Romanticism, Reaction and Revolution (Cultural History and Literary Imagination) [New ed.] 9783034322492, 9781787077041, 9781787077058, 9781787077065, 3034322496

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Romanticism, Reaction and Revolution British Views on Spain, 1814–1823

BERNARD BEATTY AND ALICIA LASPRA-RODRÍGUEZ (EDS)

Peter Lang

CULTURAL HISTORY AND LITERARY IMAGINATION When the Peninsular War ended in 1814, the prolonged struggle had all but exhausted both British government finances and the British public’s enthusiasm for war. The authoritarian rule of Ferdinand VII aroused long-standing British suspicions of Spanish ways, which emerged in British literary works that depicted a retrograde, fanatical Spain. The tumultuous years following Ferdinand’s reign also led to divisions among the European powers, some favouring the restoration of Ferdinand, with the British government and liberal forces vehemently opposed. This diverse volume focuses on British reactions to, and representations of, Spanish affairs during this lively period (1814–1823). It demonstrates both Spain’s visibility in Regency Britain and the consequent inspiration and dialectical activity of British politicians, artists and intellectuals. It does so through a combination of literary, social, historical and cultural perspectives that bring both fresh light to this formative period of nineteenth-century British attitudes to Spain and a wealth of new scholarly material.

Bernard Beatty is Senior Fellow in the English Department at the University of Liverpool and Associate Fellow in the School of Divinity at the University of St Andrews. He has written two books and edited five collections of essays on Byron and was editor of the Byron Journal for 20 years. He is Vice President of two Byron Societies and on the executive committee of the International Byron Society. Alicia Laspra-Rodríguez is Associate Professor of English Studies at the University of Oviedo. She was a Fulbright Scholar at New York University, where she obtained a Diploma in American Studies. She has edited and translated early nineteenth-century English manuscript collections of Anglo-Spanish historical interest as well as English poetry on Spain of the same period. She has also published widely on the Peninsular War and Wellington.

www.peterlang.com

Romanticism, Reaction and Revolution

CULTURAL HISTORY AND LITERARY IMAGINATION EDITED BY CHRISTIAN J. EMDEN & DAVID MIDGLEY VOL. 30 EDITORIAL BOARD

RODRIGO CACHO, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE SARAH COLVIN, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE KENNETH LOISELLE, TRINITY UNIVERSITY HEATHER WEBB, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

PETER LANG

Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • New York • Wien

Romanticism, Reaction and Revolution British Views on Spain, 1814–1823 Bernard Beatty and Alicia Laspra-Rodríguez (eds)

PETER LANG

Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • New York • Wien

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A CIP catalogue record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.

Cover image: The Spanish Lady by Sir David Wilkie. Engraved by W. Greatbach. London, 1840. Hand-coloured print. Private Collection. Cover design: Peter Lang Ltd. ISSN 1660-6205 ISBN 978-3-0343-2249-2 (print) • ISBN 978-1-78707-704-1 (ePDF) ISBN 978-1-78707-705-8 (ePub) • ISBN 978-1-78707-706-5 (mobi) © Peter Lang AG 2019 Published by Peter Lang Ltd, International Academic Publishers, 52 St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3LU, United Kingdom [email protected], www.peterlang.com Bernard Beatty and Alicia Laspra-Rodríguez have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this Work. All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This publication has been peer reviewed.

Contents

List of Figuresvii Acknowledgementsix BERNARD BEATTY and ALICIA LASPRA-RODRÍGUEZ

Introduction: Romanticism, Reaction and Revolution Part I  Political Views

xi 1

Alicia Laspra-Rodríguez

1  Wellington’s final mission to Spain (spring 1814)

3

Silvia Gregorio Sainz

2  The last Napoleonic redoubt in northern Spain: The British role

23

Juan L. Sánchez

3  Robert Southey and the ‘British Liberales’43 Young-ok An

4 The guerrilla chief and the mountain girl: Spanish figures in Letitia Landon’s Romance and Reality71 Sara Medina Calzada

5 Edward Blaquiere and the Spanish revolution of 1820

93

Roderick Beaton

6 ‘The lightning of the nations’: Byron, the Shelleys and Spain

111

vi Agustín Coletes Blanco

7 Poems on the Spanish liberal revolution in the British radical press (1820–1823)

129

Part II  Cultural Views

171

Rocío Coletes Laspra

8 The reception of Spanish Old Masters in the Regency era: A reassessment

173

Laura Martínez García

9 Revisiting national stereotypes in the 1815 edition of Centlivre’s ‘Spanish Play’ The Busy Body193 María Eugenia Perojo Arronte

10  Coleridge’s criticism of the Don Juan tradition

209

Bernard Beatty

11 Detecting Spanish fictions: Byron’s Don Juan Canto I

229

José Ruiz Mas

12  Marianne Baillie’s knowledge of Spain

249

Nanora Sweet

13 Spanish Orientalism: Felicia Hemans and her contemporaries

271

Bibliography289 Notes on contributors

315

Index321

Figures

Figure 1.1. Lord Wellington. Duque de Ciudad Rodrigo. Published c. 1814. © Museo de Historia de Madrid

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Figure 1.2. Tomás López Enguidanos, Alianza Hispano-Inglesa. Published c. 1814. © Museo de Historia de Madrid

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Figure 2.1. Vicente Tofiño de San Miguel, Port de Santoña, 1793. Public Domain. [National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London]

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Figure 2.2. W. Faden, Harbour of Santoña, 1812. © Museo Naval, Madrid

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Figure 2.3. John Synge, Fortress of Santona in the Province of Burgos, blockaded by the Spanish army, 1813. © The Board of Trinity College, Dublin

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Figure 7.1. Corpus distribution (poems per year)

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Figure 7.2. William Heath, The downfall of despotism, or the beloved & legitimate petticoat maker on his marrow bones. Published S.W. Fores, 1823. © Trustees of the British Museum

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Figure 7.3. J. Lewis Marks, Spanish emancipation, or an effectual mode of getting rid of troublesome neighbours. Published S.W. Fores, 1823. © Trustees of the British Museum154 Figure 7.4. J. Lewis Marks, A hasty sketch at Verona, or the prophecies of Napoleon unfolding. Published S.W. Fores, 1823. © Trustees of the British Museum

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Figure 7.5. George Cruikshank, The Royal Menagerie on the road to Ruin Spain [sic]. Published by Samuel Knight, 1823. © Trustees of the British Museum

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Figure 7.6. Jean Felix Salneuve, Vue de Madrid, prise près de la porte et du pont de Ségovie. Published C. Le Camus, 1823. © Patrimonio Nacional

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Figure 8.1. William Buchanan, Memoirs of painting with a chronological history of the importation of pictures by the Great Masters info England since the French Revolution, vol. 1, Front matter. Printed for R. Ackermann, 1824. Public Domain. [Archive.org]

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Figure 8.2. William Buchanan, Memoirs of painting with a chronological history of the importation of pictures by the Great Masters info England since the French Revolution, vol. 2, p. 203. Printed for R. Ackermann, 1824. Public Domain. [Archive.org]

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Figure 8.3. Workshop of Velázquez, Portrait of a man. Public Domain. [The Metropolitan Museum of Art]

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Figure 8.4. Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Virgin and child. Public Domain. [The Metropolitan Museum of Art]

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Acknowledgements

This book partly emerges out of two research networks, the Certified Research Group ‘Otras Lenguas’ [Other Languages], based at the University of Oviedo in Spain since 2014, and the international affiliation of scholars ‘Anglo-Hispanic Horizons 1780–1840’, formed in 2013. The editors would like to thank all the contributors to this volume for their hard work and dedication. Special thanks are due to Young-ok An, Roderick Beaton, and Agustín Coletes for taking on editorial responsibilities, and to the University of Oviedo for its financial support for the production costs. Additional thanks are due to the Spanish-government sponsored Project POETRY’15, which provided some of the contributors with research grants from 2016 to 2018. Further funding to bring this book to fruition has come from the City Council of Oviedo and the Principality of Asturias Board of Education and Culture. Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to Laurel Plapp and the editorial team of Peter Lang. Bernard Beatty Alicia Laspra-Rodríguez

BERNARD BEATTY and ALICIA LASPRA-RODRÍGUEZ

Introduction: Romanticism, Reaction and Revolution

British Hispanism is at least two and a half centuries old and has included such pioneers as Lord Holland, Robert Southey and Richard Ford and, more recently, academics such as James Fitzmaurice-Kelly, E. Allison Peers and Raymond Carr. This indicates that Spain has always been an object of interest, both political and cultural, to many British intellectuals, artists and literary authors. In English literature, Spanish-themed texts are largely a creation of the Romantic period, when Spain acquired an undesired protagonist role in the Napoleonic Wars which brought the country closer than ever to Britain, its ally at the time. Perhaps because this vibrant relation was substituted in the mid-nineteenth century by a cruder one based on old-fashioned but effective stereotypes on both sides, Spain has remained a relatively neglected topic in Romantic studies, including British scholarship. The book that changed the paradigm was Diego Saglia’s groundbreaking Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia (2000), which lucidly demonstrated the extent to which Spain had penetrated into the British culture of the Romantic era. Other contributions (some by authors in this volume) paved the way for the recent essay collection Spain in British Romanticism 1800–1840 (2018), edited by Diego Saglia and Ian Haywood. This remarkable book explores different aspects of the ‘creation’ of Spain by British Romantics, as alluded to above. No themed attention is given, however, to what is most distinctive in the present volume: British views on post-war and Liberal Triennium Spain. Contrary to expectations, the country receded into despotism through the return of Ferdinand VII as absolute king (1814–1819). A period of hope followed when the Cadiz Constitution was newly enforced in 1820, only to be crushed by a reactionary foreign intervention three years later. Nevertheless,

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Spain came again to the forefront of British interest and helped shape British culture and politics of the period. Our volume, precisely entitled Romanticism, Reaction and Revolution: British Views on Spain, 1814–1823, seeks to be the first in exploring different aspects of this important topic from a uniform perspective. The extensive bibliography in this book bears witness to the considerable scholarly and wider cultural interest, especially recently, in British/Spanish relations in the early nineteenth century. Our volume differs from the two books just mentioned and complements them in two ways. They naturally focus upon the drift of a whole period of time with necessarily arbitrary beginning and end points, and on the shifting reactions of major British authors, especially that of the Romantic Poets, to events in Spain. Our contributors do something similar but, crucially, extend their net much wider to include a host of writings of various kinds, frequently overlooked or unknown, which give a much broader picture of British reactions to Spain. And they do so within a very precise remit. All the essays have as their primary focus a specific period of Spanish history which does have a clear beginning and end – the restoration of Ferdinand VII in 1814, the liberal and revolutionary movements against him, and his return to absolute power in 1823. This is, of course, both a very particular and a very well-known period in Spanish history. Ferdinand’s restoration was followed by his authoritarian rule for a period of six years. Simmering liberal hostility to Ferdinand’s reactionary establishment erupted in Rafael del Riego’s revolutionary coup which produced a further three tumultuous years of liberal and radical government. This was a matter of great concern for the conservative European powers, which eventually agreed after much wrangling (and against British advice) to intervene by sending in a French Royalist army. By the end of 1823 the old absolutist order had been restored in Spain. The subsequent months saw the end of Spanish rule in continental America, and the beginning of repression and exile. It all paved the way for the so-called ‘Ominous Decade’ that would close Ferdinand VII’s reign. British attitudes to Spain, often contradictory and shifting, had rallied to the cause of Spanish freedom after Napoleon’s invasion. For the first time for nearly two centuries, the politics and culture of Spain dominated British attention and, for the first time since the sixteenth century, British

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public opinion was very pro-Spanish. But the period with which this book is concerned presents a different and more troubling picture. Conservative opinion did not relish revolution but neither did anyone like the idea of Spain apparently reverting to the long-established British image of it as backward, authoritarian, and superstitious. Liberal commentators in England were, naturally, appalled by Ferdinand and excited by the success of movements against him. Spain was still in the news but in a wholly different way. It is this altered and altering British perspective of Spain during the nearly decade-long period of Ferdinand’s restoration, both the so-called Absolutist Sexennium (1814–1820) and the subsequent Liberal Triennium (1820–1823), that is our focus. It witnesses, most crucially, to the sheer visibility of Spain in British consciousness not only during the Peninsular War (something we already knew about) but also in its aftermath (something less well known). It was at once a reference point, a political concern, and a topos and inspiration for intellectuals and writers. The list of contributors boasts both young researchers and well-established scholars who bring different perspectives to bear. Similarly, some contributors are Spanish academics who specialize in English studies and the rest are British and American scholars who specialize in Romantic topics. The unity of the volume, therefore, is one of focus, for all thirteen essays are concerned with a single period of time and a single relationship, namely British reactions to, and opinions concerning Spanish politics, literature and culture from 1814 to 1823. That period is one of revolution and reaction, but the phenomenon of European ‘Romanticism’ both feeds off and into these political antitheses, as well as being fascinated by the new Spain that is emerging and the bright and dark aesthetics of the older Spain that is also being rediscovered, or, as Rocío Coletes Laspra argues here, in the case of its pictorial art, largely being taken seriously for the first time. Hence, we think that our title – Romanticism, Reaction and Revolution: British Views on Spain, 1814–1823 – is both a useful and a precise one. The volume is divided into two parts. As amply demonstrated by ongoing projects on the British literary response to Spanish affairs in the first decades of the nineteenth century, this response was either predominantly political (occasional ‘views’ on contemporary Spanish affairs) or

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predominantly cultural (timeless ‘views’ on Spanish history and culture).1 Accordingly, Part I adopts a predominantly political perspective, and Part II presents a broadly cultural view. Both parts complement and mutually reinforce one another, as demonstrated by the many cross-references they contain. The fact that these two parts comprise seven and six essays respectively further provides the book, we believe, with a lucid and wellbalanced dual structure. Within each part, the order between chapters is predominantly chronological. In Part I, the initial chapters deal with British responses to Spanish events that took place in the early years (1814, 1815) of the period. The middle chapters discuss subsequent literary responses to the unfolding political events in Spain between 1816 and 1822. The closing chapter addresses the response of the English press to the Spanish events during the final years of the period under analysis. This substantial essay introduces the second part of the book, since the political poems explored therein also verge on the cultural. In Part II, the initial chapter deals with the reception of Spanish art in Britain, which started in the early years of the century and extended over the period under study. The following chapters successively discuss British responses to a variety of Spanish cultural topics. The final chapter focuses on the perception of Spanish ‘orientalism’ by British authors at the close of the period under analysis. More specifically, Chapter 1, by Alicia Laspra-Rodríguez, introduces the geo-political context of the latest stages of the Peninsular War and its aftermath, and analyses Wellington’s position with respect to the possibility of a civil war in Spain, in the wake of Ferdinand VII’s return. The duke’s loyalty to his Liberal Spanish friends and collaborators, not always acknowledged by commentators and popular opinion, is attested through contemporary evidence. Wellington’s visibility as a major figure in the period is reinforced by Silvia Gregorio’s Chapter 2. She discloses and explains the little-known information about Wellington’s direct concern with the siege operations carried out by the British to force the late capitulation of Santoña 1

Project OLE ’11, and Project POETRY ’15, , respectively.

Introduction: Romanticism, Reaction and Revolution

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(Santander). This was one of the last strongholds in Spain that had remained in the hands of the French after the Peninsular War was over. Chapter 3 is concerned with the Poet Laureate, Robert Southey, not as a writer but as a political thinker. Hence, it is in Part I. Southey began as a Liberal and became a Tory but Juan L. Sánchez argues that he remained in many ways a ‘true liberal statesman’. Sánchez demonstrates this on the basis of Southey’s sincere concern with the extension of social welfare, his liberal proposals in favour of the underprivileged, and his belief in a fair redistribution of wealth. Sánchez, nevertheless, does not ignore the evidence that Southey’s views were not incompatible with, but rather fell within the pragmatic scope of ‘Toryism’. There is some similarity here with Alicia Laspra-Rodríguez’s Wellington who, as a convinced Tory, was always pragmatic. Chapter 3 stands in contrast to Young-ok An’s contribution (Chapter 4), which portrays Letitia Landon as a ‘middle-class Tory woman writer’ who presents contradictory characters such as Beatrice de Zoritos and Emily Arundel, heroines both free and trapped in the middle of a conflict between reality and romance. We place An’s essay in Part I since it includes an analysis of Henriquez de Zoritos, a highly romanticized Spanish guerrilla leader who ventures into the Carbonari world of Southern Italy. This illustrates how freedom fighting was internationalized, spreading throughout Europe from Spain. Henriquez’s democratic struggles are displaced into Landon’s heterosexual romance. But Landon simultaneously suggests, through the heroines, that the constraints of gender are no less political. In Chapter 5, Sara Medina Calzada explores Edward Blaquiere’s figurations of Spain, as conveyed in his Historical Review of the Spanish Revolution (1822). This was probably written as a challenge to the popular English version of Alexander Laborde’s conservative A View of Spain (London, 1809), used, for example, by William Wordsworth. Sara Medina Calzada clearly perceives Blaquiere’s limitations and prejudice, which led him to overrate the influence of the Inquisition on the supposed lack of cultural development in Spain under Ferdinand VII – the king had actually been using the Inquisition as a police body, an instrument of ideological and political repression serving the Crown, not the Church. Blaquiere acknowledged that the main source for his description of the Inquisition was the ‘afrancesado’ Llorente. By giving

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full credit to such unscrupulous sources, Blaquiere was far from perceiving the extent to which other factors, in particular the devastating ruin of the country deriving from the war, were also responsible for its malaise. Roderick Beaton’s Chapter 6, about responses by Lord Byron and Mary and Percy Shelley to the Spanish events between 1820 and 1822, is an excellent example of the intersection of perspectives that the volume as a whole tries to suggest; since those responses, conveyed in private letters and creative works, were both political and literary. Beaton’s analysis reveals the three authors’ genuine support for the Spanish constitutionalists, a support which, with few exceptions, has passed almost unnoticed. The essay examines evidence from letters by all three authors, an ode by Percy Shelley, a long poem by Byron, and a novel by Mary Shelley. But Beaton goes much further and identifies additional references to Spain, sometimes indirect, in other works by these authors which further testify to the internationalization of the Spanish liberal revolution. Byron’s Venetian drama Marino Faliero emerges as the most outstanding and, perhaps, unexpected example of this. Chapter 7, which closes Part I, is devoted to identifying the Spanish revolution of 1820 as a source of inspiration for occasional poems published in the British radical press. A fascinating aspect of those poems, as explained by Agustín Coletes Blanco, is the way in which the feelings inspired by the events evolve in parallel with the events themselves: thus these feelings shift from celebration, through encouragement, to disappointment. The closeness with which events were being followed adds to the intrinsic interest of the phenomenon in itself. Rocío Coletes Laspra’s chapter, which opens Part II of the volume, demonstrates that Spanish Old Masters, such as El Greco, Velázquez and Zurbarán – now universally famous painters – were not known outside Spain (and El Greco not even within Spain) until the nineteenth century. She argues that a combination of the Peninsular War and a series of aesthetic and commercial interests – typified in an English painter and traveller in Spain, George Wallis, and a successful Scottish art dealer, William Buchanan – changed the scenario so that these paintings and this sensibility entered a wider British and European consciousness.

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In Chapter 9, Laura Martínez García analyses the 1815 revival – which Blaquiere might have enjoyed – of the once popular 1709 anti-Spanish play, The Busy Body. The ‘fiercely Whig’ author of this comedy of manners, Susanna Centlivre, who was ‘not above some artful borrowing’ (according to Michael Billington in The Guardian, 18 September 2012), perpetuates the familiar description of Spain, cherished by Whig tradition, as a retrograde, unrefined country. The play was so successful in Drury Lane and Covent Garden that it was republished that year, 1815. The detail is significant since it demonstrates very clearly how that older dark view of Spain was revived after the restoration of Ferdinand VII in 1814, whereas the play would not have earned the same reaction during the Peninsular War period. With the exception of his play Remorse, Coleridge’s references to Spain are to be found in his letters. The collection Letters on the Spaniards was first published in the Courier during the early stages of the Peninsular War. His review of Charles Maturin’s tragedy Bertrand, as Eugenia Perojo Arronte explains in Chapter 10, was also first published in a series of five letters in the Courier in 1816. The references to the Don Juan tradition included in these texts, which had been so far neglected, are here analysed and recovered by Perojo Arronte as an important source of Coleridge’s political, ethical and poetic principles. Throughout our period (1814–1823), Europe was in the shadow of two political and cultural figures, Napoleon (who died in 1821) and Lord Byron (who died in 1824). In Chapter 11, Bernard Beatty discusses Byron’s treatment of the Don Juan figure. On the basis of two enigmas which spring from Beatty’s reading of Don Juan Canto I, namely the fact that Byron’s Spanish heroine can apparently both speak and think in French, and his use of an impossible wood near Seville, a twofold analysis is built of Byron’s renewed figuration of Spain, as a country more inserted in mainstream Europe, and a much more ‘normal’ land than English Protestant tradition and the recent horrors of the Peninsular War had suggested. This, Beatty argues, also seems to reflect a change in the poet himself from his earlier, very influential account of his travels through Spain in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. José Ruiz Mas, in Chapter 12, traces with careful detail the literary works that, serving as sources of information about Spanish customs,

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politics and literature, were drawn on by Marianne Baillie to create accurate references to a land that she (paradoxically) never visited. Ruiz Mas concludes that this English traveller and poet’s extensive knowledge of Spain derives mainly from Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Lesage’s Le diable boiteaux and Gil Blas, to which must be added, most interestingly, Dryden’s The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards, and Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. As in Beatty’s essay, this emphasizes that older literary versions of Spain existed alongside both the dark and bright versions of Spanish history described in other essays. Chapter 13, written by Nanora Sweet, similarly singles out specifically literary images of Spain. Focusing mainly but not exclusively on Felicia Hemans, Sweet uses a gender-studies approach to examine English images and interpretations of Spanish Orientalism in the Romantic period. It is in this light that major exponents of British Romanticism’s ‘cult of the South’, like Southey’s Roderick, Coleridge’s Osorio or Hemans’ The Forest Sanctuary, are re-assessed, both artistically and as works drawing on their own authors’ political, social and even religious engagement with the troubled society of their times. As can be seen, while the essays in this collection may stand on their own as individual pieces, those who read the book from beginning to end will undoubtedly discover helpful cross references, discern significant patterns of local coherence, and find striking divergences which illuminate the complex and shifting British opinions about Spain, both popular and informed, in this precisely defined period. A final paragraph should be devoted to what the reader will see as their first British image of Spain when approaching our book: its front cover, which shows a relatively unknown hand-coloured print, The Spanish Lady. This is indeed a Spanish young lady of the early 1800s in her Sunday best, complete with mantilla, as seen by Sir David Wilkie. It adds to the interest of the piece that Velázquez painted an oil on canvas that he entitled La dama del abanico (now in the Wallace Collection). Wilkie, who visited Spain in 1827, was an admirer of Velázquez and, in all probability, took the dama into account when producing his own ‘lady with a fan’. The British artist plays with ambiguity. Is this a girl dressed as a woman, or a woman that looks like a girl? Is she going to church, or coming out of it? Is she pious

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(mantilla) or frivolous (earrings, necklace, finger rings and handbag, while rosary, scapular or cross are nowhere to be seen)? Does she look shy or selfassured? What is she doing with her fan, and why is it almost horizontal (an unusual position)? Is it meant to create distance between her and the spectator, or is it a link between the two? Is she enticing, or rejecting? Is she attacking, or defending? Is she opening, or closing the fan? Is she lifting it to hide her face, or has she just lowered it to show her face? We have chosen The Spanish Lady, typical but not topical, with all these evident contradictions and ambiguities, to represent Spain as seen by Regency Britain. She represents and embodies, we think, both the book’s single focus and its diversity. Finally, we believe and hope that the volume will make an outstanding and early contribution to the varied academic initiatives that, without doubt, will take place over the following years in order to mark the bicentenary of the Spanish liberal revolution.

Part I

Political Views

Alicia Laspra-Rodríguez

1 Wellington’s final mission to Spain (spring 1814)

Abstract A substantial part of the legacy of the Peninsular War bicentennial commemorations in Spain consisted in a huge number of published books on the war. They cover all imaginable aspects of the conflict. Wellington is a special object of interest in many of them, his image being sometimes minimized, or tainted, by prejudice. One of the frequent descriptions applied to him is linked to an alleged ‘ultraconservative’ ideology. The connotations of this term, according to its present-day definition, suggest a reactionary, whereas in the nineteenth century the term would probably have suggested an ‘absolutist’. This paper is aimed at analysing the degree to which Wellington actually acted as an opponent to change, progress and liberalism in his dealings with the Spanish institutions. For this purpose, I will focus on a rather forgotten and controversial journey he made to Madrid in 1814, when the Peninsular War was already over. The study mostly draws on English primary sources, mainly Wellington’s own dispatches and correspondence with his brother Henry Wellesley, the British Ambassador in Spain at the time.

From the Peninsula to France The term ‘Peninsular War’ has been widely used both in Britain and Portugal to refer to the campaigns sustained against Napoleon’s armies by the allied forces of Britain, Portugal and Spain. The end of this war is generally dated 16 April 1814, ten days after Napoleon had abdicated, and six days after Wellington had won his (up until then) last important victory over the French army at Toulouse. From a spatial perspective, however, the ‘Peninsular War’ proper had already ended once Wellington crossed the Bidasoa River into France, on 10 October 1813 (see Figure 1.1). But five battles, thirteen combats and the

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blockade of Bayonne were still awaiting his armies once on French territory.1 Coincidentally, the frontier town of Bayonne, where the conflict had begun in 1808, would be the last French stronghold to capitulate, as late as 26 April 1814. The ‘Peninsular’ War, therefore, eventually came to an end outside the Iberian Peninsula. A few important redoubts in Spanish territory, such as Santoña, Peñíscola, and Tortosa, would remain occupied by the French until early summer, as the typical longer-lasting remnants of a large-scale conflict.2 When Wellington left Peninsular soil, the war was actually moving on to a new phase. This involved full integration of Wellington’s campaigns in the European war effort of the Sixth Coalition against Napoleon. Paradoxically though, the term ‘Peninsular War’ had the reductionist effect of quite explicitly setting the conflict in the Iberian Peninsula apart from the mainstream European campaigns against Napoleon, at least psychologically. Before seriously considering the possibility of extending his campaign into France, Wellington had acknowledged several times that he felt a ‘great disinclination to enter the French territory under existing circumstances’. One of those ‘circumstances’ derived from the reports that were reaching him about those he significantly called ‘the Allies’ (Russia, Prussia, Austria and Sweden), whose armies were operating in Central Europe. He was well aware of those allies being anxious about the possibility of him crossing the border. He also knew that the British government had promised them that this army would advance into France ‘as soon as the enemy should be finally expelled from Spain’. Evidence is found, for instance, on 19 September 1813, after he learnt about the defeat of the allies when they were repulsed in their attack on Dresden at the end of August.

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2

Nick J. Lipscombe, The Peninsular War Atlas (Oxford: Osprey, 2010), 19. Research leading to this chapter was partly funded by the Spanish National Research Project FFI 2015-68421P (Proyecto POETRY ’15). I am grateful to the co-editor of this volume, Dr Beatty, and my colleague Dr M. Gibbons, who have kindly contributed suggestions and corrections to earlier drafts. For a study of the case of Santoña (Santander), see Silvia Gregorio-Sainz’s chapter in this volume.

Wellington’s final mission to Spain (spring 1814)

Figure 1.1. Lord Wellington. Duque de Ciudad Rodrigo. Published c. 1814. © Museo de Historia de Madrid

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He considered it necessary to make sure that the allies would manage to oppose Napoleon with some degree of effectiveness, before moving on to France: ‘I shall put myself in a situation to menace a serious attack, and to make one immediately, if I should see a fair opportunity, or if I should hear that the Allies have been really successful, or when Pamplona shall be in our possession’.3 When Wellington finally crossed the Spanish border into France he moved his General Headquarters from Vera de Bidasoa to St Pée sur Nivelle, there to continue his campaign.4 In mid-November, he received oddments of information about Leipzig but, with his characteristic caution, decided not to start large-scale operations and wait for more reliable news. The encouraging outcome of Leipzig was eventually pivotal. Both the relevance he ascribed to the military operations in central Europe and the fact that the northern European allies were in permanent contact with the British government, in order to adopt a common anti-Napoleonic strategy, provide evidence of the integration of the ‘Peninsular War’ campaigns into the European anti-Napoleonic effort.

Wellington fighting while Ferdinand is plotting Wellington was still the commander in chief of the allied armies of Britain, Spain and Portugal, though only a selection of Spanish military units had been allowed to enter France, namely the 3rd and the 4th divisions, commanded by generals Freire and Anglona respectively. Two main reasons explain Wellington’s restrictive decision. In the first place, he did not 3

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Wellington to Bathurst, Lesaca, 19 September 1813, John Gurwood, ed., The Dispatches of Field Marshall the Duke of Wellington, during his various Campaigns in India, Denmark, Portugal, Spain, the Low Countries, and France from 1799 to 1818, 7 vols (London: Parker, Furnivall, and Parker, 1845), vii. 10. Wellington’s headquarters’ movements may be very clearly traced in his own dispatches. See, for instance, Gurwood, The Dispatches, vii. 52–146.

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consider that the Spanish soldiers would be able to resist taking revenge on the French population. He feared ‘they would display intolerant levels of indiscipline’.5 Secondly, the Spanish authorities were systematically failing to grant the necessary supplies and equipment to those soldiers, who were therefore in a ‘dreadful’ state. Wellington’s complaints in this respect were frequent. It must be acknowledged, too, the true fact that relations between Spain and Britain were then strained to breaking point. As early as 11 December 1813, trying to counterbalance British influence, Napoleon had secretly signed the treaty of Valençay, by which Ferdinand VII was restored to the Spanish throne. This measure immediately reinforced the aspirations of the counter-revolutionaries, as their hopes for the restoration of absolutism were now more securely founded. Handing Ferdinand back was Napoleon’s most effective revenge for the ‘ulcer’ the Spaniards had caused him. At the same time, unaware of these dealings, Wellington was still fighting the imperial armies, though now on French soil. The Spanish Regency and Cortes, the legitimate Spanish government at the time, had passed a decree, as early as 1 January 1811, according to which no agreement with France would be sanctioned by the Spanish government as long as King Ferdinand was kept imprisoned. On 10 January, when the Spanish authorities newly established in Madrid received copies of the Treaty of Valençay, they wrote to Wellesley, as usual, in French, and explained their reaction to this news: The Regency, without wavering, without considering any other explanations, and without entering into the analysis of the Articles of the Treaty, considering only the Decree of the Extraordinary General Cortes of January 1, 1811, … considering as well the Treaty agreed with Great Britain, of which one of the articles establishes that peace will not be made with France without the intervention of that Power, has confined itself to giving the Duke of St. Charles as the only response a letter to His Majesty, in which said Decree is inserted. His Majesty is also informed of the impossibility to ratify such a treaty, which, additionally is absolutely void in all its parts.6

5 Lipscombe, The Peninsular War Atlas, 336. 6 ‘La Régence, sans vaciller, sans entrer dans d’autres explications, et sans entrer dans l’analyse des Articles du Traité, uniquement occupée du Décret des Cortes Généraux Extraordinaires du 1er Janvier 1811, … occupée d’ailleurs du Traité avec

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Copies of the Treaty and of other documents signed by Ferdinand and Napoleon were attached to the above. Wellington’s comments on the reaction to the treaty from the Spanish authorities were quite positive: ‘It appears to me that the Spanish government have managed this matter remarkably well; and I should not be surprised if Ferdinand were sent back to Spain’.7 However, the British General could easily figure out that the liberals had very little chance of fulfilling their plans, which involved requesting Ferdinand to pledge allegiance to the Constitution. Arguably, they were acting this time so ‘remarkably well’ because their only option would depend largely on British support at the time of facing the returning Spanish king. On 21 April 1814, once Bayonne had surrendered, Wellington received his friend Viscount Castlereagh’s offer to become the British Ambassador in Paris, an appointment that he accepted ‘with alacrity’.8 He then moved to the French capital, there to meet up with Castlereagh himself. They spent almost a week ‘discussing the peace settlement and the affairs of Spain and Portugal’.9 On 25 April, Henry Wellesley, the British Ambassador in Madrid, writing to his brother Arthur from Valencia, described the ‘liberales’ as ‘in very low spirits’, and their opponents ‘proportionally elated’. He further wrote: The King is so popular that I think he may do what he pleases; but I dread the ignorance, violence, and absurd prejudices of his advisers. … The King appears to me to be very amiable, much more lively and conversable than I expected, but without the least knowledge of business. … Both he and his advisers seem to think that a

7 8 9

la Grande Bretagne, dont un des articles établit qu’on ne fera la Paix avec la France sans l’intervention de cette Puissance ; s’est bornée à donner pour unique réponse au Duc de St. Charles une lettre pour Sa Majesté, dans laquelle on fait l’insertion du Décret cité, et l’on manifeste á Sa Majesté l’impossibilité où l’on se trouve de ratifier un Traité semblable, qui d’ailleurs est absolument nul dans toutes ses parties’. Foreign Office, British and Foreign State Papers, 1812–14 –Part 2 (London: James Rodgway & Sons, 1841), 1222–3. Wellington to H. Wellesley, St Jean de Luz, 16 January 1814. Gurwood, ed., The Dispatches, vii. 267. Richard Holmes, Wellington the Iron Duke (London: Harper Collins, 2003), 198. Rory Muir, Wellington. Waterloo and the Fortunes of Peace (1814–52) (Padstow: Yale University Press, 2015), 6.

