February 21, 2011 • 34 mins
Some historians think Phillip V of Spain was mad, but why? Listen in as Sarah and Deblina recount the strange rule of Phillip V, who abdicated the throne for several months in 1724.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm fair Dowdy and I'm Debline, a truck or boardy.
And in our last installment of the Bourbon series, we
left off with the last French Bourbon and kind of
(00:23):
saw how the family's reign fizzled out there. But the
influence of the Bourbons extended beyond the borders of France
into several other countries, most notably Spain, where the members
of the Bourbon line became monarch starting in the seventeen
hundreds and they ruled on and off for years. Even
the current King of Spain, Juan Carlos the First, is
a Bourbon monarch. How about that? It definitely worked out
(00:45):
for them much better in Spain than France. Yeah, so
here we're going to take a look at the first
of the Bourbon monarchs, though, the first of the Spanish Bourbons,
I should say Philip the fifth, and he was a
king who saw some positive reforms during his reign, but
it is also a thought by some historians to have
been weak, a lazy man who was ruled by the
women in his life, and many of even thought that
(01:06):
he was mad. But author Henry Common, who wrote Philip
the Fifth of Spain, the King who reigned twice, and
this is one of the only English language biographies of
the king, um, he gives a different take on Philip's
sort of crazy behavior. And so we're going to take
a look at some of those theories too and explore
why the king actually gave up his throne for seven
(01:28):
months in seventy four. Yeah, and so, first of all, though,
we've got to address how the Bourbons got to Spain
in the first place, and interestingly kind of indirectly has
to do with the invading of the Habsburg It's all
started in the late sixteen hundreds because King Charles the Second,
who was of the Spanish Habsburg dynasty, was in really
(01:49):
ill health. Um, I mean really really really ill health.
He's actually been suggested quite a bit as an episode
topic of his own. Um. He suffered from all of
the regular Habsburg complaints, and he didn't have a direct air.
So you know, you're in a bit of a quandary here,
who is going to follow Charles the Second? Fortunately there
(02:10):
were three candidates, or maybe not so fortunately. I think
it kind of led to trouble. Yeah, it was unfortunate
in some ways. The three candidates were Prince Joseph Ferdinand,
who was the son of the Elector of Bavaria, Archduke
Charles who was the second son of the Holy Roman
Emperor Leopold, and Philip, Duke of Anjou, the grandson of
Louis the fourteenth. All of these guys have Habsburg connections, right,
(02:34):
So other European powers quickly see this is going to
be a huge problem, and so they start secretly plotting
about how they want to divide up the Spanish territories
outside of Iberian Peninsula. So outside of Spain, what are
they going to do with the territories in Italy, the
Spanish Netherlands and so forth. So this is how they
handle it. They signed the first Treaty of Partition in
(02:56):
six agreeing that Joseph Ferdinand will get Spain, the Spanish
Netherlands and the Spanish colonies. Spain's Italian holdings, however, would
be divided between Austria and France. Yeah, and the main
goal here is to make sure that one government didn't
control this huge Spanish empire. They didn't have so much
(03:16):
power in Europe Spain had some other ideas on that topic, though.
King Charles catches wind of this treaty, and he and
the other Spaniards they're pretty miffed about it. They want
to preserve the integrity of the Spanish Empire, that's their
main goal. They want to keep everything that they've worked
for together in one piece, not have it broken up
into several little pieces. So Charles he approaches us by
(03:37):
altering his will, and in that will he leaves everything
to Joseph Ferdinand intact says it can't be broken up. However,
Joseph Ferdinand suddenly dies a few months later, so kind
of puts a wrench in his plans to Charles plans
for sure. And so the European powers get together again,
and this time they sign a new treaty. It's not
(03:57):
very secret at all, and it may Archduke Charles, the
King of Spain, and it gives the Spanish territories in
Italy to France, so again kind of busting up the
empire a little, making sure that nobody gets all of
the pie right. But Charles gets back at them. He
revises his will at the same time too, and he
(04:19):
decided to take a little bit of a different direction.
He's actually advised by his Council of State that keeping
the Spanish Empire united under a strong Bourbon king is
the way to go, so he leaves everything to Philip,
with one catch, though, Philip has to renounce all his
rights to the French throne, so Charles dies on November
one dred. He kind of makes this will just in
(04:40):
the nick of time, and Louis the fourteenth ends up
accepting this offer on Philip's behalf, so he's making no
concessions to other European countries. He's accepting Spain and all
of its territories on behalf of his grandson Philip, knowing
that he'll likely face war down the line because of it,
because nobody's gonna want France to be the one in
control of all of this. So Philip sets out for Spain,
(05:02):
and he's only seventeen years old, he speaks no Spanish,
and of course he doesn't even have any personal experience
on the Iberian peninsula. A very unprepared young teenager. Yeah,
and experience to say the least. And Louis, however, is
very excited about this. Upon Phillips taking formal leave of him,
and Versailles at the French court. He is excited. He
(05:26):
hugs him, embraces him exuberantly, and says, there are now
no Pyrenees. Two nations that have for so long been
rivals will in the future be a single people. The
lasting piece between them will assure the tranquility of Europe.
So again, really pumped about the situation. But I think
putting on rose colored glasses a little bit. Definitely, I
(05:46):
think that everything's going to be totally tranquil, And as
we'll see, it's actually the opposite of tranquil. So Louis
the fourteenth isn't the only one who's pumped up about
this new king. Though Spain really welcomed Philip with open arms,
they hadn't been happy at all under the Habsburgs. Under
Charles the Second, they had really watched their whole country decline.
(06:06):
There were economic problems, they lost some of their territorial holdings,
really a diminishment of their country. So they thought that
this new Bourbon King of Bourbon, though a pretty good
track record, might offer them a more promising future. And Philip,
on his way to Madrid, toured through a lot of
other Spanish cities, and he was greeted with fanfare, really
(06:28):
welcomed by the Spanish. Yeah, Philip. However, he wasn't quite
as excited about this. He wasn't really up to the
challenge to take on the problems that Spain presented. Yet
he was born. Just to give you a little background,
he was born December ninety three and the son of Louis,
the fourteenth son Louis and Marie Anne of Bavaria, and
(06:49):
he had been brought up in a really protected environment
with little contact, if any at all, with the real world.
He had been educated by tutors and trained to be
a soldier and an ass but he was still really
withdrawn and hesitance and called him slow of speech, and
no one really had confidence in his ability to lead,
not even Louie, not even his French advisors, product of
(07:10):
the Versailles bubble um. So Louie surrounds him with this
team of French advisors. This doesn't really do much to
help the young man's confidence, but because the French are
so sure that he won't do it right, they make
sure that he has all these people who can tell
him the correct decisions to make. And the other positive
(07:31):
for them is that they get to keep control over Spain.
And yeah, there was another problem here though too, and
that was that Philip had this tendency to get depressed,
and it was said that he fell into a deep
melancholy upon leaving Louis the fourteenth's court. So he started
out even from a young age, having kind of these episodes,
and things didn't seem to get much better from there.
(07:52):
Once he was in Spain, he was homesick, as you
imagine he might be. Um. He had trouble picking up
the Spanish language, and actually, just an aside to that,
throughout his reign he continued to speak only French to
his family and to his advisors. So just really real problem.
