In the winter of 1807, as Napoleon’s army swept through Portugal, the royal court fled across the Atlantic to Brazil. For the Portuguese monarchy, it was a humiliating retreat. But for one ambitious princess, it was the opportunity of a lifetime. Described as a monster by critics, mocked for her appearance, and feared for her relentless ambition, Carlota Joaquina became one of the most notorious and reviled queens in European history.
Her life was marked by scandal, political scheming, and a bitter marriage that turned into open warfare. Born in Spain on April 25, 1775, Carlota Joaquina was the eldest surviving daughter of the future King Charles IV of Spain. Her early years were shaped by family tragedy. Though her mother gave birth to several healthy daughters, every son born after Carlota died in infancy, raising fears about the succession and placing her in the royal line of inheritance for much of her childhood.
That changed only in 1784, when a healthy son named Ferdinand was born. By then, Carlota’s awareness of her position in the succession had already awakened a hunger for power that would define her later life. Her education was rigorous, focused on history, geography, languages, and the traditional accomplishments expected of royal women, yet it did little to tame her combative and spirited personality. Her family life was unstable.
Her mother, a dominant figure at court, was rumored to be having an affair with the head of the Spanish government. This made the queen a social outcast, and some of Carlota’s later notoriety was partly shaped by her being judged by the same standards as her mother. Spain, meanwhile, had declined as a great power since the mid-seventeenth century but still clung to a vast colonial empire in the Americas. Carlota remained a valuable royal bride even after Ferdinand’s birth, and in 1785, at the shockingly young age of ten, she was married to Dom João, the second in line to the Portuguese throne.
He was eighteen. Negotiations for the match had been underway since the late 1770s. The wedding by proxy took place in May 1785, but the marriage was not consummated until 1790, when Carlota was considered old enough to bear children. Days after the proxy ceremony, the ten-year-old princess was sent to Lisbon with her Spanish entourage, leaving her family behind years before the marriage truly began.
Her position changed quickly. In September 1788, her brother-in-law, the heir to the Portuguese throne, died of smallpox, making her husband the new heir. Queen Maria I, already suffering from depression, was declared insane in 1792, and João was expected to rule as regent. This made Carlota something like an unofficial queen consort from an early age, and the couple held the titles of Prince and Princess of Brazil.
As Carlota grew more prominent at the Portuguese court in the 1790s and early 1800s, she became a target of mockery and hatred. She had been raised in the more lavish Spanish court and struggled to adapt to the deeply religious and austere atmosphere of Portugal. Her outspoken nature, political involvement, and behavior considered unconventional for royal women fueled malicious gossip, compounded by widespread anti-Spanish sentiment. Her appearance drew the harshest attacks.
One French observer, the Duchess of Abrantès, wrote a scathing description of Carlota, calling attention to what she described as her ugliness, unclean and disheveled hair, thin purple lips adorned with a thick mustache, and uneven teeth. The duchess wrote that she could not convince herself that the princess was a woman, despite knowing facts that proved otherwise. Her husband echoed similar feelings after arriving at the Portuguese court, reportedly exclaiming in horror at how ugly the princess and those around her were. Other contemporary accounts repeatedly described Carlota as short, with a face marked by smallpox scars, a prominent hooked nose, and the distinctive protruding Bourbon jaw.
Some noted her slightly stooped posture. One particularly cruel later account claimed she had the most savage and strange head that could walk the earth. Her personal misery extended behind closed doors. She and João had their first child in 1793, a daughter named Maria Teresa, followed by eight more children over thirteen years.
Only one, Francisco Antônio, died young. Despite the growing tensions in her marriage, Carlota was known for her attention to her children’s health and care. But even her role as a mother was surrounded by scandal, with persistent court rumors claiming João was not the father of all her children, with suspicions especially focused on her son Miguel. Those claims were never proven.
The marriage itself suffered from João’s lack of affection and increasingly disturbed behavior. In an era when Enlightenment ideas and the French Revolution alarmed European rulers, he developed a obsessive fear that revolution would reach Portugal. Court rumors even claimed he wandered the palace corridors at night in a state of near delirium. By the early nineteenth century, the royal marriage had become open political warfare.
In 1805, at age thirty, Carlota conspired to seize power from her husband, plotting to arrest him and declare him unfit to rule, just as had happened with his mother. The plot was exposed, and her co-conspirators were arrested. Carlota escaped imprisonment only because João refused to make the scandal public. Instead, he exiled her to the palaces of Queluz and Ramalhão while withdrawing to Mafra, effectively ending their marriage.
It was during this exile that she gained her infamous nickname, the “She-Wolf. ”
Carlota’s life in Portugal from 1806 onward was shaped by broader events in western Europe. The French Revolution had erupted in 1789, and by 1792 it had escalated into a general European war that drew in nearly every power. Portugal had long tried to avoid such conflicts, bound by a fragile alliance with England dating back to the 1660s, when Catherine of Braganza married King Charles II.
