Among the many mistaken ideas which obtain currency in England with regard to Spain, perhaps none is more common or more baseless than the fiction about Don Carlos and his chances of success.  A certain small class of journalists from time to time write ridiculous articles in English papers and magazines about what they are pleased to call the “legitimatist” cause, and announce its coming triumph in the Peninsula.  No Spaniard takes the trouble to notice these remarkable productions of the fertile journalistic brain of a foreigner.  There are still, of course, people calling themselves Carlists—­notably the Duke of Madrid and Don Jaime, but the cult, such as there is of it in Spain, is of the “Platonic” order only,—­to use the Spanish description of it, “a little talk but no fight,”—­and it may be classed with the vagaries of the amiable people in England who amuse themselves by wearing a white rose, and also call themselves “legitimatists,” praying for the restoration of the Stuarts.

The truth about the Carlist pretension is so little known in England that it may be well to state it.  Spain has never been a land of the Salic Law; the story of her reigning queens—­chief of all, Isabel la Catolica, shows this.  It was not until the time of Philip V., the first of the Bourbons, that this absolute monarch limited the succession to heirs male by “pragmatic sanction”; that is to say, by his own unsupported order.  The Act in itself was irregular; it was never put before the Cortes, and the Council of Castile protested against it at the time.

[Illustration:  A CORNER IN OLD MADRID]

This Act, such as it was, was revoked by Charles IV.; but the revocation was never published, the birth of sons making it immaterial.  When, however, his son Ferdinand VII. was near his end, leaving only two daughters, he published his father’s revocation of the Act of Philip V., and appointed his wife, Cristina, Regent during the minority of Isabel II., then only three years of age.

At no time, then, in its history, has the Salic Law been in use in Spain:  the irregular act of a despotic King was repudiated both by his grandson and his great-grandson.  Nothing, therefore, can be more ridiculous than the pretension of legitimacy on the part of a pretender whose party simply attempts to make an illegal innovation, in defiance of the legitimate kings and of the Council of Castile, a fundamental law of the monarchy.  Carlism, the party of the Church against the nation, came into existence when, during the first years of Cristina’s Regency, Mendizabal, the patriotic merchant of Cadiz and London, then First Minister of the Crown, carried out the dismemberment of the religious orders, and the diversion of their enormous wealth to the use of the nation.  Don Carlos, the brother of Ferdinand VII., thereupon declared himself the Defender of the Faith and the champion of the extreme clerical party. Hinc illae lachrymae, and two Carlist wars!