She was the 21st Duchess of Medina Sidonia, Spain's most ancient dukedom whose origins go back to 1297. She was a princess, a marquess and a three-fold Spanish grandee. But from childhood, Luisa Isabel Alvarez de Toledo y Maura kicked against the conventions of her lineage.
The dictator Francisco Franco jailed her for championing workers, who nicknamed her the "Red Duchess". She challenged Spain's official history, arguing that Columbus didn't discover America. She was an atheist, a republican and reckoned her 13th-century ancestor Guzman el Bueno, ennobled for fighting the Moors, was a north African whose grandmother was black.
But the Red Duchess – a "title" she never accepted – threw down her most defiant challenge in her final hours. As she lay dying in her palace in Sanlucar de Barrameda, aged 71, Luisa Isabel married in articulo mortis her secretary and companion, Liliana Maria Dahlmann, and left her everything. Her discreet sexual preferences were known to her family, but the secret lesbian marriage has shaken Spain's proud and ancient aristocracy and is likely to unleash a legal battle over a sumptuous inheritance.
The duchess's German-born widow, 52, inherits a patrimony accumulated over seven centuries, a collection of six million letters and documents said to comprise Europe's biggest private archive, an undisclosed quantity of art and property, and the marital home, the 16th-century ducal palace.
Luisa Isabel's three children from her first marriage are furious and threaten court action to claim the inheritance they believe is theirs. "She was a singular person; she had many qualities, but not the maternal instinct," said her daughter, Maria Pilar Gonzalez de Gregorio, 51, Duchess of Fernandina. Mother and daughter at least greeted each other. But the younger son, Gabriel, 50, was cast out and last saw his mother in 1986. While Liliana, who lived with the duchess for 25 years, wept by her dying wife, Pilar and Gabriel were told their mother wouldn't see them.
"She wouldn't even receive us on her deathbed," said Gabriel after her death in March. "I was very surprised she maintained her bitterness to the point of not saying farewell." Only the eldest son, Leoncio Gonzalez de Gregorio, 53, had visited his mother in her final hours. But the duke has only one vote on the ruling committee of the Medina Sidonia Foundation his mother set up in 1990, presided over by his mother's lesbian partner.
Liliana Dahlmann first came to Sanlucar in 1983, as a guest at Leoncio's wedding, and stayed on. "Everything developed naturally without premeditation," she told the Spanish daily El Pais. "I immediately felt part of her life and her work." Luisa Isabel presided over the foundation, and appointed her friend secretary.
"The duchess built a perfect juridical structure to protect this heritage," said Jesus Barba, the duchess's lawyer. "Obviously, her children would rather she had left everything to them, but this way it's better for the public interest." The contents of the will are to be revealed shortly, but Gabriel, who inherits no title, has few expectations. "She has left us with only debts, because she put everything of value into her foundation," he said.
Gabriel is said to date the parental chill from the day his mother fled to France in 1969 to avoid political persecution. The three children remained in Madrid with their mother's grandmother, Julia Herrera.
In 1967, the Red Duchess had led a farmworkers' protest in Palomares, near Almeria, demanding compensation for contamination on their land. Four American nuclear bombs had fallen in the area in a plane crash a year earlier. The duchess was jailed in March 1969, and given amnesty in November. But her book Strike, which denounced abuses by landowners of Andalusian labourers, prompted court action and a renewed jail threat. She did not return to Spain until 1976, after Franco's death.
She then settled in the renaissance pile of the ducal palace. Parts of the estate had been taken over, including a church that is now a concert hall; other parts she gave to workers on the land. She cared only about the family library, whose stacks and bundles dating from 1228 she began investigating and cataloguing. It became her life's work.
As a girl, her grandfather had encouraged her interest in history. Otherwise she had what she called a useless convent schooling. Born in Estoril, Portugal, in 1936 – her parents went into exile at the start of the Spanish Civil War – she was a debutante with Doña Pilar de Borbón, sister of Juan Carlos.
Flaunting her republicanism, Luisa Isabel teased Spain's future king as "Citizen Borbón".
Her mother died when she was 10, and she lived with her grandmother – Julia Herrera, who later cared for the duchess's own children. At 18 she married Jose Leoncio Gonzalez de Gregorio y Marti. Her father died that year, 1955, and she inherited the title of duchess. Her husband was apparently rigid and conservative, and five years and three children later, the marriage ended. Armed with her archive, Luisa Isabel campaigned to dismantle official Spanish history. She said documents proved that voyagers from Spain and north Africa reached America long before Columbus landed in 1492.
She also claimed documentary proof that the grandmother of her illegitimate ancestor, Alonso Perez de Guzman, a hero ennobled for defending the port of Tarifa against Moorish attack in 1282, was black. She wrote a biography of a later Perez de Guzman, commander of the ill-fated Spanish Armada, based on his correspondence with Philip II.
"She was a whirlwind, an indefatigable woman," her widow recalled. "Imagine what it means to organise all this archive. She wanted to get help for such a prodigious task, but in the end she did it alone." But she never forgot who she was. According to Jose Rodriguez, a Sanlucar priest: "This lady was a duchess, even if she wore jeans and smoked [rough, black] Celtas cigarettes."
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