Don Carlos, Count of Molina

Don Carlos refused to accept his niece as queen and started a dynastic war that ran, in three instalments, for most of the nineteenth century. He was the younger brother of Ferdinand VII, and until 1830 he was the heir: Spain had operated under a Salic exclusion of women since the Bourbons arrived in 1700. Ferdinand, childless through three marriages, married a fourth time, promulgated the Pragmatic Sanction that had been approved by the Cortes in 1789 but never published, and thereby restored female succession months before his daughter Isabella was born. Carlos denied that a king could alter the succession by decree, refused to swear allegiance to the child, and was sent out of the country. When Ferdinand died in 1833 he proclaimed himself Charles V from Portugal. What followed was not simply a family quarrel. Carlism gathered the Basque provinces and Navarre, defending their fueros against a centralising Madrid, the rural clergy, and everyone who read the liberal constitutionalism around the regent Maria Cristina as an attack on the church - so the war was fought over religion, regional privilege and the shape of the state as much as over an inheritance. His general Zumalacarregui won repeatedly in the north and was killed besieging Bilbao in 1835, which was the turning point. The Convention of Vergara ended the first war in 1839 by buying off his officers with guaranteed ranks. Carlos crossed into France and was interned, abdicated in favour of his son in 1845, and died at Trieste. His descendants fought two more Carlist wars, and the movement survived to supply Franco with troops a century later.

• Lived: 1788 CE – 1855 CE
• Nationality: Spanish
• Roles: royalty