1/8 Real Spanish Mexico / Kingdom of New Spain (1519 - 1821) Copper

1814-1818, Mexico,  Ferdinand VII. Copper 1/8 Real.  Royalist Coinage of Durango!

Reference: KM-61. 

Mint Place: Durango 

Denomination: 1/8 Real (Octavo) 

Mint Period: 1814-1818 

Material: Copper 

Diameter: 23mm 

Weight: 7.54gm

Obverse: Royal crown above monogram of Ferdinand VII of Spain.

Reverse: Value (OCTAVO DE REAL) within wreath. Date (1814-1818, the actual date not visible) below, mint name barely visible (EN DURANGO) above.

Durango, officially named Estado Libre y Soberano de Durango (English: Free and Sovereign State of Durango) (Tepehuán: Korian) (Nahuatl: Tepēhuahcān), is one of the 32 states which make up the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico, situated in the northwest of the country.

Ferdinand VII (October 14, 1784 – September 29, 1833) was King of Spain from 1813 to 1833.

The eldest son of Charles IV, king of Spain, and of   his wife Maria Louisa of Parma, he was born in the vast palace of El   Escorial near Madrid.

When his father’s abdication was extorted by a   popular riot at Aranjuez in March 1808, he ascended the throne but   turned again to Napoleon, in the hope that the emperor would support   him. He was in his turn forced to make an abdication and imprisoned in   France for almost seven years at the Chateau of Valencia in the town of   Valencia.

In March 1814 the Allies returned him to Madrid. The   Spanish people, blaming the liberal, enlightened policies of the   Francophiles (afrancesados) for incurring the Napoleonic occupation and the Peninsular War, at first welcomed Fernando.   Ferdinand soon found that while Spain was fighting for independence in   his name and while in his name juntas had governed in Spanish America, a   new world had been born of foreign invasion and domestic revolution.   Spain was no longer an absolute monarchy under the liberal Constitution   of 1812. Ferdinand, in being restored to the throne, guaranteed the   liberals that he would govern on the basis of the existing constitution,   but, encouraged by conservatives backed by the Church hierarchy, he   rejected the constitution within weeks (May 4) and arrested the liberal   leaders (May 10), justifying his actions as rejecting a constitution   made by the Cortes in his absence and without his consent. Thus he had   come back to assert the Bourbon doctrine that the sovereign authority   resided in his person only.

After he succeeded to the throne in 1788 his one   serious occupation was hunting. Affairs were left to be directed by his   wife and her lover Manuel de Godoy. Although Godoy essentially took over   his wife and his office, the king was favourable towards him for all   his life. When terrified by the French Revolution he turned to the   Inquisition to help him against the party which would have carried the   reforming policy of Charles III much further. But he never took more   than a passive part in the direction of his own government. He simply   obeyed the impulse given him by the queen and Godoy. In 1803, after   smallpox had affected his daughter Maria Luisa, the king commissioned   his doctor Francisco Javier de Balmis to bring the vaccine to the   Spanish colonies on state expenses.

He had a profound belief in his divine right and the   sanctity of his person. He thought it very important to seem a very   powerful monarch, although his kingdom was treated as a mere dependency   by France and his throne was dominated by the queen and her lover. Spain   allied with France and supported the Continental Blockade, but withdrew   after the Battle of Trafalgar. When Napoleon won from Prussia in 1807,   Godoy returned to the French side, but France no longer considered Spain   a worthy ally. But even the alliance with France, as it was, made   Godoy’s rule unpopular and fueled the partido fernandista, the   supporters of Ferdinand, who favored a close relationship with Great   Britain.