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declaration from you would be of greatest advantage to the king, but I thought it right to put an end to such hopes …10

In effect, during his journey back into Spain, Ferdinand could perceive clear signs that the liberals and their Constitution did not enjoy as much popular support as he had feared. Added to that, some sectors of the Spanish army had openly declared that they would support the king’s right to recover the Spanish Crown without any restrictions whatsoever in the exercise of his powers. The king eventually refused to acknowledge the Spanish Regency and Cortes, and declared the Constitution null in his infamous Manifiesto or ‘Valencia Decree’, printed on 4 May 1814 and released a week later. The king also announced his intention to call for new Cortes, with the purpose of passing laws intended ‘to guarantee individual and royal freedom and safety, freedom of the press – without degenerating into licentiousness –, and the separation of the general treasure from the royal house expenses’. This was considered a coup d’état by many. Wellington, however, believed that the king’s intention was indeed to put forward a new, moderate constitution. Quite soon, the members of the Regency and the Spanish ministers, as well as all the liberal deputies that could be located, were arrested and imprisoned. On 10 May General Eguía, a deeply convinced absolutist, led the military occupation of the Cortes seat in Madrid and, at night, arrested the liberals who were listed in a document that the king himself had passed on to him. Among them were ‘the current members of the Regency, Pedro Agar and Francisco Ciscar (a faithful supporter of Wellington), the military governor of Madrid, General Villacampa, the Cortes deputies and anglophiles, José María Queipo de Llano, Count Toreno, and Agustín Argüelles, the poets Manuel José Quintana and Francisco Martínez de la Rosa, several newspaper editors and a number of distinguished constitutionalists’.11 10 H. Wellesley to Wellington, Valencia, 25 April 1814. Arthur R. Wellesley, Second Duke of Wellington, ed., Supplementary Despatches, Correspondence and Memoranda of Field Marshal Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington (London: John Murray, 1862), ix. 32. 11 Emilio La Parra López, Fernando Séptimo, un rey deseado y detestado (Barcelona: Tusquets, 2018), 268–9 (my translation).

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The above names would soon form part of a particularly long, sad list of Spanish refugees.

Wellington’s last journey through Spain: ‘To prevent a civil war’ In May 1814, Wellington set out on an unexpected and controversial journey back to Spain. According to his own explanation in a dispatch addressed to Lord Liverpool from Paris on 9 May, I propose to go to Madrid in order to try whether I cannot prevail upon all parties to be more moderate, and to adopt a constitution more likely to be practicable, and to contribute to the peace and happiness of the nation. … I hope I shall be able to do much good by this journey.12

The above plans concerning Madrid point at the fact that by 9 May Wellington was already aware of the unstable situation in Spain due to the strong confrontation of the main political groups, basically liberals and absolutists. Five days later, back at Toulouse, Wellington wrote again to his brother Henry in the following terms: ‘Lord Castlereagh communicated to me your dispatches of the 24 and appeared to think that it was absolutely necessary I should lose no time in getting to Madrid. God send that I may be in time to prevent mischief !’13 In those dispatches mentioned by Wellington, Henry had informed Castlereagh of an important meeting he had held with the Spanish Duke of San Carlos while in Valencia. A convinced absolutist, San Carlos had been sent by King Ferdinand to request the support of the Wellesley brothers for the devastating measures he and his followers were about to adopt. In Wellesley’s own words, The Duke of San Carlos

12 13

Wellington to Liverpool, Paris, 9 May 1814. Gurwood, ed., The Dispatches, vii. 478. Wellington to H. Wellesley, Toulouse, 14 May 1814. Gurwood, ed., The Dispatches, vii. 478–9.

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began a conversation with a view, as he said, of appraising me of the King’s intention, but more, I believe, with the desire of sounding me as to the degree of support His Majesty might expect from me. He said that the King had arrived at Gerona with the intention of accepting the Constitution, conceiving his acceptance to be unavoidable; that in his progress through the country, however, he had found that the Constitution, so far from being considered as advantageous, was generally odious to the people; … that he could rely with the utmost confidence upon the promises which had been made to him of the support of the armies in any measures of resistance which he might judge advisable.

After insisting on the extent to which the Spanish people and army had provided the king with proofs of their dislike of the new order of things, San Carlos had finally transmitted the gist of Ferdinand’s message by stating that His Majesty was anxious to know my opinion, as also the degree of support which I might be enabled to give him; and that above all he considered it to be of the utmost importance that he should receive from Lord Wellington, as Commanderin-Chief of the Spanish armies, a letter, pledging himself to give the same degree of support which had been promised to him by most of the officers commanding corps.

Wellesley’s response to San Carlos suggests that the ‘support’ requested from Wellington was none other than to act (at the front of the Spanish military units under his command) against those potentially ready to take sides with the liberals, in the event of a civil war. After acknowledging the dislike of the Constitution which existed in the provinces through which Ferdinand had passed, he observed that it was possible that the Carta Magna ‘was not so unpopular in some of the other provinces that the King had not visited’ and I concluded by telling him that it was the anxious desire of the Prince Regent and of his government that the King should be re-established upon his throne with all the authority which ought to belong to him, and at the head of a nation rich, independent, and powerful, but that it was impossible for me to take any active part in support of the measures which I understood His Majesty to have in contemplation; neither could Lord Wellington, holding as he did the chief command of the Spanish armies merely with a view to offensive operations against the enemy, make any offers of support of the nature suggested by the Duke of San Carlos.14 14 H. Wellesley to Castlereagh, Valencia, 24 April 1814. In Arthur R. Wellesley, ed., Supplementary, ix. 31–2.

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Naturally, the ambassador had managed to politely refuse to take an active part in such plans. The eloquent reason he offered for that refusal was simply that Wellington was holding the chief command of the Spanish armies merely to attack ‘the enemy’, that is Napoleon’s imperial armies, not the Spanish liberal constitutionalists. San Carlos had explained that their plans consisted in (1) dismissing the Cortes, by utter force if necessary, (2) calling a new election on the basis of a completely different electoral system, (3) having the new Cortes elaborate a fresh constitution which would present the king’s ‘liberal’ ideas, and (4) establishing a second legislative chamber, integrated by members of the nobility and the higher clergy. Such actions would, according to San Carlos, surely satisfy the expectations of the Spanish people. Wellington’s distaste for some parts of the Spanish Constitution, namely articles 110, 129 and 130, was of a practical nature. His preference for a bi-cameral legislative body, mainly connected with the preservation of private property, had been clearly explained to the Cortes deputy Andrés Ángel de la Vega. His rejection of the political orientation of the more radical liberals, predominant in the Cortes, whom he sometimes accused of being ‘republicans’, is also well known.15 But he never got involved in such plans as the ones presented to his brother on behalf of the king. Henry also shared his brother’s views, as can be seen both in his report and in his response above. Some of Wellington’s dispatches have been used and quoted by prestigious Spanish historians, including those who conclude that the duke somehow allowed Ferdinand to reintroduce absolutism in Spain, or at least did nothing to prevent it.16 Yet, it appears that written evidence on this particularly serious issue has been overlooked. The available sources provide sufficient information to determine that the main purpose of Wellington’s journeying back to Spain in May 1814 was precisely, as he himself would 15 16

Wellington to Andrés A. de la Vega, Freneda, 29 January 1813. Vaughan Papers, University of Oxford, All Souls College, Codrington Library, C119/4. Partially published in Gurwood, ed., The Dispatches vi. 261–4. See, for instance, Emilio La Parra López, ‘La restauración de Fernando VII en 1814’ Historia Constitucional, 5, 2014, 205–22 .

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later state, ‘to prevent a civil war in Spain’. This has been the object of misleading interpretation in Spain and neglected in Britain. A revision of the sequence of events gives the clue to the whole story: •

•

•

• •

17 18 19

24 April: Henry Wellesley writes to Castlereagh and makes him acquainted with Ferdinand’s plans envisaging the possibility of a civil war in Spain. At the same time, Castlereagh is informed about the ambassador’s negative response to Ferdinand’s request for Wellington’s effective support at the head of the army units still under his command.17 30 April: Wellington writes to his brother while at Toulouse, to inform him that Castlereagh has requested him to go to Paris in order to confer with him. After meeting Castlereagh in Paris, Wellington plans to go back to Toulouse in order to superintend the embarkation and return of the allied armies to their respective countries. Afterwards, he would go to Madrid. This means that by 30 April, Wellington has already been acquainted with the king’s astonishing request and with his brother’s negative response. Arthur then takes the opportunity to inform his brother that he has accepted the appointment as British ambassador to Paris, and adds: ‘Don’t mention to anybody the intention that I should be the ambassador at Paris’.18 5–9 May: Wellington is in Paris, conferring with Castlereagh. They discuss the new situation in Spain, and the duke’s imminent journey to that country is confirmed. The purpose is to prevent an armed confrontation between Ferdinand and the liberals.19 10 May: Military occupation of the Cortes seat in Madrid and imprisonment of liberal leaders. 13 May: Wellington arrives at Toulouse and corresponds with his close Spanish friend, General Miguel Ricardo de Álava, a convinced liberal. During the four days he spends at that city, Wellington delivers no

See footnote 14 above. Wellington to H. Wellesley, Toulouse, 30 April 1814. Gurwood, ed., The Dispatches, vii. 473–4. Wellington to Liverpool, Paris, 9 May 1814. Gurwood, ed., The Dispatches, vii. 477–8.

14

•

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fewer than twenty-seven detailed dispatches, mainly concerned with the evacuation of his armies.20 15 May: Wellington informs Castlereagh about the latest events, shows great concern at the fast pace of events and realizes that the military are divided: ‘Things are getting on very fast, and the army have already taken different sides; O’Donnell and Elío for the King, the former having issued a very violent declaration. And Freire and the Principe de Anglona for the constitution. I think however I can keep them both quiet’.21 17 May: Wellington is at Rabastens (Southern France), on his way to Madrid. He informs Castlereagh that the Duke of San Carlos has sent him a number of documents including the Valencia Decree dissolving the Cortes, a second decree abolishing the liberty of the press and a list with the newly appointed Spanish ministers. Sir Arthur also informs him that the liberals ‘appear to rely a good deal’ upon the 3rd and 4th Spanish armies whose commanders, Manuel A. Freire de Andrade and Anglona, he will see on his way to Madrid.22

This sequence proves that Wellington could not possibly have prevented Ferdinand’s coup because it had already been put into effect before the duke had even reached Toulouse, after his journey to Paris. His subsequent correspondence reveals that he had set as his main aim to prevent a civil war in Spain, something that Ferdinand himself had envisaged, and for which he had even requested, though not obtained, Wellington’s support. In his dispatch of 17 May, he reported that the liberals were quitting Madrid, though he was not sure whether they did so from real or pretended apprehension at the king’s intentions, or with a view to raising the provinces.23 20 Wellington to H. Wellesley, Toulouse, 14 May 1814. Gurwood, ed., The Dispatches, vii. 478. 21 Wellington to Castlereagh, Toulouse, 15 May 1814. Gurwood, ed., The Dispatches, vii. 486. 22 Wellington to Castlereagh, Rabastens, 17 May 1814. Gurwood, ed., The Dispatches, vii. 490. 23 Wellington to Castlereagh, Toulouse, 17 May 1814. Gurwood, ed., The Dispatches, vii. 490.

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Generals Freire and Anglona were, respectively, at the head of the 3rd and 4th Spanish armies, which had been allowed to continue into France under Wellington’s command, a circumstance which points to their being part of the Spanish army elite. Wellington had praised their work on previous occasions. The phrase about keeping them ‘quiet’ does not necessarily suggest any collaboration on Wellington’s part with Ferdinand’s coup. What he actually intended was to persuade them to keep calm, both to prevent a civil war and to preserve their lives. Most of the Spanish army generals were on Ferdinand’s side, so these two constitutionalists did not have much chance of success. A clarifying dispatch he addressed to the Spanish Minister at War, indirectly reminding him that he was still the commander in chief of the Spanish Army, reveals Wellington’s effort to protect those generals from reprisal. After reviewing both armies, 3rd and 4th, Wellington had urged Freire and Anglona ‘in the strongest manner to preserve the discipline of the troops and to prevent factious persons of any description from influencing the conduct of the officers and troops in order to produce a war in Spain’. And he added: ‘I have the satisfaction of reporting to Your Excellency, for His Majesty’s information, that His Majesty has not in his service officers and troops more devoted to him than those belonging to these two corps’. On that same day, Wellington felt the need to insist on protecting Freire and Anglona. This is shown in a new dispatch addressed to San Carlos. He had seen in the newspapers references to expectations that the 3rd and 4th armies would take arms in favour of the liberal Constitution. He considered it necessary to clarify that there was no foundation for such an option. Wellington insisted on the entire reliability of those generals. He added that ‘In case Your Excellency should have received any reports to the contrary, I shall be much obliged to you if you will delay to take any steps founded on those reports till I have had the honour of paying my respects’.24 Such insistence reveals the duke’s sincere concern for these Spanish commanding officers.

24 Wellington to the Duke of San Carlos. Mondragón, 21 May 1814. Gurwood, ed., The Dispatches, vii. 491–2.

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Madrid Wellington arrived in Madrid on 24 May and was received with full honours, on the king’s own orders. The letter he wrote to Charles Stuart the next day demonstrates that he had not been plotting, and also that he had not been fully acquainted with events: You will have heard of the extraordinary occurrences here, though not probably with surprise. Nothing can be more popular than the King and his measures, as far as they have gone to the overthrow of the Constitution. The imprisonment of the Liberales is thought by some, I believe with justice, unnecessary, and it is certainly highly impolitic. But it is liked by the people at large. Since the great act of vigour which has placed Ferdinand on the throne unshackled by a constitution, nothing of any kind has been done. … Those to whom I have talked, who pretend and ought to know, say that his Majesty will certainly perform the promise made in his decree of the 4th of May, and will give a free constitution to Spain. I have urged, and continue to urge this measure upon them, as very essential to his Majesty’s credit abroad. I entertain a very favourable opinion of the King from what I have seen of him, but not of his ministers.25

Wellington could indeed be ironical, and sarcastic, but he was by no means cynical, nor a liar. There was no reason for him to be either of these, especially when writing to his close friends, Castlereagh or Stuart, or to his own brothers. The above text shows that he did not agree with the imprisonment of the liberals; indeed, he clearly opposed it. It also bears witness to his strong – and rather naïve – belief in the king’s plan to produce a ‘free constitution’, something he would repeat on many occasions. On 31 May, for instance, Wellington wrote to Freire that he was persuaded, and most sincerely wished, that a ‘wise’ constitution would soon be established: J’ai toute raison de croire qu’on procédera de suite à l’établissement d’une constitution sage, qui fera le bonheur du pays ; et je le souhaite bien sincèrement.26

Wellington to Charles Stuart, Madrid, 25 May 1814. Gurwood, ed., The Dispatches, vii. 492–4. 26 Wellington to General Freire, 31 May 1814. Gurwood, ed. The Dispatches, vii. 495. 25

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Wellington’s belief in the convenience of a ‘Magna Carta’ for Spain would be persistently conveyed in further despatches. The most eloquent example is probably a long report addressed to Castlereagh on 1 June 1814. Here Wellington summarizes his dealings with and his impressions of the Spanish king and government. His insight and ability to analyse the world around him, without passion, is epitomized in the tone of disappointment27 that transpires from his words: The King and his Ministers have very well received me; but I fear that I have dome but little good. The Duke of San Carlos, in a conversation I had with him, promised me, 1st […] that the decree for calling the Cortes should appear forthwith. 2dly. That all the prisoners should be released on St Ferdinand’s day, the 30th May, excepting such as it was determined to bring to trial, who should be fairly tried, without loss of time. 3dly. That the King was determined to carry into execution all he had promised in his decree of 4th May, and moreover to establish in Spain the independence of the judges. Nothing has yet been done on any of these points.28 I told him that he must expect that the King’s measures would be attacked and abused in all parts of the world, but particularly in England; and that until some steps were taken to prove that the King was inclined to govern the country on liberal principles, and that necessity alone had occasioned the violent measures which had attended the revolution, he could not expect much countenance in England. Nothing, however, has yet been done. And I learn that three more persons were imprisoned the night before last.29

Wellington’s description of Ferdinand as ‘by no means the idiot he is represented’30 probably encouraged him to stubbornly insist that the 4th of May promises made by the monarch should be fulfilled. The many references to this matter in his dispatches provide plenty of evidence of his views. He was even bold enough to justify those who had suggested that Ferdinand should swear loyalty to the Constitution. This requirement had been established by the Cortes as early as February 1811, and sanctioned 27

Wellington’s doubts about the results of this journey did not escape his biographer Fortescue’s perception. John Fortescue, Wellington (London: Williams and Norgate, 1925), 168. 28 St Ferdinand’s day was already over. 29 Wellington to Castlereagh, Madrid, 1 June 1814. Gurwood, ed., The Dispatches, vii. 502–7. 30 Phillip Guedalla, Wellington (New York: The Literary Guild, 1931), 252.

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by the Constitution itself (art. 173). In the same dispatch addressed to Castlereagh, Wellington mentions a conversation he had with someone whose name he does not want to disclose (probably a Spanish minister) but defines as ‘la plus mauvaise tête that I have ever met’: Here arose the question of the decree of the 2nd February, and of the government de jure et de facto; and I took the opportunity of telling … as I had the Duke of San Carlos, that if anybody were to be attacked for obedience to the decree of the 2nd Feb., they ought to begin with me; for I had always obeyed the late government till His Majesty, by his decree of the 4th May, had taken the government upon himself.

During his meetings with Castlereagh in Paris, an additional purpose for Wellington’s journey to Madrid had been established. It consisted in finding a way to persuade the Spanish authorities to relinquish the frontier town of Olivenza to Portugal. On 25 May, Wellington had devised a series of strategies intended to fulfil this objective. The first one consisted in secretly making an agreement with the Spanish government according to which, in exchange for ‘certain commercial advantages’, Great Britain would ‘discourage and discountenance, by every means in our power, the rebellion in the Spanish colonies’. The second one was ‘to promise to bind North America, by a secret article’ to give no encouragement or assistance to the Spanish colonies. According to Wellington, those engagements ‘would probably induce the Spanish government to give up Olivença’. At the time Wellington could not imagine the extent to which Spain was decided not to relinquish Olivenza. But he would finally realize and admit it in the despatch to Castlereagh mentioned above. After referring to a series of unpleasant conversations on foreign politics with Ferdinand’s ministers, he concludes: From all this you will see that it has been useless even to mention Olivença and accordingly I have said nothing upon the subject, leaving it to my brother … Portugal has certainly a fair claim to Olivença. But if Spain is forced to disgorge this part of Napoleon’s robberies, she has a fair claim to Parma, of which she was robbed, or to

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compensation for that possession, with which I was given to understand the King would be satisfied.31

Wellington’s reasoning, despite his disappointment with the Spanish authorities, testifies to the fair way in which he considered the desirable implementation of what he had called ‘liberal principles’ earlier in the letter. His attitude to the outrageous policy of the Spanish king and government towards the liberals would be made crystal clear in the Memorandum he addressed to Ferdinand: Britain might provide financial aid to Spain on condition that His Majesty carries into execution ‘his gracious promises made to his subjects in his decree of the 4th May; and if some steps should not be taken to prove to the world the necessity and justice of the numerous arrests which attended His Majesty’s restoration to his throne, or for the release of the innocent, and the judicial trial of the guilty’.32

In a letter to Charles Stuart, dated 25 May 1814, Wellington had summarized the result of his journey in a positive way: ‘I have accomplished my object in coming here; that is, I think there will certainly not be civil war at present; and I propose to set out on my return on the 5th June’.33 It is no less true, however, that his exasperation with Spain had reached its peak with this, for him, unpleasant journey. His departure was as disappointing as his arrival had been glorious. His knowledge of the Spanish character, though never complete, certainly helped him to understand that it would not have been worth insisting on some of the objects his mission. Once in Bordeaux, as soon as the last Spanish troops under his command had returned to Spain, he wrote to Ferdinand and officially resigned the command in chief of the Spanish armies. It was 13 June 1814 (see Figure 1.2).

31 32 33

Wellington to Castlereagh, Madrid, 1 June 1814. Gurwood, ed., The Dispatches, vii. 503–4. Arthur Wellington, June 1814, Memorandum to His Most Catholic Majesty, Ferdinand VII, King of Spain, Gurwood, ed., The Dispatches, vii. 504–7. Wellington to Stuart, Madrid, 25 May 1814. Gurwood, ed., The Dispatches, vii. 495.

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Figure 1.2. Tomás López Enguidanos, Alianza Hispano-Inglesa. Published c. 1814. © Museo de Historia de Madrid

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A revision of Wellington’s attitude towards Spanish politics during the period studied in this chapter (October 1813-June 1814), not only in the light of his despatches, but also of other contemporary records and biographies, shows that he was far from considering absolutism as the most appropriate political alternative for Spain. He did not oppose change, progress or liberalism. Wellington was a conservative, a Tory (and a very sound one), but his attitude to Spanish politics and general affairs, far from being ultra-conservative, was guided by a pragmatic sense of justice and duty that prevailed over any kind of ideological positioning. He disliked what he called ‘democracy’ – in his words, ‘the process by which decisions were made to satisfy the wishes of the populace’, a definition that has escaped many of his detractors, particularly in Spain. Since the Hanoverian kings (apart from the restriction upon Catholic claimants from 1689) did not have a sound claim to the throne, non-Jacobite Tories were not absolutists and legitimists in the way that a continental right-winger might have been. There was by then a consensus (heightened by the excesses of the French Revolution) that English politics and political (including diplomatic and military) engagements were ‘sensible’ and pragmatic rather than theoretical – though Radical politicians took the opposite view. Wellington was part of this pragmatism, and his military experience of very varied kinds confirmed this. His disagreement with some parts of the Spanish Constitution did not prevent his promoting its proclamation when he had entered Madrid in 1812. Most of his supporters in the Cortes were liberals. And the very term liberales was the one he used most often to refer to them after absolutism was restored. Nobody but him would have been allowed to mention the infamous 4 May decree so many times, and so stubbornly while in Madrid in an attempt to remind the king of his promises. Additionally, Wellington’s best Spanish friend, Álava, was a well-known liberal who had to endure the king’s persecution. Wellington protected him to the end of his days. He also cared for the Spanish liberals who were soon to become refugees in England. And he never co-operated with the absolutist tide that was about to obscure the Spanish landscape.The prophetic words he had once addressed to the anglophile deputy Andrés Ángel de la Vega may be taken to convey an

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accurate expression of his feelings towards Spanish affairs, which result from his genuine Toryism: I have written you a very long letter, which at least shows that I take an interest in the future welfare of Spain. I should be sorry if, after all, you were to fail in establishing a system of government founded on principles of justice, which should secure the liberty of your country, and should again fall under the degrading despotism from which you have had a chance of escaping. But you may depend upon it that, whatever may be your wishes, and however good the intentions of the greater number of persons of whom the Cortes is composed, this misfortune will happen to you if you are not guided by experience and by the example of those countries in which freedom exists, instead of by the wild theories of modern days …34

34

Wellington to de la Vega, Vaughan Papers, C119/4. Partially published in Gurwood, ed., The Dispatches, vi. 261–4.

Silvia Gregorio Sainz

2 The last Napoleonic redoubt in northern Spain: The British role

Abstract By April 1814, the British, Portuguese and Spanish allies had managed to push most of the French soldiers out of the Peninsula. Napoleon had abdicated and Ferdinand VII had returned to Spain. However, some Spanish towns were still under French control. This was the case of Santoña. Occupied since 1810 by an Imperial garrison, the allied armies had not been able to take the fortress. The town became a major concern for Wellington, who eventually managed to force its capitulation, though the evacuation occurred one month after the end of the war. This chapter reconsiders the events that took place in that town in light of Wellington’s dispatches. References to Santoña in the British press and other primary sources are also examined. The presentation and analysis of this information provide new perspectives on the British siege operations in that town, the last Napoleonic redoubt in northern Spain.

The situation in Europe, 1814 In 1813, Napoleon’s power in the Peninsula had weakened after the Allies’ victories in Austria, Prussia and Russia. Wellington’s armies had managed to push most of the Imperial soldiers out of Spain. By April 1814 the war against the French had already been won, Napoleon had abdicated and Ferdinand VII had returned to his kingdom. However, peace was not yet fully effective in the Peninsula. The French were still holding a handful of

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isolated fortresses that were facing allied siege operations.1 This was the case of the Cantabrian town of Santoña, the only place in northern Spain still in enemy hands. Unlike other blockades carried out during the Peninsular War, the long-lasting siege that this town suffered, surprisingly, has not been analysed in depth.2 Wellington’s references to Santoña in his dispatches have been rather neglected.3 In this chapter, special attention is paid to Wellington’s dispatches and to his orders relating to the 1814 siege, as well as to his opinions about the operations carried out there.4 The essay also draws on

1 2

3 4

Charles Esdaile, The Duke of Wellington and the Command of the Spanish Army, 1812–14 (London: Macmillan, 1990), 135. There is no reference to this siege in the study on Peninsular War sieges by Gonzalo Butrón and Pedro Rújula, eds, Los sitios en la Guerra de La Independencia: la lucha de las ciudades (Madrid: Sílex, 2012). It is mentioned briefly twice in Francisco Escribano, ‘Los sitios en la Península Ibérica (1808–14): mucho más que mitos’, Revista de Historia Militar 53 (2009), 195–237. For an important collection of documents related to Santander and Santoña in 1808–9, see Alicia Laspra-Rodríguez, La Guerra de la Independencia en los archivos británicos del War Office. Colección documental, edición y traducción. 1808–9 (Madrid: Ministerio de Defensa, 2010). Alfredo Alonso García, Acciones militares y gestiones de guerra. Cantabria (1808–14) (Madrid: CEU, 2015) and Rafael Palacio Ramos, Santoña, plaza napoleónica (Santoña: Ayuntamiento, 2015) have recently paid some attention to British sources. John Gurwood, ed., The Dispatches of Field Mashall the Duke of Wellington, during his various campaigns in India, Denmark, Portugal, Spain, the Low Countries, and France from 1799 to 1818, 12 vols (London: Murray, 1837–8), ix–xii. Also Arthur Richard Wellesley, [II] Duke of Wellington, ed., Supplementary Dispatches, Correspondence, and Memoranda of Field Marshal Arthur, Duke of Wellington, K. G., 9 vols (London: Murray, 1861–2), vi, ix. For a comprehensive Wellington bibliography, see Rory Muir, Wellington. The Path to Victory, 1769–1814 (Cornwall: Yale University Press, 2013). More specifically on Wellington in the Peninsular War, see Ian Robertson, A Commanding Presence: Wellington in the Peninsula, 1808–14: Logistics, Strategy, Survival (Gloucestershire: Spellmount, 2008). See further Alicia Laspra-Rodríguez, ‘The reception of Wellington in Spain’, in C. M. Woolgar, ed., Wellington Studies V (Southampton: University of Southampton, 2013), 144–79.

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the British contemporary press and some contemporary authors, such as William Napier, a direct witness of the events of the Peninsular War.5 Although by the spring of 1814 most of Cantabrian territory had already been evacuated, the continued French occupation of what some called the ‘Gibraltar of the North’ produced uneasiness in every single village of the area. This was felt even more intensely when Santander became Wellington’s main harbour in northern Spain. It seemed impossible for the Cantabrian people to recover their daily routines, with the Spanish authorities permanently imposing new requisitions in order to maintain the siege of Santoña. The constant arguments and disagreements between the local and the British authorities were an additional inconvenience. The latter had been commissioned to lead the blockade and protect the rear of Wellington’s troops. The French privateers operating out of Santoña also prevented the recovery of trade and the landing of supplies for the allies.6 Peace in Cantabria, therefore, was only on paper, especially since the cessation of hostilities, signed on 18 April, had ‘officially’ put an end to the war.

5

6

William Francis Patrick Napier, History of the War in the Peninsula, and in the South of France, from the year 1807 to the year 1814 (New York: Sandlier, 1874); Andrew Leith Hay, A Narrative of the Peninsular War (London: Hearne, 1839); Robert Southey, History of the Peninsular War, 3 vols (London: Murray, 1823); John T. Jones, Account of the War in Spain and Portugal, and in the South of France, from 1808, to 1814, inclusive (London: Egerton, 1818). Joshua Moon, Wellington’s Two Front War. The Peninsular Campaigns, at Home and Abroad, 1808–14 (Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 2011), 152–3, 165 and 168–9; Palacio Ramos, La Guerra de la Independencia en Cantabria (Santander: Estvdio, 2015), 84–5; Alonso García, Acciones militares, 62 and 153; José Simón Cabarga, Santander en la Guerra de la Independencia (Santander: Cabarga, 1968), 252–4; Arsenio García Fuertes, No sin nosotros. La aportación militar española a la victoria aliada en las campañas de 1811 y 1812 de la Guerra Peninsular (Madrid: CSED, 2016), 270 and 702; Charles Esdaile, The Peninsular War. A New History (Suffolk: Penguin, 2003), 454. For actions by French privateers see Gurwood, ed., Dispatches, xi. 213, 413.

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Previous operations in Santoña: Wellington and the British sea blockade Since the beginning of the Peninsular War both the French and the allied military officers, as well as the Spanish governing bodies, had been aware of the strategic importance of Santoña on the Bay of Biscay for their operations on the northern coast. The town and its port were considered as one of the strongest positions in the area (see Figure 2.1). Lying in the peninsula of that name, Santoña is protected to the east by Mount Buciero, to the north by the beach of Berria, to the south by a bay easily commanded from the beach of San Martin in El Puntal (Laredo), and to the west by estuaries, marshlands and hills Brusco (Noja) and El Gromo (Argoños). This strategic position made it defensible with a small garrison. However, military works were necessary to optimize protection.

Figure 2.1. Vicente Tofiño de San Miguel, Port de Santoña, 1793. Public Domain. [National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London]

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British officers commissioned in the area had insisted in their dispatches on the advantages of occupying the port. On 1 September 1808, Captain J. F. Birch of the Royal Engineers sent Major General Leith a detailed report on Santoña, following the general’s instructions to examine the coast of Cantabria with a view to a possible landing by a British force. Birch emphasized the safe position of Santoña, in contrast to that of Santander, and the convenient features of its port: I have examined the Peninsula of Santoña, which is a very strong position, and a few men would be able to defend it, but it would require some time and labour to put it into proper state for this purpose. … The harbour is regarded as a remarkably good one, even for line of battle ships, and they can get out of it at any time, with any wind.

