Last Monday, Inna arrived on the La 1 de Televisión Española network with expectations accumulated for months. The broadcast of the first episode achieved great public success. A relief for journalist Pilar Ayre, author of the book … The novel of the same name on which the series is based, and the team that made the project possible. “The most complicated thing is the short time. The level of documentation is high. A period series is not the same as a historical series. Those who think that documentary rigor is a burden are wrong: history tells you things that often go beyond the wildest imagination. You have to deal with it with humility and respect. To history and real personalities. Without mediation. Show so that the viewer gets to decide what to think. “You don’t have the right to tell them,” says Javier Olivares, creator of this series about Victoria Eugenia, wife of Alfonso XIII, a queen whom no one loved.
The couple met at a party in London, where the king went looking for a bride. Victoria Eugenia for whom The family calls them Ina, daughter of Prince Henry of Battenberg and Princess Beatrice.She, Queen Victoria’s youngest son, quickly noticed the charm of the Spaniard, who was not blessed with the gift of beauty, but rather was graceful and cheerful. In turn, after being rejected by Princess Patricia of Connaught, the first cousin of the King of England, he chose that woman with big blue eyes and tall stature, who after a while abandoned Protestantism to be baptized again into the Catholic faith. At that point, it was already common knowledge that Victoria Eugenia was a carrier of hemophilia, a disease carried by women and suffered by men. In fact, Queen Regent Maria Cristina tried to dissuade her son from marrying the British woman, but he ignored her. “The king must have thought that if he was from a married family like his, Where cousins marry each other, and uncles marry their sisters’ daughters“Like Fernando VII and his great-grandmother’s whore, an ideal person like him was born. Nothing will happen by playing Russian roulette with genes,” says Marta Sibillina in her book Los Borbones y elsexual.
Victoria Eugenia and Alfonso XIII
On May 31, 1906, he and Victoria Eugenia said “I do” at the Los Jerónimos Temple in Madrid. When the procession returned to the palace, the anarchist Mateo Moral threw a bomb wrapped in a bouquet of flowers at the carriage in which the bride and groom were traveling, and more than twenty people lost their lives. This aroused great bitterness in Ina, an educated and supportive woman. Who brought to the Spanish court exquisite manners and a modern atmosphere clashed head-on with her cruel husband. “She was the first woman to publish a swimsuit in which she showed her legs and bare back during her vacation in San Sebastian,” Sibyllina adds. “It scandalized many conservatives, but it created a trend, thanks to which many women stopped suffering from pneumonia after coming out of the water with those 19th-century burqas that, when wet, drowned the wearer, causing quite a few drownings. Although her mother-in-law, Mrs. Virtue, was somewhat concerned about these novelties, the king did not care.
Victoria Eugenia with Juan Carlos I
But they say Inna was only happy during the weeks of her honeymoon in La Granja. Many of her subjects began to accuse her of not making enough effort to adapt to Spanish culture, criticizing the fact that she barely spoke Spanish and rejected some national traditions such as bullfighting. Her husband did not hesitate to blame her for the hemophilia from which two of her four children suffered, and over time he despised her for it. For a long time he had been visiting her chambers in the palace just to sleep with her in the hope of giving birth to a healthy son, and since he had always been a great womanizer and also said that his wife was very cold, he did not hesitate to cheat on her with others, which was justified by many. Moreover, his biographers say so He had many official lovers and had at least four natural children.One of them is with a nanny, two years after their marriage. The marriage ended sometime after the proclamation of the Second Republic in April 1931 and the King went into exile, leaving his wife alone and responsible for their five children (the sixth, Juan, was at San Fernando School studying a naval career). Juan Palenzo wrote about it: “They formed the nucleus of the exiled family, and it is curious that only through one of the infants (don Juan) was the royal house called upon to perpetuate itself, which would return to occupy the throne of Spain forty-four years later.” “The remaining children either gave up their rights to inheritance or died in circumstances of which the Spanish do not know enough even today.”
Although she still loved her husband very much, Ina ended their marriage permanently at the Hotel Savoy in Fontainebleau, where she stayed during the first months of exile, in a phrase that has remained for posterity: “I’m going to England because I don’t want to see your ugly face anymore.». The truth is that the English woman waited until she achieved financial independence to give her husband a passport. In the book “Secrets and Lies of the Royal Family” it is said that on the one hand, an Indian with the title of Marquis Valdicella received a million pesetas from an unexpected inheritance, who expressed his gratitude in this way, and also received his jewels from the government of the Republic, which could be worth up to thirty million euros at today’s exchange rate. “Now she is able to hire lawyers, and is making a full legal attack against her husband, on the advice of her friend the Duchess of Lysera. He demands the dowry and its interest for twenty-four years of marriage, the total of which is estimated at forty thousand pounds sterling. next to It requires a pension entitled not to the Queen of Spain, but to the Princess of Great Britain“This is a quality that, for Doña Victoria, is superior to that of the Spanish Queen.”
In the end, Don Alfonso, tired of this war, agreed to give Ena the sum of six thousand pounds a year. In January 1941, he abdicated the throne to his third son, Don Juan de Borbón, in Rome, the city where he settled after touring half of Europe, and died the following month. For her part, Ina spent some time in London with her British family, before moving to a small villa in Lausanne (Switzerland), where she resided. One of his biographers suggests that, certainly with a view to restoring the monarchy in the future after the civil war of 1936, “Relationships between the couple (who have never been legally separated) seem to be improving. They both chose neutral ground: Switzerland. Sometimes they would have tea or go to the cinema, always accompanied by one of their children. They had dinner together. Then they shook hands, and went their separate ways, until the next time.
The Duke of Baena, one of the queen’s most loyal servants, recounted that after becoming a widow, she decided “to remember only the good moments and relied on her ability to make them perfect.” Ina directly followed the training of her grandson Don Juan Carlos, whom she believed from the first moment to be the future King of Spain, and she returned to her adopted country only once: in February 1968, to serve as godmother at the baptism of her grandson, the current King Felipe VI. He soon bitterly admitted that he should not have returned to a country ruled by a man named Franco, whose son was in exile. He died in April 1969 due to an irreversible liver defect.Just three months before dictator Juan Carlos was declared heir to the title of king. “Her last wish was not to be covered in a nun’s robe, as was often the case with queens, another ‘ridiculous and terrible’ custom of that country which she never understood,” Eyre wrote.