More Than Just a Statue: The Legacy of California's First King

The beatification of the Emperor Charles I of Austria-Hungary last October by Pope John Paul II might remind Californians that we too once had monarchs — three of them in fact: Charles III, Charles IV, and Ferdinand VII: all of them kings of Spain. The pictured statue of the first of these in the old plaza downtown reminds us that he ordered both the founding of California in 1769 and the foundation of Los Angeles in 1781. The adjoining church of Our Lady of the Angels stands in itself as a memorial to his grandson Ferdinand, who paid for its construction — a fact consciously or otherwise commemorated by the royal Spanish flag in that building's sanctuary.

The statue of Charles (or Carlos) III in the plaza was cast by Federico Coullaut-Valera in 1976 and dedicated by the king and queen of Spain (Juan Carlos I and Sofia) in 1987, during a royal visit to our city. The Spanish government originally donated the 2-1/2 ton work of Coullaut-Valera to L.A. in commemoration of the U.S. Bicentennial. It was set up in 1977 in MacArthur Park, in token of being near to the route taken by Spanish explorer Portola on his visit to Monterey in 1769. It was moved to its present spot for the royal pair's dedication.

The statue is modeled on Carlos III's official portrait, painted in 1761 by Anton Raphael Mengs (1728-1779). The king is shown as a 45-year-old commander-in-chief and holds a marshal's baton; underlining his military position, he wears a suit of armor. In addition, Carlos wears a sash and, around his neck, the breast-badge of the Order of the Golden Fleece. It is a truly impressive statue.

But it is not the only one in California — although it is perhaps the least troubled. Santa Barbara, with its Old Spanish Days Fiesta, its legally mandated colonial architecture, its mission, and its reconstructed royal presidio, has long been in the forefront of preservation of Spanish heritage in California. In return, in 1954 the Spanish government presented the city with the Order of Carlos III, a knightly order presented to cities as well as individuals — although never before to a municipality outside Spain. While the medal itself is on display in the mayor's office in city hall (and worn by him at his annual formal reception kicking off Spanish Days), all city flags have blue and white streamers floating from the pole, in token of the order. Due to King Carlos III's devotion to the Immaculate Conception, those colors were made the symbol of the order bearing his name.

In further testimony to Santa Barbara's hispanophilia, in 1985 the current Spanish king donated yet another statue of Carlos III to this city. It was placed at Storke Placita, the passage connecting De La Guerra Plaza to State Street. For the next ten years, thanks to the renewal of the anti-Spanish black legend among leftists and would-be indigenists, the statue was urinated on, daubed with excrement, and had various hats, signs, articles of clothing, condoms, and other items draped on it. After a decade of this treatment, the king was removed and replaced with a sundial. He was at last placed by the reconstructed presidio, the Spanish-era fortress, on the corner of East Cañon Perdido and Anacapa.

Santa Barbara's gratitude to its founder was echoed by San Francisco. Juan Carlos I presented San Francisco with yet another statue of Carlos III in 1976. It was set up in Justin Herrman Plaza, but in 1997 moved to the median at Dolores and 16th Streets, in front of Mission San Francisco de Asis, founded at Carlos III's expense. Immediately, there were protests. Although some local groups (including the mission itself and organizations of Spanish colonial descendants) were in favor of the plan, the Mission Housing Development Corporation and others whined that "the statues are 'inappropriate symbols' of Spain's colonization of indigenous people in California."

Despite all of this, the statue of the king is now installed. It is perhaps particularly fitting that it is located here; inside the mission is an 18th century painting of King Carlos and Pope Pius VI kneeling side-by-side in prayer.

