Alfonso's Gesture

While Dictator Francisco Franco palavered along the Mediterranean with Dictator Mussolini and Marshal Petain (see p. 27) his onetime sovereign added another egg to the Spanish omelet. Dandified, talkative King Alfonso XIII, deathly ill with angina pectoris in Rome, announced that a month ago he had abdicated his vacant throne in favor of his son, 27-year-old Don Juan, Prince of the Asturias.

Don Juan is the third son of a family famed for its Bourbon nose and its unhappiness. Alfonso's Queen, Victoria Eugenia, niece of Britain's Edward VII, carried hemophilia to two of her four sons, bore two daughters who by the implacable laws of hemophilic heredity are carriers themselves. Hemophile Don Alfonso, the eldest son, renounced his right to the crown when he married a wealthy but untitled Cuban, bled to death after an auto accident in Florida three years ago. Earlier, the youngest son, Don Gonzalo, also a bleeder, died after a minor car smash.

Second Son Don Jaime never took the title of Prince of the Asturias (Crown Prince of Spain). No hemophile, Don Jaime was born deaf, was for years mute as well, though he now croaks intelligible Spanish, English, French. When Don Alfonso married, Don Jaime stepped aside, leaving healthy Don Juan as heir apparent.

Always a model son, Don Juan has been a proper princeling. He dutifully served as a cadet in Britain's Royal Navy, dutifully married a bush-league Bourbon princess, begat two daughters and a son. His only independent act to date was to volunteer for Franco's Army and to be firmly escorted over the border by the General's minions.

Ever since Alfonso left Spain by request in 1931, Britain has hoped for Spanish Restoration, would welcome British-trained Don Juan as king. Monarchist-minded Boss Franco is also Axis-minded, and for this reason he had nothing to say about Alfonso's gesture last week. Meanwhile in Mexico fugitive Spanish Republicans announced that they had banded with a cabal of anti-Franco Monarchists for Franco's overthrow. If the Spanish die were cast, it had not stopped rolling.

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