In his reports to Leith, Birch mentioned problems such as lack of the necessary resources to welcome British soldiers in the town and, most important, its relative isolation due to poor communications with the inland.7 This may explain the fact that until 1813, apart from some minor skirmishes, nothing had been done to free the place from the French. Santoña had been occupied by Imperial troops since November 1808. They initially took control of the town and the rather neglected fortifications on the adjacent rock. In 1811, as a consequence of Anglo-Spanish operations on the north coast of Spain, the French had gradually fortified it, and Napoleon had given strict orders to prevent British ships from getting control of such an advantageous position.8 Wellington’s success in 7

8

Birch to Leith, 1 September 1808, in The National Archives, Kew (hereafter TNA), W. O. 1/229, fos. 221–4, and Birch to Leith, 8 September 1808, in Alicia LaspraRodríguez, Las relaciones entre la Junta General del Principado de Asturias y el Reino Unido en la Guerra de La Independencia (Oviedo: Junta General del Principado, 1999), 329–31. See also, by the same author, Intervencionismo y revolución: Asturias y Gran Bretaña durante la Guerra de la Independencia (1808–13) (Oviedo: Real Instituto de Estudios Asturianos, 1992). Palacio Ramos, ‘Importancia estratégica de Cantabria durante la Guerra de La Independencia: vías de comunicación y plazas fuertes’, in Palacio Ramos, ed., Monte Buciero 13. Cantabria durante la Guerra de La Independencia (Santoña: Ayuntamiento, 2008), 236–7 and Un presidio ynconquistable. La fortificación de la

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Vitoria and the recapture of Castro Urdiales in June 1813 forced French troops in Cantabria to fall back into Santoña. The defensive works were then intensified in an attempt to make the stronghold impregnable.9 Fort Impérial, also known as Fort Napoléon, was then built in the peninsula to the north-west of the town. The smaller forts of Mazo, San Carlos and San Felipe, as well as the batteries of San Martín, La Cruz, Caffarelli, Ystrie and El Águila, were also erected or reinforced. The defences were completed with the construction of the forts of El Gromo and Brusco in the advanced positions of Noja and Argoños, as were the batteries of Berria, Dueso and Rouget. The French soon realized, however, that in order to obtain full control of the bay it would be essential to command the sandy area of El Puntal and the town of Laredo, south-east of Santoña. An artillery battery was positioned in El Puntal, while fort El Rastrillar in Laredo was strengthened. Santoña had, in consequence, an air of impregnability (see Figure 2.2).

bahía de Santoña entre los siglos XVI y XIX (Santander: Ayuntamiento de Santoña y Ministerio de Defensa, 2004), 65–6. For Napoleon’s orders to strengthen Santoña see Napier, History of the War, 321, 356. For military operations in the town between 1808 and 1813 see Palacio Ramos, Santoña, plaza napoleónica, 33–145; Alonso García, Acciones militares, 58–63, and García Fuertes, No sin nosotros, 478–80. 9 Napier, History of the War, 593; Southey, History of the Peninsular War, vi. 179; Palacio Ramos, Un presidio, 80 and Guerra, 98–9, and Esdaile, Peninsular War, 452–4. On the role of the British forces in the recapture of Castro Urdiales see Silvia Gregorio Sainz, ‘Asedio y destrucción de Castro Urdiales según fuentes británicas: la participación del aliado británico en la defensa de la villa cántabra (abril-junio 1813)’, in Miguel Ángel Sánchez Gómez, ed., La Guerra de la Independencia en Castro Urdiales. 11 de mayo de 1813 (Torrelavega: Gobierno de Cantabria and Ayuntamiento de Castro Urdiales, 2015), 89–115.

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Figure 2.2. W. Faden, Harbour of Santoña, 1812. © Museo Naval, Madrid

These defences prevented Spanish regular forces, led by General Gabriel de Mendizábal and supported by guerrillas from the north, from taking

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the fortress by assault. In May 1813, 4,000 Spanish soldiers were besieging a French garrison of approximately 1,300 men but the former lacked sufficient means to take the town by storm.10 The only solution was to organize a blockade, so as force the town to surrender by exhaustion. The Spanish forces took charge of the land siege while the British sealed the port. The duties of the Royal Navy involved not only preventing French aid from reaching Santoña but also protecting allied shipping and Spanish trade from enemy attacks11 (Figure 2.3).

Figure 2.3.  John Synge, Fortress of Santona in the Province of Burgos, blockaded by the Spanish army, 1813. © The Board of Trinity College, Dublin

10 11

Palacio Ramos, Un presidio, 78–80 and ‘Importancia estratégica de Cantabria’, 239, and Alonso García, Acciones militares, 62. On the British Navy during the Peninsular War see further Christopher D. Hall, Wellington’s Navy: Sea Power and the Peninsular War 1807–14 (London: Chatham, 2004).

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Nevertheless, by the start of 1814 it had still proved impossible to take Santoña. This was scarcely comprehensible to the Spaniards, who started blaming their allies, as Diario de Juan Verdades shows: Why has Santoña not surrendered yet, good question! What is the point in our troops’ siege disturbing the neighbouring villages with the burden of the blockade? As long as aid by sea succours is not intercepted, Santoña will not surrender until Doomsday. In the middle of last month, two luggers from Bayonne came through, and two schooners and other smaller boats were in the rear. Moreover, the insolence of the Santoña people is such that they have armed some privateers. With three two-masted coasters they have taken six prizes in fifteen days … Thus Santoña will not capitulate. Leave that question for the English, as they will know what to do.12

Not only were British ships blamed for the lack of progress, but according to some authors, Spanish troops could have conducted operations more efficiently.13 In any case, the sea blockade did not work. This was confirmed by Napier, who publicized the complaints of the Spanish general blockading Santoña in the summer of 1813. He had revealed that the efforts of the Spanish troops were useless, because the French were reinforcing the fortress by sea. Furthermore, the small French fleet quartered there was interfering with Wellington’s campaign in the north. The blockade was actually described by Napier as ‘nominal’: ‘[Santoña] was blockaded on the seaboard by the English ships of war, but only nominally, for the garrison received supplies, and the flotilla vexed Lord Wellington’s communications, took many of his store-ships and other vessels, delayed his 12 13

Diario de Juan Verdades, 14 January 1814, in Alonso García, Acciones militares, 63 (my translation). There is no agreement on who was to blame for the unsuccessful siege. In his December 1813 dispatches Wellington supports the effectiveness of the land blockade (Gurwood, ed., Dispatches, x, 402–7, but historians point out the flaws of that operation. Charles W. Oman, A History of the Peninsular War, 8 vols (London: Greenhill Books, 2005), vii 299, refers to the ‘unskilful attacks of Mendizabal’s engineers’ against Santoña. Esdaile, Peninsular War, 484, points out that the fortresses could have been released earlier if the Spanish besiegers (most of them guerrilla) had shown a stronger disposition. Carmen Gómez Rodrigo, ‘Ayuda inglesa a Santander en la Guerra de la Independencia’, XL Aniversario de Estudios Montañeses (Santander: Diputación Provincial, 1976), 414–15 reiterates flaws in the land blockade.

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convoy, etc’. And he adds that ‘after the battle of Vitoria not less than five vessels laden with stores and provisions, and one transport having British soldiers and clothing on board, were taken by cruisers issuing out of that port’.14 According to some Spanish sources, the flaws in the blockade were the result of the allies being involved in too many operations at the same time and not having enough vessels at their disposal.15 Wellington, in turn, put the failure down to lack of co-ordination between Spanish and British forces. He even accused the Admiralty of failing to warn transport masters that the port of Santoña was still occupied by the enemy. This confusion caused Spaniards to mistrust British intentions.16 Rumours even spread that the British wanted to take possession of the Santoña fortress themselves and turn it into a new Gibraltar.17 Wellington, aware of deficiencies in the sea blockade, was determined ‘to put it all under a better footing’, as he wrote to Lieutenant-General John Hope on 17 October 1813. Similar dispatches were forwarded to the officer in charge of the sea blockade, Captain George Collier, to Earl Bathurst and to Lieutenant-General Lord Aylmer.18 Wellington ordered the latter to head for Santoña, to tighten the blockade in collaboration with Collier and, together with Spanish forces, take Laredo and El Puntal. This manoeuvre was not possible owing to lack of co-ordination, according to British contemporary sources.19 Spanish sources, on the other hand, blamed the capitulation of Pamplona and subsequent forward movement of the allied

14 Napier, History of the War, 639 and 713. For other problems in the Santoña sea blockade see Southey, History of the Peninsular War, vi 375; Gurwood, The Dispatches, x 421–3; Gómez Rodrigo, ‘Ayuda inglesa’, 414–15, and Palacio Ramos, ‘Importancia estratégica’, 239. 15 Palacio Ramos, Un presidio, 78 and Santoña, 166. 16 Oman, A History, vii, 147–8. 17 Gómez Rodrigo, ‘Ayuda inglesa’, 414–15 and Palacio Ramos, Un presidio, 83. 18 Wellington to Collier, Lesaca 3 October 1813; Wellington to Aylmer, Vera 16 October 1813; Wellington to Hope, Vera 17 October 1813; Wellington to Bathurst, Vera 20 October 1813, and Wellington to his Adjutant General, St Jean de Luz, 1 December 1813, in Gurwood, ed., Dispatches, xi, 155, 186–98, 164, 212 and 330 respectively. See also Gómez Rodrigo, ‘Ayuda inglesa’, 415. 19 Napier, History of the War, 664 and 713.

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army towards the French frontier, which rendered Santoña useless for future allied military actions.20 Regardless of the reasons for not having carried out the operation, Captain John Wells of the Royal Engineers was sent to ‘quicken the Spanish officers’ siege operations on the ground’.21 The Treaty of Valençay was signed in December 1813. Article 5 established that all Spanish fortresses under a French garrison should be handed over to the Spanish Army. The situation in Santoña, however, remained unchanged until February 1814. In December of the previous year, Wellington had already accused Admiral Collier of negligence in his operations on the Cantabrian coast: It would appear that if the enemy’s vessels can come out of and go into Santoña, and can cruise off the port, it would not be impossible for His Majesty’s ships to maintain a blockade. If it is so, it is quite useless for them to pretend to maintain it. From all the intelligence which I have, I believe that, if the blockade had been maintained, and no vessel had run into Santoña, the place would before now have been under the necessity of surrendering.22

The end of the Santoña siege: The role of the British (spring 1814) Despite the fact that Santoña was still occupied at the beginning of 1814, the sea blockade had some positive results. The British press regularly reported the situation to the public. On 3 January, the Hampshire Chronicle and the Caledonian Mercury reported that the frigate Andromeda had captured the French vessel Prosper, on its departure from Santoña.23 However, the French also captured British ships. On 19 January, the Star reported: ‘We think it 20 Palacio Ramos, Santoña, 164. 21 See above, n. 19. 22 Wellington to Collier, St Jean de Luz, 28 December 1813, in Gurwood, Dispatches, xi, 402–3 and 406. Also mentioned in Napier, History of the War, 704. 23 Hampshire Chronicle, 3 January 1814, 4; Caledonian Mercury, 3 January 1814, 3.

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proper to apprize our commercial readers that the port of Santona on the north coast of Spain is still in possession of the French, and that several British vessels have been captured by going too near the rock.’24 No doubt, the sea blockade was not yet fully effective. Well aware of this, Wellington insisted on the importance of strengthening it with a view to ensuring the supply of the allied armies along the northern coast of the Peninsula, as well as to prevent the French garrison in Santoña from receiving reinforcements and from attacking allied vessels.25 As it seemed impossible to force a surrender by exhaustion, on 13 February 1814 the Spanish units in the area received Wellington’s orders to take Laredo and Santoña by storm.26 The English press echoed those plans a few weeks later. On 4 March 1814 the Morning Chronicle published reports from Santander dated 18 January. Plans were announced for an assault on the town: ‘The blockade of Santona is continued, and the force before it is augmented to 7,000 men. An assault is contemplated, and it is expected to be successful.’27 Napier describes these operations in detail and unveils interesting particulars about the involvement of British officers.28 On the night of 13 February, the Spanish leader of the siege, Brigadier Diego del Barco,29 who was at the head of the Monterrey Regiment, briefly held the battery of El Puntal. Seven days later, he ordered a double attack.

24 Star, 19 January 1814, 3. 25 Wellington to Bathurst, St Jean de Luz, 1 January 1814, in Gurwood, ed., Dispatches, xi, 413. See Palacio Ramos, Santoña, 175. 26 They were the 1st Brigade of the 3rd and 4th divisions of the IV Army, the 2nd and 3rd battalions of Tiradores de Cantabria and the 2nd and 3rd of Vizcaya, Volunteers of La Bureba, two companies from the 4th Field Artillery Regiment and two companies of sappers from the 6th Battalion. The sea blockade included the British frigates Surveillante, Rhin, Iris and Medusa, a brig and two cutters. See García Fuertes, ‘Cantabria y sus hombres durante la Guerra de la Independencia’, in Palacio Ramos, ed., Monte Buciero 13 (Santoña: 2008), 287–304; Palacio Ramos, Un presidio, 80–1 and La Guerra de la Independencia en Cantabria, 106. 27 Morning Chronicle (London), 4 March 1814, 2. 28 Napier, History of the War, 713. 29 See García Fuertes, El brigadier Diego del Barco en la Guerra de la Independencia (La Coruña: Arenas, 2014).

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First, Del Barco himself with the Volunteers of Toledo, León and Bureba were to storm the fort of El Rastrillar and the neighbouring town of Laredo. He succeeded in storming Laredo and took some outer defences of the fort. Unfortunately, Del Barco was wounded in the assault and the attackers fell back. At this point, the accounts given by Spanish sources differ significantly from those in British reports. According to Del Barco, Captain Wells had simply directed his first moves towards the fort.30 By contrast, British authors claim that he was the leader of the offensive that took place on 24 February: Capt. [ John] Wells … now strenuously urged the Spaniards to crown the counterscarp of the fort at Laredo and attack vigorously, but they preferred establishing four field-pieces. These guns … were dismounted the moment they began to fire, and the Spanish generals committed the direction of the attack to Wells. He immediately opened a heavy musketry fire on the fort to stifle the noise of his workmen, then pushing trenches up the hill close to the counterscarp in the night, he was proceeding to burst open the gate … when the Italian garrison … mutinied against their commander and, making him prisoner, surrendered the place.31

Afterwards, Colonel Juan José San Llorente, second in command of the Spanish blockading forces, led the 2nd and 3rd battalions of Tiradores de Cantabria and the 2nd and 3rd of Biscay to capture the outposts of El Brusco and El Gromo, a task which he carried out successfully on the 25th and 26th of that month.32 On the 26th, Del Barco died in Colindres. San Llorente then assumed command of the land siege.33 The French garrison of Santoña was in fact isolated, with the allies now fully commanding the entrance to the harbour. The Imperial forces were headed by General Charles Malo François Lameth and included French, German, Dutch and Italian troops belonging to a variety of units. An Italian 30 See above, n. 20 and n. 26. 31 Napier, History of the War, 713. The episode is briefly described in Archibald Alison, History of Europe, from the Commencement of the French Revolution in 1789, to the Restoration of the Bourbons in 1815, 18 vols (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1852), xviii, 261. 32 Palacio Ramos, Un presidio, 80–1 and Santoña, 182–5. 33 García Fuertes, El brigadier Diego del Barco, 198–214; Alonso García, Acciones militares, 63–4.

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regiment garrisoned the fort of Laredo. Even though the Spanish forces maintaining the siege had increased their numbers to 7,000 in March, it was still impossible to capture the fortress by storm. This was due to the physical shape of the peninsula and to the fact that the enemy had heavily fortified the town in previous years.34 The French governor and the garrison were still strong in their position, and confident that Napoleon would relieve them.35 Almost a month later, on 31 March, the Cheltenham Chronicle reported that ‘Ferdinand [VII] had arrived in Toulouse on his way to Spain, the fort of Laredo in Biscay had surrendered to Spanish troops; but Santoña had still a French garrison’.36 Around that time two British officers, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Sullivan and Captain Dundas of HMS Pyramid, were in Santander. Intelligence there suggested that ‘should a British force appear before Santoña (however inconsiderable it might be in point of numbers), the French General commanding would be induced to surrender’. Bearing that in mind, they decided to approach the town. However, they could not arrive until 21 March, when they ‘found that the French officer commanding the town had just concluded a capitulation with the Spaniards’.37 General Lameth, aware of the change in fortunes of the Imperial forces in France, had offered the surrender of the fortress to San Llorente, who agreed on a provisional armistice on two essential conditions. These were the closure of the port and the cessation of activities by sea along the coast. The truce, concluded in Santander on 26 March,38 had to be ratified by the commanding generals of both armies, Wellington and Soult.39

Palacio Ramos, ‘Importancia estratégica’, 239 and Santoña, 186–7. Alonso García, Acciones militares, 65. Cheltenham Chronicle, 31 March 1814, 2. Sullivan to Wellington, Rentería 24 March 1814, in [II] Duke of Wellington, ed., Supplementary Dispatches, viii. 689. 38 Archivo Municipal de Santander (hereafter AMS), Libro de Actas de Sesiones del Ayuntamiento, año 1814, Pleno 26 nº 1, 26 marzo 1814, fos. 32–3. 39 Oman, A History of the Peninsular War, vii 503; Napier, History of the War, 713; Cabarga, Santander, 254–5; Alonso García, Acciones militares, 65–6. Palacio Ramos, Santoña, 187. 34 35 36 37

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The arrival of Sullivan and Dundas in Santoña fuelled suspicions about the real intentions of the British. The French governor further sowed the seeds of distrust. On 25 March, the newspaper El Bascongado published an extract from a letter by Lameth in which he claimed that some British officers that had arrived at Santoña – perhaps referring to Sullivan and Dundas – had made a request to take possession of the town on behalf of their government. According to his letter, the French governor had rejected the proposal and actually ordered some vessels to protect the port against British action.40 Lameth was suspicious of British intentions. His refusal to hand over the town to a British force meant that Santoña remained under the French for longer. Instead of ratifying the capitulation, Wellington rejected it. The reason, as he explained to Henry Bathurst on 1 April, was that ‘it stipulated that the garrison were to return to France, under engagement not to serve for one year’. As had just happened in Jaca, Wellington was sure that the French would violate the condition, and so threaten Anglo-Spanish operations beyond the Pyrenees. He did not judge it ‘proper’ to liberate the town on those terms. He had previously turned down the evacuation of Barcelona and other strongholds, such as Tortosa, Peñíscola, and Murviedro. Finally, he also thought that Santoña might not be important for further military operations.41 Some claimed that Wellington’s real reason for not accepting the French capitulation may have been that he was jealous of the decisive Spanish intervention.42 This suspicion, on analysis, seems unsubstantiated. In his official correspondence Wellington never criticized either the Spanish land operations or their proceedings when Lameth offered to surrender the fortress. Wellington’s refusal of the Santoña capitulation seems to be

40 Palacio Ramos, Santoña, 188–9. 41 Wellington a Bathurst, Seysses, 1 April 1814, in Gurwood, ed., Dispatches, xi. 621–2. The information in this dispatch is also mentioned in José María Queipo de Llano, Conde de Toreno, Historia del levantamiento, guerra y revolución en España [1835–7] (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Políticos, 2008), 140–1. 42 Palacio Ramos, Un presidio, 82.

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well grounded: it was apparently no longer of great value for the future conduct of the war.43 Having rejected the armistice, in his dispatch of 1 April Wellington ordered the naval commander on the Cantabrian coast to keep up the blockade. He also asked Bathurst to offer the means required to maintain it, and ensured that the government was informed about the refusal. It was crucial, he stated, to quash the rumour that the French garrison in Santoña had capitulated, in order to prevent British ships from entering the port, where they might be captured.44 On 2 April, Wellington also informed Captain Hall, HMS Kangaroo, that the truce had not been accepted and therefore urged him to maintain the blockade in that part of the coast.45 Immediately after Captain Dundas became aware of the situation in Santoña, he dispatched a vessel to England with the account of the prearmistice between French and Spanish forces.46 News soon leaked to the British press, which lost no time before publicizing information about the long-awaited capitulation that had not been ratified by the commanderin-chief. On 1 April 1814 the Morning Chronicle announced that ‘mails from Cadiz and Corunna arrived yesterday, by which we learnt that the fortress of Santona has at length surrendered’. In the following days the news was published in at least eight more newspapers all over England. The Leeds Intelligencer (4 April), the Bury and Norwich Post (6 April), the Worcester Journal (7 April) and the Lancaster Gazette (9 April) all mentioned that an ‘account by the Corunna mail states that the important fortress of Santoña, in the Bay of Biscay, has at last surrendered’. On the last of these dates the Morning Post also published a letter from Cork dated 4 April, which informed readers that the fortress had been captured with its garrison of 1,000 men. On the 11th of that month, the Hampshire Telegraph also informed its readers of the event. Finally, on 18 April, the Statesman, in a section entitled ‘Spanish Papers’, included an extract of a letter from 43 Wellington to Bathurst, Seysses, 1 April 1814, in Gurwood, ed., Dispatches, xi. 621–2. 44 See above, n. 43. 45 Wellington to Hall, Seysses, 2 April 1814, in Gurwood, ed., Dispatches, xi. 11, 623. The first letter is also mentioned in Oman, A History of the Peninsular War, vii. 503. 46 See above, n. 34.

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Bilbao announcing the long-awaited news: ‘Bilboa [sic], March 26. This day the fortress of Santona capitulated, on condition of the French part of the garrison being permitted to return to France; the Germans and other foreigners are allowed to turn to their homes.’ The following day, the Morning Chronicle also published the same information.47 However, for the reasons explained above, Wellington resumed hostilities on 9 April 1814.48 Ironically, by then Paris had already capitulated and Napoleon had been forced to abdicate; the throne had been restored to the Bourbons and Wellington’s army closed in at Toulouse, where Soult had withdrawn with his troops. The Convention of Toulouse, signed on 18 April, marked the official end of the Peninsular War.49 Consequently, an agreement had to be reached concerning the release of the seven Spanish fortresses still held by French garrisons: Tortosa, Murviedro, Peñíscola, Barcelona, Hostalric, San Fernando de Figueras and Santoña.50 The plan for evacuation of the Cantabrian fortress was finally established on the following terms: Article 5. The town and forts of Santoña shall be evacuated by the French troops, and made over to the Spanish Forces. The French Garrison will remove with it all that properly belongs to it, together with such arms, artillery, and other military effects as have not been the property originally of the Spanish Government. The Marquis Wellington will determine whether the French Garrison of Santoña shall return to France by land or by sea and, in either case the passage of the garrison shall be secured, and it will be directed upon one of the places or posts contiguous to the army of the Duke of Dalmatia. The ships of war, or other vessels, now in the harbour of Santoña, belonging to France, shall be allowed to proceed to Rochefort, and be furnished with passports for that purpose. The Duke of Dalmatia will send

47 Morning Chronicle, 1 April 1814, 2–3; Leeds Intelligencer, 4 April 1814, 2; Bury and Norwich Post, 6 April 1814, 4; Worcester Journal, 7 April 1814, 4; Lancaster Gazette, 9 April 1814, 1–3; Morning Post, 9 April 1814, 2; Hampshire Telegraph, 11 April 1814, 4; Statesman, 18 April 1814, 4, and Morning Chronicle, 19 April 1814, 2. 48 Alonso García, Acciones militares, 66. 49 Huw J. Davies, Wellington’s Wars. The Making of a Military Genius (London: Yale University Press, 2012), 211; see also Alicia Laspra-Rodríguez in this volume. 50 Escribano, ‘Los sitios en la Península Ibérica’, 26.

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Silvia Gregorio Sainz an officer to communicate to the French Commander in Santoña the terms of the present convention, and cause them to be complied with.51

On 27 April, the London Gazette published a letter from Wellington, dated Toulouse on the 19th, in which he informed Bathurst of a truce between his army and the French officers in the town, though he added that it had still to be officially accepted.52 Finally, the truce was ratified by Wellington on the British side and by Soult and Suchet on the French side, on that very day, 27 April.53 The agreement, which was made public in Santander on 5 May 1814,54 did not mean an immediate lifting of the siege. On the contrary, the evacuation of the French garrison still had to wait, due to the French governor’s refusal to hand the fortress over to British officers. As mentioned above, Lameth was suspicious of British intentions, and preferred to surrender the town to Spanish forces.55 Santoña was still occupied by the French when Ferdinand VII entered Madrid on 10–11 May.56 It would not be until 15 May, according to both British and Spanish sources, that the French garrison embarked, setting sail on the following day. On 23 May, Major General Sir George Murray informed Wellington accordingly.57 The report by the Spanish officer responsible for the land siege, Juan Doz, confirms the

TNA, WO 1/203, 293–9 and WO 37/12, n. 81; Gurwood, ed., Dispatches, xi. 653–4; Cabarga, Santander, 255; Jones, Account of the War, 434–5; Palacio Ramos, Un presidio, 191 and Alonso García, Acciones militares, 67 also include Article 5 of the Treaty as it was published in El Bascongado (30 April 1814) and Diario Crítico General (1 May 1814). 52 London Gazette (London), 27 April 1814, 897. Also in the European Magazine and London Review, 66 (London: Philosophical Society, 1814), 155. 53 Palacio Ramos, Santoña, 191. 54 AMS, Libro de Actas de Sesiones del Ayuntamiento, año 1814, Pleno 26 nº 1, 5 mayo 1814, fo. 45v, quoted in Alonso García, Acciones militares, 68. 55 See above, n. 33. 56 Esdaile, Peninsular War, 499. 57 Murray to Wellington, Toulouse, 23 April 1814, in [II] Duke of Wellington, ed., Supplementary Despatches, ix. 101. 51

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date.58 The last Napoleonic military outpost in the north of the Peninsula had been evacuated approximately one month after the official end of the war, and the province of Cantabria was finally free from Imperial soldiers. The main argument of this chapter is that even when the Peninsular conflict was already over, peace was far from becoming a reality in Cantabria. The Santoña fortress and harbour were still occupied by a French garrison and under siege by the British and Spanish. Sources provide a new perspective on British activity and behaviour over the town, which had been traditionally simplified and sometimes misunderstood or neglected. From the very beginning, the British were aware of the importance of the port, although they never planned to seize it. Santoña’s poor land communications may explain the initial preference for Santander. However, as the conflict unfolded, Santoña became a major concern. The ineffective sea blockade by the British Navy led Wellington to take charge himself. Similarly, the Spanish land siege ran into difficulties. Records show that, despite shortcomings and errors, the British did their best, and the capitulation of Laredo and Santoña was in fact the result of British operations. References in the British press reveal the importance paid in Great Britain to the peculiar situation in Santoña. Plans by ‘perfidious Albion’ to establish a new Gibraltar cannot be proved, though the close attention given to the events by the British press could explain the rumours. Despite that interest, however, there seems to have been no romanticizing of the episode, as happened, for instance, with the siege of Castro Urdiales. This opens up a new topic for further research: namely, the way in which military operations in Cantabria during the Peninsular War were depicted by writers of the time.

58

Alonso García, Acciones militares, 68. The British and Spanish sources confirm the date. However, Toreno claims that the evacuation took place on 28 May. Palacio Ramos, ‘Importancia estratégica’, 239, and Escribano, ‘Los sitios’, 26 also favour the second date.

Juan L. Sánchez

3 Robert Southey and the ‘British Liberales’

Abstract According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Robert Southey’s reference to the ‘British Liberales’ in his April 1816 Quarterly Review article marks the first time the word ‘liberal’ entered the English language with a specifically political connotation. Southey appropriates the word ‘liberales’ to designate (scornfully) a specific political group in Britain. This essay returns to Southey’s defining linguistic event but probes deeper into the context from which his appropriation of the name of the Spanish political group largely responsible for drafting the 1812 Spanish Constitution emerges. By specifically identifying for the first time in print the actual British Liberales to whom Southey refers when attacking those who oppose the Alien Bill of 1816, this essay provides important insights into the evolution of Southey’s political thought in the post-Napoleonic era and the various issues that shaped national policies that were with increasing frequency labelled as ‘liberal’. Despite his dismissal of the British Liberales for what he perceived as their preference for abstract politics over the practical task of governing, Southey advocated modern policies that would become foundational to the institutions and practices of the modern liberal state.

British liberal politics In his April 1816 Quarterly Review article reviewing the Mémoires de Madame la Marquise de la Roche Jaquelein published the previous year, Robert Southey concludes his essay with several disparaging remarks directed toward what he refers to as his nation’s own ‘British Liberales!’1 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Southey’s appropriation of the

1

Robert Southey, ‘La Roche Jaquelein – La Vendée’, The Quarterly Review 15 (1816), 69.

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self-designated name of the Spanish political party in Cádiz largely responsible for drafting, ratifying, and promulgating the 1812 Spanish Constitution marks the first time the term ‘liberal’ enters the English language with a political connotation to refer to a specific political orientation. Although English references to the term as a political category can be found in parliamentary speeches predating this moment,2 Southey’s appropriation of the Spanish word as a term of abuse continues to be cited as the defining linguistic event in the evolution of the meaning of ‘liberal’ in early nineteenth-century Britain.3 For literary critics of the Romantic period, the adoption of the title Liberal as the name of a joint periodical venture involving Lord Byron, Leigh Hunt, and Percy Bysshe Shelley is of particular interest, given the fact that the term served as ‘the signature of the second generation of Romantic writers’, as Jonathan Gross writes, and, as a result, became ‘one of the most significant uses of the word as a noun in the English language’.4 Despite several efforts to trace the meaning of the term ‘liberal’ in English, particularly in relation to literary history, the connections between Southey’s importation of Spanish terminology into a British 2

3

4

See, for example, Élie Halévy, A History of the English People 1815–30, trans. E. I. Watkin (London: T. Fisher Unwin Ltd, 1926), 80, and Jonathan Gross, ‘Byron and The Liberal: Periodical as Political Posture’, Philological Quarterly 72 (1993), 471–85. See, for example, Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Croom Helm, 1976), 148–50, and J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1660–1832: Religion, Ideology and Politics During the Ancien Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 6–8. For a more recent account of Southey’s innovative use of the word, see Jörn Leonard, ‘Translation as Cultural Transfer and Semantic Interaction: European Variations of Liberal between 1800 and 1830’, in Martin J. Burke and Melvin Richter, eds, Why Concepts Matter: Translating Social and Political Thought (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 93–108. Gross, ‘Byron’, 471. According to some scholars, the correct title for the journal is the Liberal rather than The Liberal, a detail that raises important questions about the use of the term with respect to its adjectival and/or nominative function in the title. For further discussion of this issue, see Agustín Coletes Blanco, ‘Poems on the Spanish liberal revolution in the British radical press (1820–3)’, in this volume.

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political context in 1816 and its emergence as the signal phrase defining the politics and poetry of the Hunt circle in the 1820s have tended to be cursory at best. Consequently, the history of liberal thought in early nineteenth-century Britain, though often directly linked to values associated with free speech, civil liberties and domestic reform, remains susceptible to vague accounts of the progressive politics beginning to take shape in post-Napoleonic Britain.5 Despite a general acknowledgement among critics that the precise meaning of liberal is diffuse and varied, the term continues to be employed with regular frequency by literary critics who regard its meaning as self-evident. As a generic reference to progressive politics or to a general disposition of political opposition to the established Church and state, the application of the term liberal to describe Whigs, reformers, and even radicals does not seem particularly problematic. When compared to the precision and care with which literary critics explore radical opposition in the period, however, the use of the term liberal to signify the political outlook of certain writers appears woefully inadequate. This inadequacy seems especially true when critics describe political expression in the period as either liberal or conservative, an anachronism that most clearly reveals itself when self-described nineteenth-century liberals espouse ideas that have become by today’s standards the hallmarks of conservative thought. Yet, references to ‘liberal radicalism’,6 ‘Romantic liberalism’,7 ‘conservative liberalism’,8 or ‘radical

5

6 7 8

For an account of liberalism as a post-Napoleonic progressive movement, see, for example, Peter Thorslev, ‘Post-Waterloo Liberalism: The Second Generation’, Studies in Romanticism 28/3 (1989), 437–61; and Philip Shaw, ‘Leigh Hunt and the Aesthetics of Post-War Liberalism’, in Philip Shaw, ed., Romantic Wars: Studies in Culture and Conflict, 1793–1822 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 185–207. Katey Castellano, The Ecology of British Romantic Conservativism, 1790–1837 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 104. Carmen Casaliggi and Porscha Fermanis, Romanticism: A Literary and Cultural History (New York: Routledge, 2016), 175. Cynthia Chase, ‘Introduction’, in Cynthia Chase, ed., Romanticism (New York: Routledge, 2014), 21.

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Whig liberalism’,9 among others, though valuable as self-contained frameworks for political interpretation, serve to further obscure rather than clarify the ‘semantic transformation of political and social concepts’, that Jörn Leonhard argues, requires a historical investigation into the ‘specific relation between language and historical reality’.10 In this essay, I return once again to Southey’s defining linguistic usage, but probe deeper into the context from which his allusion to British Liberales emerges. Situating Southey’s remarks within the general aim of the Quarterly Review article in which they first appear, this essay also identifies for the first time in print the actual British Liberales to whom he refers when discussing those who oppose the Alien Bill of 1816. This revelation, I will argue, provides important insights into the evolution of Southey’s political thought in the post-Napoleonic era and the issues that shaped national politics that were with increasing frequency labelled as ‘liberal’. Although it is tempting to read Southey’s pejorative reference to the British Liberales in the light of customary assessments of Southey’s growing conservativism, situating the meaning of liberal within the narrative of romantic ‘apostates’, I argue, distorts rather than clarifies our understanding of the word’s significance within the political discourse of post-Waterloo Britain. An unapologetic supporter of what he consistently termed the ‘Spanish revolution’,11 Southey’s disillusionment with the Spanish Liberales towards the end of the Peninsular War had less to do with his ‘Romantic conservativism’12 as it did with his belief that the men in whom he had placed the hope of Europe had abandoned the practical task of creating 9 10 11

12

Lee Ward, The Politics of Liberty in England and Revolutionary America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 213. Jörn Leonhard, ‘From European Liberalism to the Languages of Liberalisms: The Semantics of “Liberalism” in European Comparison’, Redescriptions: Yearbook of Political Thought and Conceptual History 8 (2004), 19. Lynda Pratt, Tim Fulford and Ian Packer, eds, The Collected Letters of Robert Southey, 2009, in Romantic Circles , 228. All citations from Letters will reference the number assigned to each letter in this edition. David Eastwood, ‘Robert Southey and the Intellectual Origins of Romantic Conservatism’, The English Historical Review 104, 411 (1989), 308–31.

