Noble Blood - A King Legitimate and Illegitimate

Episode Date: December 21, 2021

In a small town in the northeast of Spain, in a small pub, a man named Albert Solà works as a waiter. He might also be the rightful King of Spain.Support Noble Blood:— Bonus episodes and scripts on Patreon— Merch!— Pre-order Dana's book, Anatomy: A Love Story— Sign up to join Dana on the Mary Shelley Pilgrimage in April Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Hey, I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong,

dance. And then there's your body having its own program. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and Grimmin Mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion is advised. In the hills of Catalonia, the region of Spain to the northeast, close to the border with France, There's a small town called La Bisba D'Importa. It's not a frequent stop for most tourists. The town is quaint, but a little run-down. A dry riverbed, grassy and derelict, runs through the town center,

a place where a weekly market appears, a few tents and carts, people selling mostly crafts and ceramics. There's a pub there in town, a restaurant and bar called El Drac, with a large outdoor seating area that sprawls onto the sidewalk. According to TripAdvisor reviews, it's not a bad place to stop for a quick bite or something to drink. Trish gave it five stars. In her review, she wrote, quote, The restaurant itself is very atmospheric with original stone walls, open fire, and well-spaced-out tables, which I like.

Another user, named Beclav M, had a slightly less enjoyable experience. His one-star review complained, quote, There was no one behind the bar for five minutes, despite we have been sitting there and staff was walking around the bar often. Finally, bartender arrived and made us drinks. The service staff seemed to be acting without organization, everyone doing everything and nothing.

I wonder if Vaclav M might have felt differently if he had asked around, if he had maybe turned to a local next to him, and inquired who exactly El Drac was employing as servers. If he looked closely, he might have seen a few things that made El Drac unique. The walls were peppered with framed newspaper articles and a framed book cover. They had a sandwich on the menu called The Monarch. And one of the servers, a man named Albert Sola, answered to a specific nickname from drinkers at the bar.

The regulars all called him the little king. Albert looks younger than his 65 years. He has a full head of salt and pepper hair, receding slightly at the sides into a deep widow's peak. His eyes are close set, deep and intelligent, and his nose is long with a patrician curve. It's the nose in particular that I think makes Albert Sola most closely resemble

the former king of Spain, Juan Carlos I, who abdicated the throne in 2014 amidst a flurry of scandals. And for the past few years, Juan Carlos has been deflecting the possibility of yet another scandal. Albert Sola, the waiter at El Drac, claims to be the former king's son.

And not just his son. According to Albert Sola's birth certificate, he would be the king's oldest son, older than Juan Carlos' son Felipe, who ascended to the throne in 2014 as Felipe the 6th. Now, on this podcast, I have covered more than a few stories of royal pretenders. There was the Tick-Borne claimant, the Australian man who came to England, claiming to be the long-missing Roger Tick-born, heir to his family's barrency, presumed dead in a shipwreck. Then there was the woman who appeared in Bristol in 1817, who spoke in a made-up language and declared that she was Princess Caribou of a faraway island. Throughout the centuries, a number of royal

children whom history acknowledged to be dead, like Marie Antoinette's son and the Royal Romanov Princess Anastasia, have been the subject of numerous hoaxes, with actors and grifters appearing and proclaiming that they've been alive this whole time, living lives of secret poverty, waiting for their chance to reemerge. You, the listener, are, of course, welcome to believe whatever you want, although I think I would be remiss in my duties as the host of this podcast if I didn't tell you that, in my professional opinion,

all of the people who pretend to be the lost-da-fault-Fa-Luie the 17th or Anastasia Romanov are just factually on the evidence, lying, and that the man who claimed to be Roger Tickbourne was actually, by all the evidence, a man named Arthur Orton, the son of a butcher, and that, of course, Princess Caribou, was complete nonsense. And so the case of Alpertula might be the first occasion in which, I think, the evidence actually weighs more likely than not, that a man who was working as a waiter in a restaurant for most of his adult life might actually be the previous King of Spain's oldest son. He's not necessarily the heir to the throne. He was, after all, illegitimate, but certainly

