IS there a birthday in your family this week?
Michael Coy has been trawling through the archives, looking for interesting Spanish personalities whose birthday will fall – or would have fallen – around today’s date.
Margaret Theresa of Spain (July 12, 1651)
This is the sad story of a beautiful child whose life showed limitless promise, but which ended in tragedy.
The daughter of King Felipe IV, Margaret was born into royal luxury.
When she was five years old, her father commissioned the court artist, Diego Velazquez, to paint her portrait.
The resulting canvas, ‘Las Meninas’, can justly claim to be the most famous work of art ever to come out of Spain.
Velazquez came up with a multi-layered masterpiece.
Margaret is surrounded by her ladies-in-waiting, dwarfs and pets: Velazquez himself makes an appearance, as do the king and queen.
It is a happy, confident depiction of Spain in the final years of its Golden Century, and no-one in the picture knows of the suffering to come.
At the luminous centre of the composition is Margaret herself – blonde, beautiful and self-assured.
But Margaret was female, and therein lay her tragedy.
Her father loved her dearly, but he was desperate for a son and heir.
Losing patience with his first wife, Felipe married his own niece, who was twenty years his junior.
Margaret was their first-born. She was physically normal, but her only surviving brother showed distinct signs of in-breeding.
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Much would depend on Margaret’s marriage to some European prince. If her brother Charles were to die, Margaret would be the next Spanish monarch.
France was growing far too powerful (this was the era of Louis XIV) and so it was decided to marry Margaret off to the Austrian emperor – who was both her uncle and her cousin – and she was officially betrothed in April 1660, when she was eight years old.
They married in 1666.
There were relationship omens which we would see as threatening: first, the couple married by proxy, with Leopold remaining in Vienna and Margaret in Madrid.
Second, she never called him by his first name – he was always ‘uncle’.
Third, throughout the marriage, she kept her Spanish servants and courtiers around her, insisted on hearing Spanish music, and refused to learn German.
Eventually, she undertook the arduous journey to Austria.
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Once again, a male heir had to be produced and the woman was called upon to make the effort.
Margaret gave birth to four children in four and a half years. One – a daughter – lived to be eleven. The others all died as babies. She also had two miscarriages.
Margaret was four months into her seventh pregnancy when, utterly worn out, she died in March, 1673.
So what did her husband Leopold do?
He re-married, immediately.
That wife lasted only two years, and so he married a third. The need for a son and heir was obviously very pressing.
The angelic five-year-old of ‘Las Meninas’ (and she was known around the Madrid court as ‘the little angel’) lived only another sixteen years after that canvas was painted.
Her potential as a human being was squandered in the pointless pursuit of boy children who never came.
Spare a thought for the Spanish Princess on July 12, on what would have been her birthday, and how our promise and our optimism can turn so easily to bitter disappointment, particularly if we allow others to dictate to us what’s best for us.
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