Kind of mingling in not a particularly endearing trait for
the king and not at all, and he didn't like
(08:15):
anything about his new environment. It seems he didn't like
the Spanish palaces, he didn't like their style of coaches,
he didn't like the clothes or the food. And this
is kind of one of the funny things, the funny anecdotes,
i should say, from Commons book, he explains how Philip
didn't like the food and although he asked for it
to be changed, the Castilian style cooks. They kind of
(08:35):
just said no. They refused to really change their style
of cooking. So he ended up having to set up
an entirely new French household so that he could eat
the stuff that he liked. Didn't she say the cooks
would come out and make sure he ate, Like watch
him right. I don't know if they made sure he ate,
but they definitely came out and wanted to place the
food in front of him themselves. They really wanted to
bring it out to him and see that he was
(08:57):
actually eating. Yeah. Well, unfortunately, none of the French really
liked life at the Spanish court, all of these frenchmen
who Philip had surrounded himself with, and they started introducing
foreign theater and music to Madrid, and understandably, Spaniards were
pretty disappointed that their imported king didn't try at all
(09:19):
to pick up some of their ways, right, So there's
a little bit of tension, or not necessarily trouble, but yeah,
a little bit of tention on that frustration. People were
so excited about this king coming in, and at least
in Madrid, they definitely got a little worse of an
opinion about him from this. But Philip, for his part
(09:39):
expressed his displeasure to his tutor. He said, I would
rather go back to being Duke of Anjou, and I
can't stand Spain. So that sums it up, I guess.
But you think somebody saying that might just sort of
devote himself to trying to turn Spain back into the
French he loves and knows. But he really did dutif
(10:00):
try to apply himself to his work for a while,
at least through his first year and a half as
king in seventeen o one and seventeen o two, um,
even though he suffered two pretty serious bouts of depression
during that time. Yeah, the second bout of depression was
particularly notable. It occurred while he was visiting Italy and
he was incapacitated for days at a time. He had
(10:22):
to be attended to by doctors. You know, everybody was
wondering what's wrong with the king. Nothing seemed to work
on him. They bled him, they tried all these things,
but there really wasn't anything physically wrong with him, and
that's kind of what it came down to. But then
something happened that really snapped him out of it. The
inevitable Spanish Wars of succession began, and this was when
the other European powers tried to prevent Philip, whom they
(10:45):
guessed was controlled by Louis and that was pretty much
correct from getting such a large slice of that European pie. Um.
Just to give you some basics acts about the war.
Obviously there's a lot more to it, but to keep
things to seven, to keep this podcast from being hours long, UM,
we'll just tell you it officially lasted until about set
(11:07):
and it was pretty much an uneven fight from the start.
Although Spain had the might of the French army behind them,
they didn't really have much of their own army at
that point. Um Bavaria, Cologne, and Savoy all aligned with France,
although Savoy ended up later switching sides just going to
be proved awkward as well. Laiter learn absolutely and the
Anti French Alliance the other side of this. It consisted
(11:30):
of England, to the Dutch Republic and the Emperor Leopold.
So basically everyone who had tried to sign a treaty
before Charles the Second passed away. Everyone who might be
mad that France was now in possession of Spain and
all of its colony exactly, and these powers were later
joined by Prussia, Hanover, some other German states and also Portugal.
(11:50):
So suffice to say, France suffered a lot of losses.
At one point, Louis the fourteenth even tried to kind
of back out of the war. He had so many
losses in Italy and in the Low Countries, he just
kind of wanted to get out of it. But here
was the problem. The British wanted him to remove Philip
from Spain. They wanted that to be part of the
so called compromise. Louis just refused to do that. Yeah,
(12:12):
he was willing to almost remove his military support from Spain,
but not flat out turn its back on his grandson. Right.
But the tides finally turned on the whole situation when
Archduke Charles inherited all the Austrian Hapsburg possessions. So at
that point the British and the Dutch they didn't want
him to get the Spanish inheritance as well, so they
(12:34):
all compromised. They signed the Treaty of Utrecht, in which
Spain lost the Spanish Netherlands and their Italian possessions and
just kept Spain in the colony. So it sort of
turned out the way would have if the treaty had
been honored anyway, except with Philip in charge of Spain,
and everybody's happy except the Habsburgs that they're not in
(12:55):
control of most of Europe, right, Something kind of ironic
was happening here too, though. Although Spain kind of lost
out a little bit on everything that had happened with
the Wars of Succession, Philip actually seemed to thrive in
wartime from a personality standpoint. He found some sort of
respite from his depressive state. During this time. He actually
(13:17):
risked his life in battles. He participated fully. Um it was.
It's actually quite interesting if you think of him being
considered like kind of a weak, meek personality, but there
were reports of people dying on either side of him
in battle. I mean, he really put himself at the forefront,
and he managed to successfully defend Spain itself even after
battles and the territories were lost. And at one point
(13:38):
he even kind of stands up to Louie when Louis
appears to abandon him. In seventeen o nine, when Louis
tried to back out of the war, Philip wrote to
him and said, God has placed the crown of Spain
on my head. I shall maintain it as long as
I have a drop of blood in my veins. I
owe it to my conscience, to my honor, and to
the love I received from my subjects. I shall never
(14:00):
give up Spain. So long as I have life. I
would rather perish fighting, which is a pretty far cry
from his earlier statement that he'd rather be back the
Duke of Anjoux than the King of Spain. Yeah, so
it appears almost as if he's done this one eight.
But this is why many Spaniards would later remember him
as a valiant king, the hero of his people, because
he did go into battle and he was so brave.
(14:23):
But the biographer that we mentioned Common, he actually believes
that this was another side to the condition that Philip
was suffering from. You see, in his book, he proposed
that the king actually had bipolar disorder, which is sometimes
known as manic depression, and this had begun in his
adolescence with these pocketsive depression that we mentioned before, and
(14:43):
the war that seemed to snap him out of it.
Common suggests was actually this period of high energy in
which he seemed to get better but he might have
actually been getting worse because he was experiencing the highs
and lows that he would oscillate between throughout the rest
of his life. So well, it seems like war wasn't
really snapping phil out of these depressive states. It did
seem like his wife had some ability to do that.
(15:05):
He was married twice during his lifetime. His first wife
was Marie Louise of Savoy, and they got married right
after Philip became king, and she was really young at
the time, only thirteen years old, but could pretty much
hold her own from the start. She tended to the
affairs of state while he was off fighting in the war.
She ran the household really well and she kept him happy,
(15:28):
which was kind of the most important thing for this
king who suffered from depression so severely he'd be off
the map. Sometimes. They were really an inseparable couple, and
he was thought to have really been in love with her,
and it didn't always make the French and Spanish advisors
very happy because it was maybe a little he was
(15:50):
a little too much in love with her. They thought
he spent a little too much time with her, and
they were also concerned that she had too much control
over political decisions being made that she was, in essence,
his chief advisor. Yeah, at that time, women didn't really
have a role in government at all, and and men
really weren't supposed to publicly display so much affection for
their wives, which Philip certainly did, so he kind of
(16:13):
went against convention, I guess. But unfortunately, Marie Louise died
of tuberculosis on February fourteen, seventeen fourteen, so she died
very young, and Philip was really devastated about it. However,
it didn't take him very long to remarry and sort
of get over that loss. A search began almost immediately
after Marie Louise's death for a new queen, and they
(16:34):
settled on a woman named Elizabeth Farnaise, who was the
niece of the Duke of Parma. Right away, the king
seemed to be as devoted to her as he was
to his last wife, and according to common she was
really devoted to him as well. But this is where
accounts tend to differ a bit, so it just depends
on who you believe. A lot of historians see Pharnise
is just a dominating wife who, along with her advisor
(16:56):
Alberoni used to control her husband and really use him
to pursue her own goals, and her goals were mainly
to secure a position in her native Italy for her
own children, because it was Philip's second family of course,
right Philip already had sons with Marie Louise, and the eldest,
Don Luis, was already in line for the Spanish throne.
