Carlos the Bewitched: The Last Spanish Hapsburg

by John Langdon-Davies

Genres: History

272 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1962

About the author

John Eric Langdon-Davies MBE (1897–1971) was a British author and journalist. He was a war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War and the Soviet-Finnish War. His books varied between military, scientific, historical and Spanish (including Catalan) subjects.

Reviews

[Mark Desrosiers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating biography of one of the weirdest, saddest (also, let's be fair: dumbest) monarchs ever. I especially enjoyed Langdon-Davies' evidence that Carlos II did not reproduce because he actually did not know how to perform sexual intercourse, and neither of his two queens could be bothered to show him the ropes. Of course everyone else in Spain figured he was possessed by the devil, hence the book's title.

[Christopher Roth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Somebody has GOT to make this into a movie. It has: incest, inbreeding, international intrigue, murder, witchcraft, and a strangled parrot. And, since it's also a triumph-over-affliction narrative, it's Oscar-bait! How could someone NOT win an Academy Award after portraying someone this severely disabled?

[Doria · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a sad, pathetic story, all the more so for being true. The life - if one could call it that - of poor Carlos II of Spain is here recounted in fascinating and morbid detail. The results of generations of selective inbreeding, Carlos lived to be almost 40. Sadly, this was to be the only miracle vouchsafed this unfortunate monarch, whose sex life (or lack thereof) was the subject worldwide obsession and fantastical speculation. For upon his (im)potency rested the fate of Europe at the dawn of the 18th century.

In addition to being well written, if self-consciously witty, this book contains one of the best annotated bibliographies I have ever read.

[Maddy Gold · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fun biography of Carlos II of Spain, although he doesn’t feature in it very much. It’s more about the intrigue and insanity going on around him as he slowly putrefies along with the Spanish empire.

The weirdest anecdote about Carlos was that he couldn’t stand on his own legs till after the age of 4, and was suspended on strings when he needed to make formal appearances. What an image.

I’m not entirely convinced he didn’t know how to have sex. More like he wasn’t capable of penetration. It’s ironic considering his dad was such a famous philanderer.

The writing style is accessible and lively, but I struggled with keeping track of all the advisors, priests, heirs to the throne, potential wives, etc. This book is also filled with words I had to look up in the dictionary. For example, Energumen: a person possessed by the devil.

The moral of the story is don’t inbreed for 100 years just to keep your empire together.

[Andrew Dockrill · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Davies book on Charles II, was an excellent read. This book takes on a chronological narrative from cradle to grave. He makes the case that Charles II thought he was possessed by the devil as did the Inquisitors because he could not perform sexually and was largely incompetent as an individual in almost every context. Davies demonstrates the sheer amount of mental illness which resulted from inbreeding and how it could be seen developing as early as Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor and culminated in Charles II.

One case which I didnt entirely agree with Davies was his assessment of Maximilian who he believed it all started with because he was "eccentric" as a gentlemen who liked to perform seeances and was obsessed with the idea of dying. This doesn't prove anything as many people were superstitious at the time, did not mean they were mentally ill. However I do agree that Juana La Locha was arguably very unstable.

The book itself was very well written and I felt tremendous sadness for this man who meant so well but was incapable and brought aong the end of the Habsburg dynasty and the beginning of the Bourbons ruling spain. Would definitely recommend this book to any and all as it was a very enjoyable read.

[Leslie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating account of Carlos II, the last of the Spanish Habsburgs, whose death without heirs set off the War of the Spanish Succession. A product of several generations of first cousin and uncle-niece marriages, Carlos was a genetic disaster - mentally incapacitated, impotent and with such an extreme version of the Habsburg jaw that he was unable to chew his food properly. Against all expectations he lived to be almost forty, but spent his entire sad life as a pawn of various advisers, his mother and two wives - none of whom did Spain any good as it slid more deeply into decline.

[Jane · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well-written for general readers, non-historians. It's a very good thing that the science of genetics has made so many discoveries.