someone with a claim to it. Unlike most episodes of Noble Blood, this is a modern story from the 20th century and a story that's ongoing, continually developing today. But it's a story that sheds a light on the problems for modern monarchies today. Back in the 1600s, it was easy enough to shroud a king in majesty. Back when the people of a kingdom would only be exposed to a king through portraitures and glamorous pageantry, and of course the words of the trusted church. But today, journalists and internet gossip makes easy work of proving that the people who are supposed to be God's chosen rulers on earth are just as mortal in their failings as the rest of us. It's enough to make you wonder, who are the real pretenders?

I'm Danish Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood. Maybe now is as good a time as any to go over a little bit of Spanish history. In 1931, the monarchy of Spain was overthrown in favor of the Second Spanish Republic. The former king, Alfonso the 13th, went peacefully into exile. He and his two oldest sons renounced their claims to the throne and went to live in Rome. But the Second Spanish Republic was short-lived. There was an election for a constitutional Cortez, a group to rewrite the Constitution of Spain with progressive reforms, and those reforms included the separation of church and state,

forbidding religious teachings in public schools. But Spain was still an incredibly Catholic country, and the Republican Prime Minister at the time was religious himself. He resigned, and another Prime Minister, the more liberal Azania, was eventually ousted in an election in favor of a right-winger Leroux. From that point on, there were a number of socialist uprisings throughout the country, and the factionalism among the Republicans weakened their hold on the country, which gave the military opportunity to attempt a coup.

When I refer to the Republicans here, I'm not talking about a specific political party, like Republicans in America. I'm referring to the people in favor of the Second Spanish Republic, the ostensible, democratic, more progressive government of the country, which was recognized internationally, but which, because it's, contained people from across the political spectrum, failed to be united enough to maintain control against the oncoming coup. The war between the Republicans and the military, who came to be known as the Nationalists, devastated the country, with countless atrocities, massacres, and brutal

attacks, including the bombing of Gernica, now immortalized in one of Pablo Picasso's most famous paintings. Eventually, the nationalist, the Spanish military, captured Barcelona and then Madrid, and their leader, Francisco Franco, declared victory, setting off the next several decades of his far-right authoritarian regime. I'm skating through a lot of history here very quickly, but to get back to the monarchy, Franco was attracted to the idea of the grandeur of Spain historically, the pomp and pageantry of nationalist Spain. And he hated the idea of a democratic republic forming after he was gone. And so he decided he would reinstate the monarchy.

At this point, the grandson of Alfonso the 13th was living in Rome, a man named Juan Carlos. And so Franco brought the prince, Juan Carlos, back to Spain and named him his heir. Franco imagined that Juan Carlos would be something of his protege and would continue on his authoritarian regime after his death. Well, Franco died, but then Juan Carlos did something unexpected. Rather than carry on the dictatorship to the surprise of Spain and the rest of the world, King Juan Carlos I ushered democracy into Spain, spearheading the first democratic election in the country since the 1930s

and facing down the ensuing right-wing military coup that was attempted in the aftermath. It's almost difficult to overstate what an incredible thing Juan Carlos did, how he peacefully unraveled decades of authoritarianism and ushered in a new era of Spain, in which the nation would be democratic and participatory in the economy of the rest of the world. He was a hero, beloved by two generations of grateful Spaniards, still reckoning with the trauma of Franco's authoritarian regime. Juan Carlos was a king who could have become an autocrat,

but instead gave a country back to its people. Later, King Juan Carlos would have another, admittedly smaller-scale hero moment, when he went viral in 2007 at a summit in Chile, when he told the then-president of Venezuela Hugo Chavez, why don't you shut up? But the goodwill towards the King of Spain would soon run out. In 2012, King Juan Carlos went on a secret vacation. A vacation that would have remained secret

