the Movimiento. Anticipating that Franco would soon offer to declare him Spain's next king rather than Don Juan, in June 1969, Juan Carlos warned his father that if he declined Franco's offer, Alfonso would be invited to accept the crown, nevertheless Don Juan refused to consent to being bypassed. Nonetheless on 12 July 1969 Franco offered to designate Juan Carlos king whenever he stepped down from power, and Juan Carlos accepted. Asked by Juan Carlos to be chief witness at the ceremony declaring him successor and Prince of Spain, Alfonso immediately agreed to do so and sent some of his supporters to visit his father in Paris to persuade him to express no opposition publicly. In return for his full support, Franco later appointed Alfonso Spain's ambassador to Sweden. But in June 1972, after he had taken up that post, Alfonso advised Franco's foreign minister Laureano López Rodó that he deemed his support conditional upon his cousin's continued loyalty to Francoist Spain. He further hinted that Spain's law of succession should be amended to facilitate Alfonso's replacing or succeeding Juan Carlos as Franco's heir or on the throne, if circumstances called for such a change. On 8 March 1972, in the Palace of El Pardo in Madrid, Alfonso married Doña María del Carmen Martínez-Bordiú y Franco, daughter of Don Cristóbal Martínez-Bordiú, 10th Marquis de Villaverde, and of his wife, Doña Carmen Franco y Polo (Franco's only daughter. Doña Carmen was granted a title in 1975 becoming the 1st Duchess de Franco after Franco's death). The witnesses of the marriage were Franco and Alfonso's mother. Alfonso and Carmen separated in 1979, received a civil divorce in 1982 and an ecclesiastical annulment in 1986. On 22 November 1972, General Franco awarded Alfonso the Spanish title Duque de Cádiz with the dignity Grandee of Spain, and he received the style of Royal Highness. The Cádiz title had been held by Alfonso's great-great-grandfather, the Infante Francisco de Asís. French succession rights Since Alfonso's mother was not born a princess of royal descent, his grandfather Alfonso XIII did not consider young Alfonso in line to the Spanish throne in accordance with the Pragmatic Sanction of 1830. Alfonso's father Jaime, however, came to assert that his sons were French dynasts entitled to the style of Royal Highness. In Spain up until 1972, Alfonso was generally addressed as Don Alfonso de Borbón y Dampierre. Elsewhere he was