[Pamela Chartrand · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book . Throughout the beginning few chapters I like how the author covered a lot of biography on Carlos earlier Habsburg relatives

[Brigid · Rating 4 out of 5]

“A normal biography proceeds from the birth to the baptism to the weaning, thence to nursery days and the putting away of childish things. For us this would be an impossible progress, for we are dealing with a man who died of poison two hundred years before he was born. If birth is a beginning, of no man was it more true to say that in his beginning was his end. Carlos was history’s ’I told you so’ to the proud Emperor Maximilian.”

I don’t know how long ago I first heard of King Charles II of Spain (who is referred to as Carlos II throughout this book), but since first learning about this man, I have always wanted to read more about what his life was like. This is because Charles II is described by different sources as being a severely inbred and incapable ruler due to his many health issues: “A man’s ancestors in the third, fourth and fifth generations comprise eight, sixteen and thirty-two relationships respectively. Thus Carlos’s parents, like everyone else, each had fifty-six such relationships in their family trees, or one hundred and twelve between them. These one hundred and twelve relationships in their case were shared between only thirty-eight individuals.”

Carlos: The King Who Would Not Die by John Langdon-Davies, first published in 1963, is the only book about this man’s life currently available to me that I have been able to read. This is not a perfect book, and there were many times throughout the text where the author’s word choices were very reflective of the time that it was published. This nonfiction book has a looser feel than history books and seems to be written for people like me in mind: nosy, non-historian looky-loos who want to learn more and be entertained at the same time. It is invaluable to read about Charles II at age three responding to a grandee’s formal remark with something clever and sharp: “Thus, when a grandee, bending to kiss his hand, said that he hoped to be as good a friend to him as he had been to his father, the child replied, ‘Kings regard their vassals not as friends but as servants.’”

It is still unclear to me exactly how incapable Charles II actually was, and considering the author of this book notes how there has been “[…] scarcely any study of Carlos II in English,” I don’t know how possible it is to obtain more definitive information and answers. Additionally, because Charles II was born in 1661 and died in 1700, I consider it too difficult to assess Charles II’s actual abilities because of the limitations of medicine when he was still alive. Charles II undergoes many medical treatments that easily conjure up the word “quackery” within my own mind, particularly as he seeks treatment for his sterility through exorcisms: “It resembles a badly designed experiment by an incompetent psychical researcher. He told the devil to pinch Carlos in one hand, and Carlos shouted out at once that he had felt it. He then ordered the devil to transfer his activity to the King’s shoulder, and at once Carlos felt a pain there. If we were told that Carlos was prevented in some way from hearing these orders to the devil, the test would be very much more significant.”

Overall, the sense I got about Charles II as a man is that he was very much influenced by those immediately surrounding him, and he seems to have struggled with severe health problems his entire life. This book is a fine way to learn about Charles II mostly through the perspective of others, but there are fascinating moments when Charles II’s point of view is considered as well: “The King was experiencing one of his short periods of good health, or rather of sufficient relief to be able to have a mind of his own for a few days. Naturally he attributed this to the exorcisms, now in full swing, and nothing would induce him to take any step which might bring them to an end. They were a drug of addiction.” I rate Carlos: The King Who Would Not Die by John Langdon-Davies as four-out-of-five-stars and recommend this book to anyone else curious about Charles II, and I hope that I can find additional books about this subject someday as well.

[Hiram · Rating 5 out of 5]

I got my copy from alibris, it’s an online bookstore.

[Nefertari · Rating 3 out of 5]

While it's not a history whose tone stands the test of time (references to male weakness and mental illness make this easily identifiable as a book out of the 1950s), this book is an interesting investigation of the end of the Hapsburg line. In particular, its investigation of the concept of incest and attitudes toward it at the time, make it a standout read about a part of history that tends to focus more on the doings of Louis XIV. The evidence that the author brings up doesn't always stand the test of time, but there is a great deal of attention paid to the plots in the Spanish court.

Perhaps the most shocking thing in the entire book is the family tree leading to Carlos's birth. Both mother and father's sides share a frightening number of relatives.