How to lose friends and alienate people: The transformation of the image of Ferdinand VII

A quick search on Ferdinand VII will return his two enduring and most famous bynames: el Rey deseado (the desired king) and el Rey felon (the felon/criminal king). These diametrically opposed attributions might seem surprising at first, but they are simply the result of a transformation of Ferdinand VII’s image over time. The former byname was attributed to Ferdinand while he was still heir to the throne and briefly during his early reign (March-May1808), whereas the latter emerged during the last ten years of his reign, the so called ‘ominous decade’ (1823-33). How does a king go from being the desired one to ending as the felon, the criminal king?