, COUNT (CONDE) DE MOLINA

born March 29, 1788, Madrid, Spain died March 10, 1855, Trieste, Austrian Empire [now in Italy] byname Don Carlos the first Carlist pretender to the Spanish throne (as Charles V) and the second surviving son of King Charles IV. Don Carlos was imprisoned in Napoleonic France from 1808 to 1814 and led an uneventful life thereafter until he incurred the hostility of the Spanish radicals during the constitutional period (182023). Although pious and rigidly orthodox, he was unwilling to pay attention to the overtures of the apostlicos (extreme clericals) until his brother Ferdinand VII tried to make him recognize his daughter Isabella as heir to the throne. Don Carlos refused, maintaining that by the form of Salic law established by Philip V in 1713 (subsequent revocations of which he considered invalid) he was Ferdinand's rightful successor. Since the Spanish liberals supported Isabella's claim, Don Carlos became the candidate of the clericals, asserting that he represented the true traditions of the monarchy, the church, and regional liberties against the foreign innovations of liberal constitutionalism and centralization. He went to Portugal in March 1833 to meet his brother-in-law Dom Miguel, the pretender to the Portuguese throne, and, in consequence of the civil war there, was cut off from Spain when Ferdinand VII died in September 1833. Don Carlos could return to Spain, where his supporters proclaimed him king as Charles V, only via England, and it was not until July 1834 that he put himself at the head of his partisans in the Basque provinces. Toms de Zumalacrregui, his commander in chief, was a general of genius, but Don Carlos' lack of judgment prevented any early solution to the first Carlist War. After Zumalacrregui's death (1835) and the Carlists' failure to take Bilbao, the initiative passed increasingly to the liberals. When, in August 1839, the Carlist general Rafael Maroto signed the Convention of Vergara, by which the liberals recognized Basque legal privileges, most of the fighting ceased and Don Carlos went into exile. He abdicated his pretensions in 1845, taking the title Count de Molina, in the vain hope that his son Carlos Luis de Borbn might heal the breach within the Bourbon family by marrying Isabella II.