Downfall of a King

A riveting and deeply researched account of King Juan Carlos’s epic fall from grace.

Paul Preston, the preeminent historian of modern Spain, here lays bare the complex web of financial and sexual excess that led to the hero’s vertiginous downfall. For decades, King Carlos was immensely popular in Spain and much beloved – in part because of his courageous defence of Spanish democracy after Franco’s death. However, his secrets’ gradual exposure was detonated in April 2012 by his appearance on television cameras as he left a Madrid hospital. An astonished nation heard him make a declaration unprecedented from the lips of any Spanish Head of State, royal or republican: ‘I am very sorry. I have made a mistake and it will not happen again’.

Revelations that he had been badly injured while elephant hunting in Botswana accompanied by a woman who was not his wife opened the floodgates to prurient research into his marital infidelities. From there, it was a short step to journalistic, followed by judicial, investigation into his financial misdemeanours. The consequent accumulation of hostile coverage culminated in his abdication on 2 June 2014 and, from August 2020, a gilded exile in Abu Dhabi.

Paul Preston’s spectacular biography tells the story of the King’s very public implosion and identifies the seeds of self-destruction in Juan Carlos’s unhappy childhood and upbringing. In so doing, Preston also throws a penetrating light on the massive scale of corruption within the Spanish establishment and sets the King’s downfall against Spain’s own identity crisis as it continues to grapple with its fascist past.