Nor is this the only trace of the king along El Camino Real, "the King's Highway" (Carlos III himself being the king in question). Another contemporary portrait of him is prominently displayed at Carmel Mission, home and burial place of Blessed Junípero Serra and headquarters of the missions as a whole. At Mission San Gabriel, the old church boasts a Blessed Sacrament lamp, topped by a crown, and a hammered copper baptismal font, both gifts to the mission from the king. The font has seen well over 25,000 baptisms. Santa Clara Mission, now swallowed up by the Jesuit Santa Clara University, received a set of bells from Carlos. The king asked that these bells be rung every evening at 8:30 p.m. in memory of the dead. Unfortunately, only one of these bells survived the fire of 1926 that destroyed the mission, although the custom was continued after its reconstruction. Not to be outdone by his ancestor, then-King Alfonso XIII sent a new set to replace the bells melted by the flames. (Alfonso was as generous a gift-giver to California; he assisted in reconstructing Carmel Mission and donated the tapestries bearing the arms of the Spanish provinces that hang in the San Gabriel city auditorium.)

But, of course, the missions themselves were actually gifts of King Carlos, as was Father Serra; it was the king who paid all of the Church's expenses in the evangelization of California. This was because of the patronato, a deal struck between the king of Spain and the pope in 1508. In return for conceding to the king the right to erect every collegiate or prelatial church in the New World, to present candidates for the episcopate to the pope, and for lesser church offices to the bishops so chosen, the pope had the assurance that the king would provide for all the expenses of the Church in the newly discovered regions. As patron of the Church in Spanish America, Carlos III was obligated to provide missionaries for the frontier and clergy for the settled regions.

All of this he did gladly. For one thing, Carlos III was a very devout man; he ordered all of his officials to take an oath to defend to the death the (then undefined) doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. He was zealous in fulfilling his role as patron and brought over many new clerics from Spain and funded the training of locals.

But there was another side to his character. Influenced by the Enlightenment, King Carlos appointed Freemasons like Floridablanca to high cabinet positions and centralized administration at home and in the empire, to the detriment of traditional local liberties. Determined to keep the Church from becoming too politically independent, Carlos joined the kings of Portugal, France, and Naples and the Holy Roman emperor in suppressing the Jesuits in his realms. Seizing their extensive properties (including the mission-state of Paraguay), he forcibly expelled the Society of Jesus from his territories. This led to unrest in various parts of his American realm, because the Jesuits were popular, and contributed to a weakening of royal authority that would contribute to the bloody wars of independence that would sweep Latin America in the early 19th century.

But it led to another problem — a lack of clerical manpower; even today Mexico has parishes that have had no resident pastors since the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767. Nowhere was this problem more acute than in Baja California, where the chain of missions was exclusively Jesuit-staffed. To try to make up for the lack, King Carlos placed the Baja California missions in the hands of the Franciscans, who dispatched one Junípero Serra to take them over. But when, in 1768, reports reached the king that Russian fur-traders from Alaska were trapping off the shores of Alta California, he ordered Serra and the governor of California, Felipe de Neve, to colonize and evangelize Alta California. Thus began the epic story of the exploration of California, the founding of the missions, and the whole stage of our state's early settlement. From that time on until his death, the king would both order and/or approve the establishment of every mission, presidio, pueblo, and ranch in California.

Father Serra was acutely aware of what he owed Carlos, both in terms of loyalty and respect. In his letters Serra frequently mentioned him as "His Majesty, whom God keep." Father Serra never ventured an opinion on the Jesuit matter, referring to it as "the recent banishment ordered by the Catholic Monarch, for reasons locked up within his royal breast, of the Jesuit Fathers both from this province as well as from all other dominions of the same King, our lord." What his actual feelings were on the matter we will never know, this side of the grave.

Apart from skirmishes against hostile Indians, Serra's king only went to war once during the padre's time in California: that was in 1779, when Carlos III joined his cousin, Louis XVI of France, in fighting the British — this conflict was the American Revolution. Spanish troops fought their enemy in Florida and the Illinois Country, as well as on the high seas and in the West Indies. Father Serra's announcement of hostilities to his priests puts a very different spin on the conflict to that with which we are familiar. He informed them that the king ordered "public prayers be offered up for the prosperity and success of our Catholic armed forces." Serra asked "each and every one of Your Reverences" that they "be most attentive in begging God to grant success to this public cause which is so favorable to our holy Catholic and Roman Church and is most pleasing in the sight of the same God Our Lord. Our Catholic Sovereign is at war with perfidious heretics. And when I have said that, I have said enough for all to join with His Majesty in the manner in which Heaven grants us to do so."

