Liberal army oligarchs led by Marshal Francisco…

Liberal army oligarchs led by Marshal Francisco Serrano and Progressive conspirators behind Juna Prim plot revolution in Spain.

Isabella II has spent the past twenty-five years attempting to impose despotic rule on an increasingly liberal-minded nation.

During Spain’s Moderate Era, which began with Isabella’s majority in 1843, several military men have become prominent in party leadership positions and the government has adopted three more constitutions.

Socialist ideas have begun to circulate and peasant anarchism has begun to attract adherents.

O'Donnell's death on November 6, 1867, in Biarritz had deprived Isabella of one of her strongest allies.

Ramón María Narváez, another of Isabella's staunchest supporters, dies on April 23.

The agreements made by Liberals and republican exiles abroad at Ostend in 1866 and Brussels in 1867 have laid the framework for a major uprising, this time not merely to replace the Prime Minister with a Liberal, but to overthrow Isabella herself, whom Spanish liberals and republicans have begun to see as the source of Spain's inefficacy.

Her continual vacillation between liberal and conservative quarters has, by 1868, outraged the moderates, the progressives and the members of the Unión Liberal, and enabled a front that crosses party lines.

Leopoldo O'Donnell's death in 1867 had caused the Unión Liberal to unravel; many of its supporters, who had crossed party lines to create the party initially, join he growing movement to overthrow Isabella in favor of a more effective regime.