had he not injured himself and need to be airlifted out to receive an emergency hip replacement. The king was in Botswana. hunting elephants. Now that would have been bad enough, but every new detail about the story that emerged just made the situation worse and worse. Spain was in a massive economic downturn, a period of huge unemployment in the aftermath of the 2008 global recession. This little elephant hunting vacation cost over 40,000 euros, and it was subsidized by a year. advisor to the Saudi royal family with seedy ties to 15 offshore companies named in the Panama

papers. And on this pretty dodgy vacation, the king wasn't accompanied by the queen, Sophia, the mother of his children. He was with a woman named Corina Zussain Wittenstein, a German princess by marriage. The media in Spain had been historically very generous in their coverage of the family. A reporter from the New Yorker once wrote that he was told by a newspaper editor that he and his peers, quote, exercise self-censorship on the subject of the king. When the New Yorker reporter wrote an article alluding to one of the king's alleged numerous rumored affairs, one of the journalists with whom he had spoken felt so guilty and nervous for the future of his own career that he called the chief of the royal household to apologize. But after the elephant hunting incident,

it seemed like the royal family was stuck on a treadmill with a speed that kept increasing. When the king tried to downsize by giving up his 18 million euro yacht, it just brought more attention to the fact that he had an 18 million euro yacht to begin with, and that it cost 20,000 euros just to staff it, and that it had been a gift by an assortment of 25 random businessmen and the Bel Air government. For all of the king's relatively progressive politics, Juan Carlos had a bad habit of accepting exorbitant gifts and swaddling himself with the luxury that maybe he felt he had been denied as a child in exile. Royal biographer Lawrence Debray wrote that Juan Carlos, quote, had known as a young man the humiliation of having to economically depend on rich Spanish aristocrats

who were voluntarily ensuring the lifestyle of the royal family in exile. That stress or anxiety, no doubt shaped his magpie-like tendency to hoard wealth. But it didn't make it any less palatable to a modern and struggling Spanish population in the 21st century. The snowball of scandals were just too much for the monarchy to bear. In 2014, the Prime Minister announced that the king had told him that he intended to abdicate. And later in that year, Juan Carlos the first did just that, becoming the fourth European monarch to abdicate in just over a year after Pope Benedict the 16th, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, and King Albert II of Belgium. It was a reckoning for the monarchies of Europe, a global moment of modernism colliding with an inherently regressive institution.

To survive, monarchies needed to adapt, to become likable, likable multi-millionaires to whom people need to bow when they enter a room. It's a tricky order. Youth and good looks help. More progressive politics do too, although not not too progressive as to not alienate the traditional base who make up the support for having a monarchy at all in the first place. It seems, in my estimation at least, that many of the present-day European monarchies recognized the utility in a shift towards what I consider a sort of kitsch, the sale of tea towels and china plates with their faces painted on them. The monarch becoming less a political power and more a mascot. Someone that the country can unite behind,

much in the same way a crowd at a football game, can get excited about a guy dancing in a tiger costume. For the crowns of Europe, it was a moment of adapt or die. The new king of Spain, Felipe the 6th, was handsome and comparatively unadorned by scandal, and the country was further endeared to him by his marriage. marriage to a beautiful non-royal woman who had worked as a news reporter. Now our story requires us to go back in time once again, to 1956 in Barcelona, where a baby was born and given the name

Alberto Fernando Augusto Bach Roman. Alberto, who would eventually begin going by Albert, was one of the 300,000 children orphaned during the Franco regime. Not all infants whose parents, who parents had died, but also children whose parents were political enemies or unwed mothers in the deeply Catholic country, mothers who smuggled their children out of their homes to be raised by different families. As an infant, Albert was sent to the island of Abitha to be cared for by a poor farming family. The daughter of that family is still alive. Her name is Yulalia, and she's 90 years old now. She recounted how her family had frequently fostered children from the mainland, illegitimate children of powerful families usually. But Albert's case was peculiar from the start.