The same letter goes on to instruct the friars on the manner of public prayers, directing them to add to the Litany of the Saints the verse, "that Thou wouldst be pleased to restrain and bring to naught the efforts of heretics," and to include in their Masses the collect, secret, and postcommunion of the Mass Against the Heathen, exchanging the word "heretic" for "heathen." What the gentlemen of the Continental Congress, who had denounced George III's lifting of the penal laws against the Catholics of Quebec, would have made of their new ally's sentiments is anyone's guess.

The war was still raging when the king authorized Governor de Neve to found a new civil town in 1781. This was Los Angeles. The new pueblo's first settlers were a mixed bunch racially, but part or pure blacks predominated — this was why, in 1793, no one thought it especially noteworthy when a mulatto from Jalisco, Don Juan Francisco Reyes, was elected alcalde. Don Juan was L.A.'s first black mayor; the city would not see another until the advent of Tom Bradley 180 years later.

The king granted the new settlement ownership of the water in the Los Angeles River in perpetuity; this privilege was retained when the pueblo was incorporated as a city by the Americans 69 years later. In a sense, the most impressive monument to its founder may not be the statue in the plaza but the water that flows from our taps (for all that later folk, like Mulholland, would add to the supply).

The king's hand however may be seen elsewhere than in the plaza and our plumbing. The area set aside as the rancho real, the royal rancho, was today's Boyle Heights; Elysian Park is the last large piece of pueblo lands granted by the king at the town's founding in 1781. At that time, Carlos III provided the new town with a royal grant of four-square Spanish leagues (28 square miles or about 17,000 acres). Of this public land grant, the 575 acres of Elysian Park are all that remain, the rest having been auctioned off or given away.

Moreover, many other sections in the Los Angeles area owe their origins to Carlos III. The southernmost portion of the basin, the Rancho San Pedro, was the first Spanish land grant in California and was given in 1784 by the king to Juan José Dominguez. The grantee was a retired Spanish soldier who first came to California with the Portola expedition; he later returned with Father Junípero Serra. At its beginning, Rancho San Pedro boasted 75,000 acres, which included the entire Los Angeles harbor. It has passed through successive generations, remaining today in the hands of Dominguez descendants who run the Watson Land Company and the Carson Estates Company on original Rancho land. When the last actual bearers of the name died, they left their adobe ranch house to the Claretian missionaries, who own it today; in recent years, the Dominguez descendants have hosted Spain's royal couple, thus paying in some measure their ancestor's debt.

But the biggest contribution Carlos III made to Los Angeles and California, apart from their existence, was the establishment of the Catholic faith here. So deep were the roots he set down that they survived the secularization of the missions by the Mexican government in the 1830s. In fact, on January 17, 1837, the ayuntamiento, or city council, declared "the Roman Catholic apostolic religion shall prevail throughout this jurisdiction." If it has not been so since, it is not because of Carlos III.

Carlos III, 1759-1788

Federico Coullaut-Valera, 1976

Thanks for posting this history. It was fascinating. I LOVE that California, at every Mission, was Holy Land, dedicated to the Lord. What a great heritage. And we need it SO BADLY.

No, the statue in the picture is the one mentioned first in the article, the one in Los Angeles. The current location is only indirectly explained in the article:

The pictured statue of the first of these in the old plaza downtown reminds us that he ordered both the founding of California in 1769 and the foundation of Los Angeles in 1781. The adjoining church of Our Lady of the Angels stands in itself as a memorial to his grandson Ferdinand

I could not find pictures of the Santa Barbara and San Francisco statues, and I have not seen the Los Angeles statue other than in this picture.

I am not sure, just why would people attack the statues? The article referred to the Black Spanish legend but I have never heard of this.

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