The country joined the First Coalition against the French in 1793 but played no major role in the revolutionary wars that followed. What changed everything was the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1807, after conquering Germany and Poland, Napoleon turned west and invaded Portugal. The royal court and government fled across the Atlantic to establish a government in exile in Brazil, Portugal’s vast South American colony.
During the terrible winter crossing, Carlota was forced to shave her head because of a lice infestation on board the ship. The exiled court finally arrived in Rio de Janeiro. Over the next thirteen years in Brazil, Carlota’s ambitions became fully visible. With her mother-in-law still nominal ruler of Portugal and its colonial empire, events elsewhere in South America offered Carlota a chance to expand her influence.
Wars of independence were breaking out across Spain’s colonies after France took control of Spain itself. A faction in the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata even proposed making Carlota regent, a movement known as “Carlotism. ” It made sense because she was the daughter of King Charles IV of Spain. The scheme gained support from British Admiral Sir Sidney Smith, but faced opposition from her husband, the exiled Portuguese government, Spanish officials, and many local elites.
Carlota undermined her own chances by insisting on exercising the powers of an absolute monarch. While many of her supporters imagined her as a constitutional figurehead, the movement gradually collapsed, and the provinces of the Río de la Plata eventually became the Republic of Argentina. Her time in Brazil was controversial in other ways as well. She reportedly scorned the local people, drank heavily, was said to have used marijuana tea, and was the subject of persistent rumors about an affair with a prominent Brazilian businessman.
In the midst of this scandal, Carlota finally got what she had long awaited. Queen Maria I died on March 20, 1816, at age 81. At age forty, Carlota finally achieved the title she had wanted for decades, becoming Queen of Portugal. But her major political battles were still ahead.
By the time the couple became king and queen, Portugal had long been liberated. Portuguese and Spanish forces, with significant British help, had driven the French from the Iberian Peninsula in 1813 and 1814, following the collapse of Napoleon’s empire after his disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812. Yet the Portuguese royal court did not immediately return to Lisbon, even after Napoleon’s final fall in 1815. The delay reflected deep uncertainty about what kind of kingdom would be reestablished after the Napoleonic Wars.
That uncertainty came to a head with the Liberal Revolution of 1820, when a military uprising demanded a constitutional monarchy and forced the royal family to return to Portugal. On April 26, 1821, they left Brazil. According to the Viscount of Porto Seguro, the royal family’s emotions upon leaving Brazil were visible in everyone’s tears except the queen’s. Carlota, who had never enjoyed life in Brazil, was said to be delighted to leave.
One famous story claims that before boarding the ship, she dusted off her shoes, declaring, “I will not take even the dust of this land with me. ”
After returning to Portugal, João accepted the country’s first constitution in 1822. It sought to end absolute rule, but it had little success and was quickly abandoned in 1823. At the same time, Brazil separated to become an independent empire under Carlota’s son Pedro in 1822, costing Portugal a colony that had been central to its wealth throughout the eighteenth century.
The Liberal Revolution signaled the complex political situation Carlota, her husband, and the monarchy returned to after the Napoleonic Wars. A power struggle developed as Carlota sided with her younger son Miguel in an attempt to take power from her husband. João briefly became a virtual prisoner, but British intervention in 1824 led to Miguel’s exile and the restoration of João and his supporters’ control over the government. João ruled until his death in March 1826, at age 58.
It was a miracle that Carlota’s marriage had lasted until one partner died, given their hostility. She refused to visit him during his final illness. João’s death plunged Portugal into a complex succession crisis. Miguel, the expected heir, was still in exile.
His older brother Pedro was ruling the newly independent Empire of Brazil. Pedro briefly claimed the Portuguese throne before abdicating in favor of his young daughter, who became Queen Maria II in May 1826. Miguel later returned in 1828 to reclaim the crown, with a plan to avoid civil war by marrying his niece, Queen Maria. That never happened.
By the time of this rapid succession of rulers between 1826 and 1828, Carlota had been pushed out of Portuguese politics. Despite Miguel’s earlier alliance with his mother, he did not summon her to court after becoming king in 1828. Instead, she spent her final years in bitterness, away from court life, living in the countryside outside Lisbon at the Queluz Palace. She died on January 7, 1830, at the age of 54.
By then, a new civil war had broken out and ended four years later with Miguel’s deposition. He lived the remaining 32 years of his life in exile, while Queen Maria II was restored to the throne in 1834. Carlota was initially buried in Sintra before her remains were moved in 1854 to be interred beside her husband in the royal pantheon of the Braganza dynasty in Lisbon. Although she always aspired to greater power, Carlota spent her adult life at the heart of one of the world’s largest monarchies, as queen or princess regent of Portugal and its vast empire stretching across Brazil, Africa, and Asia.
To her enemies, she was an ugly, scheming, power-hungry foreign queen. To others, she was an intelligent, determined woman who refused to accept the limits imposed on royal women of her era. The truth may lie somewhere in between.
Either way, she remains one of the most controversial and fascinating queens in Iberian history.