According to Yulalia, they were paid almost twice their usual rate to care for him, given almost 300 pizettas a month. As a young boy, Albert was taken from Abitha and brought to live in a mansion in Barcelona, although the force behind these movements and machinations weren't clear then and still aren't clear to Albert today. All he has to go on are his hazy half-memories. In Barcelona, he remembers the manner he lived at had a garden and high walls, and that an older woman would come and visit him, bringing him toys. He believes now the woman might have been his grandmother. A tutor would come to the house to teach him, and he lived in the mansion in Barcelona until age eight when he was sent to the home of a farmer named Salvatorsola in the province of Hirona. A whisper followed him there, a whisper that he

was noble-born, a child of an important family. It was that whisper that Albert clung to as his life became even stranger, more inexplicably charmed. After Albert got his driver's, he was a driver's license, a mysterious gift appeared, an expensive motorcycle and a car. When Albert served his mandatory military service in his 20s, he was given cushy preferential treatment. He was even given a chartered helicopter to take home to visit family after one of his relatives was injured in an accident. Eventually, Albert would begin working as a waiter, the job he would keep for his entire life. But he remained curious about his childhood, his origins, the way good things just tended to follow him, and why he had faint memories of a woman in a garden who looked like the, by then-deceased mother of the

king. In 1982, Albert took his curiosity to a local office in Barcelona that specialized in finding adoption records. Albert waited, while several of their employees were called over to look at his files. There was speaking behind lifted hands, a visit to the manager in the back of the office. Finally, the manager emerged to tell Albert

that they couldn't help him, but the manager did give Albert one cryptic piece of information, that this was the most complicated adoption case that they had ever seen. Albert has decades of stories of gossip

following him, of powerful people telling him that he came from a powerful family. He made a claim in court to see his birth records, a claim that got no official response. Finally, off the record, Albert was given the answer that he had waited for his entire life. The judge on his case called him privately after hours and told him that he was the son of King Juan Carlos I. An illegitimate child that the king, had at 18, before he married Queen Sophia several years later. Later, that judge would deny making the phone call at all, but in Albert's mind, the case was solved. He was the king's son, and the king's oldest son. In 2007, Albert sent a handwritten letter by fax to Zazuela Palace.

It began, Dear Father, someone in the palace responded and told Albuhran, that his letter would be forwarded along to the king. But Albert waited and waited, and no response came. And so Albert continued to write letters. Give me some answers and I will not bother you again, one of the letters read. My patience has run out. Albert wasn't asking for money or to claim the throne. He just wanted answers, and maybe a chance to get to know the father that he had been missing his entire life. Albert requested DNA and a paternity lawsuit, both of which were denied. When Juan Carlos I was king, he had full protection under sovereign immunity from both civil and criminal lawsuits. But the question became a little trickier after Juan Carlos abdicated. And Albert

Sola isn't the only person claiming to be an illegitimate child of the former king. A Belgian woman named Ingrid Sartua, born in 1966, claims that she's the king's daughter, born from an affair that the king had in France with her mother, Lillian. Allegedly, Lillian turned down royal offers to get an illegal abortion, and because bearing a child out of wedlock would have been dangerous in Franco's Spain, Lillian smuggled her infant daughter to Belgium. Lillian had told young Ingrid for her entire life that her father had died in a plane crash, until finally she believed that her child was old enough to hear the truth. As with Albert's, all of Ingrid's legal avenues to try to get an answer as to her paternity hit dead ends. But then the parent decided to test their DNA against one

and others. An independent agency in Belgium verified the results. The two, Ingrid and Albert, are most likely have siblings. It makes a certain kind of sense. I mean, for centuries, kings had been having affairs and having illegitimate children. If you're a fan of this podcast, you're probably well aware that that's just sort of what kings do. But that type of behavior looks a little different in the 21st century. And the incredibly self-serious question of the quote-unquote legitimacy. of claims to the thrones of Europe seem almost even a little silly in a world of Wikipedia

and books being delivered to our front doors via drone. Personally, I would welcome someone who had spent a lifetime in the service industry, becoming the king of a nation. It seems to me that a server would have the best ability to actually, well, serve the people and not just provide lip service to that effect while smiling for the cameras. Albert Sola may never become the King of Spain, but he'll always be the little king to the patrons at his bar. That's the still unfolding story of the possible illegitimate son of the former King of Spain, but keep listening after a brief sponsor break to hear yet another scandal Juan Carlos got himself into.