(17:16):
Common disagrees with this point of view, though he says
that Philip himself was motivated to fight for Italian territories
on behalf of his son. So who knows. We we
really don't know who whose idea it was. I can
accept a mixture of both of those ideas. I think
that both parents would have interests in their children. You
would think so. Regardless, Spain did get caught up in
(17:38):
conflict with major European powers once again, but this time
there was a major difference, and that was that France
actually got involved, and this time they were against Spain.
I can imagine this is pretty devastating for Philip, who
so loves France still, and I mean, eventually, Spain does
have some success and the end they secured a title
(17:59):
in Parma for Don Carlos later Charles later Charles the
third one of these sons from the second family. But
the conflict in the hostility with France was really upsetting
to fill up. Yeah, it really got to him. He
had some serious, extended bouts of depression during this period,
(18:21):
and during this period he would actually have to appoint
for Naise and Alberoni as regents to manage the government
for periods of time. He was just going through a lot.
He was obsessed with death. He would think he was
dying and that he had all these diseases. Just an
example of one of the things that he went through,
he thought that the sun had struck his shoulder and
penetrated his inner organs, which would be a disturbing thought,
(18:43):
I think absolutely. After the conflict ended, though, and Spain
patched things up with France, Philip still managed to fill
his role pretty well and pretty adequately. For a few years.
He kept a semi normal schedule. He took care of
political decisions, hunted in the afternoons, that was one of
his favorite pastimes, and he even participated in court activities,
(19:03):
balls and dancing celebrations, and spent lots and lots of
time with his queen. They were also like he and
Marie Louise, they were inseparable, they love to spend time together.
So things seem to be fairly normal even after these
massive bouts of depression that he had. He managed to
gain some sense of normalcy now and again until he
surprises everyone and in January Sevo announced that he was
(19:27):
resigning the throne and leaving Spain and all of its
territories to his eldest son, Don Louise. And obviously, a
king resigning the throne, not a not a particularly old
or sickly king either, is a shock. And the truly
shocking thing about it, though, is that it turned out
that it wasn't a sudden decision. It wasn't just that
(19:49):
he was suffering more and more from his depression and
just decided to pull the plug on being king. It
was something that Philip and Elizabeth too had out about
for a really long time. Yeah. They first signed a resolution,
a kind of secret written vow that he would do this,
he would abdicate the throne. They signed a resolution to
(20:11):
this effect in seventeen nineteen, following his distress about the
conflict with France that had gone on while he was
pursuing interests in Italy, and they repeated this vow that
they made every year after that. So basically what they
did is they wrote this vow out on a sheet
of paper, you know, on such a such a date
in seventeen twenty three, we planned to resign the throne,
(20:32):
and then every year after that they confirmed it by
you know, writing a son is confirming their intentions and
signing underneath it. So this was something they had calculated
for a long time, or at least Philip had and
Elizabeth kind of went along with it. That's what we
can assume, I mean, a very bizarre situation. And the
reason he gave for resigning his throne was that he
(20:54):
wanted to serve God free from other cares, to meditate
on death and see his salvation. And of course Spain,
even even the pious Spanish, don't quite buy this explanation,
and a lot of people thought that maybe he just
wanted to make himself available in case that French throne
came open, because of course, by being King of Spain,
(21:17):
he had renounced his claim to the French throne right
and that was a very real possibility, but common The
biographer says, that there's really no evidence that this was
the case. We can only take the information that he
gave us, the motives that he gave us as as truth.
But he thinks that these actions, this abducation, also had
to do with his bipolar disorder. Philip was very preoccupied
(21:39):
with death, and common suggests that abjucating the throne was
kind of a type of political suicide, so represented a
death in that way. Yeah, for this man who was
obsessed with death. But regardless of his motives, the situation
didn't last long at all, especially when you consider how
many years of planning go into it. Because Philip's heir, Louise,
(22:02):
got smallpox and died in August of seventeen twenty four,
so that very same year, and on his deathbed, he
made his father his successor. And Philip didn't really want
to become king again. I mean, that's like going into
retirement and coming back right away, but he was convinced.
He was talked into it since his other sons were
(22:23):
still considered too young to rule, and the Spanish people
understandably were not that excited to have him back, this
guy who's quit on them. Um, they were pretty happy
with Louise. You know, finally they have this Spanish born king,
somebody who who knows Spain and appreciate Spain, and they're
(22:43):
back to their their Bourbon king again. Yeah, back to
foreigners on the throne. And it's funny that he Philip
I mean, had been a foreigner on the throne for
his entire reign, but this was sort of the first
time that his legitimacy in that position had been questioned,
so it was kind of a big d But Philip
at first seems to do reasonably well in his return
to the throne, though his illness still comes and goes
(23:07):
now and again. Then, in the first major signs of
a change in his mental health came about, he started
doing a few weird things. At this time, he would
spend several days at a time in bed, and he
also inverted the order of day and night. So his
once normal schedule that involves taking care of business in
the morning and hunting in the afternoons now involved him
(23:28):
holding audiences with ambassadors at midnight and meeting with his
ministers in the wee hours of the morning, sometimes finishing
meetings around dawn. I'm sure they loved that. Um. It
also became clear that he was thinking about abdicating again,
which I mean, come on, I don't know if you
can try that already that twice. This time Elizabeth, instead
(23:50):
of being his his partner in abdication, managed to stop him,
and she had to really go to great lengths to
do so. She took away all the paper or an
ink from the royal suite so he wouldn't be able
to dash off a little note of abdication and send
it onto the appropriate party. And she had a watch
kept on him at all times too to make sure
(24:11):
and Casey did get ahold of some ink or let
some important person know, but still he rebelled, and he
tried these escape attempts from the palace. Escape attempts, escape attempts. Yeah,
he would try to get out of the palace half
naked in the early hours of the morning, and she
would have to have the guards kind of restrain him
(24:31):
and look out from and bring him back. But by
that summer everyone at the palace knew about his condition
because it would be a hard secret to keep. It
would be a very hard secret to keep. And after
that things just seemed to get worse. He would give
audiences to ambassadors dressed only in his night shirt, so
apparently had some fixation with not being in clothes. But
in addition to that, he couldn't sleep. He would have terrors, delusions,
(24:54):
and hallucinations. He was also paranoid, and he thought people
were plotting to poison him. So there was one story
that I saw where he would actually wear one of
Elizabeth's shirts underneath his shirt because there was some shirt
poisoning thing that was going on at the time. I
was afraid somebody would would give him a gift of
a poison shirt, or exactly his laundries somehow get into
(25:15):
his closet. Maybe at night he would bite himself, scream
or start singing randomly. Sometimes he would relieve himself in
his bed. At one time he even believed that he
was a frog, and at another he believed he was dead.
