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On a cold November day in 1885, King Alfonso XII breathed his last as the oppressive gloom of winter settled over Madrid. His royal spouse, the Habsburg Maria Christina, became Regent for her five-year-old daughter Maria-de-las Mercedes. In Spain, the season of the people's discontent was upon them. Progressive ideas were seething in reactionary cauldrons. Under a Queen such as little Maria, who was sure to be dominated all her life by her mother's ideas, Spain could only expect to see the new wine of her progressive aspirations poured down the neck of the grandee's old bottles—with the disastrous results depicted in the Bible.
But on the 17th day of May in the year 1886, the sun rose to kiss the orange trees; and men rose with the joyous feelings born of spring. Not much later in the day, an event which put the sun in an unnatural eclipse was announced: The Dowager Queen Maria had given birth to a son, six months after the death of her husband. No longer was little Maria Queen; Alfonso XIII, a baby not yet in swaddling clothes, had in theory become King from the minute of his birth. Madrid was burned to a cinder in a great fire of enthusiasm; and the conflagration spread rapidly to the provinces.
At first, it was thought that the little King would not live—such a palefaced child was he, suffering from the effects of generations of inbreeding. On the perfectly plausible plea of sparing him undue fatigue, the royal child was relegated to the beautiful seclusion of luxuriant palace gardens. Rarely did he appear on the streets, never was he taught anything that might help him later on to understand his people. Under these circumstances, ominous reverberations of public discontent again began to shake the kingdom.
Sixteen years of titular kingships under a domineering regency was necessary before the boy-King was to assume control. Whatever hopes the people had placed in Alfonso XIII were instantly blighted. To the man-in-the-street he appeared to be the paragon of haughty despotism—a king caring only for the external magnificance of his court, depending only on the conservative grandees and the bigoted prelates for advice. His former popularity had vanished like snow upon the desert.
Moreover, sports were little understood in Spain, especially at this period of her history; and the fact that her monarch was devoted to polo, fond of riding, shooting, yachting, motoring— because, in fact, he was an all-round sportsman—the people suspected that all was not well with him. El juego sportivo—that was not for Spaniards. Indeed, the king's star was not in the ascendant.