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the ‘modern liberal state’13 they had originally sought to establish. By returning to this originating moment in the history of the word ‘liberal’ in the English language, I identify the beginning of what I argue is a bifurcation in the history of British liberal thought, with one path leading to the development of the ‘modern liberal state’ and the other to the emergence of liberalism as a political philosophy and ideological construct. Such an argument, though presented in very general outline for the sake of clarity, is not designed to deny the manifold and sometimes contradictory ways that the term liberal was employed by writers throughout the period, nor is it meant to justify a projection onto the past of meanings and concepts that could not have been intended or were only formulated much later. Instead, by situating its analysis within the specific context of Southey’s political thought between 1816 and 1822, this essay limits its investigation into the linguistic history of the word liberal to the terms of political debate available to Southey as he struggled to diagnose the social discontent of the post-war period and offer ‘true practical remedies’14 for its alleviation. Despite his dismissal of the British Liberales for what he perceived as their preference for abstract politics over the practical task of governing, Southey advocated policies that would become foundational to the institutions and practices of the modern liberal state. By emphasizing process over concept, the present over history, and the political over the ideological, Southey’s newfound pragmatic approach to solving Britain’s post-war problems justified state intervention when done in the interest of the welfare of its citizens. Yet, as Southey always insisted, ‘[i]t is the People at this time who stand in need of reformation, not the Government’.15 Limiting the role of government to ‘better[ing] the condition of the populace’, Southey 13

The phrase ‘modern liberal state’ is an English translation of the Spanish description of ‘un estado moderno y liberal’ frequently used by the Spanish Liberales to refer to the modern Spanish state they hoped would emerge from the nation’s adoption of the ‘liberal’ constitution of 1812. See Javier Fernández Sebastián, ‘Liberales y Liberalismo en España, 1810–50: La forja de un concepto y la creación de una identidad política’, Revista de Estudios Políticos 134 (2006), 125–76. 14 Francis Jeffrey, ‘Wat Tyler and Mr. Southey’, The Edinburgh Review 28 (1817), 169. 15 Southey, A Letter to William Smith, Esq. M. P. from Robert Southey (London: John Murray, 1817), 31.

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began to articulate principles that not only helped establish the rationale for the creation of the welfare state, but also contributed to the concept of the modern liberal state that holds individuals accountable for their own moral development and limits the state to protecting the freedom of individuals to do so.

Liberalism and Jacobinism In her evaluation of the international dimensions of liberal thought in early nineteenth-century Britain, Daisy Hay convincingly demonstrates the remarkable consistency with which the term liberal in English became increasingly associated with ‘a more diffuse foreign, radical otherness’.16 Southey’s political attack on those whom he viewed as British Liberales, according to Hay, was merely one of the first of what would become a salvo of public censures denouncing the ‘un-English’ importation of dangerous ‘liberal’ ideas.17 Lord Castlereagh, for example, in response to a motion put forth by Henry Brougham requesting formal British intercession on behalf of the recently persecuted Liberales in Spain following the restoration of Ferdinand VII, seizes the opportunity to denounce the Spanish Liberales as ‘politically a French party of the worse description’.18 Although the Liberales were ‘in a military point of view, an Anti-French party’ and noble and heroic in their efforts to expel the enemy from their borders, Castlereagh admits, their attempt to ‘correct partial imperfections, by the total subversion of an established system’ clearly demonstrated that the

16 17 18

Daisy Hay, ‘Liberals, Liberales and The Liberal: a Reassessment’, European Romantic Review 19/4 (2008), 310. Hay, ‘Liberals, Liberales and The Liberal’, 310. T. C. Hansard, The Parliamentary Debates from the Year 1803 to the Present Time, 41 vols (London, 1812–20), xxxii. 602.

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‘Liberales were a perfectly jacobinical party in point of principle’.19 By 1822, when the Blackwood’s reviewer of the Liberal had occasion to comment on the political meaning of its title, the political designation of ‘liberal’ had become a commonplace term of abuse by those who wished to associate their political opponents with revolution and dangerous radical thought. As the reviewer concludes, ‘If the professors of the Liberal schools persist in their endeavours to deprave the minds of their followers, and root out the better feelings of our nature from their hearts, it will be impossible much longer to distinguish between Liberalism and Jacobinism’.20 Whether motivated by a desire to represent a more direct connection between British liberals and French Jacobins or simply a matter of misinformation, the reviewer, however, misidentifies the Liberales as a party not in Spain but in France, whose political disposition is readily legible in the opposition between ‘ultra-liberals’ and ‘ultra-royalists’ in post-Napoleonic France.21 While those who called themselves Chevaliers de la Foi but were widely known as Ultraroyalistes became a legitimist party following the Bourbon restoration, no party ever formally adopted the designation of ‘liberal’ until much later, although party challengers to the ultra-royalist faction did appeal to that Napoleonic invention of ‘idées liberales’.22 Francis Jeffrey, though resorting to the terminology of ‘Ultras’ and ‘Liberals’ to describe ‘Bourbonists’ and ‘Bonapartists’ in his 1820 Edinburgh Review article on the present state of France, prefaces his comments with an acknowledgement of the difficulty of describing the ‘political point of view’ of the various parties in France, since ‘so much and so variously do they modify and balance and neutralize each other – and so frequently do parties change their names, and qualify their principles in the alternations of success and

19 Hansard, The Parliamentary Debates from the Year 1803 to the Present Time, xxxii. 602 (sitting dated 15 February 1816). 20 ‘The Candid. No. I’., Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 11 (1822), 122. 21 ‘The Candid. No. I’., 110. 22 The phrase is enshrined in Napoleon’s 10 November 1799 Proclamation justifying the coup of 18 Brumaire that made him First Consul of France and formally ended, according to many historians, the French Revolution.

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defeat that occur in a protracted struggle’.23 Sydney Owenson, the AngloIrish author of The Wild Irish Girl, identified similar challenges when she attempted to define French politics after 1815. Her personal observations of French society during her six-month residence in France in 1816, which became the first complete account of post-Restoration France when it was published the following year, remains one of the best English descriptions of the post-Napoleonic French political landscape. Her description of Paris on first arriving there in the spring of 1816 is particularly striking in its poetic mode of reflection: The agitated surface, still heaving with recent commotion, was strewn with relics of remote time, thrown up from the bosom of oblivion; and it was covered with specimens of all the recent political system, which had reigned in France, since the first great social irruption. Characters belonging to different ages; opinions supported in distant eras; dogmas the most novel; prejudices the most antiquated; philosophy the most sceptical; bigotry the most inveterate; opposition the most violent; submission the most abject; – all appeared mingling on the scene of daily intercourse, as if the discomfiture of some powerful enchanter had suddenly released the multifarious victims of his magical influence, who, resuming their peculiar forms, presented an assemblage at once the most singular and the most contradictory.24

Owenson’s representation of 1816 Paris as a disoriented society slowly coming to terms with a reality long hidden by the charm of Romance eventually gives way to a general account of the political opposition between the ‘royalistes’ on the one hand, themselves divided between the ‘modéré’ and the ‘ultra’,25 and, on the other, ‘les enfants de la révolution’, the ‘contemners of old systems’ among whom she includes the ‘constitutionalists’ and the ‘Buonapartists’.26 Although the ‘[s]udden resurrection of a longburied aristocracy’27 led to the dominance of the ultras in the Chamber of Deputies, nicknamed the Chambre introuvable for its ultra-royalist majority, Owenson’s reflections on the future of France remained hopeful. 23 ‘France’, The Edinburgh Review 34 (1820), 2. 24 Lady Morgan [Sydney Owenson], France (London: Henry Colburn, 1817), 88. 25 Lady Morgan [Sydney Owenson], France, 113. 26 Lady Morgan [Sydney Owenson], France, 111. 27 Lady Morgan [Sydney Owenson], France, 86.

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In Owenson’s estimation, ‘A new form of things presents itself; new arrangements arise out of the elementary wreck of exhausted systems […] and new lights beam upon the collected mass of human knowledge, to correct its theories and to fortify its conclusions’.28 Thus, while the emergence of new political parties in France helped redraw the political landscape of postNapoleonic Europe, in 1816, the influence of French politics in Britain was much more general than Tories like the Blackwood’s reviewer want to suggest. Not coincidentally, Owenson is one of the first to employ the variant ‘liberalism’ to describe a political ideology, which she directly associates in her December 1818 diary entry with the patriotism of Madame Roland, the famous Girondist guillotined during the Reign of Terror.29 Madame Roland’s Appeal to Impartial Posterity, her memoirs written during her imprisonment in Paris prior to her execution, created a sensation in England when it was translated and published in London in 1795. Like Owenson, Southey had also expressed a deep admiration for the memoirs of the late republican author, confessing to John May on 26 May 1797 that ‘it is one of those books that makes me love individuals & yet dread detest & despise mankind in a mass’.30 In that same letter, Southey explains recent changes in his political opinions: ‘There was a time when I believed in the persuadibility of man & had the mania of man-mending; experience has taught me better. After a certain age the organs of voice cannot accommodate themselves to the utterance of a foreign pronunciation; so is it with the mind, it grows stiff & unyielding like our sinews as we grow older’.31 In 1817, Francis Jeffrey would recall how in his youth Southey ‘had coquetted in verse with Mary Wollstonecraft [sic] and the ghost of Madam Roland’32 before launching into his vicious attack on the recently laurelled Poet Laureate and author of Wat Tyler. By then, Southey’s reputation as an apostate had Lady Morgan [Sydney Owenson], France, 2. Lady Morgan [Sydney Owenson], Passages from My Autobiography (London: Richard Bentley, 1859), 207. 30 Southey, Letters, 228. 31 Southey, Letters, 228. 32 Jeffrey, ‘Wat Tyler’, 157. 28 29

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been firmly established, less as a result of his growing conservatism than as a consequence of the extremity and intolerance of his political opinions.33 Although Jeffrey ridicules Southey throughout his review, he eventually admits that the primary difference between their two political outlooks relates to their contrasting views on the cause of revolutions and the role of government in alleviating social ills. For Jeffrey, ‘there is but one radical cause, we take it, for these disastrous movements – and that is, gross misgovernment on the part of the rulers […]. There never was any national revolution accomplished, scarcely any attempted, that may not be referred to this cause, and that might not have been prevented, by timely concessions and reasonable reformations, on the part of the Government’.34 By contrast, Southey believed that government was neither the cause nor the solution to social disorder. For Southey, the problem was with society itself. Although the government could participate in the reformation of the populace, it was first obligated to create the conditions that will allow the people to reform themselves. Jeffrey may have had occasion to deride the new Poet Laureate as an apostate following the unauthorized publication of Wat Tyler, but as Southey’s essays on parliamentary reform suggest, he could not be so easily dismissed.

Southey and parliamentary reform Few other essays more clearly express changes in Southey’s political views than his 1816 Quarterly Review article denouncing parliamentary reform. Although most critics view this essay as a decisive stamp marking Southey’s shift from radical to conservative thinker, Southey’s extensive discussion of the merits of pursuing parliamentary reform in post-war Britain deserves 33

See Juan L. Sánchez, ‘Southey, Spain, and Romantic Apostasy’, in Ian Haywood and Diego Saglia, eds, Spain in British Romanticism: 1800–40 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 55–73. 34 Jeffrey, ‘Wat Tyler’, 167.

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another look in light of its reference once again to the ‘British Liberales’, whom he identifies in this essay for the first time as the ‘Ultra Whigs and Extra-Reformers’.35 No one reading Southey’s arguments about the necessity of a state religion, the dangers of public opinion, and the vital importance of placing limits on the press will be convinced that it was not he that changed, but the world around him that had. Yet, several features of his argument, including his sympathy for the radical Spenceans, his advocacy for government spending on public work projects, and his insistence on revising the poor and penal laws make it difficult to dismiss Southey as an arch-conservative. In 1809, Southey had already expressed his views on the topic in a long essay responding to Sir Francis Burdett’s motion for parliamentary reform. While Southey conceded that Burdett’s proposal made sense in theory, he ultimately agreed with Sir Perceval’s objection that ‘such a plan never could produce the effects which are ascribed to it’.36 Southey, however, had no qualms admitting that ‘[b]etter systems, no doubt, are conceivable – for better men. The theory of a pure republic is far more delightful to the imagination’, but concluded that such a system was impossible to implement until ‘society shall be so far advanced in its progress that all men live in the light of reason’.37 Although the Revolution had proved that society had not yet arrived at that point, Southey’s faith in Enlightenment progress and rational administration in government continued unchanged throughout his career. Notwithstanding the several exaggerated remarks throughout the essay (e.g. ‘The direct road to anarchy is by way of Parliamentary Reform’38 and ‘the despotism of public opinion, would soon lead to the destruction of all liberty’),39 Southey’s arguments challenging the logic of parliamentary reformers reveal a sophisticated understanding of the problems

35 36 37 38 39

Southey, ‘Parliamentary Reform’, The Quarterly Review 16 (1816), 241. Southey, ‘The History of Europe for 1809’, The Edinburgh Annual Register for 1809 2/1 (1811), 287. Southey, ‘The History of Europe for 1809’, 287. Southey, ‘The History of Europe for 1809’, 289. Southey, ‘The History of Europe for 1809’, 291.

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facing Britain in 1816. Forgoing a discussion over the value of increased representation throughout the kingdom, Southey exposes instead the link behind proposals for diminishing public expenditures and the reformers’ real desire to lessen the influence of government. While property requirements allow the government to continue to exert influence ‘in elections and in Parliament’, Southey admits, ‘[t]he real evil of our representation lies, not in the influence of the Treasury, but in the power of a few great landholders’.40 Southey’s solution to these pocket boroughs, however, was not to eliminate wealth qualifications for electors as Burdett had recommended, for such were necessary for ‘taking away votes from the ignorant’.41 Instead, Southey proposed increasing the number of freeholders in the country by selling off public lands in smaller divisions, a policy that would result in both increased representation and increased revenue for the government. To counterbalance the influence of large landowners, Southey further suggests restricting entails (i.e. the legal practice of settling the inheritance of property over multiple generations to ensure it remains within the family) and levying heavy taxes for those who accumulate property. The idea of taxing the rich and government-directed land redistribution to help the poor is so much more radical than anything Burdett proposed that it would be tempting to dismiss Southey’s plans as somewhat disingenuous if it were not for the fact that he returns to these protosocialist notions in his Quarterly Review article several years later. Although his respect for the ideas of the Spencean Philanthropists, a radical group promoting communal ownership of public land, serves as a foil to highlight the ‘shallow orators who disclaim about Reform “with many words making nothing understood”’,42 Southey’s reprint of the society’s handbill outlining its mission and meeting places, his history of its founding and growth and his elaboration of its philosophy amounted to a public endorsement of the group, despite his claims to the contrary. Although Southey felt obliged to conclude that ‘[n]o doctrine could be more directly subversive of the peace and welfare of society, than those which he was disseminating 40 Southey, ‘The History of Europe for 1809’, 291. 41 Southey, ‘The History of Europe for 1809’, 291. 42 Southey, ‘Parliamentary’, 263.

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in the way which was most dangerous’, he still confessed that ‘[n]either is the Agrarian system so foolish, or so devoid of attraction, that it may safely be despised’.43 The consolidation of farms and other acts of enclosure had convinced Southey that agriculture, formerly a means of independence for the peasant, had now become nothing more than ‘a branch of great commercial speculation’.44 In an essay that is supposed to serve as the quintessential statement of Southey’s apparent conservative turn, such passages seem particularly remarkable for a former republican whose Pantisocratic schemes similarly promoted the elimination of private property. Yet, Southey was not interested in engaging in a war of ideas as much as he was in urging Parliament to return to the urgent task of ‘mitigating present evils and preventing crimes in the future’.45 The problem with reformers, according to Southey, was that they, like the revolutionary writers who ‘amused themselves by building constitutions in the air, instead of castles’,46 presented parliamentary reform as a panacea to all of Britain’s social and economic problems, as if one could ‘annul the law of gravitation by act of parliament’.47 Rampant unemployment, rising food prices, ‘stagnant manufactures, and languishing agriculture’ required new kinds of policies to address the ‘new state of things’.48 Revision of the poor laws, investment in infrastructure projects involving ‘improvement of roads, the completion of canals’,49 and government support for soldiers returning from the war were the only types of reforms that promised immediate alleviations of the social distress exacerbated by the end of the war. For as Southey put it, ‘true reform’ is based on ‘[b]enevolence’, specifically on a desire ‘for bettering the condition of the poor, for preventing poverty and guilt by national education’.50 As Southey expressed in a letter to John 43 Southey, ‘Parliamentary’, 268, 271. 44 Southey, ‘Reports of the Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor’, The Quarterly Review 15 (1816), 201. 45 Southey, ‘Parliamentary’, 225. 46 Southey, ‘Parliamentary’, 264. 47 Southey, ‘Parliamentary’, 260. 48 Southey, ‘Parliamentary’, 277. 49 Southey, ‘Parliamentary’, 277. 50 Southey, ‘Parliamentary’, 292.

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May on 26 June 1797, the cause of the entire ‘incalculable wretchedness of society’ could be seen in the way ‘the rich are strangely ignorant of the miseries to which the lowest & largest part of mankind are abandoned’.51 Southey, it would seem, was determined to change that. Southey was thus understandably furious when he discovered that William Smith, an MP in the House of Commons, attributed such views to ‘the malignity and baseness of a renegade’.52 In his public response to Smith, which served as a general reply to the growing chorus denouncing his apostasy, Southey attributed his change in political opinions to a ‘more enlarged view of the nature of man and the progress of society’.53 This concession did not mean that he had ever abandoned his ‘liberal opinions’,54 which he summarizes as ‘an enthusiastic love of liberty, a detestation of tyranny wherever it exists and in whatever form, an ardent abhorrence of all wicked ambition, and a sympathy not less ardent with those who were engaged in war for the defence of their country, and in a righteous cause, – feelings just as well as generous in themselves’.55 The only change he underwent, Southey writes referring to himself in the third person, is that ‘he has ceased to believe that old monarchical countries are capable of republican forms of government. He has ceased to think that he understood the principles of government, and the nature of man and society […]. He has ceased to wish for revolutions even in countries where great alteration is to be desired, because he has seen that the end of anarchy is military despotism. Nevertheless, he has not ceased to love liberty with all his heart, and with all his soul, and with all his strength’.56 Whether or not one is persuaded by Southey’s animated response to the charge of apostasy, there is no denying that his remarks on the state

51 Southey, Letters, 228. 52 Southey, Letter to Smith, 9. 53 Southey, Letter to Smith, 15. 54 Southey, Letter to Smith, 14. 55 Southey, Letter to Smith, 25. Southey’s ‘liberal opinions’ compare interestingly with Wellington’s: see Alicia Laspra-Rodríguez, ‘Wellington’s final mission in Spain (spring 1814)’, in this volume. 56 Southey, Letter to Smith, 24.

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of society convey the opinions of a writer who believes the status quo is unacceptable: Let us not deceive ourselves. We are far from that state in which anything resembling equality would be possible; but we are arrived at that state in which the extremes of inequality are become intolerable. They are too dangerous, as well as too monstrous, to be borne much longer. Plans which would have led to the utmost horrors of insurrection have been prevented by the Government, and by the enactment of strong, but necessary laws. Let it not, however, be supposed that the disease is healed, because the ulcer may skin over. The remedies by which the body politic can be restored to health must be slow in their operation. The condition of the populace, physical, moral, and intellectual, must be improved, or a Jacquerie, a Bellum Servile, sooner or later, will be the result. It is the People at this time who stand in need of reformation, not the Government.57

Southey’s support for government repression and his advocacy for established religion as the only means to national security certainly appear to be reactionary. Such comments, however, must also be squared with his admiration for the utopian socialism of Robert Owen, whose efforts to improve the health, education and labour conditions of the working class constituted for Southey a form of ‘practical benevolence’.58 Like his respect for the Spencean Philanthropists, Southey’s appreciation of Owen’s experimental socialistic community, despite its undeniable radicalism, is based on its clear programmes for addressing the direct material improvement of the poor. These programmes, despite their utopianism, at least offered concrete solutions to real social problems. Southey’s determination to shine a spotlight on poverty in British society was an area in which even his fiercest critics admitted he had proven most assuredly consistent. In 1803, writing to John May after Francis Jeffrey in his review of Thalaba accused him of having ‘exaggerated human misery’,59 Southey unapologetically affirmed that ‘[t]here certainly is a design in the most part of my poems to force into notice the situation of the poor, & to

57 Southey, Letter to Smith, 31–2. 58 Southey, Letter to Smith, 33. 59 Southey, Letters, 765.

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represent them as victims of the present state of society’.60 In 1816, Southey was just as vehemently opposed to the evils of the ‘inequalities of property’ as he was a decade earlier. In his diagnosis, ‘poverty in the true sense of the word, actual physical want is an evil of modern growth, […] the effect of the commercial system, beginning with that system & increasing with it’.61 Southey invests his observations with religious significance, ascribing to the ‘doctrine of Christ’ the radical renunciation of private property.62 In fact, Southey’s only real objection to Owenite socialism was that it was not founded on religious principles, which Southey remained convinced was the best antidote to the ‘selfishness & acquisition [that] make the basis of the commercial system’.63 Yet, Southey was less concerned with debating the merits of socialist ideals and justifying his career-long fascination with Pantisocratic-like schemes for communal living than with providing ‘immediate relief of the poor’.64 More specifically, Southey advocated the use of public money to purchase unused land in order to settle the ‘disbanded soldiers and sailors, and people who are in want of employment, dividing them into estates of different sizes […] and allotting to every cottage that should be erected there a certain proportion of ground’.65 In addition to making ‘immediate provision for those brave men whose services are no longer required for the defence of their country’, the government should also ‘lighten the poor-rates, give occupation to various branches of manufacture, and provide a permanent source of revenue’.66 Other policy recommendations made from his progressive platform include increased worker wages, pension increases, penal law reform, income tax proposals and other forms of land redistribution.67 Such plans required a ‘liberal expenditure in public works’,

60 Southey, Letters, 765. 61 Southey, Letters, 773. 62 Southey, Letters, 773. 63 Southey, Letters, 773. 64 Southey, Letter to Smith, 33. 65 Southey, Letter to Smith, 34. 66 Southey, Letter to Smith, 34. 67 See William Haller, ‘Southey’s Later Radicalism’, PMLA 37/2 (1922), 281–92.

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the opposite of the retrenchment proposed by parliamentary reformers seeking to lessen the influence of government by reducing government spending at a time when it was most needed. It is at this point that we can better understand Southey’s antipathy towards parliamentary reform. Instead of identifying the war as a cause for the economic and social distresses of British society in 1816, radical reformers, like those from Bishopsgate and Cripplegate calling for an end to standing armies, naively presented parliamentary reform as a simple answer to complex social problems. As Southey more poignantly put it, ‘Could it [parliamentary reform] increase the consumption of iron, and thereby set the foundries at work, and give activity to the collieries? Could it compel the continental nations to purchase more of our goods, and encourage English manufacturers while their own are starving?’68 That the system of parliamentary representation in Britain required improvement Southey never contested. In fact, at one point, Southey looks to the Spanish Cortes as a model for parliamentary reform in Britain as a system for ‘electing the electors, and thus filtering them through many successive processes, after the manner of the Spanish Cortes’.69 The problem was that agitations for parliamentary reform detracted from the real and more urgent task of governing. Southey, consequently, had no tolerance for these ‘state-menders’,70 the ‘ultra-liberty men’71 and ‘Ultra Whigs and Extra-Reformers’72 who, like the rich who are ‘strangely ignorant of the miseries to which the lowest & largest part of mankind are abandoned’, are more concerned with the ‘fashionable doctrines of liberty’73 than the suffering citizens of their own nation. In short, Southey had little time for what he refers to in both his April and October 1816 Quarterly Review articles as the ‘British Liberales’.74

68 69 70 71 72 73 74

Southey, ‘Parliamentary’, 260. Southey, ‘History for 1809’, 291. Southey, ‘Parliamentary’, 253. Southey, ‘Parliamentary’, 257. Southey, ‘Parliamentary’, 241. Southey, ‘Parliamentary’, 264. Southey, ‘Parliamentary’, 240, and ‘La Roche’, 69.

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Southey and the Spanish Liberales Although Hay is right in her observations that the word ‘liberal’ came to signify for many an ‘un-English’ and ‘foreign, radical politics’75 after 1815, Southey’s ‘negative semantic adaptation’76 of the Spanish political denomination to attack his opponents was emphatically not a result of some antiSpanish sentiment. Southey, the leading Hispanist of his generation, did not view Spanish influence on British politics as a form of contagion; he ardently welcomed it. Despite the ongoing political battles over British intervention in the Peninsula at the outset of the Peninsular War, Southey’s particular response to the Iberian controversy was unequivocal. ‘Were I minister’, he wrote to Coleridge in 1808, ‘I would send half the regular army without delay to Spain’.77 Southey disagreed with the ideological justification of the Quarterly Review that sought to recast the conflict in terms of restoring the balance of power and loyalty to established institutions. For Southey, ‘the people […] [had] the right of appointing a government when they were without one; the right of recovering, maintaining, and establishing their freedom’.78 In fact, the war, in Southey’s view, was an opportunity for the establishment of a new political order in Europe, a rare opportunity for completely refashioning the Spanish monarchy into a genuine republic. ‘This is the moment’, he writes to Coleridge on 13 June 1808, ‘for uniting Spain and Portugal […] in a commonwealth [rather] than in a monarchy; Portugal […] would preserve its old dignity by uniting in a federal republic – a form which the circumstances of Spain more especially require’.79 Southey had no doubt that the Spanish were up to the task, but feared his own nation would likely oppose such arrangements. ‘No nation has ever had a fairer opportunity for reforming its government 75 Hay, ‘Liberal’, 310. 76 Leonard, ‘From European’, 23. 77 Southey, Letters, 1466. 78 Southey, ‘The History of Europe for 1808’, The Edinburgh Annual Register for 1808 1/1 (1810), 390. 79 Southey, Letters, 1466.

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and modelling it anew’, Southey continues, ‘but I dare say this wretched cabinet will be meddling too much in this, and too little in the desperate struggle which must be made […]. The crown […] will sacrifice any thing rather than see the downfall of royalty’.80 Notwithstanding his support of the war, Southey’s critique of ‘this wretched cabinet’ clearly put him at odds with the Tory administration. Napoleon, though no hero of Southey’s, was still in his mind as one of the chief architects in the great transformation Southey believed Europe was now undergoing. ‘The truth of the present history’, he enthusiastically writes to John Rickman in 1808, ‘is, that a great military despotism […] like that of France – will and must beat down corrupt establishments and worn-out governments’.81 While the language of liberty and patriotism continued to be appropriated on both sides of the question, Southey’s denunciation of ‘corrupt establishments and worn-out governments’ was a clear renewal of the language of radical critique. So too was his representation of the ‘state of home politics’, which he described to Tom Southey in November 1809 as ‘perfectly hopeless’.82 By contrast, in Spain, he writes to Richard Duppa in 1808, ‘there is a spirit of patriotism, a glowing and proud remembrance of the past, a generous shame for the present, and a living hope for the future, both in the Spaniards and Portuguese, which convinced me that the heart of the country was sound, and that those nations are likely to rise in the scale, perhaps, Duppa, when we are sunk. Not that England will sink yet, but there is more public virtue in Spain than in any other country under Heaven’.83 Southey’s apocalyptic vision of the decline of Britain – ‘ours is a degrading and dwarfing system of society’84 – was matched only by his equally bleak view that in Britain ‘all things are tending towards revolution’.85 As Britain continued to sink, Spain began to rise, thus foreshadowing

80 Southey, Letters, 1466. 81 Southey, Letters, 1483. 82 Southey, Letters, 1713. 83 Southey, Letters, 1477. 84 Southey, Letters, 1507. 85 Southey, Letters, 1530.

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the ‘future political regeneration of Europe’ that The Annual Register announced was just beyond the horizon.86 By 1811, however, Southey’s initial enthusiasm for what he consistently styled as the ‘Spanish revolution’ began to abate.87 Southey’s reservations were not, however, a result of growing doubt about the possibility of Spanish success. As he wrote to Charles Wynn in January 1813, ‘I have never doubted of the eventual independence of Spain; but concerning the government which may grow out of the struggle my hopes diminish, and I begin to think that Portugal has better prospects than Spain, because the government there may be induced to reform itself ’.88 Having failed to heed the lessons of the French Revolution, the Spanish Cortes had ‘instead of making the deliverance of the country their first and paramount object, […] busied themselves in framing a constitution, a work which might well have been left for a more convenient season’.89 Southey praised the liberal party not only for effecting the kind of social and political reform that resulted in the abolishment of the slave trade, the Inquisition, and feudal jurisdictions, but also for their commitment to civil liberties and fair representation. What concerned him was what he saw as the insidious influence of ‘French philosophy’ that led Spain’s leaders to be consumed by ‘metaphysical discussions’ while the enemy laid siege to their cities.90 Despite their ‘good intentions’, their tendency towards ‘abstractions’ and the language of radical reform made it practically impossible for the changes instituted now to remain permanent.91 Writing to Wynn on 17 January 1813, Southey confesses ‘I fear that the Cortes have been sowing dragons’ teeth […]. The danger is, that the Cortes, by their folly, will afford too plausible a pretext, and too tempting an opportunity for undoing the good which

86 ‘Prospectus’, The Edinburgh Annual Register for 1808 1/1 (1810), v. 87 Southey, Letters, 1503. 88 Southey, Letters, 2205. 89 Southey, ‘The History of Europe for 1811’, The Edinburgh Annual Register 4/1 (1813), 365. 90 Southey, ‘The History of Europe for 1811’, 365. 91 Southey ‘The History of Europe for 1811’, 365.

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they have done’.92 Southey’s critique of the Spanish Liberales is not directed at their desire for reform, but that they have made their cause susceptible to reversal by the nature and timing of their deliberations. The image of the Spanish Liberales engaged in writing constitutions and debating the principles of liberal thought as the nation crumbles around them provides a more accurate portrayal of Southey’s view of the British Liberales than standard readings of Southey’s apostasy have long suggested. Like the liberal politics that defined the Spanish Liberales, the political principles guiding their British counterparts were never the object of Southey’s attack. In fact, in his letter to William Smith, Southey readily admits that his ‘enthusiastic love of liberty, and detestation of tyranny wherever it exists’ more often than not aligns him with the ideological commitments of progressive Whigs like Smith himself. Yet, the means by which Southey sought to advance those commitments differed radically from Whig ideologues like Smith, about whom Southey writes, ‘between you and me, Sir, there can be no sympathy, even though we should sometimes happen to think alike’.93

Southey’s review of the Mémoires de Madame la Marquise de la Roche Jaquelein While Southey’s 1816 essay on parliamentary reform has attracted considerable attention among critics interested in describing changes in Southey’s political opinions, his review of the Mémoires de Madame la Marquise de la Roche Jaquelein has rarely been discussed outside of its privileged status as the first document to contain a reference to the term ‘liberal’ as a specifically political grouping in English. Despite the seemingly partisan spirit of Southey’s attack, the review in which it is first invoked is decidedly not.

92 Southey, Letters, 2281. 93 Southey, Letter to Smith, 23.

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Prefacing his remarks on the memoirs of the royalist Marchioness de la Roche Jaquelein, the goddaughter of Louis XVIII’s daughter and a member of the court family, Southey praises the Girondist Madame Roland as the ‘best of republicans’, whose Appeal to Posterity, like the royalist memoirs Southey considers in his review, offers the hope that ‘[n]ow that the contest is over, both parties might derive from these books a wholesome lesson of political charity’.94 In recounting the details of the counter-revolutionary uprising in the Vendée, which resulted in over 200,000 deaths between 1793 and 1796, Southey’s primary purpose is not to celebrate or evoke sympathy for the loyalist cause, despite his acknowledgement that the Roche himself possessed ‘a noble principle, a loyal, religious and heroic sense of duty’.95 Southey is equally committed to praising republicans who, like Quinteneau, are ‘honest and humane’ and ‘not less capable of heroic self-devotion than their opponents’.96 Southey’s review instead is a case study in what Ian Haywood calls ‘Bloody Romanticism’, a sensationalist representation of extreme violence that constitutes a form of ‘hyperbolic realism’, which he describes as ‘spectacular violence’.97 Southey’s general account of the indiscriminate hunting down and murder of aristocrats and the widespread destruction caused by both sides is only superseded by detailed descriptions of acts of individual cruelty that reach the limits of acceptable representation even for a print industry already accustomed to describing the atrocities of the French Revolution. The mutilation of bodies, the butchering of women and children, and the accumulation of severed heads and ‘heaps of dead bodies’98 throughout the cities intimate the ineffability of revolutionary violence that provides substance to Southey’s claim that ‘of all evils – of all miseries – of all curses which can befall a civilized country, – revolution is

94 95 96 97

Southey, ‘La Roche’, 2. Southey, ‘La Roche’, 27. Southey, ‘La Roche’, 41–2. Ian Haywood, Bloody Romanticism: Spectacular Violence and the Politics of Representation, 1776–1832 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 4. 98 Southey, ‘La Roche’, 48.

