page_title: History of Spain (1700–1810)
section_title: Ferdinand VI (1746–59)
hierarchical_section_title: History of Spain (1700–1810) / Bourbon monarchs, 1700–1810 / Ferdinand VI (1746–59)
caption_attribution_description: Español: Retrato del aristócrata y politico español José de Carvajal y Lancaster (1698-1754), que llegó a ocupar altos cargos en el siglo XVIII y fue nombrado caballero de la Orden del Toisón de Oro.
context_page_description: Spain entered a new era with the death of Charles II, the last Spanish Hapsburg monarch, who died childless in 1700. The War of the Spanish Succession was fought between proponents of a Bourbon prince, Philip of Anjou, and an Austrian Hapsburg claimant. With the Bourbon victory, Philip V's rule began in 1715. Spain entered a period of reform and renewal, as well as continued decline. Ideas of the Age of Enlightenment entered Spain and Spanish America during the eighteenth century. The invasion of the Iberian Peninsula by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1807–1808 upended political arrangements of the Spanish Empire and the Portuguese Empire.
context_section_description: The end of the War of the Austrian Succession had awarded Ensenada a victory that cemented his support in Spain. However, two years before the war ended, King Philip, his strongest supporter, died, and was succeeded by his son Ferdinand VI. Ferdinand was Philip's son by his first marriage to Princess Maria Luisa of Savoy; he had suffered under the domineering influence of his stepmother as a child, and as king, he was constantly unsure of his own abilities. Elizabeth Farnese, the queen who had effectively controlled Philip V, left the court on her husband's death. Like his father, Ferdinand was extremely devoted to his wife, and she dictated much of his policy and political decisions; at the time of Ferdinand's coronation in 1746, it was said that "Queen Barbara has succeeded Queen Elizabeth." For her part, Queen Maria Barbara de Braganza, a member of the Portuguese royal family, advocated a policy of neutrality that coincided with the opinions of her leading courtiers, far different from the irredentist policy of Elizabeth.
  Ferdinand's rule reaped good fortune and the rewards of Philip V's reforms. He was a charitable ruler, relieving drought-stricken Andalusia from all taxes in 1755 and devoting large sums of money to the reconstruction of that part of the country. As king, he deferred many of his judgments to his leading ministers.
  Ensenada continued to be the leading member of court in the early part of Ferdinand's reign. After the successful alliance with France in the War of the Austrian Succession, he advised strengthening that bond as a means of protecting Spain's vulnerable security and checking British interests in her empire. He was opposed by an anglophile faction at court led by Jose de Carvajal y Láncaster, a mixed British-Spanish gentleman descended from the House of Lancaster. Carvajal believed that the key to Spain's defense and modernization was a closer alliance with Britain, whose naval power could complement Spain's empire and whose commercial strength could encourage economic development in Spain. Carvajal's most enduring accomplishment was the 1750 agreement with Portugal, which ended a long, low-level conflict in Banda Oriental (southern Uruguay) between the two countries.
  The agreement with Portugal, however, was to have important political consequences for Spain. The agreement traded seven Jesuit-established and -operated missions in southern Uruguay for Portuguese-founded and -controlled Uruguay. The plan (opposed by both the Jesuits and the British) led to resistance led by the Jesuits and their native Guaraní allies in the area. Both Spain and Portugal responded in force to the crisis, suppressing the Jesuits and Guaraní in the War of the Seven Reductions. The war broke a traditionally friendly relationship between the Spanish government and the Jesuits and launched a period of anti-Jesuit policies both in Spain and Portugal that would be continued by Charles III of Spain.
  A scandal at court, resulting from a conspiracy between Carvajal and the British ambassador, led to the embarrassment of Ensenada and his disrepute at court. When Carvajal died in 1754, Ferdinand and his wife dismissed Ensenada, fearing that the Marquis's French sympathies would lead to an alliance with Louis XV of France and war, without Carvajal's British sympathies to counterbalance him. An Irishman, Ricardo Wall, was appointed to replace Ensenada as chief minister. Wall, a staunch defender of Spain's neutral policy, successfully kept the country out of war for the remainder of Ferdinand's reign, in spite of the outbreak of the largest European war since the Thirty Years' War, the Seven Years' War.
  Although his wife had always feared that Ferdinand would die before her and leave her destitute – she had amassed huge personal wealth as a safeguard against this – it was his wife Maria Barbara who would precede him, dying in 1758. Deeply distraught by her death, Ferdinand became apathetic to his duties as king, and indeed, suicidal. He died a year later, in 1759.
caption: Jose de Carvajal y Láncaster, leader of the pro-British faction in King Ferdinand VI's court.
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