Early Life
He was born as Rafael María José Pedro Francisco Borja Domingo Gerardo de la Santíssima Trinidad Merry del Val y Zulueta at the Spanish Embassy in London, England, to a Spanish diplomat, as the second of four sons. His mother was Sofia Josefa de Zulueta (died 1925), elder daughter of Pedro José de Zulueta, count of Torre Díaz, of the London bank of Zulueta & Co., and his wife, Sophia Ann Wilcox, who was of Scottish and Dutch ancestry. The Zuluetas were an old Basque family ennobled as counts de Torre Díaz in the nineteenth century. His father was Rafael Merry del Val (1831–1917), Marquis of Merry del Val, secretary to the Spanish legation in London, a monarchist supporter of Alfonso XII and nobleman. The del Vals were an Aragonese family originally from Zaragoza, claiming descent from a twelfth-century Breton crusader; the surname Merry came from a line of Irish merchants from County Waterford, Ireland, who settled in the late eighteenth century in Seville, Spain. His elder brother Alfonso, marquess of Merry del Val (b. 1864), was Spanish ambassador to the United Kingdom between 1913 and 1931.
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