So all kinds of extremes going on. He also had
believe me it too. He would eat voraciously for an
hour or two at a time without stopping. Also, though
(25:38):
he started to just generally neglect his person himself. He
I think when his disease advanced, not necessarily around seventy eight,
but in the thirties, he wouldn't bathe regularly, he wouldn't
cut his toe nails. Sometimes he would lie in bed
for days at a time and really just not take
care of them at all, so he would have trouble
walking then when he got up again because his toe
nails were so long. He also would cut his hair,
(26:01):
and so it grew to be this kind of crazy
mass of hair and he would wear a wig over
it to kind of, I guess, mitigate the situation. But
it's it's interesting though, in the midst of all of this,
there was one thing that would kind of snap him
out of it every now and then and and bring
(26:21):
him back to a functioning state, and that was the
idea that he might claim the French throne um. One example,
he heard that Louis was sick with smallpox in and
and he did snap out of it briefly. He thought
that maybe if he was back in France again, all
his problems would be solved and he could be happy
(26:42):
and he could go back to the idealized man he
he thought he once was. Yeah. Again, that was probably
just another factor in his illness of probably just more delusions,
because he obviously had a medical disorder that couldn't just
be fixed by changing location, and there was obviously no
way for him to go back to get to France. Yeah, well,
(27:04):
that is also an aspect of it too. Elizabeth Farnese, though,
stood by him throughout all of this. She ended up
actually having to take control of government at times when
he was incapacitated, but she also tried to alleviate his suffering,
so she was very kind towards him as well. She
did this in a couple of ways. She traveled with him,
took him out of Madrid to visit other palaces in Spain,
(27:25):
in Seville and arn for example, and they did this
for extended periods of time. I think in Seville especially,
they spent five years there or something. Moved the entire
court there and it gave him a change of environment,
but it also took him out of the public eye,
so it served a couple of purposes. She also did
something else to kind of help him out though, and
help him escape his depression. In seventeen thirty seven, she
(27:47):
invited a famous Castrado singer known as Farinelli his real
name was Carlo Broschi, and she invited him to Madrid
into the palace at that time, Philip was in one
of his periods of really deep depression, so he was
lying in bed. I don't think he even attended the
first performance. Just to give you a little bit of
background Farinelle before we go on. Farinelli is often called
(28:08):
one of the greatest singers in the history of opera,
a quote from Nicholas Clapton, and he created a two
thousand and six exhibit on Castrati at London's Handle House Museum.
He said Farinelli was more famous than Madonna, Johnny Depp
and David Beckham combined. So this would be the equivalent
of asking David Beckham to your backyard to do free
(28:29):
kicks or something. Yeah, well you have Madonna perform a
concert and Johnny to do some improv or something. Pretty
amazing and hearing Farinelli thing really did help snap Philip
out of his depression, at least for a little bit.
So the Queen demanded that Farnelli thing for them every
single day, and he became a real part of their lives.
(28:51):
He was given a title which essentially translated to my
personal assistant, and he did never have to give a
public concert again. I mean, so imagine people of that
fame level Madonna or Johnny Depp or somebody just retiring
to become someone's personal assistant putting on private shows. I mean, unbelievable. Yeah,
(29:13):
he's saying only for the royal family and lived rent
free in the Royal Palace, and he set up an
Italian opera at court, and he was paid under the table,
and he was paid his pay was tax free. He
was paid the same rate that he was being paid
in London before he came to Madrid, but didn't have
to pay taxes. So yeah, really raking it in. But
you know, some compromises on Farnelli's part. Of course, he
(29:34):
had to adapt to the king's strange waking hours and
make himself available at all hours of the night, and
every single night he would sing eight or nine arias
and the general belief. And I actually thought this was
that Farnelli sang the same songs every single night, which
makes it a little disturbing. I guess I had heard
(29:56):
that as well, But apparently he had a much larger
pitoire that he would sing for the king. Um, I
think you said that common claimed Farnelli's paper showedy thing
hundreds of different songs, so so a more more varied
program going on nightly. But the thing I was kind
of a therapist. I get a musical therapy therapist position.
(30:18):
This was maybe the first one of the first examples
of music therapy out there. But although Philip improved a
little bit with his music therapy, his basic symptoms never
really disappeared. He still kept his weird schedule and really
just continued to decline until he passed away quite suddenly
on July nine. And this made his son Ferdinand king,
(30:38):
and that was King Ferdinand the sixth of Spain. And
at the end many considered him to be mad, so
it was really kind of quite sad. But in conversations
most people reported that he was still lucid, and with
the help of his advisors, he was able to make
many economic and governmental reforms throughout his reign. So who
knows if Commons theory about bipolar disorder was correct, but
(30:59):
I think, judging from reports and things that people say
about meeting with him at the time, he was at
least able to seem lucid. He was able at least
to seem like he was saying when you spoke to him,
and I mean, he if we're going to go back
to the Bourbon series here, I mean he is at
the beginning of a line that, as you mentioned at
the beginning, does still exist today. I think it's been
(31:21):
one of the fun aspects of this Bourbon series has
been covering the beginning and ends of these lines from
from Henry and now his his head that was relocated,
and the strange Comte de Chambourg, the last French Bourbon
Philip for Spanish. It's interesting to see the group of
people when you put them that way, and the and
(31:42):
the type of people who found lines and who in them. Yeah, definitely,
he's he was a he was a good founder. I
think he's still strange bird, the strange bird, definitely. But
you know, like we said, he was known for a
lot of reforms and also known, i think especially for
building up the Spanish navy. So he did a lot.
And Elizabeth also stuck around for a long time as well.
(32:05):
She actually outlived Ferdinand um and ended up acting as
regent for a few months before her son Charles the
Third came back to Spain to rule, so she was
around and Parnelli was in the picture for a while too.
He ended up really achieving distinction as a Spanish and Presario,
and he took an active role in public affairs. To
Charles the Third, I think eventually dismissed him because they
(32:27):
had political differences, but he still was around for a
while and ended up retiring peacefully to Italy and was
very wealthy at the time. So and of Lenna and
I were talking about how we might have to revisit
some of these famous castrati, just because I mean, I
knew y'all are interested in that. You'd have to be right, Yeah,
And there's an exhamation involved. There is an exhamation. Paranelli's
(32:48):
body was exhumed in two thousand six for study. So
you know, we began with the head, we began the
burn series with the head, and now we're ending with
exhumes remains something else. We had to book end it
like that. Well, um, yeah, so that's that's the end
of the bourbon series. I'm sure we will, of course
revisit this family. How could we not, How could we
(33:11):
not revisit people at least influenced by the bourbon Um.
But it's been it's been pretty interesting talking about all
these different rulers and the people close to them, people
associated with them, I always like a good series. The
series was fun. It was fun to see how everybody
was connected, and just also explore some of the tinier
(33:31):
stories too. I think, just pull out some of these
little intrigues and um, random medical conditions that we didn't
know people have medical conditions. Yes, um, so yeah, if
you have any more suggestions for cool series, I mean
it'll probably be a little while, but we're always that
for a series. As we mentioned, it's fun to to
(33:52):
just enter that world completely. Um. Feel free to drop
us a note. We're on Twitter at Myston history, We're
on Phase fuck, and you can also send us an
email at History podcast at how stuff works dot com.
We'd love to hear your ideas. Yeah, and if you
would like to learn a little bit more about how
bipolar disorder works, maybe compare what you read to some
(34:14):
of the symptoms that Philip the Fifth pad. You can
look up a story about it on our website just
by visiting our homepage and typing in bipolar disorder at
www dot how stuff works dot com. For more on
this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works
dot com. To learn more about the podcast, click on
(34:35):
the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our homepage.