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the greatest’.99 Through a series of vignettes, like the account of republican soldiers marching against 400 to 500 wild dogs feasting on the festering corpses of the unburied dead, Southey represents a reality ‘he believes to be unprecedented – hitherto unknown and unexperienced’.100 Although he is particularly disturbed by the republican implementation of a ‘system of extermination’101 against the Vendeans, Southey’s focus always remains on the innocent victims of extreme violence who suffer equally at the hands of royalists and republicans. In his account of the siege on Savenay, for example, where the Marchioness with her infant daughter take refuge among the peasants ‘untainted by the poison of the times’,102 Southey represents the types of massacres that have led historians like Reynald Secher to refer to the war in the Vendée as a ‘French genocide’.103 As Southey writes, ‘The work of fusillading was carried on during eight days at Savenay, until the walls were scaled with blood, and the ditches filled with human bodies!’104 By representing extreme human suffering and directly confronting the brutality of war, Southey undoubtedly intends to arouse his readers’ moral indignation toward the inhumanity of the Revolution. Yet, the representation of extreme violence, whether sensationalist or not, resists interpretation itself, denying the possibility of political meaning to the sacrifices of both republicans and royalists now reduced to indiscriminate piles of human remains. Political ideology, as Southey understood it, was awkwardly out place in such a world. It is the Marchioness herself, however, the principal agent and subject in Southey’s review, and her inability to respond adequately to the violence 99 Southey, ‘La Roche’, 2. 100 Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution, 1789–1820 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 1. Paulson presents his book as a response to the following question: ‘How does a writer or artist represent something he believes to be unprecedented – hitherto unknown and unexperienced?’ Southey’s representation of ‘spectacular violence’ also provides an answer. 101 Southey, ‘La Roche’, 47. 102 Southey, ‘La Roche’, 63. 103 See Reynald Secher, A French Genocide: The Vendée, trans. George Holoch (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003). 104 Southey, ‘La Roche’, 63.

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surrounding her and her infant daughter that arguably provides the most compelling portrait of the human cost of revolution. In recording the Marchioness’s escape from Pontoisou, where 600 republicans lay dead following their defeat at the hands of the triumphant royalists, Southey recounts, ‘the Marchioness speaks of the jolting of her carriage over their dead bodies, and the unutterable sensation when she felt their bones crush under the wheels!’105 Whether from a shock to the general violence of the scene or from an unexpected glee at being able herself to pulverize the remains of those responsible for her husband’s death, or a mixture of both, the Marchioness as emblematic victim of the Revolution becomes the ethical embodiment of what critics citing Emmanuel Levinas have called ‘radical passivity’.106 The Marchioness’s involuntary fascination with the suffering minutely detailed in her memoirs and her subsequent paralysis before unspeakable crimes against humanity reflects a ‘radical passivity’ not only in Southey himself, but the readers of his review as well. By allowing the ineffable reality of extreme violence and suffering to stand without an appeal to a specific political framework for meaning, Southey erases the distinction between ‘Same and Other’ in order to develop an ethical stance based on a shared humanity and one that neither requires nor desires rationality as a precondition of ethical choice.

The British Liberales and the Alien Bill of 1816 Given Southey’s explicit call for ‘political charity’ at the beginning of his review, it seems hypocritical to conclude his essay with a pointed political barb directed against his favourite target in 1816, the ‘British Liberales!’107 Perhaps even more curious is the fact that Southey associates 105 Southey, ‘La Roche’, 59. 106 Benda Hofmeyr, ‘Radical Passivity: Ethical Problem or Solution? A Preliminary Investigation’, South African Journal of Philosophy 26/2 (2007), 150. 107 Southey, ‘La Roche’, 69.

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the British Liberales with those members in parliament openly opposing ‘the continuance of the Alien Bill’,108 a rather specific piece of legislation that seems to have little to do with the preceding discussion. Southey’s allusion to the Alien Bill is a reference to the proposed renewal of the Alien Act of 1793 that required the registration and regulation of foreigners emigrating to Britain. Introduced on 19 December 1792 by Lord Grenville, the first Alien Bill was opposed primarily because it granted too much power to the Crown, which now had the authority to deport aliens without due process if deemed a threat to national security.109 Although the Act was designed to be temporary, it was renewed every two years with minor revisions until 1826. In the post-war years, as J. R. Dinwiddy points out, support for renewing the Aliens Act during a time of peace became increasingly difficult to maintain.110 Although several members in parliament conjured up the spirit of Jacobinism to justify the necessity of the Act, most supporters viewed its renewal as merely a precautionary measure, accusing the opposition of making much ado about nothing.111 For Whigs in the House of Commons like Samuel Whitbread, Sir John Newport, Henry Grey Bennet, Sir James Mackintosh, and Sir Samuel Romilly, among others, however, the issue was a matter of constitutionality and ‘liberal policy’.112 According to Whitbread, ‘the Alien Bills from the beginning down to the present day were a blot on the Statute-book of the country’.113 By granting the Crown the power to engage in ‘deportation and surveillance’, ‘alien terms’, according to Lord Holland, ‘not to be found in any English dictionary’,114 the Alien Act was a ‘flagrant violation of the principles of the constitution’.115 J. P. Grant broadened the Whig critique 108 Southey, ‘La Roche’, 69. 109 See J. R. Dinwiddy, ‘The Use of the Crown’s Power of Deportation Under the Aliens Act, 1793–1826’, Historical Research 41/104 (1968), 193–211. 110 Dinwiddy, ‘The Use of the Crown’s Power of Deportation Under the Aliens Act, 1793–1826’, 207. 111 Hansard, Parliamentary, xxxiv. 455. 112 Hansard, Parliamentary, xxxiv. 451. 113 Hansard, Parliamentary, xxx. 659. 114 Hansard, Parliamentary, xxxiv. 1069. 115 Hansard, Parliamentary, xxxiv. 1139.

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in describing the measure as not only ‘repugnant to our constitutional policy’, but also ‘wholly repugnant to the fundamental principles of English policy, from the Magna Charta to the year 1792’.116 According to Grant, ‘our ancestors, by a policy, equally prudent and liberal […] made it a part of those stipulations that foreigners should be protected’.117 Like Grant, Francis Horner represented Britain’s longstanding open-immigration policy as an ideal merger between a socially liberal perspective and politically liberal tradition, lamenting the fact that the nation was about ‘to depart from the ancient law and policy of the country, and withdraw from strangers that hospitable and generous reception which it had been the pride of our ancestors to afford them’.118 Opposition leaders like Lord Milton, the Marquis of Buckingham, Earl Grosvenor, and Romilly, however, went even further, describing the bill as ‘designedly in furtherance of that alliance which existed for establishing and forming governments contrary to the will of the people, and thus giving the ministers of those allied powers the means of persecuting every individual who was obnoxious to them, and who ventured to entertain and cherish ideas of liberty’.119 Like Romilly, Earl Grey globalized the implications of Britain’s domestic policy by discussing its effects on the ‘exiles of liberty’,120 among them the Spanish Liberales. As Grey succinctly put it, ‘England no longer afforded protection to the martyr of freedom or of faith; the country of liberty was now in a general league with governments against the people, to repress the spirit of liberty all over the world’.121 As the debate heated up, it was becoming clear that the Alien Bill was shaping up to be a key issue in defining liberal politics in Britain. It is equally apparent exactly to whom Southey alluded when he labelled the ‘Ultra-Whigs’ as ‘British Liberales’.

116 Hansard, Parliamentary, xxxiv. 617. 117 Hansard, Parliamentary, xxxiv. 619. 118 Hansard, Parliamentary, xxxiv. 969–70. 119 Hansard, Parliamentary, xxxiv. 168. 120 Hansard, Parliamentary, xxxiv. 1142. 121 Hansard, Parliamentary. 1142.

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Like Lord Sidmouth, who chastised the opposition for producing abstract ‘arguments derived from general principles […] [and] the oftenquoted terms of Magna Charta’, Southey had no time for the philosophizing tendencies of ideologues who based policy decisions on anything but practical considerations. As Southey wrote in response to the ‘Burdettites’, those other notable British Liberales who had ‘cured me of all wish for Parliamentary Reform’,122 ‘the constitution is an excellent war-cry for a party. “Nothing but the Constitution!” – But what do they, who use this cry, mean by the constitution?’ When ‘[e]verywhere there are mouths crying out for food, because the hands want work’, it is only the ‘State-quack’ who clambers on about constitutions and liberal principles.123 Although Southey’s denunciation of the British Liberales seems to fit nicely within the traditional narrative of romantic apostasy, signalling as it were his conformity with reactionaries bent on associating liberalism with Jacobinism, his refusal to enter into a debate over principles reflected a new pragmatic approach to politics that accepted the complex world of practice as the new political reality of what would eventually become the modern liberal state. That reality, most powerfully reflected in his review of the Vendean revolt, made the metaphysical speculation of the Spanish Liberales and the constitutionalist rhetoric of the British Liberales out of touch with the suffering of the world and possibly criminal. As a ‘practical statesman’, Southey had come to reject all systems of thought, placing his faith instead in the state itself as the principal agency of social improvement. The state, Southey insisted, had the responsibility to address social inequality with concrete policies that materially improved the conditions of the most vulnerable in society. Southey’s proposals for redistributing wealth through tax reforms, his recommendations for counteracting the devastating effects of manufacturing on the poor through land reorganization, and his advocacy for government spending programmes designed to increase employment and individual wages were not the policies of a Tory or a Whig. They were the innovative policies of a liberal – not the 122 Southey, Letters, 1986. 123 Southey, Letter to Smith, 37.

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kind who makes policy decisions based on a system of ideas, but the type of liberal who might be categorized as such for the unintended consequences of his pragmatic approach to problems and situations of modern society. In other words, Southey formulated policies that eventually became, for historically contingent reasons, associated with those of the modern liberal state. Southey may have detested any perceived association between him and the British Liberales, but, in the same manner William Blake understood Milton, Southey was a true statesman and of the liberal party without knowing it.

Young-ok An

4 The guerrilla chief and the mountain girl: Spanish figures in Letitia Landon’s Romance and Reality

abstract Letitia Landon’s novel Romance and Reality, published in 1831, offers a critical insight into Spain and Anglo-Spanish relations during the 1810s and 1820s, in part through the characters of Don Henriquez and Beatrice, a father-daughter pair. As Landon’s characters navigate the unfolding geopolitical situations, Spain’s internal social strife and the Cortes’s alliance with the Carbonari movement, she sustains throughout the novel a tension between romance and reality and complicates standard Spanish figures of the Romantic era. Exploring and ultimately displacing male military and political heroism with its heroine’s transnational romance, the novel opens possibilities for a future of the Anglo-Hispanic relationship by uniting half-Spanish, half-English Beatrice with Edward, who inherits an English aristocratic title. In displacing the conventional, passive English heroine, Emily Arundel, with foreign Beatrice, Landon reverses the endings the British reading public were familiar with, such as those in Walter Scott’s romances and Madame de Staël’s Corinne.

Metafictional moments in Romance and Reality Highly popular in the 1820s under her pen name L. E. L., especially after The Improvisatrice’s immense success in 1824, Letitia Landon (1802–38) was primarily known as a ‘poetess’, whose fame rivalled that of Felicia Hemans (1793–1835), the latter being ‘the most widely read woman poet in the nineteenth-century English-speaking world’.1 In 1831, after establishing 1

Donald Reiman, Introduction, Felicia Dorothea Hemans, Tales and Historic Scenes, etc. (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1978), v. Landon was (and still is)

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her poetic career, Landon published her first novel, Romance and Reality, which ‘construct[ed] quite a different literary self ’ (as Glennis Stephenson notes).2 In the words of her male protagonist Edward Lorraine, Landon suggests why she decided to write in the genre: [A] novelist will soon be as necessary a part of a modern establishment as the minstrel was in former times. The same feeling, which in the olden days gave a verse to a ballad, now gives a column to the Morning Post; only that the ball has taken place of the tournament, and white gloves are worn instead of steel gauntlets.3

Landon’s astute comments indicate her awareness of her culture’s changing literary tastes and may explain her continued investment in the genre, as she went on to write two more three-volume novels after Romance and Reality. Throughout her first novel, she positions herself as a commentator on social and worldly affairs, as well as responding to British readers’ curiosity about the manners and lives of high society and foreign countries. Her depictions of Anglo-Hispanic relationships in the novel, the focus of this chapter, need to be understood in the context of Landon’s broad and complex engagement with her society as a self-identified ‘minstrel’. Romance and Reality as a literary pastiche goes beyond typical minstrelsy, however, for it incorporates considerable self-parodying and metafictional gestures: it is a dialogic, ironic, complex and self-reflective novel of 1,000 or so pages, which ambitiously incorporates various sub-genres

often compared to Felicia Hemans in terms of widespread fame and productivity. During the 1820s and 1830s, Landon published about seventeen volumes of poetry, three three-volume novels, two books of short fiction, a small book-length play, and hundreds of uncollected works of poetry, fiction and criticism, which appeared in periodicals, annuals and anthologies. 2 Glennis Stephenson, Letitia Landon: The Woman behind L. E. L. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 39. Landon’s contemporary Edward Bulwer Lytton, whose work she praised highly, observed in his unsigned review of the novel for the New Monthly Magazine, ‘Miss Landon’s prose contains the witness of some faculties not visible in her poetry – acute liveliness, and playful, yet deep observation’ (‘Romance and Reality by L. E. L’., New Monthly Magazine 32/127 [1831], 550). 3 L. E. L., Romance and Reality (London: Colburn and Bentley, 1831), i. 185. Hereafter, the volume and page number indicate this edition.

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of novelistic narratives (such as gothic, historical, satirical, travel, Regency drama, courtship, picturesque and manners, etc.). Throughout the novel, Landon also adopts, mimics, and comments on many influential contemporary authors such as Byron, Scott, Wordsworth and Southey, invoking them in many of the epigraphs preceding her chapters, as well as in her characters’ conversations. Landon maintains the novel’s hybridity through her wit and wry tone, while demonstrating facility and acuity in weaving together these various facets. In particular, in her lively and ironic Chapter 14 of Volume I, she creates a literary salon (conversazione) at the home of Mrs Smithson, the female protagonist’s former governess turned novelist. This and other illustrative moments suggest Landon’s deliberate appropriation of two other popular novelistic sub-genres of the period in particular: the roman à clef (such as Lady Caroline Lamb’s Glenarvon, 1816) and the silver-fork novel (which was fashionable in the 1820s and 1830s).4 The Literary Gazette reviewer ringingly endorses Landon’s maiden venture into the novel form, declaring that Romance and Reality is ‘a perfectly original specimen of fictitious narrative’, and adding: There is no performance of the class, within our knowledge, which it resembles. […] In part like works by preceding novelists, it is in its own form and combinations

4

For example, Romance and Reality was included in H. D. Jump (gen. ed.), Silver Fork Novels, 6 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2005), as vol. ii., edited by Cynthia Lawson. Landon may have been inspired by such works as Benjamin Disraeli’s Vivian Grey (1826), Lytton Bulwer’s Pelham (1828), and Catherine Gore’s Manners of the Day (1830). The participation of Ladies Blessington and Bury in the genre in the 1830s confirms its appeal, and Landon’s last novel, Ethel Churchill; or, the Two Brides (1837), heavily incorporates the silver-fork genre. Claire Knowles situates Romance and Reality in the genre, indicating the similarity between Glenarvon and Romance and Reality and tracing the ways in which Landon exploits her own celebrity while negotiating the constraining gender norms of her time (‘Celebrity, Femininity and Masquerade: Reading Letitia Landon’s Romance and Reality’, European Romantic Review 23/2 [2012], 247–63); Cheryl Wilson’s Fashioning the Silver-Fork Novel (New York: Routledge, 2012) elaborates various aspects of the genre and also situates Landon in that framework.

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Enumerating various kinds of contemporary novels in circulation – such as ‘romantic’ (i.e. the supernatural and gothic); satirical; historical; sentimental; philosophical; political; religious; moral and instructive; the novel of ‘common life’; that of ‘highlife and fashionable’; and ‘novels illustrative of national and foreign manners’ – the reviewer pronounces that ‘in Romance and Reality we have glimpses of most of the ingredients we have enumerated; and they are mingled together without a single artifice of practised novel-writing’.6 With such high praise of the novel’s hybrid character, the reviewer recognizes Landon’s ‘equal fidelity of delineation, not only from town to country, but to Spain and Italy’.7 Compared with Landon’s poetry, however, Romance and Reality has received relatively little critical attention. As Tricia Lootens suggests, we should pay more attention to Landon’s accomplishment as a fiction writer, which, ironically, her success as a poet might have eclipsed.8 Only recently have critics begun addressing Romance and Reality, among them Claire Knowles, who has focused on female authorship and celebrity culture, and Jonas Cope, who has examined its stylistic ‘inconsistency’ and indeterminate subjectivity.9 Knowles and Cope particularly focused on Landon’s vivid and masterful depictions of London’s upper-class society, 5 6

7 8

9

‘Review of New Books’, The London Literary Gazette and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences, Etc. 775 (1831), 753. Perhaps we should take into account that, while the identity of the reviewer has not been established, the magazine’s editor is none other than Landon’s patron-lover, William Jerdan, with whom she entered into a sustained and secret affair in the mid-1820s. Literary Gazette, 753. Tricia Lootens, ‘Receiving the Legend, Rethinking the Writer: Letitia Landon and the Poetess Tradition’, in Harriet Linkin and Stephen Behrendt, eds, Romanticism and Women Poets: Opening the Doors of Reception (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 242–59. Claire Knowles, ‘Celebrity, Femininity and Masquerade’; and Jonas Cope, ‘“A Series of Small Inconstancies”: Letitia Landon and the Sewn-Together Subject’, Studies in Romanticism 52/3 (2013), 363–87.

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which appear in volume I. These depictions centre around the unfolding courtship romance and the romance of high society, with Landon’s running commentary about its other side – ‘reality’. To summarize its narrative arc, nineteen-year-old Emily Arundel, the novel’s putative heroine, a naïve, good-natured, timid English woman, debuts in London society as a protégée of a highly fashionable matron, Lady Mandeville, and finds a romantic hero, Edward Lorraine, the younger son of the hereditary aristocrat Lord Etheringhame. So far, the story follows the grammar of the heterosexual courtship narrative. A typical such narrative (with which Landon demonstrates her thorough familiarity in her conversazione chapter) would have Emily and Edward, despite initial misrecognition, gain each other’s love in the end. Instead of offering her readers such a tidy and predictable plot, however, Landon complicates the formula: in the middle of the novel, Landon sends Emily and Edward to Italy and Spain respectively, leaving readers in suspense. At first, this appears to be a diversion into ‘exotic’ locales – an obligatory nod to, or exploitation of, the popular picturesque and gothic genres – which should be resolved by the eventual union of the amiable English upper-class couple.

The romance and reality of the foreign With the novel’s exploration of the foreign, the narrative scope expands significantly, well beyond the expected path of a Regency romance, silverfork novel, or travel narrative. Landon uses Romance and Reality to explore continental European politics and cultures, popularized by her contemporaries through poetry, novel, drama, essays and travel narratives, including those by Byron, Southey, Coleridge, Caroline Norton, Mary Shelley, Hemans and Lady Blessington. In particular, Landon explores the imaginary construction of, and provides sustained commentary upon, the European geopolitics of the time, adding a romance-reality dialectic to the otherwise expected framework of ‘domestic’ courtship romance.

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Since Landon had not experienced first-hand most of the foreign regions she delineates in Romance and Reality, her vivid depictions must be the result of her copious reading. The materials she relied on included ‘new’ media such as newspapers, magazines, and periodicals, which continually and competitively fed the appetite of the reading public for news of foreign locales and cultures. Daily newspapers, as well as literary and political narratives, offered reports on ‘war[s] at a distance’, as well as travel narratives to picturesque and exotic locales.10 Landon participated in such cultural milieu by appealing to both a general audience and the literary elite by incorporating references to highbrow (Milton, Shakespeare and Dryden) and middlebrow (Morning Post, Morning Chronicle, Gazetteer, etc.) texts into her characters’ conversations. Emma Roberts’s memoir of Landon highlights Landon’s reading habits and the scope of her knowledge: ‘She not only read, but thoroughly understood, and entered into the merits of every book that came out’.11 Roberts praises ‘the extent of her learning, and the depth of her research’, noting that ‘[t]he history and literature of all ages and all countries were familiar to her; nor did she acquire any portion of her knowledge in a superficial manner’.12 The European countries mentioned (and at times traversed) in Romance and Reality include France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Greece, Switzerland and Norway, while other regions 10 In War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), Mary Favret examines the British experience of the Revolution and the Peninsular War. 11 Emma Roberts, ‘Memoir of L. E. L’., The Zenana and Minor Poems of L. E. L. (London & Paris: Fisher, Son & Co., 1839), 17. Roberts’s remarks are particularly pertinent to the Spanish material since Roberts herself wrote a definition-poem titled ‘Spain’ in her Oriental Scenes, Dramatic Sketches and Tales, with Other Poems (Calcutta: Norman Grant, 1830), 217. For potential sources for Landon on the Spanish material, Spanishto-English translations included Joaquín Telesforo de Trueba y Cossío’s three-volume The Romance of History: Spain (1830) and José Joaquín de Mora’s three ‘artículos de costumbres’ on Spanish manners, published in the European Review between 1824 and 1826. New Monthly Magazine and the Westminster Review published Spanish émigrées’ materials. Also, Mary Leman Grimstone published Zayda: A Spanish Tale in three Cantos (under the pseudonym ‘Oscar’, 1820), which has displaced guerrilla material. 12 Roberts, ‘Memoir of L. E. L’., 17.

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include Turkey, Russia, India, China, Persia, Egypt, America, Africa, South America and the tropics. Writing in ‘modern’ times, as nation-states emerged and Britain expanded its empire, and reflecting her contemporaries’ engagement with the world beyond national borders, Landon has her English characters busily cross national borders and tests their prejudices in encounters with the ‘foreign’ Other(s) and with different points of view. Their travels to Italy and Spain are not just a diversion but a thematically and discursively integral part of the novel. They also develop through travel and experience of the world, à la Childe Harold, and transform their views on themselves and others, while shaped by these changes. Danielle Barkley notes the significance of geographic expansiveness in Romance and Reality, but focuses on its Italian theme.13 Landon’s treatment of the Spanish material in the novel, on the other hand, has been so far unexamined, even though the Spanish theme is arguably more important: it is crucial to the novel’s dynamic rendering of European geopolitics in the early nineteenth century. As Britain in the early decades of the nineteenth century expanded its power across national borders, the English sense of national identity was often forged through international alliances vis-à-vis hostile ‘enemy’ forces. At the mid-point of Romance and Reality, Landon wryly comments on English attitudes towards foreigners: ‘“I am an Englishman, and I hate the French”, is the common expression of our cosmopolite feelings – the French being a generic term for all foreigners’.14 With such ironical observations, Landon mocks what she considers typical English attitudes toward foreigners. Indeed, while foreign accounts constituted a considerable portion of historical, travel and fictional narratives in circulation, they often reinforced the general sense of cultural superiority the English felt, as well as their certainty that England was the centre of the modern world. In the

13

Danielle Barkley, ‘Crossing Borders: Geographic and Generic Expansiveness in Letitia Landon’s Romance and Reality’, European Romantic Review 27:2 (2016), 175–188. 14 L. E. L., Romance and Reality, II. 269. Landon’s exaggerated contention may be only partly true. Many educated English people of the time did not think of the French as ‘other’. They flocked to France when they first could do so in 1814; and they still mostly exalted Italian taste, despite some of the Gothic associations with Italy.

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late 1810s, Jane Austen crystallizes this through the reckoning of one of her female protagonists. In the famous ‘reckoning’ scene of Northanger Abbey, sixteen-year-old Catherine Morland, after being chastised by Henry Tilney, concedes her folly in imagining that a scenario like those in The Mysteries of Udolpho could possibly occur in central England, the enlightened centre of Europe: Of the Alps and Pyrenees, with their pine forests and their vices, they [The Mysteries of Udolpho] might give a faithful delineation; and Italy, Switzerland, and the South of France might be as fruitful in horrors as they were represented there. Catherine imagined that all these places may be the places for gothic violence, but she dared not doubt [that they were] beyond her own country, and even of that, if hard pressed, would have yielded the northern and western extremities.15

The moment thus captures Catherine’s nationalist education by Henry, who subjects different parts of Europe to the imperial gaze of England, while denying the possibility of its own domestic and colonialist violence. As Britain’s conflict with France expanded during the Napoleonic Wars and especially through the Peninsular War (the Spanish War of Independence), Spain suddenly became Britain’s ally. As the general public revised their relationship with Spain and forged a sense of English national identity vis-à-vis Spain, women writers, including Hemans and Landon, were active shapers of this discourse.16 Landon’s detailed portrayals of

15

16

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey: an Annotated Edition, ed. Susan Wolfson (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 277. First written in 1798–99 under the title Susan, the novel was revised in 1816–17 and was posthumously published with the new title, Northanger Abbey in 1818. See Diego Saglia, Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000) and Susan Valladares, ‘Romantic English Women and “the Theatre of Glory”: the Role of the Peninsular War in Forging British National Identity’, Moveable Type: Journal of the Graduate Society, Department of English, University College London [online journal] (Summer 2008) , 105–20, accessed on 10 March 2015; also see Susan Valladares, ‘British Women Writers of Peninsular Fiction’, in Spain in British Romanticism 1800–40, eds Diego Saglia and Ian Haywood (Gewerbestrasse: Palgrave, 2018), 195–213; Jeffrey Cass, ‘Fighting Over the Woman’s Body: Representations of

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Spanish characters in Romance and Reality demonstrate her considerable knowledge of Spain’s political situation and culture, as well as the English public’s changing perception of the English-Spanish relationship. Landon’s participation in the literary explorations – and appropriations – of Spanish history, tropes and romances for raw material is evidenced in her earlier Spanish-themed poems, in which we can trace influences of Byron, Scott, Southey, Coleridge and Hemans, among others. Landon’s ‘The Guerilla Chief ’, a blank verse poem collected in The Improvisatrice; and Other Poems (1824), presents the motif of the Spanish guerrilla that became common in the wake of the Peninsular War. It is likely that the guerrilla motif struck a chord with English readers because of their realization that guerrilla warfare, rather than conventional battles, had played a large part in the defeat of French forces in the Peninsular War. In the poem, Landon focuses on the romance of a young Spanish couple, Leandro and Bianca, who part due to Leandro’s irrepressible ‘passion’ for foreign exploration.17 Upon his return from Mexico, Leandro finds his country ravaged and Bianca traumatized. Bianca, after reuniting with Leandro and regaining her sanity, expires in his arms.18 The poem ends with a short verse paragraph: Leandro lives for revenge as a brave guerrilla, and after the French retreat, he unites with Bianca in the grave. ‘The Guerilla Chief ’, removed from the specificities of Spanish history or society, focuses on the formula of the military hero engaging in a tragic romance. In contrast, Romance and Reality, benefiting from Landon’s historical and critical distance from the decades of Spanish narrative, extends and complicates the Spanish tropes and narratives, including insights on political and cultural dynamics. By the time the novel was published, British

17

18

Spain and the Staging of Gender’, in Romanticism and the Anglo-Hispanic Imaginary (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), 233–48. L. E. L., ‘The Guerilla Chief ’, in The Improvisatrice; and Other Poems (London: Hurst, Robinson and Co., 1824), 143–54. Other Spain-related poems in the volume include ‘The Minstrel of Portugal’, ‘The Basque Girl and Henri Quatre’,‘Inez’, ‘The Grey Cross’ and ‘Apologue’: see Proyecto Poesía y Trienio for details. For the formation and roles of Spanish guerrillas, see René Chartrand, Spanish Guerrillas in the Peninsular War 1808–14 (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2004).

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readers were familiar with both the hagiographic portrayals of Spanish patriots and parodies of them.19 Thus, while in ‘The Guerrilla Chief ’ Landon primarily uses the trope of the guerrilla as an exotic, melancholy vehicle with which to sentimentally exploit the theme of tragic love, in Romance and Reality, she examines the guerrilla movement’s historical evolution and its local dynamics during and following the Peninsular War. She explores the way some guerrillas incorporated themselves into the Cádiz Cortes, who resisted Ferdinand VII’s oppressive regime and allied themselves with the Italian Carbonari movement.20 By harnessing these political struggles to her paradigm of romance and reality, she attempts a more informed portrayal of national identities and cultures. In the process, Landon creates a remarkable Spanish heroine who embodies the Spanish ethos better than male military hero types and whose passion and strength re-energizes the novel’s romance arc, without falling into the existing model of (Scott’s or even Austen’s) English womanhood. The Spanish episodes in the novel, which form the most substantial and liveliest portion of the third volume, revolve around the fatherdaughter pair of Don Henriquez de los Zoridos and Beatrice. Henriquez had formerly fought against Napoleonic forces as a guerrilla chief; he turns 19 Hispanicus, Spanish Eclogues, including an Elegy on the Death of the Marquis de la Romana, with Other Pieces (London: M. Allen, 1811); Laura Sophia Temple, The Siege of Zaragoza, and Other Poems (London: William Miller, 1812); Felicia Hemans, The Forest Sanctuary; and Other Poems (London: John Murray, 1825); Byron, George Gordon, Lord, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan, in The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–93); James Hogg, ‘The Guerilla’, in The Poetic Mirror, or the Living Bards of Britain (Edinburgh: Constable, 1822 [1816]). Many poems on the guerrilla have been analysed and translated into Spanish in Agustín Coletes Blanco and Alicia Laspra-Rodríguez, eds, Libertad frente a Tiranía: Poesía inglesa de la Guerra de la Independencia (1808–14). Antología bilingüe (Madrid: Espasa, 2013). 20 The Cádiz Cortes, Spain’s first national sovereign assembly, was formed in 1810 and passed the Spanish Constitution of 1812. They proclaimed universal male suffrage under a constitutional monarchy; during the Trienio Liberal (1820 to 1823), this Cortes was in effect. Landon thus demonstrates her awareness that the 1812 Constitution the Cortes of Cádiz worked to promulgate was the model of the Carbonari in 1820–1.

