Manifesto of Sandhurst

It was made public on December 1, 1874, three days after the prince had turned seventeen, and was carefully drafted by Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, the leader of Alfonsism within Spain.

The movement did not find great opposition in the country and Cánovas quickly assumed the Ministry-Regency while waiting for the king, which meant the birth of the Bourbon Restoration.

Formally it was a letter sent from the British Royal Military Academy of Sandhurst, where Prince Alfonso had entered at the beginning of October 1874 on the initiative of Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, the maximum leader of the Alfonsism cause since August 1873, in order to enhance his constitutional image,[5][6][7] in response to the numerous congratulations he had received from Spain on the occasion of his 17th birthday and especially to a document, drafted by the Marquis of Molins and signed by the high nobility, in which, after congratulating him "when V. A. reaches the threshold of manhood", "directing his studies to the military sciences in which one is taught to obey in order to know how to command", and after alluding to England, model of constitutional monarchies, which "fosters with filial care the almost religious love between kings and subjects", they told him as follows:[8][The undersigned], firm in their religious beliefs, loyal to their legitimate kings, fond of the representative institutions of their country... ask God, by whom kings reign and by whom legislators justly agree, that V. A. may find the reward of his noble conduct and that he may be, in all concepts, a prince worthy of the name he bears, of the century in which he lives and of the country in which he was born.The letter-manifesto had been written by Cánovas, although it passed through several hands, including the former Queen Isabel II, who, according to Cánovas, discussed it "at length".

[4][9][10] According to Manuel Suárez Cortina, the moment chosen by Cánovas to publish the Manifesto was not only due to the 17th birthday of Prince Alfonso but also to the fact that the candidacy to the throne of the Duke of Montpensier, married to the younger sister of Isabel II, was reappearing.

Montero points out four: "to fill with dynastic legitimacy a political and juridical vacuum that in fact had been widening during the sexennium" ("Orphaned the nation now of all public law and indefinitely deprived of its liberties", it is said in the Manifesto); "to conciliate, to pacify, to look for ways of compromise, to accommodate the maximum number of positions" (".... before long, all those of good faith will be with me, regardless of their political background, understanding that they cannot fear exclusions either from a new and dispassionate monarch or from a regime that today imposes itself precisely because it represents union and peace"); "a national sovereignty shared between the king and the Cortes" ("It is not necessary to expect me to decide anything flatly and arbitrarily; without the Cortes, the Spanish princes did not solve the arduous business of the ancient times of the Monarchy"); and "the announced "tolerant" solution to the religious question" ("Whatever my own fate may be, I will not cease to be a good Spaniard, nor, like all my ancestors, a good Catholic, nor, as a man of the century, a true liberal").

What Prince Alfonso really thought is recorded in the following letter which he sent to his mother on November 30, 1874, the day before the Manifesto was made public (and which Cánovas leaked to the press):[17][18]I believe that in Spain what I will have to do will be to gather all the intellectual forces of the country and unite with them to kill the word 'party' and place in its place that of 'regeneration of the Fatherland' and, without ceasing, to try to raise our agriculture, our industry, our commerce..., to raise it to the level of the other European countries, to restore its finances, that is to say that there be economy and to protect the laws in the future, forgetting the past in order to obtain order.

[19] Carlos Dardé comments: "It cannot be pretended that a teenager, in the circumstances through which he had gone through, no matter how clever he was and how much the exile in France, Switzerland, Austria and Great Britain had taught him, was capable of finding the formula to provide stability to the liberal regime in Spain".

[20] And he adds: "Alfonso XII supported and identified himself with the best of a project that belonged to a generation before his own —with its appeal to unity and harmony, of patriotism—, but he was disconcerted when he saw the other side of the coin —the administrative corruption on which it largely rested—.