The How Stuff Works iPhone up has a rise. Download
it today on iTunes
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm fair Dowdy and I'm Debline, a truck or boardy.
And in our last installment of the Bourbon series, we
left off with the last French Bourbon and kind of
(00:23):
saw how the family's reign fizzled out there. But the
influence of the Bourbons extended beyond the borders of France
into several other countries, most notably Spain, where the members
of the Bourbon line became monarch starting in the seventeen
hundreds and they ruled on and off for years. Even
the current King of Spain, Juan Carlos the First, is
a Bourbon monarch. How about that? It definitely worked out
(00:45):
for them much better in Spain than France. Yeah, so
here we're going to take a look at the first
of the Bourbon monarchs, though, the first of the Spanish Bourbons,
I should say Philip the fifth, and he was a
king who saw some positive reforms during his reign, but
it is also a thought by some historians to have
been weak, a lazy man who was ruled by the
women in his life, and many of even thought that
(01:06):
he was mad. But author Henry Common, who wrote Philip
the Fifth of Spain, the King who reigned twice, and
this is one of the only English language biographies of
the king, um, he gives a different take on Philip's
sort of crazy behavior. And so we're going to take
a look at some of those theories too and explore
why the king actually gave up his throne for seven
(01:28):
months in seventy four. Yeah, and so, first of all, though,
we've got to address how the Bourbons got to Spain
in the first place, and interestingly kind of indirectly has
to do with the invading of the Habsburg It's all
started in the late sixteen hundreds because King Charles the Second,
who was of the Spanish Habsburg dynasty, was in really
(01:49):
ill health. Um, I mean really really really ill health.
He's actually been suggested quite a bit as an episode
topic of his own. Um. He suffered from all of
the regular Habsburg complaints, and he didn't have a direct air.
So you know, you're in a bit of a quandary here,
who is going to follow Charles the Second? Fortunately there
(02:10):
were three candidates, or maybe not so fortunately. I think
it kind of led to trouble. Yeah, it was unfortunate
in some ways. The three candidates were Prince Joseph Ferdinand,
who was the son of the Elector of Bavaria, Archduke
Charles who was the second son of the Holy Roman
Emperor Leopold, and Philip, Duke of Anjou, the grandson of
Louis the fourteenth. All of these guys have Habsburg connections, right,
(02:34):
So other European powers quickly see this is going to
be a huge problem, and so they start secretly plotting
about how they want to divide up the Spanish territories
outside of Iberian Peninsula. So outside of Spain, what are
they going to do with the territories in Italy, the
Spanish Netherlands and so forth. So this is how they
handle it. They signed the first Treaty of Partition in
(02:56):
six agreeing that Joseph Ferdinand will get Spain, the Spanish
Netherlands and the Spanish colonies. Spain's Italian holdings, however, would
be divided between Austria and France. Yeah, and the main
goal here is to make sure that one government didn't
control this huge Spanish empire. They didn't have so much
(03:16):
power in Europe Spain had some other ideas on that topic, though.
King Charles catches wind of this treaty, and he and
the other Spaniards they're pretty miffed about it. They want
to preserve the integrity of the Spanish Empire, that's their
main goal. They want to keep everything that they've worked
for together in one piece, not have it broken up
into several little pieces. So Charles he approaches us by
(03:37):
altering his will, and in that will he leaves everything
to Joseph Ferdinand intact says it can't be broken up. However,
Joseph Ferdinand suddenly dies a few months later, so kind
of puts a wrench in his plans to Charles plans
for sure. And so the European powers get together again,
and this time they sign a new treaty. It's not
(03:57):
very secret at all, and it may Archduke Charles, the
King of Spain, and it gives the Spanish territories in
Italy to France, so again kind of busting up the
empire a little, making sure that nobody gets all of
the pie right. But Charles gets back at them. He
revises his will at the same time too, and he
(04:19):
decided to take a little bit of a different direction.
He's actually advised by his Council of State that keeping
the Spanish Empire united under a strong Bourbon king is
the way to go, so he leaves everything to Philip,
with one catch, though, Philip has to renounce all his
rights to the French throne, so Charles dies on November
one dred. He kind of makes this will just in
(04:40):
the nick of time, and Louis the fourteenth ends up
accepting this offer on Philip's behalf, so he's making no
concessions to other European countries. He's accepting Spain and all
of its territories on behalf of his grandson Philip, knowing
that he'll likely face war down the line because of it,
because nobody's gonna want France to be the one in
control of all of this. So Philip sets out for Spain,
(05:02):
and he's only seventeen years old, he speaks no Spanish,
and of course he doesn't even have any personal experience
on the Iberian peninsula. A very unprepared young teenager. Yeah,
and experience to say the least. And Louis, however, is
very excited about this. Upon Phillips taking formal leave of him,
and Versailles at the French court. He is excited. He
(05:26):
hugs him, embraces him exuberantly, and says, there are now
no Pyrenees. Two nations that have for so long been
rivals will in the future be a single people. The
lasting piece between them will assure the tranquility of Europe.
So again, really pumped about the situation. But I think
putting on rose colored glasses a little bit. Definitely, I
(05:46):
think that everything's going to be totally tranquil, And as
we'll see, it's actually the opposite of tranquil. So Louis
the fourteenth isn't the only one who's pumped up about
this new king. Though Spain really welcomed Philip with open arms,
they hadn't been happy at all under the Habsburgs. Under
Charles the Second, they had really watched their whole country decline.
(06:06):
There were economic problems, they lost some of their territorial holdings,
really a diminishment of their country. So they thought that
this new Bourbon King of Bourbon, though a pretty good
track record, might offer them a more promising future. And Philip,
on his way to Madrid, toured through a lot of
other Spanish cities, and he was greeted with fanfare, really
(06:28):
welcomed by the Spanish. Yeah, Philip. However, he wasn't quite
as excited about this. He wasn't really up to the
challenge to take on the problems that Spain presented. Yet
he was born. Just to give you a little background,
he was born December ninety three and the son of Louis,
the fourteenth son Louis and Marie Anne of Bavaria, and
(06:49):
he had been brought up in a really protected environment
with little contact, if any at all, with the real world.
He had been educated by tutors and trained to be
a soldier and an ass but he was still really
withdrawn and hesitance and called him slow of speech, and
no one really had confidence in his ability to lead,
not even Louie, not even his French advisors, product of
(07:10):
the Versailles bubble um. So Louie surrounds him with this
team of French advisors. This doesn't really do much to
help the young man's confidence, but because the French are
so sure that he won't do it right, they make
sure that he has all these people who can tell
him the correct decisions to make. And the other positive
(07:31):
for them is that they get to keep control over Spain.
And yeah, there was another problem here though too, and
that was that Philip had this tendency to get depressed,
and it was said that he fell into a deep
melancholy upon leaving Louis the fourteenth's court. So he started
out even from a young age, having kind of these episodes,
and things didn't seem to get much better from there.
(07:52):
Once he was in Spain, he was homesick, as you
imagine he might be. Um. He had trouble picking up
the Spanish language, and actually, just an aside to that,
throughout his reign he continued to speak only French to
his family and to his advisors. So just really real problem.