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freedom-fighter resisting Ferdinand VII; then he becomes an ally leader of the Italian Carbonari. Beatrice is a beautiful maiden who grew up in the mountains, becomes a courageous and spirited woman, and takes care of her ailing mother as head of the family; upon her mother’s death and loss of family home by her father’s enemies, she crosses over to Italy on her own, while fending off dangers. She conquers the heart of the male protagonist and befriends the putative heroine of the novel, ending up marrying the former and inheriting the latter’s home and wealth. In situating the father-daughter Spanish pair thus, Landon utilizes what Saglia calls ‘readily recognizable typologies’ of Spain, such as the guerrilla chief and the passionate Spanish maiden, but I would argue that she tests these familiar tropes by maintaining a dialectical tension with more complex social and personal realities.21 To maintain this tension, Landon incorporates some concrete historical and social references, such as South American cultural integration (evidenced in the depiction of an African servant named Caesar, for example), continuing political and social strife within Spain (through her depictions of Henriquez’s local followers and foes), and the Cortes’s alliance with the Italian Carbonari movement (through her keen portrayals of disinterested Neapolitan members). The familiar Spanish references she utilizes include Columbus’s discovery of America and the widespread consumption of chocolate. At one point, Landon exaggeratedly likens the cross-cultural romance of the English nobleman and Spanish maiden to the discovery of America by the often Spanish-identified explorer. Her narrator declares: Love is the Columbus of our moral world, and opens, at some period or other, a new hemisphere to our view. For the first time in his life, Lorraine loved – deeply and entirely; for the first time he had met one in whose favour his feeling, his imagination, and his judgment, [were] equally decided.22

Landon thus adds local airs to familiar expressions of romantic feelings. Yet, in the process of utilizing the standard leitmotif of strong Spanish maidens,

21 Saglia, Poetic Castles, 149; also see 152 and 173. 22 L. E. L., Romance and Reality, iii. 91–2.

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she creates a new female hero – a brave, intelligent and self-possessed person (the standard modern leitmotif ) in stark contrast to her reserved, domestic British counterparts (such as Adelaide Morton and Emily Arundel). Soon after his arrival in Spain, Edward rescues the cross-dressed Beatrice and her servant from danger and accompanies them to the decrepit family home. Like Honoria Scott (in her ‘The Fair Andalusian’, 1810), Landon writes a national-political dimension into an intercultural romance; in this case, using an English gentleman rescuing a Spanish maiden to do so.23 We can peg this time at around 1824, when Beatrice is sixteen years old. Once situated in her home, she tells Edward her life story, focusing on her father. We soon learn that Napoleon’s 1808 invasion of Spain marked a traumatic turning point for the de los Zoridos family. Pre-enacting a Spanish-English alliance, Don Henriquez, a young Spanish nobleman, visits England in 1804, staying with the Fortescues, ‘the last of one of [England’s] last Norman nobles’, a family who had held on to the Catholic faith.24 Henriquez falls in love with the young heiress of the family, Margaretta Fortescue. Landon notes that Henriquez’s ‘high birth, splendid fortune, and answering creed […] overcame even the objection to his being a foreigner’.25 Following their marriage, Margaretta comes to Spain with her parents to enjoy an extended stay at her new husband’s mansion. But the Peninsular War ruins the family utterly: Margaretta’s mother is killed in the French attack, afflicting Margaretta’s mental state – evoking the situation of Bianca in ‘The Guerilla Chief ’. For the rest of her life, Margaretta lives in a childlike state, relying on the care of her devoted daughter, Beatrice, especially once Henriquez is in prison or in flight. After Margaretta’s peaceful death, her English Bible represents Beatrice’s cultural identity as half-English. As Beatrice’s narration to Edward unfolds, we learn more about her as well as about her adored father. After the French attack, Henriquez joins a guerrilla group formed to fight the French and becomes its heroic chief. At Susan Fraser [Honoria Scott], Amatory Tales of Spain, France, Switzerland, and the Mediterranean: containing The Fair Andalusian: Rosalia of Palermo, and the Maltese Portrait: Interspersed with pieces of original poetry, 4 vols (London: J. Dick, 1810). 24 L. E. L., Romance and Reality, iii. 62. 25 L. E. L., Romance and Reality, iii. 62 23

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some point during the war, when he realizes that the initial French attack has permanently affected Margaretta’s mental state, he moves his family to a mountain cottage until the Battle of the Pyrenees allows them to return to their battle-ravaged mansion. Growing up as a ‘mountain girl’ enables Beatrice to handle life’s difficulties. As she begins to eclipse the novel’s putative heroine, Emily, both in Edward’s eyes and in the narrative arc of the novel, Landon contrasts Beatrice’s fortitude with Emily’s weakness, a result of Emily’s sheltered life. Landon observes: Both had strong feelings, poetical imaginations – and both had lived much in solitude; But Emily’s feelings had been left to her imagination, and her solitude had been that of reverie and idleness. Beatrice’s feelings, on the contrary, had been early taught the necessity of restraint; her imagination, curbed by action, had only been allowed to colour not create circumstance; and her solitude had been one of constant and useful employment. Both had much mental cultivation; but Emily’s was accomplishment – Beatrice’s was information. The one dreamed – the other thought. The one, only accustomed to feel, acted from impulse – the other, forced to reflect, soon formed for herself a standard of principle. Emily was governed by others – Beatrice relied on herself. Emily loved Lorraine as the first idol which her feelings had set up, an almost ideal object – Beatrice loved him from a high sense of appreciation. The English girl would have died beneath the first danger that threatened her lover – the Spaniard would have stood the very worst by his side. Both were sweet in temper, gentle in step and voice, and refined in taste.26

Through this extensive comparison between Emily and Beatrice, Landon links Emily to ‘romance’ and Beatrice to ‘reality’; or, rather, she presents Beatrice as one who incorporates both aspects within her, whereas Emily falls short of doing so. Landon complicates the typical love triangle and female rivalry by having Beatrice and Emily form a lasting bond when they find themselves at a convent in Naples, St Valerie. Beatrice assists Emily through various physical and psychological dangers, and manages to get Emily released from vows she has taken rashly. Thanks to Beatrice’s care, Emily, though gravely ill, is able to return to England, and, in a gesture reminiscent of Corinne, leaves her fortune to Beatrice. In effect, Beatrice inherits the old 26 L. E. L., Romance and Reality, iii. 247–8.

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English house of the Arundels, becoming a proper match for Edward. Instead of perishing like Spanish Bianca or English Margaretta, the mountain girl seems to thrive in any cultural context – Spain, Italy or England. Through Beatrice, Landon thus reinvents her most emblematic poetic heroine, a Corinne-based ‘improvisatrice’, into a vibrant, adventurous, resilient Spanish-English maiden, while revising its ending.

Revising guerrilla heroism Landon’s treatment of Don Henriquez illustrates her ironizing of the Spanish imaginary in the Romantic period. Henriquez as a guerrilla chief makes explicit the allegorical dimension of Spain’s national struggles. Landon utilizes all the trappings of the romantic revolutionary but grounds them in the historical context of Spanish politics from the Peninsular War to the mid-1820s. When ‘Beatrice reached her sixteenth year’, Landon’s narrator states, ‘the system of oppression and extortion enforced in his native province called imperatively on Don Henriquez to take his place in the Cortes. A few weeks of bold remonstrance ended with the imprisonment of the most obnoxious members, and a heavy fine on their property’.27 Henriquez is incarcerated in the dungeon, then escapes, ‘aided by a party with whom he was now linked’ and he then sought Naples: ‘a knot of exiles had there laid a daring plan for revolution which, in their country’s liberty, involved their own restoration’.28 Since Henriquez’s ‘talents and activity pointed him out as a fit agent’, he goes back and forth between Spain and Italy, ‘to join and take command of an insurrection [in Italy], whose

27 L. E. L., Romance and Reality, iii. 67. 28 L. E. L., Romance and Reality, iii. 85.

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success was to be the touchstone of their countrymen’.29 This sounds like a shorthand description of the life of a fierce freedom fighter.30 Yet, once readers have heard Henriquez’s story since his incarceration as told to his adoring daughter, the narrator views him ironically. Using the same detached voice that satirizes English politics and high society in volume 1, the narrator evaluates him as a flawed hero: ‘It must be owned, that Beatrice’s character of him was rather his beau idéal than himself ’.31 While Landon shows sympathy for the Spanish liberal factions under Ferdinand VII’s rule, ultimately she seems to maintain critical distance from them. She promulgates individualism over factionalism and nationalism, and gradualism over radical social change. Yet, like other English literati addressing the Mediterranean political future, she maintains that English constitutional monarchy ought to serve as a model for Spain and Italy. While implicitly endorsing a patriotic stance concerning English political systems, however, she also reveals her scepticism about the upper echelons of English society, as well as Whig politicians. In addition, she takes a dig at masculine ambitions and glory-seeking. While depicting Don Henriquez’s forays into the English political system and the high society, she comments critically upon them: He [Don Henriquez] had seen enough of England to have caught impressions, rather than convictions, of the advantages of a free people; and a good constitution seemed equally necessary to the nation and the individual. But his ideas of liberty were more picturesque than practical. He dwelt on the rights of the people without considering whether that people were in a state to enforce, or even receive them. He declaimed on tyranny like an ancient, on information like a modern. He forgot that, for change to be useful, it must be gradual; and while enlarging on the enlightened

29 L. E. L., Romance and Reality, iii. 85. 30 These include Robert Southey’s Chronicle of the Cid (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1808), Laura Sophia Temple’s The Siege of Zaragoza and Other Poems (London: William Miller, 1812), George Croly’s The Angel of the World; an Arabian tale. Sebastian; a Spanish tale. With other poems (London: John Warren, 1820), and John Belfour’s Spanish Heroism or the Battle of Roncesvalles (London: Vernor and Hood, 1809). 31 L. E. L., Romance and Reality, iii. 100.

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This is as much an ironic comment on Don Henriquez’s Spanish politics as Landon’s critical view of contemporary English politicians. Landon’s own national identity – couched in her typical ironic colour – is marked by being a middle-class woman who considered herself a ‘respectable Tory’.33 The authorial pronouncement expressed here echoes Mary Shelley, who has Victor Frankenstein realize the value of such gradualism in his account of his past to Walton. When she imagines Henriquez’s English counterpart as a member of the landed gentry and a titled parliamentarian, Landon seems to allude to Blanco White and the Holland House circle.34 Here again, her acerbic commentary targets English Whigs as much as members of the Spanish Cortes: Don Henriquez would have been a happy man in England: he would have taken the chair at public dinners, and said the most touching things about alleviating the distresses of our fellow-creatures […] he would have given dinners to politicians, and called it supporting his party – and dinners to a few successful authors, and called it encouraging genius: he would have been in the opposition, and made some eloquent speeches on retrenchment and reform, and the newspapers next day would have complimented the honourable member for Cockermouth on his brilliant and patriotic display: he would have died, and left material for a well-rounded paragraph in the obituary, without having retarded or advanced one single circumstance in the great chain of events.35

32 L. E. L., Romance and Reality, iii. 100–1. 33 Landon describes herself as ‘rather inclined … to respectable Toryism’ (in Letters by Letitia Elizabeth Landon, ed. F. J. Sypher [Ann Arbor, MI: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 2011], 127). 34 For the significance of The Holland House group on English discourse concerning Spain, see Lloyd Sanders, The Holland House Circle (London: Methuen, 1908), esp. Chapter 24, ‘Foreign Refugees and Visitors’. Also see Saglia, Poetic Castles, 26–32; and Nanora Sweet, ‘The Forest Sanctuary: The Anglo-Hispanic Uncanny in Felicia Hemans and José Maria Blanco White’, in Romanticism and the Anglo-Hispanic Imaginary (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), 159–82. 35 L. E. L., Romance and Reality, iii. 102–3.

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Through her ‘reality’ check on Henriquez, Landon implies a critique of the Cortes movement and the Spanish political situation. As she highlights the ‘romance’ of his espoused cause, she at once demonstrates her understanding of the political dynamics of a country in turmoil and reveals her own ideological slant: But, alas! for the mismanagement of fate – he [Henriquez] was quite out of his place in the Cortez of Spain: he dilated on religious toleration to those in whose ears it sounded like blasphemy – on the blessing of knowledge, to those with whom intellect and anarchy were synonymous – and on the rights of the people, to Hidalgos, who were preux chevaliers in loyalty to their king. Zoridos soon became an object of suspicion to the government.36

In Landon’s view, by the time the three years’ constitutional monarchy ends in 1823, Henriquez has run the course of the ‘romantic’ freedom-fighter. The next era cannot afford a grandiose figure such as Henriquez; post-1823, the scene in which Edward has a brush with Spanish government officials introduces Don Manuel, a highly intelligent, sensible judge who can handle the complexity of his country’s political situation.37 Set against the foil of Don Manuel, Henriquez’s lack of self-reflection and judgement, as well as his narrow-mindedness, fuelled by passion, are revealed.38 Landon offers this assessment of him: Don Henriquez was, besides, a vain, and therefore a restless man. The earlier part of his life [during the Peninsular War] had been spent in a career, for which, above all others, he was suited – that of a bold and active Guerilla chief: but the quiet and loneliness of the succeeding peace was perfectly intolerable.39

This unsentimental, indeed cynical, view of the guerrilla-turned-freedom fighter contrasts with Landon’s earlier portrayal of ‘The Guerilla Chief ’ as an ‘ill-fated character destined for suffering, loss and death’.40 Complicating 36 L. E. L., Romance and Reality, iii. 103. 37 L. E. L., Romance and Reality, iii. 294–6. 38 L. E. L., Romance and Reality, iii. 101. 39 L. E. L., Romance and Reality, iii. 101–2. 40 Saglia, Poetic Castles, 177.

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the established rendition of the freedom fighter, or even the ‘emotional psychomachia’ that Saglia finds in ‘The Guerrilla Chief ’, Landon’s Romance and Reality paints a prosaic but much more realistic trajectory of a former guerrilla chief.41 In this regard, the novel can be seen as Landon’s counterpart to Hemans’s 1825 poetic commentary, The Forest Sanctuary, which tracks the fate of a former Spanish freedom-fighter in a displaced, ‘mutated panorama’.42 As Henriquez moves back and forth between the Neapolitan region, where the Italian Carbonari reside, and his native land ruled by Ferdinand VII, Landon also presents a scathing critique of the Carbonari movement. Her depiction of the movement makes a critical assessment of the failed political movement that once attracted passionate freedom fighters across Italy. Henriquez’s political career ends at an Italian convent, which he invades with some Italian Carbonari in a guerrilla or ‘vendetta’ style, in order to loot some of its treasures. He accidentally and dramatically reunites with his daughter there and is persuaded by her to help Emily flee the convent and sail with them to England.

Beatrice as a new female hero? The portrayal of Henriquez and the Carbonari as a bunch of ‘ragged desperados’ in the mid-1820s attests to the historical vantage point Landon had gained by the time of her writing and also reflects the ideological tendency of many English representations of Mediterranean politics.43 Landon, too, displaces the question of political freedom and military battles into narratives of transnational journeys and domestic space. Henriquez’s guerrilla 41 Ibid. 42 Saglia, Poetic Castles, 178. 43 As Saglia notes, by the 1820s the romanticized aura of the guerrilla had largely vanished, and the guerrilla had turned into a ragged desperado by the time the repression of the Spanish liberal regime reached a climax in 1823 (Poetic Castles, 182).

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heroism has gradually faded into the background of the story by the time he departs from the Mediterranean region to England. Thus, he reverses the path he had taken previously as an energetic Spanish nobleman marrying an English woman. Landon’s subordination of the guerrilla theme to an intercultural romance may signify the demise of Spanish liberation struggles as vibrant inspirations for the British. Henriquez’s move justifies Beatrice’s adoption of England as her new home. And it implicitly supports the British Empire’s legitimacy as well as its continuous revitalization through integration of new ‘foreign’ sources of energy. In the novel’s dénouement, we learn that after Beatrice settles happily in England, Henriquez becomes interested in science and embarks on a tour of the Egyptian hieroglyphics, pursuing a new ‘romance’ of Napoleonic proportion. Egyptian pyramids, of course, were ultimate symbols of grandeur and magnitude and Henriquez’s trip to Egypt completes the mythical journey of the military hero turned transnational Romantic wanderer.44 Displacing military, geopolitical and masculine heroism, Beatrice represents the Spanish spirit, transnational mobility and the prospect of an Anglo-Hispanic alliance. As the novel re-situates Beatrice in Emily’s place, readers are invited to reassess Spanish and English identities through female figures. One can see Landon’s critique of conventional English womanhood through both Emily and Margaretta. The latter, the English bride who marries the noble Spaniard before the Peninsular War, becomes the emblem of the war’s collateral damage. Her daughter, Beatrice, who becomes the Spanish-English bride of the dashing English aristocratic hero, embodies a new, prosperous alliance. Landon suggests that Beatrice retains her foreignness and her ‘mountain girl’ qualities even when she is settled into the upper-class English womanhood of her day. This touch of difference marks her as a new heroine, who eclipses not only the English domestic womanhood of her time, but also the romantic qualities of her guerrilla-chief father.

44 For example, in Byron’s Sardanapalus, A Tragedy (1821), the titular Assyrian king states, in his dying speech, that the ruins of his blazing palace are a ‘nobler monument than Egypt’ (v. 480–2).

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Do the Spanish episodes contribute to Romance and Reality’s becoming a ‘perfectly original specimen of fictitious narrative’, as the reviewer of the Literary Gazette sees it? Does the novel refigure or complicate existing Spanish tropes in a significant way, or does it rehash the literary clichés of the day? To put it another way, does Landon’s romanticized Spain become an ‘all-explanatory image of Spain’, or does it convey some complex details and textures of the Mediterranean politics and culture, allowing polyglossia (to use Mikhail Bakhtin’s term) to be heard within ‘the Spanish palimpsest’, rather than reinforcing British preconceptions of the Spanish imaginary?45 Throughout the novel, Landon attempts to place romance and reality in tension, as she uses and appropriates foreign material. Her narrator at one point comments, ‘if it were not for romance, reality would be unbearable: nevertheless, they are very different things’.46 In weaving the romance of national cultures involving English, Spanish and other nations with courtship romance, she writes with ironic distance about the romance of the military, commercial, political and explorative leaders of the British Empire, even when she endorses British nationalistic ideological mandates as she treats the Spanish politics of her time. By the same token, she ironizes the typical gender dynamics of intercultural romance. It is important to note that Beatrice is not ‘delivered’, either physically or symbolically, from what most English of the time would have regarded as the antiquated feudal system to the civilized metropolitan centre by enlightened English gentleman Edward. In contrast to the gender norm that Landon explicitly questions, Beatrice actively charts out her path, taking a ‘long and unprotected’ journey on a boat from Spain to Italy; then, she delivers Emily – with her father’s help – from danger. And it is Emily who enables Beatrice to become financially independent, thus allowing her be a proper match in the eyes of English high society. Eclipsed by Beatrice, Emily becomes the emblem of the old ideal of English womanhood. On their way back to England from Italy, Emily 45 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 291–2. For the term ‘the Spanish palimpsest’, see Diego Saglia, Poetic Castles, 14; 23. 46 L. E. L., Romance and Reality, iii. 155.

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says to her nurturing friend (albeit her rival in romance) Beatrice: ‘You know not […] how I pine to be at home again; every voice grates on my ear with a foreign sound – my eyes look round in vain for some accustomed object – the very air I breathe has an oppression in it. I feel ill; but it is an illness that only asks for its cure familiar faces, and quiet and home’.47 This melancholic sentiment is an elegy to the memory of her old English home, which also contrasts with Beatrice’s non-sentimental attitude toward her own home, which has been burned by Henriquez’s enemies. In her will, Emily stipulates that, although she is bestowing fortune upon her Spanish counterpart, her family home should be demolished, so that the physical estate of the Arundel house will die with her. This dramatic gesture is a quasi-immolation of Emily’s old English identity. From the ruins, emerges a new kind of ideal hybrid womanhood in Beatrice Lorraine, while paying homage to Emily as her ‘ministering angel’. Thus Landon ironizes the typical coding in romances through questioning the notion of the quintessential English heroine and suggesting that Emily can be a moral ‘ministering angel’ in her spectral form. As a middle-class Tory woman writer, Landon, while navigating the romance and reality of the literary market, as well as the tastes of the reading public, participates in – and ironically uses – the structure of ‘othering’ that operates in prevailing nationalism and gender norms. When she first introduces Beatrice, Landon states, ‘if ever Circumstance, that “unspiritual god” of Byron, took it into his head to put Wordsworth’s theory of “how divine a thing a woman may be made,” into practice, it was in the case of Beatrice de los Zoridos’.48 Yet, Landon situates Beatrice within contemporary Spanish politics and endows her with Mediterranean passion and ethos, the qualities resonant in Byron’s fierce yet domestic Spanish maidens and de Staël’s Corinne. Rather than embracing Victorian womanhood, becoming conventional and proper, Landon’s Spanish heroine resides in English high society but lives outside the norm, remaining other, and remaining strong.

47 L. E. L., Romance and Reality, iii. 265. 48 L. E. L., Romance and Reality, iii. 61.

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5 Edward Blaquiere and the Spanish revolution of 1820

Abstract Six years after the end of the Peninsular War, Spain was once again in the international spotlight. The establishment of a constitutional regime was regarded with enthusiasm and optimism by European liberals, who hoped that the spirit of revolution might spread to other countries. One of the supporters of the liberal cause was Edward Blaquiere (1779– 1832), an Irishman of Huguenot descent who had served in the Napoleonic Wars as a lieutenant of the Royal Navy. He travelled to Spain in 1820 and gathered materials to write An Historical Review of the Spanish Revolution, Including Some Account of Religion, Manners, and Literature in Spain (1822). In this voluminous work, Blaquiere examines the events of the recent history of Spain and provides information on Spanish manners, religious character, and current literature. As Blaquiere’s text has received little scholarly attention, this chapter aims to explore a gap in current research by analysing his representation of Spain and his assessment of the current state of affairs in the country.

Edward Blaquiere: A Benthamite in Spain Described by John Bowring as ‘a sort of wandering apostle of Benthamism’,1 Blaquiere was an ardent defender of liberalism and utilitarianism. He was particularly interested in the political upheavals in the Mediterranean in the 1820s and wanted to create an international community that would unite all liberals so as to oppose tyranny and counteract the influence of

1

John Bowring, ed., The Works of Jeremy Bentham, 11 vols (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1843), x. 514.

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the Holy Alliance in post-Napoleonic Europe.2 Renowned for his involvement in the Greek revolution (1821–9), he was one of the founders of the London Greek Committee and was partly responsible for the recruitment of Byron to the Greek cause. He travelled to Greece in 1823 and 1825, and published several works sympathizing with the Greek struggle for independence: Report on the Present State of the Greek Confederation (1823), The Greek Revolution: Its Origins and Progress (1824) and Narrative of a Second Visit to Greece (1825). However, this was not the first time that he had presented himself as a freedom fighter. Just a few years before, Blaquiere had shown a similar enthusiasm for the Spanish revolution of 1820. When he read the news of the re-enactment of the Constitution, he decided to travel to Spain to obtain first-hand knowledge of the new constitutional regime. He communicated his intentions to Jeremy Bentham in a letter written on 4 May 1820, where he explains that he was on his way to Spain ‘for the double purpose of collecting all the information [he could], and of witnessing a great people struggling for their liberties’.3 Blaquiere’s journey can be partially reconstructed thanks to the information contained in his letters to Bentham. He reached Spanish soil in June 1820: on 7 June he arrived in Pamplona, on 13 June in Zaragoza, and on 22 June in Madrid, where he stayed for a few weeks.4 By the end of July, he was already on his way to France. On 29 July, he was in Irún, and he remained there until at least early September. By November of that year, he had settled in Paris.5 Therefore, his residence in Spain lasted only around three months, and it was certainly a fruitful time. He became acquainted with the political situation in Spain and with the manners of the Spanish people, thus gathering materials to write An Historical Review of the Spanish Revolution.

Frederick Rosen, ‘Blaquiere’s Liberalism and Mediterranean Nationalism’, in Bentham, Byron, and Greece: Constitutionalism, Nationalism, and Early Liberal Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 132–3. 3 Stephen Conway, ed., The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham. Volume 9: January 1817 to June 1820, 12 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), ix. 430. 4 Conway, The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, ix. 493. 5 Stephen Conway, ed., The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham. Volume 10: July 1820 to December 1821 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), x. 47, 51, 147. 2

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In addition, he acted as an agent for the spread of Bentham’s principles in Spain. In a letter, Blaquiere promises to Bentham that he would explain his reform proposals to the members of the Spanish Cortes and would take some copies of Bentham’s works to distribute in Spain.6 Although the promise might have been made in the hope of securing Bentham’s financial support, Blaquiere was as good as his word. Soon after his arrival in Madrid, he met the journalist and lawyer José Joaquín de Mora and realized that he would be a suitable person to translate Bentham’s works. Blaquiere acquainted Bentham with the news in a letter dated 26 June 1820.7 Just a few weeks later, Mora published Consejos que dirige a las Cortes y al pueblo español Jeremías Bentham, the Spanish translation of ‘Letter to the Spanish Nation on a Then Proposed House of Lords’ (1821). Mora became Blaquiere’s ‘main contact’8 in Madrid and their relationship continued after the latter’s departure from Spain. Bentham’s papers include four autograph letters from Mora to Blaquiere written between 25 January and 21 February 1821.9 The tone of these letters is slightly informal. They reflect Mora’s concerns about the current situation in Spain and his complaints about the anti-liberal attitude which, in his view, the new liberal government had adopted. Their correspondence may have continued for longer, but only these four letters have been found. They survived because Blaquiere sent them to their ‘common friend’ Bentham, who kept

Conway, ed. The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, ix. 430. The spread of Bentham’s doctrines in Spain and his interest in Spanish affairs in the early 1820s have been studied by various scholars, including Gregorio Alonso García, ‘“A Great People Struggling for Their Liberties”: Spain and the Mediterranean in the Eyes of the Benthamites’, History of European Ideas 41/2 (2015), accessed 20 April 2017; Jonathan Harris, ‘Los escritos de codificación de Jeremy Bentham y su recepción en el primer liberalismo español’, Télos. Revista Iberoamericana de Estudios Utilitaristas 8/1 (1999), 9–29; Pedro Schwartz, ‘La influencia de Jeremías Bentham en España’, Información Comercial Española. Revista de Economía 517 (1976), 37–57. 7 Conway, The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, x. 123. 8 Rosen, ‘Blaquiere’s Liberalism’, 129. 9 British Library, Add MS 33545, Correspondence and Papers of the Family Bentham, ix. 1810–23, fos. 475–6, 485–7, 490. 6

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them among his papers. In addition, Blaquiere sent Mora a copy of An Historical Review of the Spanish Revolution or at least intended to do so, because the copy of this book held at Senate House Library, London, bears this handwritten dedication on the title page: ‘To Dn. J. J. de Mora from his most faithful and affectionate friend, the Author. London November 19th 1822’. Mora was not just Blaquiere’s friend, but also one of his main sources. Blaquiere acknowledges this when he states that he was indebted to him ‘for much valuable information’ contained in his book.10 The role that Mora could have played as his informant is highlighted by José María Blanco White, who, in a letter to his brother Fernando written on 22 August 1822, refers briefly to Blaquiere’s work and comments that Mora was probably his ‘inspirer’ and ‘oracle’.11 Blanco, who had been in voluntary exile in Britain since 1810, disliked Blaquiere’s account of the Spanish revolution and, in the same letter, he criticized it for being the work of a boastful man who spoke, from hearsay, of things that he did not understand. Reviewing Blaquiere’s book in the Monthly Review Blanco pointed out that his views were too optimistic, his knowledge of Spanish politics inaccurate, and that he had probably been biased by the opinion of his Spanish ‘oracle’. Moreover, he complains that the sections devoted to the Spanish revolution of 1820 form ‘an inconsiderable part of the work, which he has been anxious to enlarge by a heterogeneous mass of information collected during his residence […] without much discrimination’.12 Blanco might have been offended at not having found his name in the pages where Blaquiere deals with contemporary Spanish writers. However, as the following sections will argue, his observations are well grounded, at least in part.

10 Blaquiere, An Historical Review, 534. 11 Letter quoted in Manuel Moreno Alonso, La forja del liberalismo en España. Los amigos españoles de Lord Holland 1793–1840 (Madrid: Congreso de los Diputados, 1997), 373. 12 José María Blanco White, ‘New Publications, With Critical Remarks. Voyages, Travels, &c. An Historical Review of the Spanish Revolution […]’, The Monthly Magazine 6 (1 October 1822), 463.

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A history of contemporary Spain The title of the book, An Historical Review of the Spanish Revolution, reveals that Blaquiere conceived his work as a history of contemporary Spain rather than as a travel book. In the preface, he explains that his initial intention was ‘to produce a rapid and limited view of Peninsular affairs, immediately after [his] return from Madrid’, but he had decided to delay its publication in order to provide a more detailed account of the situation in Spain than could be found in newspapers.13 He thus produced a 600-page volume containing sixteen letters, a postscript, and an appendix including the English translation of five historical documents: the Treaty of Fontainebleau between Napoleon and Charles IV (1807), the secret convention relating to this treaty, the 1814 decree restoring the Inquisition, a document on the procedure of the Holy Office, and the proclamation issued by General Francisco Javier de Elío before the execution of some soldiers in Valencia in 1819. The inclusion of these texts is connected with Blaquiere’s intention to provide an objective and detailed account of the political history of contemporary Spain. But the truth is that his prejudice and liberal ideals permeate the whole work. Although the title of the book also suggests that it is mainly devoted to the Spanish revolution of 1820, the military uprising led by Riego and the constitutional regime established after it are only discussed in letters I, XI, the supplementary letter, and the postscript. The greater part of the book, from letter II to letter X, offers a comprehensive account of the events between 1814 and 1820, a period that the author repeatedly calls ‘the reign of terror’. He thoroughly explores the restoration of absolutism in Spain after the Peninsular War, paying special attention to the persecution suffered both by the liberals who had promoted the Constitution of 1812 and the afrancesados who supported Joseph Bonaparte (especially in letters IV–VI). He also examines the political tensions of the period and describes the failed military coups against Ferdinand VII led by Juan Díaz Porlier (letter VIII) and Luis Lacy y Gautier (letter IX). It is striking that

13 Blaquiere, An Historical Review, ix.

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Blaquiere decided to pay so much of attention to the first absolutist phase of Ferdinand’s reign instead of exploring in further detail the eventful and agitated first years of the Liberal Triennium (1820–3). He describes the operations involved in Riego’s coup in the first weeks of 1820, the Cádiz massacre in March that year,14 and the solemn ceremony in which Ferdinand opened the Cortes and pledged allegiance to the Constitution on 9 July 1820,15 which Blaquiere himself witnessed. However, he remains silent on events between July 1820 and the publication of the work in the summer of 1822, and he reviews only some of the problems and internal conflicts experienced by the constitutional regime during that period in the postscript to the work. This suggests that much the greater part of the text was written immediately after his short residence in Spain in 1820, and was not substantially modified to include updates on more recent events in the Peninsula – except for the postscript written in 1822. Although Blaquiere contends in his preface that the publication of the book had been delayed to allow him to elaborate a substantial study, he must have simply worked on the materials that he had gathered while he was in Spain. Even though the focus of his book is on political events, Blaquiere also examines the influence of the Catholic Church and the Inquisition on Spanish society in letters XII and XIII. His description of the procedures of the Inquisition is perfectly consistent with the most extreme accounts of the Black Legend. The Holy Office is presented as a ‘monster’, and its officers and supporters are said to be worse than savages. He thus affirms that 14 Blaquiere, An Historical Review, 318–29. The Cádiz massacre occurred on 10 March 1820, when troops led by General Manuel Freire attacked a group of citizens who were celebrating the re-enactment of the 1812 Constitution. Dozens of civilians were killed or injured. News of the attack spread all over Europe and reached Britain, where the radical newspaper The Republican compared it with the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 (see Richard Carlyle and William Sherwin, ‘Massacre at Cádiz’, The Republican 2/13 [14 April 1820], 433–6). A parallel between the two events was also drawn by Bentham, who wrote the pamphlet ‘Observations on Judge Advocate Hermosa’s Panegyric on Judicial Delays; on the Occasion of the Impunity as yet Given by Him to the Loyal Authors of the Cádiz Massacre’ to criticize the delay and mildness of the legal procedures against the perpetrators of the attack. 15 Blaquiere, An Historical Review, 8–16.

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‘the human sacrifices of the South Sea Islands, and the scalping practised by the North American savages were acts of mildness when compared with the procedures of the Holy Office’. The information regarding the history of the Inquisition, its practices and methods of torture is mostly extracted from Juan Antonio Llorente’s Historia crítica de la Inquisición en España, first published in French between 1817 and 1818. He assigns full credibility to Llorente’s works and refutes the views of other foreign authors such as Alexandre de Laborde who, in his opinion, had depicted the Inquisition too leniently.16 Blaquiere severely condemns the superstitious and irrational rites and beliefs promoted by the Spanish Catholic Church, whose influence on political affairs he also notably highlights. In addition, in Blaquiere’s view, the religious fanaticism promoted by the Spanish Church had had a major effect on contemporary Spanish manners and literature, explored in letters XIV and XV. He observes a relaxation of manners since the reign of Charles IV (1788–1808) and wishes for their reform as part of the political regeneration that the country has been experiencing since the re-establishment of the Constitution.17 Consequently, he links political liberalism with moral reform, an association in tune with the ideas of some of his contemporaries because, in Paquette’s words, ‘Constitutionalism was identified with civilization, as well as moral and political regeneration’ by the supporters of liberalism in the early nineteenth century.18 Blaquiere regards the new political regime as an opportunity for the cultural and literary regeneration of Spain. He blames the Inquisition for the country’s cultural isolation and observes that education and culture had been neglected for centuries, with the exception of the reign of Charles III (1759–88). Under the latter’s enlightened rule, Spanish letters had experienced ‘talismanic progress’, reflected in the works of Jovellanos, Trigueros, Cabarrús and Meléndez Valdés, who formed ‘a galaxy of genius

16 Blaquiere, An Historical Review, 20, 366, 398, respectively. Blaquiere alludes to Laborde’s Itinéraire descriptif de l’Espagne (1809). 17 Blaquiere, An Historical Review, 442–3. 18 Gabriel Paquette, ‘Introduction: Liberalism in the Early Nineteenth-Century Iberian World’, History of European Ideas. Special Issue: Liberalism in the Early NineteenthCentury Iberian World 41/2 (2015), 162–3.

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and talent’.19 Now that liberty had been restored, he predicts a new era of cultural splendour and emphasises – or even exaggerates – the literary merits of contemporary Spanish authors who, in his view, did ‘honour the age’.20 On the other hand, although Blaquiere’s work had not been specifically conceived as a travel book, it contains some of the commonplaces that can be found in the travel writing about Spain of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He complains about the lack of safe roads and comfortable accommodation, he speaks of bandoleros and muleteers and, of course, he refers to bullfighting, which he describes as a ‘horrid exhibition’ worthy of the Middle Ages. Although, in his view, the revolution of 1820 had placed the Spanish people in the vanguard of civilization, he portrays Spain as a backward country which had not reached the sophistication of other European nations. This is clearly reflected in the passage where he comments on the similarities between Spaniards and Africans, and praises their primitive but noble manners and customs.21 Like other enlightened and romantic travellers, Blaquiere presents Spain as out of touch with modern European developments and, echoing Iarocci’s words, as ‘a non-European Europe, a non-Western West’.22 Despite this portrayal, Blaquiere assigns to the Spanish people a major role in the political regeneration of Europe, as will be seen below.