And just on a personal note, I want to thank everyone so much for all the support they throw to the show. Everyone over on the Patreon, just a reminder, we're on patreon.com slash nobleblood Tales, where you can get episode scripts and bonus episodes, like where I go through episodes of the Tudors on Showtime and the television show, rain about Mary Queen of Scots on the CW. We also have merch at DFTBA.com. I'm linking that in the episode description. And also, I'm leading a pilgrimage to Sussex this spring in April. I think there might still be a few spots left if you sign up soon.

It's a pilgrimage to discuss the works of Mary Shelley, particularly Frankenstein, to walk, to talk, to read. I think it's going to be a really great experience. Now, I would be so excited to meet any listeners in person. So that's very exciting. And also, oh gosh, Anatomy, the book that I've been yammering on about forever. It's a novel about the dawn of surgery in 19th century, Scotland. It finally comes out January 18th. And thank you so much to anyone who has already preordered it.

If it interests you at all, it would mean the world to me if you take a look. If you like this podcast, I think you'll really like it. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong stance. And then there's your body having its own program. I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes. makes other plans. We share stories and scientific insights to help us all better navigate

these periods of turbulence and transformation. There is one finding that is consistent, and that is that our resilience rests on our relationships. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. Listen to a slight change of plans on the I-Heart Radio app. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Will Ferrell's Big Money Players and IHeart Podcasts presents soccer moms. So I'm Leanne. Yeah.

This is my best friend, Janet. Hey. And we have been joined at the Hips since high school. Absolutely. Now a redacted amount of years later, we're still joined at the hip. Just a little bit bigger hips, wider. This is a podcast. We're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey.

With all the snacks and drink. Sidebar. Why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer? I would have had a bogo. Well, then you got it. Do you want a white collar something here? Just take it. Oh, what are y'all doing?

Microphones? Are you making a rap album? Oh, I would. Come on. How did you imagine? I would buy it. Cuts through the defense like a hot knife through sponge cake. That sounds delicious.

Oh, you're lucky. I'm not a drug addict. You're lucky I'm not an alcoholic. You are. I'm not a killer. I love this team, and I'm really trying to be a figure in their lives that they can rely on. Oh. Oh, oh.

Listen to soccer moms on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Even after Juan Carlos abdicated from the throne, he still managed to find trouble. The Supreme Court in Spain was forced to open a preliminary investigation about the former king's involvement in the building of a high-speed rail in Saudi Arabia, after a Swiss newspaper, reported that when Juan Carlos was king, he had received $100 million in kickbacks from the Saudi king. While this was coming to light, the former Spanish king literally disappeared from the country. For three weeks, no one in the world knew who he was. The media speculated that he was in the Dominican Republic or maybe Portugal. The only clue was an enigmatic goodbye letter that he wrote to his son, the current king Felipe

the 6th. Three weeks later, after the former King of Spain was missing for three weeks, the palace confirmed his whereabouts. He was in the United Arab Emirates, where he remains today under self-imposed exile. Noble Blood is a production of IHeart Radio and Grimmin Mild from Aaron Manky. The show is written and hosted by Dana Schwartz. Executive producers include Aaron Manky, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. The show is produced by Rima Ilkaiali and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social media at Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn more about the show over at Noble Blood Tales.com.

For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become, when life makes other plans.

I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong stance. And then there's your body having its own program. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.