Kind of mingling in not a particularly endearing trait for
the king and not at all, and he didn't like
(08:15):
anything about his new environment. It seems he didn't like
the Spanish palaces, he didn't like their style of coaches,
he didn't like the clothes or the food. And this
is kind of one of the funny things, the funny anecdotes,
i should say, from Commons book, he explains how Philip
didn't like the food and although he asked for it
to be changed, the Castilian style cooks. They kind of
(08:35):
just said no. They refused to really change their style
of cooking. So he ended up having to set up
an entirely new French household so that he could eat
the stuff that he liked. Didn't she say the cooks
would come out and make sure he ate, Like watch
him right. I don't know if they made sure he ate,
but they definitely came out and wanted to place the
food in front of him themselves. They really wanted to
bring it out to him and see that he was
(08:57):
actually eating. Yeah. Well, unfortunately, none of the French really
liked life at the Spanish court, all of these frenchmen
who Philip had surrounded himself with, and they started introducing
foreign theater and music to Madrid, and understandably, Spaniards were
pretty disappointed that their imported king didn't try at all
(09:19):
to pick up some of their ways, right, So there's
a little bit of tension, or not necessarily trouble, but yeah,
a little bit of tention on that frustration. People were
so excited about this king coming in, and at least
in Madrid, they definitely got a little worse of an
opinion about him from this. But Philip, for his part
(09:39):
expressed his displeasure to his tutor. He said, I would
rather go back to being Duke of Anjou, and I
can't stand Spain. So that sums it up, I guess.
But you think somebody saying that might just sort of
devote himself to trying to turn Spain back into the
French he loves and knows. But he really did dutif
(10:00):
try to apply himself to his work for a while,
at least through his first year and a half as
king in seventeen o one and seventeen o two, um,
even though he suffered two pretty serious bouts of depression
during that time. Yeah, the second bout of depression was
particularly notable. It occurred while he was visiting Italy and
he was incapacitated for days at a time. He had
(10:22):
to be attended to by doctors. You know, everybody was
wondering what's wrong with the king. Nothing seemed to work
on him. They bled him, they tried all these things,
but there really wasn't anything physically wrong with him, and
that's kind of what it came down to. But then
something happened that really snapped him out of it. The
inevitable Spanish Wars of succession began, and this was when
the other European powers tried to prevent Philip, whom they
(10:45):
guessed was controlled by Louis and that was pretty much
correct from getting such a large slice of that European pie. Um.
Just to give you some basics acts about the war.
Obviously there's a lot more to it, but to keep
things to seven, to keep this podcast from being hours long, UM,
we'll just tell you it officially lasted until about set
(11:07):
and it was pretty much an uneven fight from the start.
Although Spain had the might of the French army behind them,
they didn't really have much of their own army at
that point. Um Bavaria, Cologne, and Savoy all aligned with France,
although Savoy ended up later switching sides just going to
be proved awkward as well. Laiter learn absolutely and the
Anti French Alliance the other side of this. It consisted
(11:30):
of England, to the Dutch Republic and the Emperor Leopold.
So basically everyone who had tried to sign a treaty
before Charles the Second passed away. Everyone who might be
mad that France was now in possession of Spain and
all of its colony exactly, and these powers were later
joined by Prussia, Hanover, some other German states and also Portugal.
(11:50):
So suffice to say, France suffered a lot of losses.
At one point, Louis the fourteenth even tried to kind
of back out of the war. He had so many
losses in Italy and in the Low Countries, he just
kind of wanted to get out of it. But here
was the problem. The British wanted him to remove Philip
from Spain. They wanted that to be part of the
so called compromise. Louis just refused to do that. Yeah,
(12:12):
he was willing to almost remove his military support from Spain,
but not flat out turn its back on his grandson. Right.
But the tides finally turned on the whole situation when
Archduke Charles inherited all the Austrian Hapsburg possessions. So at
that point the British and the Dutch they didn't want
him to get the Spanish inheritance as well, so they
(12:34):
all compromised. They signed the Treaty of Utrecht, in which
Spain lost the Spanish Netherlands and their Italian possessions and
just kept Spain in the colony. So it sort of
turned out the way would have if the treaty had
been honored anyway, except with Philip in charge of Spain,
and everybody's happy except the Habsburgs that they're not in
(12:55):
control of most of Europe, right, Something kind of ironic
was happening here too, though. Although Spain kind of lost
out a little bit on everything that had happened with
the Wars of Succession, Philip actually seemed to thrive in
wartime from a personality standpoint. He found some sort of
respite from his depressive state. During this time. He actually
(13:17):
risked his life in battles. He participated fully. Um it was.
It's actually quite interesting if you think of him being
considered like kind of a weak, meek personality, but there
were reports of people dying on either side of him
in battle. I mean, he really put himself at the forefront,
and he managed to successfully defend Spain itself even after
battles and the territories were lost. And at one point
(13:38):
he even kind of stands up to Louie when Louis
appears to abandon him. In seventeen o nine, when Louis
tried to back out of the war, Philip wrote to
him and said, God has placed the crown of Spain
on my head. I shall maintain it as long as
I have a drop of blood in my veins. I
owe it to my conscience, to my honor, and to
the love I received from my subjects. I shall never
(14:00):
give up Spain. So long as I have life. I
would rather perish fighting, which is a pretty far cry
from his earlier statement that he'd rather be back the
Duke of Anjoux than the King of Spain. Yeah, so
it appears almost as if he's done this one eight.
But this is why many Spaniards would later remember him
as a valiant king, the hero of his people, because
he did go into battle and he was so brave.
(14:23):
But the biographer that we mentioned Common, he actually believes
that this was another side to the condition that Philip
was suffering from. You see, in his book, he proposed
that the king actually had bipolar disorder, which is sometimes
known as manic depression, and this had begun in his
adolescence with these pocketsive depression that we mentioned before, and
(14:43):
the war that seemed to snap him out of it.
Common suggests was actually this period of high energy in
which he seemed to get better but he might have
actually been getting worse because he was experiencing the highs
and lows that he would oscillate between throughout the rest
of his life. So well, it seems like war wasn't
really snapping phil out of these depressive states. It did
seem like his wife had some ability to do that.
(15:05):
He was married twice during his lifetime. His first wife
was Marie Louise of Savoy, and they got married right
after Philip became king, and she was really young at
the time, only thirteen years old, but could pretty much
hold her own from the start. She tended to the
affairs of state while he was off fighting in the war.
She ran the household really well and she kept him happy,
(15:28):
which was kind of the most important thing for this
king who suffered from depression so severely he'd be off
the map. Sometimes. They were really an inseparable couple, and
he was thought to have really been in love with her,
and it didn't always make the French and Spanish advisors
very happy because it was maybe a little he was
(15:50):
a little too much in love with her. They thought
he spent a little too much time with her, and
they were also concerned that she had too much control
over political decisions being made that she was, in essence,
his chief advisor. Yeah, at that time, women didn't really
have a role in government at all, and and men
really weren't supposed to publicly display so much affection for
their wives, which Philip certainly did, so he kind of
(16:13):
went against convention, I guess. But unfortunately, Marie Louise died
of tuberculosis on February fourteen, seventeen fourteen, so she died
very young, and Philip was really devastated about it. However,
it didn't take him very long to remarry and sort
of get over that loss. A search began almost immediately
after Marie Louise's death for a new queen, and they
(16:34):
settled on a woman named Elizabeth Farnaise, who was the
niece of the Duke of Parma. Right away, the king
seemed to be as devoted to her as he was
to his last wife, and according to common she was
really devoted to him as well. But this is where
accounts tend to differ a bit, so it just depends
on who you believe. A lot of historians see Pharnise
is just a dominating wife who, along with her advisor
(16:56):
Alberoni used to control her husband and really use him
to pursue her own goals, and her goals were mainly
to secure a position in her native Italy for her
own children, because it was Philip's second family of course,
right Philip already had sons with Marie Louise, and the eldest,
Don Luis, was already in line for the Spanish throne.