From slaves to liberators: Blaquiere on the Spanish revolution of 1820 Throughout his book Blaquiere recurrently portrays the establishment of a constitutional monarchy in Spain in 1820 as one of the most important events in modern history. He presents it not only as a glorious moment 19 Blaquiere, An Historical Review, 487–92, 493 and 506, respectively. 20 Blaquiere, An Historical Review, 507. 21 Blaquiere, An Historical Review, 5–6, 455–64, 166–7, 456, 467, and 51–2, respectively. 22 Michael P. Iarocci, Properties of Modernity: Romantic Spain, Modern Europe, and the Legacies of Empire (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2006), 15.

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that marked the beginning of the political regeneration of Spain, but also as a great opportunity for civilization in general: The revolution of 1820 is, in fact, one of the sublimest instances of forbearance, magnanimity and self-denial, that history will have to record; and, as such, what language can describe the merit of the actors, or how is it possible sufficiently to reward them for the interminable blessings they have conferred on civilization!23

Blaquiere understood the Spanish revolution as the onset of a transnational movement that would foster the spread of liberalism across Europe. For him, the consolidation of constitutionalism in Spain was thus instrumental in securing the progress of European societies: Aye! convinced that the fate of Europe is in their hands, I feel satisfied the military heroes of Spain and Portugal will realize the hopes of mankind. That in consolidating the fabric of freedom in the Peninsula, they may establish the liberties of other nations, must, therefore, be the anxious wish and ardent prayer of every man, whose breast glows with sentiments of humanity and virtue.24

Blaquiere is not the only one who attributed such a momentous role to Spain. Other European liberals believed that the revolutionary wave of the early 1820s in the Mediterranean could spread to northern Europe. For instance Bentham, who followed the news from Spain with great interest, was also convinced that the Spaniards could liberate Europe. As he puts it in his ‘Letter to the Spanish Nation on a Then Proposed House of Lords’: Magnanimous Spaniards! For years to come, not to say ages, in you is our best, if not our only hope! To you, who have been the most oppressed of slaves, to you it belongs to give liberty to Europe. Yes: to all Europe!25

23 Blaquiere, An Historical Review, 349. 24 Blaquiere, An Historical Review, xvi. 25 Jeremy Bentham, ‘Letter to the Spanish Nation on a Then Proposed House of Lords (Anno 1820)’, in Catherine Pease-Watkin and Philip Schofield, eds, On the Liberty of the Press, and Public Discussion, and Other Legal and Political Writings for Spain and Portugal. The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2012), 69.

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The idea that those who were slaves were to become liberators is expressed in similar terms by Blaquiere, who argues that ‘the people who were slaves, little more than two years ago, are now the advanced guard of civilization’ and wonders whether it was ‘in the order of nature, that those who have suffered most from oppression, are destined to find a compensation, in conferring freedom and happiness to others’.26 In Blaquiere’s view, the role of liberators recently assumed by the Spaniards suited their national character. He portrays them as a heroic people who had repeatedly fought for their freedom throughout history, thus arguing that ‘a spirit of freedom, and love of independence, scarcely known to any other nation, have distinguished the people of Spain in all their struggles against foreign aggression’.27 This depiction is consistent with the images of Spain and its inhabitants that emerged in Britain during the Peninsular War. These Romantic figurations, which have been extensively studied by Saglia, tend to present Spain as a land of conflict where history repeats itself.28 Successive invasions by the Romans, the Moors, and most recently the French show that the peoples of the Iberian Peninsula had been long forced to fight to repel their foreign enemies. Nevertheless, Blaquiere observes that despite the courage displayed in fighting against their ‘external foes’, the Spaniards had submitted mildly to their ‘domestic oppressors’, who had exercised their tyrannical rule over them for three centuries.29 In 1820, however, the Spanish people had dared to free themselves from the yoke of absolutism. The contrast that Blaquiere establishes between the past and the present condition of the Spanish people reflects the significant changes that, in his view, the country had experienced since the restoration of the Constitution in 1820. His account of the sudden transformation of Spain and its inhabitants in their transition from despotism to freedom may seem illusory and even naïve, but it testifies to his firm belief that the nation 26 Blaquiere, An Historical Review, xiii–xiv. 27 Blaquiere, An Historical Review, 19. 28 Diego Saglia, Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 19. 29 Blaquiere, An Historical Review, 19.

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was undergoing some form of political regeneration which was in turn promoting happiness and prosperity. This is best illustrated in letter I, in which Blaquiere describes his journey from the French border to Madrid. He claims that even in provincial towns and secluded villages the mood of the people had changed, and everybody rejoiced in their new state of liberty.30 According to his account, the Spaniards had previously been dull and silent, but everything had changed after their emancipation: Instead of the dead silence which had hitherto pervaded the streets, nothing was seen but cheerful faces, and groups at every corner, busied in discussing passing events, or congratulating each other on the return of liberty. Not a day passed without the celebration of some circumstance connected with their emancipation; serenades and concerts enlivened the streets at night, while the theatres were thronged, to witness productions, which either retraced the past glories of Spain, or pourtrayed [sic] its present happiness.31

He includes a detailed description of the festivities held in Madrid to mark Ferdinand’s allegiance to the Constitution and the opening of the Cortes in July 1820, but he also refers to the celebrations that were taking place in other towns. He describes a very peculiar ceremony in Tudela, Navarre, where he witnessed a procession led by a group of monks on their way back to the cathedral. They had just consecrated a constitutional stone in the main square of the city to mark the restoration of the 1812 Constitution. Then mass was celebrated in the cathedral and when it ended, some bands paraded down the streets playing national airs.32 This use of religious rites to pay tribute to the constitutional regime not only reflects the omnipresence of religion in Spanish life, but also and most importantly confers on the Constitution a kind of sacred nature. In addition, considering the major role played by the Catholic Church in sustaining absolutism, this type of ceremony represents an appropriation of the rituals of the (recent) past that serves to legitimate the new regime.

30 Blaquiere, An Historical Review, 1–2. 31 Blaquiere, An Historical Review, 346. 32 Blaquiere, An Historical Review, 2–3.

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Especially in letter I, Blaquiere insists on highlighting the support that members of the Catholic Church provided to the newly established constitutional monarchy. By doing so, he was clearly underlining the general approval of the Constitution by the different classes of Spanish society, even if he was probably aware that this consensus did not exist. The presence of religious and secular elements in the celebrations for the restoration of liberty also suggests that the new political order had an effect on religious life as well. Liberalism is presented as a new faith to which the Spanish people are devoted, and the Constitution is portrayed as their new political Bible. This is best exemplified in the passage where Blaquiere narrates his experiences in Zaragoza, where he comments on the fact that in the cathedral a priest had been appointed to explain the articles of the Constitution.33 Blaquiere probably exaggerates the support that the constitutional regime received from the clergy, but the truth is that initially in 1820 the Spanish Church formally approved the king’s decision to pledge allegiance to the Constitution.34 Indeed, according to Ramón Solans, it had already participated in the process of legitimation and sacralization of early Spanish liberalism during the Peninsular War, and did so again during the Liberal Triennium.35 However, vast portions of the Spanish clergy were reactionary, and they eventually contributed to the destabilization of the fragile constitutional regime. Although in his preface Blaquiere claims to have adopted ‘a tone of impartiality’,36 he cannot be regarded as a reliable and unbiased observer. His enthusiasm for the liberal cause permeates the whole book and interferes with his interpretation of the state of affairs in Spain. He witnesses the recent political changes with enormous optimism and expresses his full confidence in the brilliant future of Spanish liberalism. For him, the Spanish

33 Blaquiere, An Historical Review, 5. 34 Gérard Dufour, Sermones revolucionarios del Trienio Liberal (1820–3) (Alicante: Instituto de Cultura Juan Gil-Albert, 1991), 36. 35 Francisco Javier Ramón Solans, La Virgen del Pilar dice …: usos políticos y nacionales de un culto mariano en la España contemporánea (Zaragoza: Prensas de la Universidad de Zaragoza, 2014), 139. 36 Blaquiere, An Historical Review, x.

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revolution had already succeeded, and no one could stop the process of political regeneration that had been initiated. To a certain extent, his is a delusive and idealized portrayal of the Liberal Triennium in which he highlights the most positive aspects of the new regime, underlining the consensus and moderation shown by the supporters of the Constitution. He praises the non-violent transition from tyranny to freedom and underlines the ‘unexampled moderation’ and ‘unexampled clemency’ shown by the leaders of the uprising and the Spanish people in general.37 His emphasis on the moderate and even non-revolutionary nature of the Spanish revolution was intended to reassure his readers that it was totally different from the French Revolution. Indeed he contrasts the two revolutions at the end of letter XI, where he points out that those who had condemned the ‘horrors which sullied the revolution of 1789’ would not find any revolutionary excesses in that of 1820.38 Blaquiere also has a very favourable opinion of the protagonists. He warmly praises Rafael de Riego as the military hero of the insurrection and underlines his ‘decision and presence of mind’ at the most critical moments.39 Riego was fervently admired in Britain and, after his execution, he became a symbol and martyr of freedom among British Liberals.40 Blaquiere also acclaims the speakers of the Spanish patriotic societies, the clubs that were created throughout the whole country to spread the principles of the new constitutional regime. In his opinion, those who gave speeches at these societies were remarkably eloquent men and faithful supporters of the Constitution. He describes their meetings as quiet gatherings and underlines their utility ‘in consolidating and maintaining the constitutional system’.41 Nonetheless, he ignores the political agitation

37 Blaquiere, An Historical Review, 283, 348. 38 Blaquiere, An Historical Review, x, 283, 348, and 349, respectively. 39 Blaquiere, An Historical Review, 289. 40 Juan Luis Simal, Emigrados: España y el exilio internacional, 1814–34 (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales, 2012), 433–6. See also Richard Stites, The Four Horsemen: Riding to Liberty in Post-Napoleonic Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 334. 41 Blaquiere, An Historical Review, 6–7, 7, and 345–6, respectively.

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that emerged from these societies and the tensions that arose between them and the constitutional government.42 He simply alludes to these issues when mentioning that ‘calumnies’ and ‘falsehoods’ were being circulated about these societies,43 but he does not provide any further information on the matter. In his attempt to sanitize the Spanish revolution, Blaquiere even speaks favourably of King Ferdinand VII. Although he openly criticizes the Bourbon dynasty and emphasizes their ‘imbecility’, his remarks on Ferdinand are neither caustic nor condemnatory. He describes the first years of his reign as tyrannical and is perfectly aware of the inconsistencies in the monarch’s conduct, but he insistently blames his counsellors, not the king himself. Blaquiere believes that the nobility and the Church were had been responsible for the restoration of absolutism in 1814 and portrays Ferdinand as a ‘deluded’ and ‘unfortunate monarch’. He establishes a sharp contrast between Ferdinand’s despotic way of ruling and his faultless behaviour in private to prove that he was not a cruel person. In order to illustrate this point, he translates a letter from one of his Spanish correspondents, who knew the king personally and gave an idealized portrait of the monarch. This correspondent states that ‘Ferdinand is adored by his domestics’ or that ‘he is the best of sons and husbands’.44 Blaquiere’s benevolent and, to a certain extent, contradictory portrayal of Ferdinand VII – a contradictory historical figure himself – reflects his own self-delusive attitude when trying to describe the recent events in the Peninsula in the most favourable light, but claiming to adopt an impartial tone that would conceal his own enthusiasm. It is only in the postscript, written in July 1822, that Blaquiere approaches the issue in a more realistic way. By that time, his zeal for the Spanish Liberal cause had cooled down and, although he was still confident of the success of constitutionalism, he was aware of the problems 42 For a thorough analysis of patriotic societies during the Liberal Triennium, see Alberto Gil Novales, Las sociedades patrióticas (1820–3) (Madrid: Tecnos, 1975). 43 Blaquiere, An Historical Review, 345. 44 Blaquiere, An Historical Review, 116, 35, 613 and 620–1. See also 20, 24, 74–6, 162, 625.

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that the liberal regime was facing. The postscript reveals his concern about the difficult situation of the country, which had been ‘thrown into a state bordering on civil war’ aggravated by increasing fear of foreign invasion. Blaquiere shows his disappointment with the Spanish Liberal cabinet due to what he considered the anti-liberal policies that they had adopted, including the laws restricting the freedom of the press and public discussion, the arbitrariness of judicial procedures, and the persecution of Riego. For him, the only people who could correct the course of the constitutional regime were the king and the comuneros, a radical group.45 Although Blaquiere portrays them as the most popular party in Spain,46 they were actually a secret society connected with Freemasonry. He must have sympathized with the radical outlook of the comunero society, but he overstated their capacity to prevent the inevitable fall of the Liberal Triennium.

Spanish affairs from a British perspective The presence of Britain is also conspicuous in Blaquiere’s text. After all, his work is aimed at a British readership. Blaquiere presents a favourable view of the Spanish revolution to gain the support of British public opinion and, eventually, modify the policy of the Foreign Office. As Cosores remarks, although the British cabinet seemed friendly towards the constitutional regime, their real aim was to overthrow it ‘by such means as would not 45 Blaquiere, An Historical Review, 633, 602, 634, 576 and 636. The activities of the comunero group during the Liberal Triennium are studied by Marta Ruiz Jiménez, El liberalismo exaltado: la Confederación de Comuneros españoles durante el Trienio Liberal (Madrid: Editorial Fundamentos, 2007). 46 Blaquiere states that ‘this party [comuneros] already boasts some of the most distinguished members of the late Cortes, together with all the generals of note and nearly the whole army; to these may be added the commercial classes, and most of those who fill the middling ranks of society. The rapidity with which its numbers are swelling, will soon make it irresistible, if those who undertake to lead are but true to their constituents and to themselves’. Blaquiere, An Historical Review, 600.

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strengthen any other governments’.47 The apparent neutrality and nonintervention policy adopted by the British government were not signs of their support for the liberal cause, but rather of their desire to take advantage of the events in the Peninsula. Consequently, according to Guerrero Latorre, Spain and the Spanish liberals were secondary issues because the main concern of the British cabinet was to preserve their commercial relationship with Spanish America,48 where most colonies declared their independence from Spain between 1811 and 1824. Blaquiere was not satisfied with the neutrality adopted by the British cabinet and demanded a more active support for the liberal cause. For him, that was a way of compensating for the wrongs of the past. In particular, he is very critical of Britain’s role in the Peninsular War, which had been responsible for the restoration of Ferdinand VII and, consequently, of absolutism in Spain. Even though Blaquiere had served in the Royal Navy against Napoleon, he underlines the positive consequences of the French invasion of 1808 for the modernization of the country and, above all, he stands for the afrancesados. On the whole, he regards the Peninsular War as a disproportionate reaction that had only served to maintain a dynasty on the throne. Moreover, he complains about the ingratitude shown by the Spanish monarchy towards Britain and British traders.49 Trade is actually one of Blaquiere’s central concerns. He openly advocates commercial relations between Spain and Britain, thus regretting the protectionist policies of the constitutional government. He argues for the signing of a ‘judicious commercial treaty’50 between the two countries and explains that it would benefit both: Spain is one of the most agriculturally productive, and Great Britain is one of the most industrious countries in Europe, at the same time that it is super-eminent in

47 Nadyezdha Cosores, ‘England and the Spanish Revolution of 1820–3’, Trienio. Ilustración y Liberalismo 9 (1987), 50. 48 Ana Clara Guerrero Latorre, ‘La política británica hacia España en el Trienio Constitucional’, Espacio, Tiempo y Forma. Serie V, Historia Contemporánea 4 (1991),238. 49 Blaquiere, An Historical Review, 167, 172–3, 634–5, 118–38, and 172, respectively. 50 Blaquiere, An Historical Review, 172.

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skill. […] A long period must elapse before Spain can become a great manufacturing country, in her present scarcity of skill and pecuniary capital, and whilst her population is so scanty, when it is compared with the productiveness of its climate and the fertility of its soil. Spain will be essentially benefited by the exchange of many of her super-abundant productions for many of our super-abundant manufactures.51

In these lines, Blaquiere acknowledges the economic and industrial backwardness of Spain and assigns to it a sort of colonial status. This shows that, although he was mostly an enthusiastic defender of political liberalism, he may also have wanted to favour British economic intervention in the Iberian Peninsula. Only a few months after the publication of his work, Blaquiere realized that he had been wrong. He had thought that the fate of Europe lay in the hands of the Spanish people, but it was actually the other way round: the fate of Spain lay in the hands of Europe. After the decisions of the Congress of Verona in November 1822, the illusory hopes for external support vanished, and French troops – the so-called Cien Mil Hijos de San Luis – invaded Spain in 1823 and restored absolutism. Blaquiere’s plans and recommendations became totally outdated with the new state of affairs. Nonetheless, although his work may be considered historically inaccurate and ideologically biased, it is a proof of the enthusiasm and hopes that Riego’s coup and the restoration of the Constitution aroused among European liberals at a time of counter-revolution. Blinded by his liberal fervour, Blaquiere may have misinterpreted some facts and provided an idealized and romanticized account of the Spanish revolution, but his ideas were in tune with those of the supporters of the liberal cause in the early 1820s. His text thus illustrates that, for a short period of time and after centuries of perceived oppression, the Spanish people were seen as liberators and their constitutional regime as a model for political reform.

51 Blaquiere, An Historical Review, 172–3.

Roderick Beaton

6 ‘The lightning of the nations’: Byron, the Shelleys and Spain

Abstract All three of these major second-generation British Romantics were affected, in their lives and their work, by the repercussions of the Constitutionalist Revolution in Spain in January 1820. The chapter examines political responses by all three as evidenced by their letters, and includes close readings of Shelley’s ‘Ode to Liberty’ (1820), Byron’s The Age of Bronze (1822, published 1823), with brief reference to Mary Shelley’s historical novel Valperga (1820–1, published 1823). The final part explores the interplay between the final act of the Trienio Liberal and the establishment of the London Greek Committee at the beginning of 1823, which helped launch Byron on his final journey to Greece to support the revolution there.

The first reference by Byron to the Constitutionalist Revolution in Spain, at the beginning of 1820, is oblique and characteristically flippant. The arrangement that re-established his relationship with Teresa Guiccioli on a new footing at Ravenna, this time living under the roof of the man he was openly cuckolding, was the consequence of the count having read an article in a newspaper: The Guiccioli revolution is the consequence of the revolution in Spain, and the good humour of A[lessandro] is caused by his having read the supplement to the Lugano Gazette. What a good thing Politics are in this world!1

1

Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 13 vols (London: John Murray, 1973–94), vii. 35–6: Byron to Teresa Guiccioli, 7 February 1820 (original in Italian).

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By April, the acceptance of the restored 1812 Constitution by King Ferdinand VII in Madrid was widely known in Italy. According to Byron, ‘the Spanish business has set all Italy a constitutioning – and they won’t get it without some fechting [fighting] as we Scottish say’.2 A series of letters written during that spring refer, for the first time, to Byron’s newfound enthusiasm for taking part in violent political action himself. His Italian carbonari friends had been galvanized by events in Spain. Byron, in his offhand, somewhat languid way, was beginning to think he might ‘take a turn with them’. It was the beginning of a trajectory that would lead first to the fiasco of the resistance-that-never-was, against the Austrians outside Ravenna in February 1821, and ultimately to his participation in the revolution in Greece. In verse, however, Byron was more hesitant. At the same time as he wrote those letters, with their mock-bravado and political enthusiasm, he embarked on the drama Marino Faliero, which dramatizes the dilemma of an aristocrat such as himself who takes up arms against his own city and pays the penalty.3 Then in July came revolution against another restored Bourbon monarchy, this time closer to home, in the ‘Kingdom of the Two Sicilies’, whose capital was Naples. This one, too, was a bloodless and barely resisted putsch, which forced an absolute monarch to grant a constitution, very much after the Spanish example. By the summer of 1820, when Byron first met Teresa’s brother, Pietro Gamba, all her family had become caught up in revolutionary fervour, and Byron with them. In a letter written later that year, which is a kind of prospective last will and testament, addressed to his estranged wife, Byron stated solemnly that ‘the Spanish & Neapolitan revolutions have changed every thing’.4 By the end of the year, Byronthe-man was stockpiling weapons in the cellars of the Casa Guiccioli in Ravenna and preparing for action – at the same time as Byron-the-poet was composing rhetorical verse dramas that questioned every aspect of the step he was preparing to take. 2 Byron, Letters and Journals, vii. 76: Byron to Kinnaird, 14 April 1820. 3 For this reading of the play, see Roderick Beaton, Byron’s War: Romantic Rebellion, Greek Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 61–3. 4 Byron, Letters and Journals, vii. 210: Byron to Lady Byron, 25 October 1820.

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During the same months, on the other side of the Italian peninsula, in Pisa, and for the time being quite independently of their friend Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife Mary responded politically to events in Spain and their repercussions in ways that were very similar. But what they wrote could hardly have been more different. Such is the varied spectrum of British Romanticism in its responses to political events. In the same month that Byron was writing to his friends in England about ‘taking a turn’ with the Italian patriots in Ravenna, Shelley wrote to Leigh Hunt: If I could believe that Spain would be effectual, I might possibly be tempted to make a voyage thither, on account of the glorious events of which it is at this moment the theatre. You know my passion for a republic, or anything which approaches it.5

We have the habit of thinking of Byron as the man of action, Shelley as the dreamer. But in this case, it was Shelley who first had the idea of actually going to the site of a revolution to take up arms for the cause. As was often the case with Shelley, the impulse for action seems not to have lasted. Almost at once, he turned instead to doing what he always did best: he wrote a poem, the ‘Ode to Liberty’. He was not alone in the Shelley household in Pisa at this time. Mary Shelley’s enthusiasm was no less: ‘The inquisition is abolished – The dungeons opened & the Patriots pouring out – This is good. I should like to be in Madrid now’, she wrote in a letter when the news from Spain was fresh. In July, in the wake of the Constitutionalist putsch in Naples, she was ready to extend her hopes to Italy: ‘What a glorious thing it will be if Lombardy regains its freedom – and Tuscany’.6 As late as February 1821, when the Neapolitan story had already entered its endgame, Shelley still

5 6

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Letters, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964), ii. 180: Shelley to Leigh Hunt, 5 April 1820. Mary Shelley, Letters, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1944), i. 104; i. 156.

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believed, much as Byron did, that ‘the defeat of the Austrians would be the signal of insurrection throughout all Italy’.7 Of the Shelleys, it seems to have been Mary who made the greater effort to grapple with the liberal-national politics that had gained momentum in Italy as a result of the revolution in Spain. Her second full-length novel, Valperga, is set in Tuscany in the early fourteenth century.8 Based on painstaking historical research, it projects on to the medieval conflict between Guelfs and Ghibellines the aspirations and convictions of contemporary liberals and nationalists in the making. She began work on the novel during the summer of 1820, while she was following the news first from Spain and then from Naples. By the time she resumed work on it after a break of several months, the following May, her attention had moved on to the revolution in Greece, which had begun in the meantime, in March 1821. But a more immediate spur may have been news from nearer home, immediately after the last hopes for Naples had been crushed. In her journal for 16 March 1821, Mary noted: ‘News of the revolution of Piedmont – & the taking of the citadel of Candia’.9 The revolution in Piedmont in March 1821 would prove short-lived. But this too was one of the aftershocks of the Constitutionalist action in Spain the year before, and it would leave its mark on Mary Shelley’s fiction. Candia is the name of a lake in Piedmont, above which the citadel of Mazzè, at the time when Mary was writing, was the seat of the last of the medieval dynasty of Valperga – from which her novel derives its title.10 7 Shelley, Letters 2. 262: Shelley to Peacock, 15 February 1821. Compare Byron, Letters and Journals, viii. 49: ‘For my own part, it seems to me, that nothing but the most decided success of the Barbarians [i.e. Austrians] can prevent a general and immediate rise of the whole [Italian] nation’ (‘Ravenna Journal’, 21 February 1821). 8 Mary Shelley, Valperga, ed. Michael Rossington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 9 The published entry ends: ‘by the Greeks’ (Mary Shelley, Letters, i. 357), but this is either a Freudian slip on her part or a misreading by the editor, from which others have supposed that news of revolution in Greece had already reached Pisa by this date (see e.g. 1.357 for editor’s note). In fact, Crete (known as ‘Candia’ at the time) did not become involved in the Revolution until 14 June 1821. 10 Miranda Seymour, Mary Shelley (London: Picador, 2001), 253 n.

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Shelley’s ‘Ode to Liberty’ represents the fullest literary response by any of the three British Romantics to the re-establishment of constitutional rule in Spain. It was written between March and July 1820, and was finished in time to be published along with Prometheus Unbound later the same year, as a kind of postscript to that volume. In that way the futuristic fantasy that is the verse-drama becomes (at least relatively) grounded in an actual moment of political history. Whereas Prometheus Unbound projects the poet’s political ideas forward to imagine a cosmic liberation far in the future, the more compressed ‘Ode’ is a retrospect.11 It begins and ends with a present moment that is explicitly at once the moment of writing and the moment in history when ‘Liberty […] gleamed’ (2, 5) in Spain – both of them moments whose sequel is unknowable by the poet and his imagined first readers. The revolution in Spain is the starting point for the poem. But although the Spanish people are called ‘glorious’ in the first line, the stanzas that follow are addressed not to them but to the abstraction ‘Liberty’. In the first stanza, it is the action of the people that generates the electric charge that then becomes visible as a flash of lightning – the ‘lightning of the nations’, or the ‘contagious fire’ that is Liberty. The same mixed metaphor is developed further in stanza 13, the only part of the poem where Spain is mentioned again. Spain calls out to an England that ‘yet sleeps’, ‘as with its thrilling thunder / Vesuvius wakens Etna’ (181–3). The metaphor at first invokes the reverberations of thunder, and then the phenomenon whereby volcanic activity at one point of the earth’s crust can spread to others remote from it (compare ‘contagious’ in line 4). Either way, Liberty is equated to the most violent and mysterious forces of nature.12 Liberty is always a force, for Shelley, not a thing. The Spanish troops under Rafael del Riego who mutinied rather than sail to reconquer the lost colonies in

11 12

Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Major Works, ed. Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 466–74. Line-numbers of this poem are given in parenthesis in the main text. Cf. Cian Duffy, Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 183–4; William Keach, Arbitrary Power: Romanticism, Language, Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 154.

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the Americas, the restored constitution, the imprisoned Ferdinand VII – these are of no interest to Shelley the poet, though he must have read about them in the newspapers. Instead, the ‘Ode to Liberty’ tests the limits of the power of language to create what it names.13 All but the first and last stanzas ‘record’ what the poet imagines he heard spoken by a biblical ‘voice out of the deep’ (16) – that is, the voice of his own imagination. It is a voice that at the end is ‘suddenly withdrawn’. At once, the poet confesses, ‘My song […] / Drooped’. The final image is of the last moments of a drowning man, a disturbing intimation of Shelley’s own end (281–5). In a way that is very different from Byron in Marino Faliero, Shelley concludes by doubting the political vision that his poem has conjured up. As the voice ‘droops’, what agency is left to proclaim the political reality? Alternatively, is the poet’s voice, itself, consumed by the all-conquering ‘contagious fire’ that it began by celebrating? According to William Keach, ‘What survives this staging of the poem’s own death is a trajectory of commitment of “Liberty’s” unfinished cause’.14 I am not so sure. The ‘Ode’ also explores that irresolvable conundrum about the relation between ‘history’ and ‘thought’ or between time and eternity, that is a hallmark of late Shelley.15 In its allusive way, the narrative thread of the poem is a summary of human history from prehistoric savagery (when ‘thou [Liberty] wert not’ – 23), through the achievement of the ancient Greeks (‘For thou wert’ – 72), the subsequent disappearance of ‘Liberty’ for a millennium, and the abortive stirrings of recent centuries, including the Reformation, the English Civil War, the French Revolution and finally the news from Spain. Overlaid on this temporal scheme is a series See Karen Weisman, ‘The Lyricist’, in Timothy Morton, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Shelley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 51: ‘“Ode to Liberty” […] is really a poem about the relationship between liberty and poetry’; Keach, Arbitrary Power, 151–8. 14 Keach, Arbitrary Power, 156, 158 (the latter quoted). 15 Roderick Beaton, ‘Re-imagining Greek Antiquity in 1821: Shelley’s Hellas in its Literary and Political Context’, in Dimitris Tziovas, ed., Re-imagining the Past: Antiquity and Modern Greek Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 47–58. 13

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of invocations of a higher reality that transcends time and ‘cannot pass away’ (79), an ‘Art, which cannot die’ (133), ‘songs whose music cannot pass away’ (146). The stanza on Spain builds up to an ‘appeal / To the eternal years enthroned before us’, praising thoughts and deeds that, somewhat enigmatically, ‘Time cannot dare conceal’ (192–3, 195). The ‘Ode to Liberty’ and the ‘Ode to Naples’, which followed it almost immediately, are usually, and reasonably enough, classed as ‘the more overtly political’ of Shelley’s odes.16 But Shelley’s political commitment is never far removed from metaphysics, just as Byron’s is always hedged about with more pragmatic considerations. Shelley did not live to see the endgame of the Spanish Trienio Liberal. But Byron did. And what he saw would play no small part in shaping the final act of the drama that was his life. Byron was living in Genoa when the representatives of the ‘Concert of Europe’ gathered at Verona to determine the fate of Spain. The Congress of Verona began on 20 October 1822 and continued until early December. While it was winding down, between 2 and 17 December, Byron weighed in intemperately in verse, with a long political diatribe, to which he gave the title The Age of Bronze. Its invective is broad-brush, somewhat extreme, and from a political point of view, most interesting for the new insights it reveals into Byron’s thinking about what he termed, writing in Don Juan at about the same time, ‘political economy’.17 What disgusted Byron about the spectacle of the crowned heads of state and their plenipotentiaries at Verona was the whole ‘Congress system’ that had grown up after the first of them, the Congress of Vienna, that had sat from 1814 to 1815 to decide the shape of the European continent and its politics after the defeat of Napoleon. Most of the targets he takes aim at in the poem are familiar ones, the invective unsubtle. By the time he finished the poem, Byron had evidently read reports that France, under its restored Bourbon king, Louis XVIII,

16 17

Weisman, ‘The Lyricist’, 50. Shelley’s attention to Spanish events is also apparent in ‘An Ode, written October, 1819, before the Spaniards had recovered their liberty’, and in the shorter ‘Liberty’ (written in 1820). See further Roderick Beaton, ‘Byron and Greece: Lessons in “Political Economy”’, in Roderick Beaton and Christine Kenyon Jones, eds, Byron: The Poetry of Politics and the Politics of Poetry (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 249–60.

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was preparing to invade Spain and put an end to the Constitution. The bitterness, and even some of the imagery (such as the invocation of King Pelayo, Visigoths, hidalgos) recall poems of a decade earlier, less inspired than Byron’s, that had been devoted to the Peninsular War.18 Byron calls on the Spaniards to resist, as they had previously resisted Napoleon: Mount, chivalrous Hidalgo! not in vain Revive the Cry – ‘Iago! and Close Spain!’ Yes, Close her with your armed bosoms round, And form the barrier which Napoleon found, – Th’exterminating war, the desert plain, The Streets without a tenant, save the Slain; The wild Sierra, with its wilder troop Of vulture-plumed Guerillas, on the stoop For their incessant prey […]

Recalling heroic moments from that old campaign, Byron rounds off his diatribe: Such have been, such shall be, such are. Advance! And win – not Spain, but thine own freedom, France!19

It is not only the freedom of Spain that is stake, Byron insists, with this sudden, final twist. The French themselves have been enslaved by the restored monarchy. Byron by this time would have read Shelley’s ‘Ode to Liberty’, with its plea, ‘O that the free would stamp the impious name / Of King into the dust!’ (211–12). He had echoed it in his own private journal written at Ravenna at the beginning of 1821, when it still looked as though the carbonari would rise against the Austrians: ‘The king-times 18

19

See Agustín Coletes Blanco, ‘Byron and the “Spanish Patriots”: The Poetry and Politics of the Peninsular War (1808–14)’, in Beaton and Kenyon Jones, eds, Byron, 187–99. On The Age of Bronze and Spain, see Coletes Blanco, ‘Spain and Byron’s The Age of Bronze (1823)’, in Diego Saglia and Ian Haywood, eds, Spain in British Romanticism 1800–40 (London: Palgrave, 2018), 115–37. Lord Byron, The Age of Bronze, ed. Peter Cochran, , lines 358–66, 376–7.

