We’ll never know whether, had Armada come out of the Cortes triumphant, the King would have rejected his triumph by refusing to sanction a unity government extracted by means of blackmail, but we know that Armada’s failure shrank the perimeter of the words of the royal message until all the doors of the Zarzuela were closed to the golpistas and the monarch was publicly set with no turning back against Tejero’s coup, against Milans’ coup, against Armada’s coup, against all the coups of the coup. I repeat that this does not mean that at twenty-five past one in the morning the coup had failed; Milans and Armada’s soft coup had failed, but not Tejero’s hard coup: the lieutenant colonel was still occupying the Cortes, Milans was still occupying Valencia and part of the Army was still lying in wait, indifferent to the King’s message or irritated or disconcerted by it, awaiting the slightest troop movements to dispel their doubts, gathering the fury accumulated in their Francoist hearts to hand the victory to the supporters of the coup. And it was at that moment when the excuse appeared that so many had spent the evening waiting for, the tiny movement that could predict a rebel avalanche: at thirty-five minutes past one in the morning, ten minutes after the defeat of the former royal secretary had been consummated, a column sent by a major of the Brunete Armoured Division and made up of fourteen light vehicles and more than a hundred soldiers tried to break the balance of the coup by joining the several hundred Civil Guards who were holding the Cortes hostage. And in this way the coup began to enter its final phase.
* The existence of the list is not certain. It was made known ten years after the coup by the journalists Joaquín Prieto and José Luis Barbería. Prieto and Barbería’s source was Carmen Echave, a UCD member who worked on the staff of one of the congressional vice-presidents and who, as a physician, enjoyed freedom of movement that night to attend to the deputies; as a result, Echave apparently heard one of Tejero’s officers reciting Armada’s list. Whether it existed or not, whether or not Armada read it to Tejero, the list is substantially plausible: there were political leaders and journalists close to Armada, such as Manuel Fraga and Luis María Anson, military officers with certain democratic credentials, such as the generals Manuel Saavedra Palmeiro and José Antonio Sáenz de Santamaría, business leaders who had publicly called for a government of national unity, such as Carlos Ferrer Salat, together with many politicians of the right, the centre and the left who had also done so or with whom Armada had kept in contact over the months before the coup or those Armada considered likely, with or without reason, to accept a solution like the one he embodied, or simply those it would have suited him to have accept. Although there are those who claim to have had news of Armada’s possible plans for government in advance of 23 February, before the coup the majority of the people who figured on the list were completely unaware of it. The list is the following: Prime Minister: Alfonso Armada. Deputy Prime Minister for Political Affairs: Felipe González (Secretary General of the PSOE). Deputy Prime Minister for Economic Affairs: José María López de Letona (former governor of the Bank of Spain). Minister of Foreign Affairs: José María de Areilza (Coalición Democrática deputy). Minister of Defence: Manuel Fraga (leader of Alianza Popular and Coalición Democrática deputy). Minister of Justice: Gregorio Peces Barba (PSOE deputy). Minister of the Treasury: Pío Cabanillas (UCD deputy). Minister of the Interior: General Manuel Saavedra Palmeiro. Minister of Public Works: José Luis Alvarez (Minister of Transport and Communications and UCD deputy). Minister of Education and Science: Miguel Herrero de Miñón (UCD deputy and spokesman of their parliamentary group). Minister of Employment: Jordi Solé Tura (PCE deputy). Minister of Industry: Agustín Rodríguez Sahagún (Minister of Defence and UCD deputy). Minister of Commerce: Carlos Ferrer Salat (president of CEOE, the Confederation of Spanish Business Organizations). Minister of the Economy: Ramón Tamames (PCE deputy). Minister of Transport and Communications: Javier Solana (PSOE deputy). Minister of Autonomías and Regions: General José Antonio Sáenz de Santamaría. Minister of Health: Enrique Múgia Herzog (PSOE deputy). Minister of Information: Luis María Anson (director of EFE news agency).