(17:16):
Common disagrees with this point of view, though he says
that Philip himself was motivated to fight for Italian territories
on behalf of his son. So who knows. We we
really don't know who whose idea it was. I can
accept a mixture of both of those ideas. I think
that both parents would have interests in their children. You
would think so. Regardless, Spain did get caught up in
(17:38):
conflict with major European powers once again, but this time
there was a major difference, and that was that France
actually got involved, and this time they were against Spain.
I can imagine this is pretty devastating for Philip, who
so loves France still, and I mean, eventually, Spain does
have some success and the end they secured a title
(17:59):
in Parma for Don Carlos later Charles later Charles the
third one of these sons from the second family. But
the conflict in the hostility with France was really upsetting
to fill up. Yeah, it really got to him. He
had some serious, extended bouts of depression during this period,
(18:21):
and during this period he would actually have to appoint
for Naise and Alberoni as regents to manage the government
for periods of time. He was just going through a lot.
He was obsessed with death. He would think he was
dying and that he had all these diseases. Just an
example of one of the things that he went through,
he thought that the sun had struck his shoulder and
penetrated his inner organs, which would be a disturbing thought,
(18:43):
I think absolutely. After the conflict ended, though, and Spain
patched things up with France, Philip still managed to fill
his role pretty well and pretty adequately. For a few years.
He kept a semi normal schedule. He took care of
political decisions, hunted in the afternoons, that was one of
his favorite pastimes, and he even participated in court activities,
(19:03):
balls and dancing celebrations, and spent lots and lots of
time with his queen. They were also like he and
Marie Louise, they were inseparable, they love to spend time together.
So things seem to be fairly normal even after these
massive bouts of depression that he had. He managed to
gain some sense of normalcy now and again until he
surprises everyone and in January Sevo announced that he was
(19:27):
resigning the throne and leaving Spain and all of its
territories to his eldest son, Don Louise. And obviously, a
king resigning the throne, not a not a particularly old
or sickly king either, is a shock. And the truly
shocking thing about it, though, is that it turned out
that it wasn't a sudden decision. It wasn't just that
(19:49):
he was suffering more and more from his depression and
just decided to pull the plug on being king. It
was something that Philip and Elizabeth too had out about
for a really long time. Yeah. They first signed a resolution,
a kind of secret written vow that he would do this,
he would abdicate the throne. They signed a resolution to
(20:11):
this effect in seventeen nineteen, following his distress about the
conflict with France that had gone on while he was
pursuing interests in Italy, and they repeated this vow that
they made every year after that. So basically what they
did is they wrote this vow out on a sheet
of paper, you know, on such a such a date
in seventeen twenty three, we planned to resign the throne,
(20:32):
and then every year after that they confirmed it by
you know, writing a son is confirming their intentions and
signing underneath it. So this was something they had calculated
for a long time, or at least Philip had and
Elizabeth kind of went along with it. That's what we
can assume, I mean, a very bizarre situation. And the
reason he gave for resigning his throne was that he
(20:54):
wanted to serve God free from other cares, to meditate
on death and see his salvation. And of course Spain,
even even the pious Spanish, don't quite buy this explanation,
and a lot of people thought that maybe he just
wanted to make himself available in case that French throne
came open, because of course, by being King of Spain,
(21:17):
he had renounced his claim to the French throne right
and that was a very real possibility, but common The
biographer says, that there's really no evidence that this was
the case. We can only take the information that he
gave us, the motives that he gave us as as truth.
But he thinks that these actions, this abducation, also had
to do with his bipolar disorder. Philip was very preoccupied
(21:39):
with death, and common suggests that abjucating the throne was
kind of a type of political suicide, so represented a
death in that way. Yeah, for this man who was
obsessed with death. But regardless of his motives, the situation
didn't last long at all, especially when you consider how
many years of planning go into it. Because Philip's heir, Louise,
(22:02):
got smallpox and died in August of seventeen twenty four,
so that very same year, and on his deathbed, he
made his father his successor. And Philip didn't really want
to become king again. I mean, that's like going into
retirement and coming back right away, but he was convinced.
He was talked into it since his other sons were
(22:23):
still considered too young to rule, and the Spanish people
understandably were not that excited to have him back, this
guy who's quit on them. Um, they were pretty happy
with Louise. You know, finally they have this Spanish born king,
somebody who who knows Spain and appreciate Spain, and they're
(22:43):
back to their their Bourbon king again. Yeah, back to
foreigners on the throne. And it's funny that he Philip
I mean, had been a foreigner on the throne for
his entire reign, but this was sort of the first
time that his legitimacy in that position had been questioned,
so it was kind of a big d But Philip
at first seems to do reasonably well in his return
to the throne, though his illness still comes and goes
(23:07):
now and again. Then, in the first major signs of
a change in his mental health came about, he started
doing a few weird things. At this time, he would
spend several days at a time in bed, and he
also inverted the order of day and night. So his
once normal schedule that involves taking care of business in
the morning and hunting in the afternoons now involved him
(23:28):
holding audiences with ambassadors at midnight and meeting with his
ministers in the wee hours of the morning, sometimes finishing
meetings around dawn. I'm sure they loved that. Um. It
also became clear that he was thinking about abdicating again,
which I mean, come on, I don't know if you
can try that already that twice. This time Elizabeth, instead
(23:50):
of being his his partner in abdication, managed to stop him,
and she had to really go to great lengths to
do so. She took away all the paper or an
ink from the royal suite so he wouldn't be able
to dash off a little note of abdication and send
it onto the appropriate party. And she had a watch
kept on him at all times too to make sure
(24:11):
and Casey did get ahold of some ink or let
some important person know, but still he rebelled, and he
tried these escape attempts from the palace. Escape attempts, escape attempts. Yeah,
he would try to get out of the palace half
naked in the early hours of the morning, and she
would have to have the guards kind of restrain him
(24:31):
and look out from and bring him back. But by
that summer everyone at the palace knew about his condition
because it would be a hard secret to keep. It
would be a very hard secret to keep. And after
that things just seemed to get worse. He would give
audiences to ambassadors dressed only in his night shirt, so
apparently had some fixation with not being in clothes. But
in addition to that, he couldn't sleep. He would have terrors, delusions,
(24:54):
and hallucinations. He was also paranoid, and he thought people
were plotting to poison him. So there was one story
that I saw where he would actually wear one of
Elizabeth's shirts underneath his shirt because there was some shirt
poisoning thing that was going on at the time. I
was afraid somebody would would give him a gift of
a poison shirt, or exactly his laundries somehow get into
(25:15):
his closet. Maybe at night he would bite himself, scream
or start singing randomly. Sometimes he would relieve himself in
his bed. At one time he even believed that he
was a frog, and at another he believed he was dead.
