Maria Luisa of Parma

Maria Luisa of Parma was queen of Spain, was blamed by her contemporaries for promoting her favourite to first minister, and lost the throne with her husband to Napoleon. She was a Bourbon princess of Parma, married at fourteen to her cousin the future Charles IV of Spain, and bore fourteen children of whom six survived. Charles became king in 1788 and left government largely to others; from 1792 the others meant Manuel Godoy, a guardsman from Extremadura in his mid-twenties who rose to first minister and to the title Prince of the Peace. Contemporary Madrid took it for granted that Godoy was her lover and that this explained his career, and modern historians treat the evidence as circumstantial and the political calculation as at least as important. Her reign covered the French Revolution, the execution of her husband's cousin Louis XVI, war with and then alliance with France, and the destruction of the Spanish fleet at Trafalgar in 1805. In 1808 the Aranjuez riot forced Charles to abdicate in favour of their son Ferdinand; Napoleon summoned the whole family to Bayonne, where parents and son denounced each other in front of him, and he took the crown for his brother Joseph. She spent the rest of her life in exile in France and then Rome with Charles and with Godoy, the three of them living in the same household. Goya's group portrait of the family, in which she stands at the centre, is the most familiar image of the reign and has been read as satire ever since. She died in Rome in January 1819, three weeks before her husband. Both were buried at the Escorial only after their son Ferdinand had permitted it. Godoy outlived them by thirty years and died in Paris on a French pension.

• Lived: 1751 CE – 1819 CE
• Nationality: Spanish
• Roles: royalty