Juan Carlos I who is Spain’s disgraced former king and his successor have also been counted among those who had attended the final funeral rites of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II on Monday, in a sign of public rapprochement.
Juan Carlos who had abdicated while still in power with his tenure mired in scandal in 2014 had also gone into self-imposed exile in the United Arab Emirates in 2020 against a background of numerous investigations into his fortune.
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But the former king and his estranged wife Queen Sofia and King Felipe VI and his wife Queen Letizia had sat side by side at Westminster Abbey for the queen’s state funeral which had been held today.
The father and son had been last seen together in public in January 2020 for the funeral of a sister of Juan Carlos, an aunt of the king and it has also been reported that the two couples had arrived separately at the abbey but were seated together in a section, close to the coffin, reserved for royal families.
Felipe had worn a military uniform while Juan Carlos dressed in a dark suit.
The former king was invited by the British government, prompting officials in Madrid to insist that Spain’s official representative was Felipe.
“The head of state is clearly King Felipe VI” while the former monarch “is in London in response to an invitation in a personal capacity”, Spain’s Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Albares told reporters.
Juan Carlos and the late queen were distant cousins — their shared great-great-grandmother was Queen Victoria — and Felipe called the monarch “Aunt Lilibet”.
Juan Carlos was for decades revered for his role in steering Spain to democracy following dictator Francisco Franco’s death in 1975.
