. When the Federal Republic was proclaimed
on the abdication of King Amadeus, the Carlists had overrun Spain to
such an extent that they held all the interior of Navarre, the three
Basque provinces, and a great part of Catalonia, Lower Aragon, and
Valencia, and had made raids into the provinces of Old Castile and
Estremadura. Don Carlos re-entered Spain on the 15th of July 1873, just
before the Carlists took Estella, in Navarre, which became, with Tolosa
and Durango in the Basque provinces, his favourite residence. He
displayed very lax morals and an apathy which displeased his staff and
partisans. Don Carlos was present at some fights around Estella, and was
in the neighbourhood of Bilbao during its famous siege of three months
in 1874 until its relief by Marshals Serrano and Concha on the 2nd of
May. He was also present at the battle near Estella on the 27th of June
1874, in which Marshal Concha was killed and the liberals were repulsed
with loss. Twice he lost golden opportunities of making a rush for the
capital--in 1873, during the Federal Republic, and after Concha's death.
From the moment that his cousin Alphonso XII. was proclaimed king at
Sagunto, at Valencia, in Madrid, and at Logrono, by General Campos,
Daban, Jovellar, Primo de Rivera, and Laserna, the star of the pretender
was on the wane. Only once, a few weeks after the Alphonsist
restoration, the army of Don Carlos checked the Liberal forces in
Navarre, and surprised and made prisoners half a brigade, with guns and
colours, at Lacar, almost under the eyes of the new king and his
headquarters. This was the last Carlist success. The tide of war set in
favour of Alphonso XII., whose armies swept the Carlist bands out of
central Spain and Catalonia in 1875, while Marshal Quesada, in the upper
Ebro valley, Navarre, and Ulava, prepared by a series of successful
operations the final advance of 180,000 men, headed by Quesada and the
king, which defeated the Carlists at Estella, Pena Plata, and Elgueta,
thus forcing Don Carlos with a few thousand faithful Carlists to retreat
and surrender to the French frontier authorities in March 1876.

The pretender went to Pau, and there, singularly enough, issued his
proclamations bidding temporary adieu to the nation and to his
volunteers from the same chateau where Queen Isabella, also a refugee,
had issued hers in 1868. From that date Don Carlos became an exile and a
wanderer, travelling much in the Old and New World, and