So all kinds of extremes going on. He also had
believe me it too. He would eat voraciously for an
hour or two at a time without stopping. Also, though
(25:38):
he started to just generally neglect his person himself. He
I think when his disease advanced, not necessarily around seventy eight,
but in the thirties, he wouldn't bathe regularly, he wouldn't
cut his toe nails. Sometimes he would lie in bed
for days at a time and really just not take
care of them at all, so he would have trouble
walking then when he got up again because his toe
nails were so long. He also would cut his hair,
(26:01):
and so it grew to be this kind of crazy
mass of hair and he would wear a wig over
it to kind of, I guess, mitigate the situation. But
it's it's interesting though, in the midst of all of this,
there was one thing that would kind of snap him
out of it every now and then and and bring
(26:21):
him back to a functioning state, and that was the
idea that he might claim the French throne um. One example,
he heard that Louis was sick with smallpox in and
and he did snap out of it briefly. He thought
that maybe if he was back in France again, all
his problems would be solved and he could be happy
(26:42):
and he could go back to the idealized man he
he thought he once was. Yeah. Again, that was probably
just another factor in his illness of probably just more delusions,
because he obviously had a medical disorder that couldn't just
be fixed by changing location, and there was obviously no
way for him to go back to get to France. Yeah, well,
(27:04):
that is also an aspect of it too. Elizabeth Farnese, though,
stood by him throughout all of this. She ended up
actually having to take control of government at times when
he was incapacitated, but she also tried to alleviate his suffering,
so she was very kind towards him as well. She
did this in a couple of ways. She traveled with him,
took him out of Madrid to visit other palaces in Spain,
(27:25):
in Seville and arn for example, and they did this
for extended periods of time. I think in Seville especially,
they spent five years there or something. Moved the entire
court there and it gave him a change of environment,
but it also took him out of the public eye,
so it served a couple of purposes. She also did
something else to kind of help him out though, and
help him escape his depression. In seventeen thirty seven, she
(27:47):
invited a famous Castrado singer known as Farinelli his real
name was Carlo Broschi, and she invited him to Madrid
into the palace at that time, Philip was in one
of his periods of really deep depression, so he was
lying in bed. I don't think he even attended the
first performance. Just to give you a little bit of
background Farinelle before we go on. Farinelli is often called
(28:08):
one of the greatest singers in the history of opera,
a quote from Nicholas Clapton, and he created a two
thousand and six exhibit on Castrati at London's Handle House Museum.
He said Farinelli was more famous than Madonna, Johnny Depp
and David Beckham combined. So this would be the equivalent
of asking David Beckham to your backyard to do free
(28:29):
kicks or something. Yeah, well you have Madonna perform a
concert and Johnny to do some improv or something. Pretty
amazing and hearing Farinelli thing really did help snap Philip
out of his depression, at least for a little bit.
So the Queen demanded that Farnelli thing for them every
single day, and he became a real part of their lives.
(28:51):
He was given a title which essentially translated to my
personal assistant, and he did never have to give a
public concert again. I mean, so imagine people of that
fame level Madonna or Johnny Depp or somebody just retiring
to become someone's personal assistant putting on private shows. I mean, unbelievable. Yeah,
(29:13):
he's saying only for the royal family and lived rent
free in the Royal Palace, and he set up an
Italian opera at court, and he was paid under the table,
and he was paid his pay was tax free. He
was paid the same rate that he was being paid
in London before he came to Madrid, but didn't have
to pay taxes. So yeah, really raking it in. But
you know, some compromises on Farnelli's part. Of course, he
(29:34):
had to adapt to the king's strange waking hours and
make himself available at all hours of the night, and
every single night he would sing eight or nine arias
and the general belief. And I actually thought this was
that Farnelli sang the same songs every single night, which
makes it a little disturbing. I guess I had heard
(29:56):
that as well, But apparently he had a much larger
pitoire that he would sing for the king. Um, I
think you said that common claimed Farnelli's paper showedy thing
hundreds of different songs, so so a more more varied
program going on nightly. But the thing I was kind
of a therapist. I get a musical therapy therapist position.
(30:18):
This was maybe the first one of the first examples
of music therapy out there. But although Philip improved a
little bit with his music therapy, his basic symptoms never
really disappeared. He still kept his weird schedule and really
just continued to decline until he passed away quite suddenly
on July nine. And this made his son Ferdinand king,
(30:38):
and that was King Ferdinand the sixth of Spain. And
at the end many considered him to be mad, so
it was really kind of quite sad. But in conversations
most people reported that he was still lucid, and with
the help of his advisors, he was able to make
many economic and governmental reforms throughout his reign. So who
knows if Commons theory about bipolar disorder was correct, but
(30:59):
I think, judging from reports and things that people say
about meeting with him at the time, he was at
least able to seem lucid. He was able at least
to seem like he was saying when you spoke to him,
and I mean, he if we're going to go back
to the Bourbon series here, I mean he is at
the beginning of a line that, as you mentioned at
the beginning, does still exist today. I think it's been
(31:21):
one of the fun aspects of this Bourbon series has
been covering the beginning and ends of these lines from
from Henry and now his his head that was relocated,
and the strange Comte de Chambourg, the last French Bourbon
Philip for Spanish. It's interesting to see the group of
people when you put them that way, and the and
(31:42):
the type of people who found lines and who in them. Yeah, definitely,
he's he was a he was a good founder. I
think he's still strange bird, the strange bird, definitely. But
you know, like we said, he was known for a
lot of reforms and also known, i think especially for
building up the Spanish navy. So he did a lot.
And Elizabeth also stuck around for a long time as well.
(32:05):
She actually outlived Ferdinand um and ended up acting as
regent for a few months before her son Charles the
Third came back to Spain to rule, so she was
around and Parnelli was in the picture for a while too.
He ended up really achieving distinction as a Spanish and Presario,
and he took an active role in public affairs. To
Charles the Third, I think eventually dismissed him because they
(32:27):
had political differences, but he still was around for a
while and ended up retiring peacefully to Italy and was
very wealthy at the time. So and of Lenna and
I were talking about how we might have to revisit
some of these famous castrati, just because I mean, I
knew y'all are interested in that. You'd have to be right, Yeah,
And there's an exhamation involved. There is an exhamation. Paranelli's
(32:48):
body was exhumed in two thousand six for study. So
you know, we began with the head, we began the
burn series with the head, and now we're ending with
exhumes remains something else. We had to book end it
like that. Well, um, yeah, so that's that's the end
of the bourbon series. I'm sure we will, of course
revisit this family. How could we not, How could we
(33:11):
not revisit people at least influenced by the bourbon Um.
But it's been it's been pretty interesting talking about all
these different rulers and the people close to them, people
associated with them, I always like a good series. The
series was fun. It was fun to see how everybody
was connected, and just also explore some of the tinier
(33:31):
stories too. I think, just pull out some of these
little intrigues and um, random medical conditions that we didn't
know people have medical conditions. Yes, um, so yeah, if
you have any more suggestions for cool series, I mean
it'll probably be a little while, but we're always that
for a series. As we mentioned, it's fun to to
(33:52):
just enter that world completely. Um. Feel free to drop
us a note. We're on Twitter at Myston history, We're
on Phase fuck, and you can also send us an
email at History podcast at how stuff works dot com.
We'd love to hear your ideas. Yeah, and if you
would like to learn a little bit more about how
bipolar disorder works, maybe compare what you read to some
(34:14):
of the symptoms that Philip the Fifth pad. You can
look up a story about it on our website just
by visiting our homepage and typing in bipolar disorder at
www dot how stuff works dot com. For more on
this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works
dot com. To learn more about the podcast, click on
(34:35):
the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our homepage.
The How Stuff Works iPhone up has a rise. Download
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