Alfonso XII.’s first task was to suppress the Carlists, and in this he succeeded.  The people were tired of the continual strife.  Royalists and republicans alike welcomed the new monarch.

The number of his followers gradually dwindling and finding that continued resistance would be unavailable, Don Carlos was finally convinced that it would be useless to continue the struggle.  So early in 1876 his army disbanded.  Accompanied by his bodyguard he crossed the Pyrenees.  As he stepped his foot on French soil he turned as if to bid farewell to Spain, but his last words, energetically pronounced, were:  “Volvere, volvere!  I will return, I will return!” And it is the belief of his followers that his time is near at hand.

His loyal followers.

No man has more devoted followers.  The army that fought for Mm during the Carlist revolution was one of the most heroic that has ever been gathered together.  To his standard came young men of good family from every nation.  He was regarded as the representative of the old regime of monarchists, and in his ranks were those who hoped for the re-establishment of the now obsolete divine right of kings.  He was the head of the house of Bourbon in all Europe.  Except for the existence of Maria Theresa, daughter of Ferdinand of Modena, married the Prince Louis of Bavaria, Don Carlos would be the legitimate representative of the royal house of Stuart, and, barring the English act of settlement, King of Great Britain and Ireland.

This fact may have had something to do with the cold shoulder that was turned to him by all of the powers of Europe.  Don Carlos was regarded as the representative of the half-dozen pretenders to the throne who live in exile amid little courts of their own and build air castles peopled with things they will do when they mount the thrones of which they believe themselves to have been defrauded.

The Carlists believe that with the support of one of the great governments they would have won.  But they could obtain no recognition even of their belligerency, and that was in spite of the fact that, as early as 1873, the president of the Spanish Republic has declared in the cortes:  “We have a real civil war. ...  It has a real administrative organization and collects taxes.  You have presented to you one state in front of another.  It is in fact a great war.”

Yet in spite of this declaration and in spite of the fact that the five successive heads of the Madrid government recognized the belligerency of the Carlists by conventions; that treaties were made for the running of railroads and for other purposes, and that the Carlists, had a mint, postoffice and all of the equipments of a regular government, recognition was withheld by the powers.  Everything depended upon England, and General Kirkpatrick, a brigadier general in the civil war, who represented the Carlists as charge d’affaires at London, was unable to secure that boon from Gladstone, and none of the continental powers would act until England had led the way.