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are fast finishing. There will be blood shed like water, and tears like mist; but the peoples will conquer in the end’.20 But for all the rhetorical animus of the Age of Bronze, Byron got the political significance of the Congress of Verona badly wrong. Far from reaffirming the hated status quo in Europe, as its predecessors had done, this congress ended in disarray, and would prove to be the last. The failure of the powers to agree on joint intervention against the liberal revolution in Spain would spell the end of the ‘Concert of Europe’, that was the principal target of Byron’s satire. There was a further irony in this, because the chief agent of the change that came about in European politics at Verona had been none other than Castlereagh, the British Foreign Secretary who years before had earned the passionate detestation of both Byron and Shelley. Castlereagh was dead by the time the Congress met. His successor was George Canning, an orator of some wit, of whom Byron therefore approved despite his being a Tory (this much he concedes in the poem).21 But Canning had not yet mastered his brief. At Verona the British government was represented by the Duke of Wellington (another of Byron’s pet hates). The duke’s instructions had been drawn up in the summer by Castlereagh before his suicide. Castlereagh’s instructions were precisely to block concerted action against the revolutionaries in Spain. This was the principal reason why France ended up acting alone. Greece was on the agenda for the congress too, since revolution had broken out there in the spring of 1821. And Byron’s poem has passing words of support for the embattled Greeks, too.22 It was once again the hated Castlereagh who first proposed that the revolutionaries fighting against the Turks should be recognized as belligerents. This fell a long way short of supporting the Greek cause, but it did mark the first chink in the united front the allied powers had presented to condemn the uprising since 1821. It also showed that even at its most conservative, the British government thought it worth

20 Byron, Letters and Journals, viii. 26: ‘Ravenna Journal’, 13 January 1821. 21 Byron, The Age of Bronze, lines 552–4; cf. Don Juan, Preface to Cantos VI–VIII (Byron’s note on ‘Sejani’). 22 Byron, The Age of Bronze, lines 274–5 and Beaton, Byron’s War, 120.

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competing against Russia for influence in the region.23 In December 1822, although he could not have known it, Byron was already out of date on all these matters of state. That said, by the time The Age of Bronze was finished on the 17th, the writing was on the wall for the Constitutionalists in Spain. The build-up of the ‘Hundred Thousand Sons of St Louis’ who would cross the Pyrenees in April had already begun. Louis XVIII had a mandate from the ‘Concert of Europe’ to intervene. But the French would be on their own. Byron, following the news from Albaro, where he was living on the outskirts of Genoa, wrote with apparent irritation to his friend and banker Douglas Kinnaird, on 27 January 1823, ‘You see there will be a Spanish war’.24 This was not Byron the poet speaking, not even Byron the political pamphleteer of The Age of Bronze. He was worried about the security of his investments. This was a period in Byron’s life when his preoccupation with money and financial matters impressed friends and acquaintances at the time, and has exercised commentators ever since.25 Whatever the reason, his first recorded thought about the impending suppression of the Spanish Constitution shows no sign of the political fervour of the poem he had just completed, but only a fretful anxiety about the financial inconvenience to himself of war between France and Spain. By the beginning of March, it was clear that the constitutionalists were going to have to fight if they were to survive. Byron had been in poor health throughout the winter in Genoa, a fact that colours his next mention of Spain in a letter, again to Kinnaird, and again largely about financial matters: ‘If my health gets better and there is a war – it is not off the cards that I may go to Spain – in which case I must make all “Sinews

Irby Nichols, The European Pentarchy and the Congress of Verona, 1822 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1971); Dakin, Douglas, The Greek Struggle for Independence, 1821–33 (London: Batsford, 1973), 148–50. On top of Portugal, parts of Italy and Greece, the knock-on effect of the Spanish revolution would also reach Russia: see further Richard Stites, The Four Horsemen. Riding to Liberty in Post-Napoleonic Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 240–321. 24 Byron, Letters and Journals, 10.90: Byron to Kinnaird, 27 January 1823. 25 See, for example, Beaton,‘Byron and Greece’, 249–52. 23

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of War” (monies that is to say) go as far as they can – for if I do go – it will be to do what I can in the good cause’.26 The letter immediately continues, ‘But these are reveries …’. Byron, as so often, was thinking aloud. It is more likely that the letter captures a passing notion than that it is the record of a carefully considered position. But, however arrived at, the conjunction between his old preoccupation with political liberty and his new preoccupation with finance, set out in this sentence, would become the blueprint for much that Byron would later write and say about Greece, and for almost everything that he did once he went there. Byron as volunteer, Byron as private financier, Byron for the first time in his life subordinating himself to a ‘good cause’ – all these would soon become the regular refrain of his commitment to the revolution in Greece, that would take up the last year of his life.27 Who knows, if Spanish resistance to the Bourbons had lasted longer than it did, whether Byron’s translation of himself from Romantic poet to pragmatic statesman and man of action might not have been accomplished on Spanish soil, rather than Greek? The meeting of minds that would result in the formation of the London Greek Committee took place not in London but in Madrid, at the end of 1822. The words and actions of three individuals, two British, the third Greek, who started out together from Spain would have a fateful impact on Byron’s choices too.28 John Bowring (1792–1872) was a self-made businessman who had first gone to Spain as victualler for Wellington’s army during the Peninsular War, and would later become a Member of Parliament and Governor of Hong Kong. In England, he had become an admirer and friend of Jeremy Bentham

26 Byron, Letters and Journals, 10.114: Byron to Kinnaird, 1 March 1823. See also 10.118: Byron to Kinnaird, 8 March 1823, ‘I am very anxious to get together a few thousand pounds – to be at my own disposal – and to invest where I please – in America – Spain – or any where but in your country’ (emphasis added). 27 Beaton, Byron’s War, 129–30. 28 William St Clair, That Greece Might Still be Free: The Philhellenes in the War of Independence (London: Open Book, 2008 [1972]), 140–2; Beaton, Byron’s War, 124–6.

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and shared his liberal political ideals. He was back in Spain in 1821 and 1822, when he ‘formed the acquaintance […] of many well known liberals’ (unfortunately not named). His later autobiography makes no mention of his political activities there. But it does testify to his extensive travels and knowledge of the country. Not longer after his return to England, Bowring would publish a substantial anthology of traditional Spanish poetry in translation, which he dedicated to the Radical Whig Lord Holland (to whom Byron had also been close while he was in London).29 Edward Blaquiere (1779–1832) had served in the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean during the Napoleonic Wars, and had thrown himself passionately into the politics of the region. He had just published a 600-page book glorifying the revolution in Spain.30 It was in Spain that Bowring and Blaquiere had become friends. The third member of the trio was Andreas Louriotis (Luriotti). Born in 1789 in Ioannina (today in north-west Greece, at the time the capital of Ali Pasha), Louriotis had studied in Germany and France, and was now a close friend and associate of Alexandros Mavrokordatos, the Greek politician in exile whose confidence the Shelleys had gained in Pisa. Louriotis had worked as secretary in his uncle’s commercial house in Livorno. He had also been a member of the Philiki Etairia,the secret society dedicated to revolution in Greece. In autumn 1822 Louriotis had been sent to Madrid by the Greek Provisional Government. Desperate to raise cash abroad, the administration in which Mavrokordatos played a leading role had sent one of its most eloquent and well-educated advocates to plead its cause before the Constitutionalist government in Spain. Arriving in the Spanish capital while the Congress of Verona was in session, and the threat to the continued existence of the Constitution was becoming daily more apparent, it was the worst possible time. The governments of the two countries might

29 30

John Bowring, Autobiographical Recollections (London: King, 1877), 5–6 (‘Memoir’ by Lewin Bowring), 98–111 (on Spain); John Bowring, Ancient Poetry and Romances of Spain, selected and translated (London: Tayler and Hessey, 1824). Edward Blaquiere, An Historical Review of the Spanish Revolution (London: Whittaker, 1822). See further Sara Medina Calzada, ‘Edward Blaquiere and the Spanish revolution of 1820’, in this volume.

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have shared the same constitutionalist principles, but the Spaniards had enough on their plate as they prepared to defend themselves against the French. They had no money and no political capital to spare for revolutionary Greece. But as well as his letters of introduction to members of the government in Madrid, Louriotis also brought one addressed to Bowring. Bowring was already a well-known figure in European liberal circles. The letter was written by the Orthodox bishop of Hungary and Wallachia, another Greek living in exile in Pisa: Le Gouvernement de la Grèce ma patrie a chargé le porteur de la présente Monsieur Lourioti de passer à Madrid et d’implorer l’assistance d’un peuple magnanime, qui a jadis sauvé l’Europe de l’islamisme, et dernièrement du joug militaire d’un soldat Empereur.31

It must have been a true meeting of minds. Because shortly afterwards, and well before the belligerent intentions of France had become public knowledge, the trio left Madrid for London. Bowring, who travelled separately from the other two, was arrested in Calais, while carrying confidential despatches that ‘announced […] the intended invasion of the Peninsula by the Duc d’Angoulême’.32 By early in 1823, the three were reunited in England and the London Greek Committee came into being. Its members were mostly Members of Parliament from the Radical wing of the Whig party, who by this time included Byron’s close friend and former travelling companion in Greek lands, John Cam Hobhouse. Among their number was Bentham. It seems to have been Hobhouse’s idea to recruit Byron. No one objected. And since Blaquiere was about to set out with Louriotis on a fact-finding mission to

31

‘The Government of Greece, my fatherland, has charged the bearer of the present letter, Mr Lourioti, with calling at Madrid and imploring the assistance of a magnanimous people, which has already saved Europe from Islamism, and lately from the yoke of a soldier-Emperor’ (my translation). Athens: National Library of Greece, Papers of the London Greek Committee, file K10: Ignatios to Bowring, 19 August 1822. 32 Bowring, Autobiographical Recollections, 135–7.

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Greece, on behalf of the newly formed Committee, it was determined that they would make a small detour on the way and call on Byron in Genoa. This is the background to the meeting that according to most accounts played a crucial role in Byron’s decision to go to Greece. The reality was more complicated than that, as I have argued elsewhere.33 Suffice it for now to note that as Byron summed up the pros and cons of committing himself to the Greek cause, he still paired Greece with Spain – and indeed Spain came first. Teresa’s brother, Pietro Gamba, he tells Hobhouse, in the immediate aftermath of his meeting with Blaquiere and Louriotis, ‘ever since the ruin of Italian hopes in 1820 [sic, for 1821] – has been eager to go to Spain or to Greece – and very desirous to accompany me to one or other of those countries’.34 During the months that followed, while Byron was still trying to make up his mind, Hobhouse’s letters continued to report what he had heard in the House of Commons about Canning’s policy towards Spain. In March, Hobhouse noted a ‘difference of opinion as to whether we can go to war’. In May, Hobhouse himself was trying to persuade the Foreign Secretary to intervene in Spain on the side of the Constitutionalists, though he had to concede that for pragmatic reasons Canning was unlikely to come round to his view.35 Byron knew and approved the action of Sir Robert Wilson, a former general in the British army, who had gone to Spain as a volunteer. Much less famous than the philhellenes would become, liberal-minded foreigners were also volunteering to fight in Spain against the forces of absolutism in the spring of 1823. As late as June, when he was all but committed to Greece, Byron threw in, as an aside, in a letter to Kinnaird: ‘if Wilson quits Spain – send him up [i.e. to Greece] – he would do wonders probably’.36

33 Beaton, Byron’s War, 114–39. 34 Byron, Letters and Journals, 10.143: Byron to Hobhouse, 7 April 1823. 35 John Cam Hobhouse, Byron’s Bulldog: The Letters of John Cam Hobhouse to Lord Byron, ed. Peter W. Graham (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1984), 326, 330–1. 36 Byron, Letters and Journals, 10.114: Byron to Kinnaird, 1 March 1823; 10.196: Byron to Kinnaird, 9 June 1823.

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Even once the die was cast, during his last days in Cephalonia, while he was waiting for a ship to take him to join Mavrokordatos in Missolonghi, Byron signed off an excited report to Bowring, ‘May you live a thousand years! – which is 999 longer than the Spanish Cortes Constitution’.37 By that time, the revolution in Spain really was over. The torch had passed to the Greeks. It would be in Greece, not in Spain or in Italy, as had seemed much more likely, that a new kind of liberal, national, constitutional polity would eventually be forged. How that came about is another story. In their political sympathies, all three British Romantics were solidly in sympathy with the Spanish Constitutionalists. Events in Spain, and still more (probably) the reverberations of these events in Italy, where all three of them were living at the time, contributed in a variety of ways both to their lives and to their work. Shelley’s ‘Ode to Liberty’ is most obviously a poetic response to what was happening in Spain. More indirectly, and at much the same time, so too were Byron’s drama Marino Faliero (even if it was a negative response) and Mary Shelley’s second novel to be published, Valperga (1823). After the failure of the Neapolitans to resist or the carbonari elsewhere in Italy to support them, by the spring of 1821 the political hopes of all three became directed towards Spain and Greece. By the close of 1822, Byron responded with undisguised anger to what he saw as the ‘Congress system’ of European diplomacy in action, and hit out against it in verse, in The Age of Bronze. But during the very months when the endgame was being played out in the Iberian Peninsula, Byron, having at first toyed with the idea of going to Spain, committed himself to the only national-liberal struggle in the Old World that by the summer of 1823 still presaged any prospect of success, namely the Greek Revolution. Catalysts for the shift of focus among British liberals from defeated Spain to insurgent Greece turn out to have been individuals, two British and one Greek, who first met in Madrid at the end of 1822, united by their interest in the constitutional cause in Spain.

37 Byron, Letters and Journals, 11.78: Byron to Bowring, 13 December 1823.

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To that extent, it is true that Greece and the philhellenic movement became the inheritors of international liberal-national support that had previously and perhaps more easily been channelled towards the less exotic causes of constitutional reform in Spain and national unification in Italy.38 But this shift (as it appears in hindsight) obscures an important disjunction between those western liberal movements of the early 1820s and the Greek Revolution of the same decade. The former were all essentially about reform. For all Byron’s bravado and the (real) preparations of the carbonari for an armed struggle, the radical political movements that gained the most traction in Spain and in Italy at this time were not aimed at the violent overthrow of the entire political system. That was what had happened in France after 1789, and none of the three British Romantics of the immediately succeeding generation had been prepared to give wholehearted support to it in retrospect. The revolution in Greece was something else again, and politically is much harder, even with the benefit of 200 years of hindsight, to characterize.39 But it must have been obvious to Byron and the Shelleys, as to many others, that what was happening in Greece was much more like the revolution in France than anything that characterized the ‘revolutions’ of Spain or Naples in 1820 or Piedmont in 1821. The Greek Revolution from the beginning had been a bloodbath, a vicious struggle to exterminate the oppressor, who to compound matters, was of another religion. Shelley, in the first half of Hellas, knew this – which may be one of the reasons why that poem ends on an altogether different plane, with the defeat of the insurgents of 1821 and the vindication of a ‘brighter Hellas’ that is not of this world at all.40 See, for example, Frederick Rosen, Bentham, Byron, and Greece: Constitutionalism, Nationalism, and Early Liberal Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon,1992), 247–8. 39 Roderick Beaton, ‘Introduction’, in Roderick Beaton and David Ricks, eds, The Making of Modern Greece: Nationalism, Romanticism, and the Uses of the Past (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 8; John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 139–43; Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 76–7. 40 Beaton, ‘Re-imagining Greek Antiquity’, 52–5. On the character of the Greek Revolution see David Brewer, The Flame of Freedom: The Greek War of Independence, 1821–33 (London: John Murray, 2001). 38

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But neither Shelley’s ‘Ode to Liberty’ (written before the outbreak of revolution in Greece) nor Byron’s Age of Bronze (written after) makes this kind of distinction. Shelley is simply not interested in the different historical forms that the manifestation of Liberty might take in different historical circumstances. The difference between constitutional reform and violent revolution is elided throughout the ‘Ode’, as also are the very different historical periods and conflicts enumerated in The Age of Bronze. It was only Byron, when alone of the three he found himself actually engaged in fighting for a revolution, who ever faced up to the political choice between the two. Perhaps, in turn, this helps to explain why, when the time came, the decisive choice that Byron in Greece made was to support Alexandros Mavrokordatos and his allies in the internal Greek struggle against the absolutism of local warlords such as Kolokotronis. Byron’s intervention in Greece can truly be described as constitutionalist – a final legacy to British Romanticism from the constitutionalists of Spain from 1820 to 1823.

Agustín Coletes Blanco

7 Poems on the Spanish liberal revolution in the British radical press (1820–1823)

Abstract On 1 January 1820, Rafael del Riego, an officer in the Spanish army, rose in arms for the restoration of the Cádiz Constitution. Three months later, Ferdinand VII (reluctantly) pledged allegiance to it. This marks the start of the Trienio Liberal, a three-year period that ended with the intervention of a French army, the execution of Riego, repression and exile. In Britain, large-scale newspaper reporting greeted the Spanish ‘revolution’ from its inception. Initial amazement turned into all-out support that would continue unabated until the end. This chapter focuses on the reception of the Spanish liberal revolution as reflected in the occasional poetry published in contemporary British radical newspapers. Early poems celebrate the newly free Spain, later ones encourage the Spaniards in their fight against the invaders, and the final ones hold the British government partly responsible for the return of tyranny in Spain. This represents an interesting and coherent body of opinion that has never been brought to light and analysed until now.

Home disruptions: Peterloo, Queen Caroline and the radical press The OED first records the use of the noun radical in a political sense in 1802, as ‘one who holds the most advanced views of political reform on democratic lines’. The sense has not changed in the essentials, so we may safely assume that, when we discuss the word as used in the Romantic period, we are referring to the same basic meaning. Two hundred years ago, British radicals typically sought redistribution of property, the abolition of sinecures, a truly representative electoral system, republicanism, and freedom of the press. Philosophical grounding (mostly based on

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utopian thought, Jacobinism, and utilitarianism) was important, but popular agitation and protest was not at all disregarded as a form of ‘radical’ political action. With Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791) as their bedside book, British radicals loosely organized themselves around intellectual or action-oriented leaders ( Jeremy Bentham and Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt are prime examples), and into debating societies (the so-called Hampden Clubs) plus a parliamentary grouping that would eventually merge into the Liberal Party.1 As remains the case today, (British) radicals two centuries ago cherished the media as it dispersed their alternative, action-oriented political agendas among supportive audiences – and helped them to reach new audiences. Radical media included a variety of flyers, pamphlets, billboards, placards and cartoons, but, naturally enough, ‘serious’ radical media meant the newspaper press.2 A minority option by nature, radicalism, including the radical press, thrives in times of disruption. This is exactly what happened in postNapoleonic Britain. In the country of a long-insane king and a longprofligate regent, led by a long-standing, highly unpopular Tory Prime Minister, the (then young) radical press first showed its teeth on 16 August 1819 at St Peter’s Fields in Manchester. The suppression of a large protesting crowd was soon dubbed the Peterloo Massacre by the press itself. As Hanna Barker rightly contends, Peterloo proved a propaganda victory for the radicals. Most newspapers were extremely critical of the government but expressed themselves in a well-mannered way. The radical press adopted a far more aggressive and sensationalist tone, to the extent that it accused

1

2

For the meaning and history of radicalism, see further Paul McLaughlin, Radicalism: A Philosophical Study (New York: Macmillan, 2012), 7–133. Research leading to this chapter was partly funded by the Spanish National Research Project FFI 2015-68421P (Proyecto POETRY’15). I am grateful to the editors of this volume and other colleagues (Dr M. Gibbons, Dr J. A. Jones) who have kindly contributed suggestions and corrections to earlier drafts. See John D. H. Downing, Radical media: Rebellious Communication and Social Movements (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2001), 3–11.

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the government of ‘High Treason against the People’, as one headline ran.3 Naturally the establishment reacted. Following the failed Cato Street conspiracy, the government revamped the Stamp Act of 1712, creating the infamous ‘Six Acts’ (passed 30 December 1819), whereby punishment for ‘blasphemous and seditious’ publications was increased to fourteen years’ transportation and, even more importantly, cheap unstamped radical papers publishing opinion and not news were reclassified as newspapers, thus becoming liable for a stamp duty that would double or triple their retail price. This meant (among other abuses) imprisonment for Richard Carlile, who would direct the Republican from Dorchester Gaol and, perhaps more importantly, untimely death for a number of new radical papers that had bloomed in the heat of the occasion: Medusa, Democratic Recorder, and Cap of Liberty among others could not survive beyond a couple of issues.4 No sooner had the fury over the so-called Peterloo Massacre cooled off than another scandal shocked the nation, and hit the headlines. George III died on 29 January 1820 and the Prince Regent finally became king. George IV’s relationship with his self-exiled wife Caroline had deteriorated by the time of his accession, so much so that she was eventually and famously excluded from the coronation ceremony at Westminster Abbey on 19 July 1821. But for more than a year the royal ex-couple had been heavily covered by the press in what was in practice a public trial of the queen at the House of Lords, complete with melodramatic overtones and salacious detail. The country (and the press) divided sharply over the immensely popular issue, as had happened with the Peterloo Massacre. Only very conservative, government-subsidized newspapers (such as the Morning Post) took the king’s side, while the independent and liberal press,

3

4

Hannah Barker, Newspapers, Politics and English Society, 1695–1855 (London: Longman, 2000), 200. It should be kept in mind that, back then, the connotations of the words ‘High Treason’ were spine-chilling: see Agustín Coletes, ‘Taming Lord Byron: Burned, Faked and Bowdlerized’, in J. Martínez, ed., Mundus vult decipi (Madrid: Clásicas, 2012), 89–101. See Barker 196–203, and Kevin Gilmartin, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 195–226.

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which in this case echoed the feelings of the majority of British people, was favourable to the queen. As in the case of Peterloo, the radical newspaper press went further: it joined in the general clamour over the scandalous affair and presented Caroline as a wronged but also dignified woman and a victim of corruption. The Black Dwarf saw her as a champion of modernity whose interests ‘are the same with the interests of the people’.5 Caroline died only three weeks after the notorious coronation. Rumours held that she had been poisoned. Her support had already waned, but, by then, the press was busy with another momentous issue, a foreign one this time – the Spanish liberal revolution.

Foreign affairs: The Spanish liberal revolution and the radical press On 1 January 1820 a major political event took place in Spain: the military uprising of Rafael del Riego, who pledged loyalty to a liberal Constitution (the ‘Cádiz Constitution’) that had been in force for just over two years,

5

For a lucid account of this pivotal moment in British history, see Malcolm Chase, 1820. Disorder and Stability in the United Kingdom (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 9–199. Specifically for George IV, see Saul David, Prince of Pleasure. The Prince of Wales and the Making of the Regency (London: Grove, 2000), 150– 205; for Queen Caroline, see Flora Fraser, The Unruly Queen. The Life of Queen Caroline (London: Anchor, 2009), 342–4, and for the Peterloo events, see Robert Walmsley’s classic Peterloo: the Case Reopened (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1969), 100–215 and the recent Katrina Navickas, Protest and the Politics of Space and Place 1789–1848 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 82–105. General approaches to the period include J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1660–1832, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 514–16; Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad, & Dangerous People? England 1783–1846 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 195–308 and the classic Frank O’Gorman, The Long Eighteenth Century. British Political and Social History 1688–1832, 2nd rev. edn (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 363–71.

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from 19 March 1812, when it was promulgated, to 4 May 1814, when it was abolished. Three months after Riego’s coup, on 9 March 1820, King Ferdinand VII of Spain (reluctantly) pledged allegiance to the Constitution. These events marked the start of the so-called Liberal Triennium, a threeyear period that began in hope and ended in despair – the intervention of a French army, the execution of Riego, repression and exile. An outburst of newspaper reporting greeted the Spanish ‘revolution’ (as it was soon called) from its inception. Initial amazement soon turned into all-out support. This time there was unanimity: the conservative, independent, liberal, and radical newspapers gave their support to the Spanish cause.6 Significantly, parallels were soon drawn between home and Peninsular events: ‘A massacre has occurred at Cadiz in Spain, which equals in atrocity the late massacre at Manchester’ – such was the way in which the Republican of 14 April 1820 compared the Cádiz killings of 10 March 1820, when General Manuel Freire’s troops shot dead a number of civilians who were celebrating the re-enactment of the Constitution, to the still recent Peterloo.7 A growing sense of internationalism, the feeling that absolutism (as personified by Ferdinand’s reign between 1814 and 1820) was a superseded political system, and (for the radicals) the sensation that the Spaniards had succeeded in achieving for their country what they wanted to achieve for theirs were reasons behind a support that would continue unabated until the end of the period and beyond. For reasons of formal economy and sheer academic interest, this chapter focuses on the reception of the Spanish liberal revolution in contemporary British radical newspapers. More specifically, it focuses on its reception as reflected in the occasional poetry published in those papers, something that has never been attempted before. As amply demonstrated in a recent international essay collection, occasional poetry published in European newspapers of the period encapsulated precious information and, more importantly, worked as a partisan weapon whereby authors (often anonymous) took sides and acted as mediators between the 6 See Chase 94–8, 166–8. 7 The Examiner (9 April), the Observer (10 April) and the Black Dwarf (12 April), among others, drew similar parallels. See also Sara Medina Calzada, ‘Edward Blaquiere and the Spanish revolution of 1820’ in this volume.

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events and a wide readership, which they sought to win over to their cause.8 This time, it was the cause of the Spanish liberals, which soon became an example, provoking similar revolutionary episodes in Portugal, the Two Sicilies, the Piedmont, Greece and Russia, as well as having significant repercussions in Germany and Britain.9

The corpus: An all-out response to Spanish affairs A corpus of twenty-five poems on the Spanish revolution published in the contemporary British radical press has been gathered for the purposes of this chapter.10 The corpus includes twenty-three original poems plus 8

9

10

Elisabel Larriba and Agustín Coletes, eds, La poésie, vecteur de l’information au temps de la Guerre d’Espagne, 1808–14 (Marseille: PU Provence, 2017). See especially chapters by Alicia Laspra-Rodríguez, ‘Presse, politique et poésie anglaise de la Guerre d’Indepéndance (1808–14)’, 73–104 and Gabriela Gândara, ‘Évocations poétiques de l’Espagne dans la presse et autres imprimés portugais pendant la Guerre d’Indépendance (1808–14)’, 135–58, on occasional poems in support of the Spanish cause published in the British and the Portuguese press respectively. See also Stephanie K. Weiner, Republican Politics and English Poetry, 1789–1874 (London: Palgrave, 2005), 35–65 and John Gardner, Poetry and Popular Protest. Peterloo, Cato Street and the Queen Caroline Controversy (London: Palgrave, 2011), 11–217. For a comprehensive account of this revolutionary ‘knock-on effect’, see Richard Stites, The Four Horsemen: Riding to Liberty in Post-Napoleonic Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 28–321. The ‘four horsemen’ are Riego (Spain), Pepe (Naples), Ypsilanti (Greece) and Muraviev-Apostol (Russia). The little-known Piedmontese case is analysed in Gonzalo Butrón Prida, ‘La inspiración española de la revolución piamontesa de 1821’, Historia Constitucional 13 (2012), 73–97. For the Portuguese episode, see Jeremy Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 333–6 and the recent Ángel Rivero, ‘The Portuguese Uprising of 1820: A Forgotten Atlantic Revolution’, in Francisco Colom and Ángel Rivero, eds, The Traditions of Liberty in the Atlantic World: Origins, Ideas and Practices (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 155–68. The corpus is offered as an Appendix to this chapter. See the Appendix for the full bibliographic details of poems 1 to 25.

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two reprints, which count as units since they involve formal variation and different publishers. All these poems were published between 1820 and 1823 in four different papers that qualify as radical: the Examiner, the Black Dwarf, the Republican and the Liberal.11 The only pre-Peterloo paper among the four, the Examiner (‘A Sunday paper, on politics, domestic economy, and theatricals’), was founded by Leigh and John Hunt in 1808. It played a leading role expounding radical principles for the next few decades, and its editors were often given prison sentences for libel, as famously happened to the Hunt brothers in 1813. The paper had a respectable print run (7,000 to 8,000 weekly copies) and sold at a fairly expensive price (7d, of which 4d was stamp duty). Five occasional poems dealing with events of the Spanish liberal revolution were published in the Examiner in 1822 and 1823. Another victim of the Six Acts, Thomas Wooler’s weekly Black Dwarf, launched in 1817, was soon retailing at 6d, up from the original 4d, but, through its unique combination of substantial political analysis and iconoclastic, almost surreal satire, it managed not only to survive but to become the figurehead of radical newspapers, often selling up to 12,000 copies, which meant between twice and four times as much as most other rival weeklies. Eight poems dealing with (or touching on) the Spanish revolution saw public light in the Black Dwarf between early 1820 and late 1823. The inception of the Republican, also a weekly, was a direct consequence of Peterloo. John Carlile published his eyewitness account of the events in Sherwin’s Weekly Political Register, 18 August 1819. When the government responded by closing the Register, Carlile counter-attacked by changing its name to the Republican, and continuing publication. He was prosecuted for blasphemy and sedition and was imprisoned (for three years). The journal, packed as a rule with anti-establishment and dissenting invective, retailed at 6d and had a

11

William St Clair gives details on print runs and retail prices for many contemporary periodicals in The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 572–7. See also Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor, eds, Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland (London: Academia, 2009), ss. vv., and Kim Wheatley, ed., Romantic Periodicals and Print Culture (London: Cass, 2003).

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circulation of over 5,000 copies. As many as seven poems on the affairs of Spain were published in different Republican issues from mid-1820 to mid-1823. Finally, the Liberal was John Hunt’s short-lived new venture, famously shared with Byron, Shelley and his brother Leigh.12 The title for the periodical – an early use of liberal as favourable to changes and reforms – was chosen by Byron, who took inspiration from the revolutionary movements in Spain and Italy.13 Begun in autumn 1822 as a quarterly magazine, with a print-run of 7,000 copies, the Liberal did not survive beyond its fourth issue one year later – time enough for its publisher to be brought up on fresh charges of libel. Between late 1822 and early 1823 five poems on Spain were printed in the Liberal – Verse and Prose from the South, as its subheading significantly ran.14 Figure 7.1 shows the yearly distribution of the twenty-five-strong corpus.

12

13 14

See the classic William H. Marshall, Byron, Shelley, Hunt, and ‘The Liberal’ (University Park, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960), 50–134. The right title for the journal seems to be the Liberal rather than The Liberal, as contended by Jeffrey H. Cox, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 38. But if this is so, Liberal is not a noun (as contended by Jonathan Gross, ‘Byron and The Liberal: Periodical as Political Posture’, Philological Quarterly 72/4 (1993), 471) but an adjective. See Juan L. Sánchez, ‘Robert Southey and the “British Liberales”’, in this volume. A point demonstrated by Gross, 471–85. See also Roderick Cavaliero, Italia Romantica. English Romantics and Italian Freedom (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), 1–10. As rightly contended by Jane Stabler, ‘by writing “from the South”, the Liberal project was inviting its readers to abandon a secure Anglo-centric perspective’, ‘Religious Liberty in the “Liberal”’, in D. F. Feluga, ed., BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net (web, accessed 25 January 2018).

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18   16   14   12   10   8   6   4   2   0  

1820  

1821  

1822  

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1823  

Figure 7.1. Corpus distribution (poems per year)

Uneven as it looks, the graph makes perfect sense when seen in the light of events in Spain. Riego’s uprising took place on 1 January 1820, but it was not until March, when Ferdinand VII swore to uphold the Constitution, that the Liberal Triennium really took off, and occasional poets started responding in the radical press. The earliest poem about the Spanish situation was published on 19 April 1820, to be followed by another four by mid-December. The year 1821 was relatively calm. It is not surprising that there was little or no occasional poetic response to events in the radical press, since the revolution appeared to be slowly settling down and the country was ruled by various moderado (conservative-liberal) cabinets. The following year, however, was quite different and events soon took a sour turn. The March elections were won by Riego, and exaltado (radical-liberal) governments took office. In Madrid, the Guardia Real staged an uprising, instigated by Ferdinand, which was promptly subdued by pro-government Milicia Nacional. In late summer, the king’s ultra supporters set themselves up at Seu d’Urgell, took up arms and put in place a rebel absolutist Regency. In autumn, the Quintuple or Holy Alliance (Russia, Prussia, Austria, France and Britain) gathered at the Congress of Verona and gave France a free hand to intervene in Spain. There was again good reason to respond to events, so four new poems on the Spanish crisis were published in the radical press. The year 1823 saw the collapse of the Constitutional system in Spain. Amid a growing feeling of indifference among the common Spanish people

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and a tendency to defect among the Spanish generals, the so-called One Hundred Thousand Sons of Saint Louis crossed over the Bidasoa River. Ferdinand was declared ‘insane’ by the government and forcibly taken to Cádiz. Madrid was seized by Angoulême’s troops. Cádiz surrendered, the king was released and handed over to the French, and the last scattered bastions of liberal resistance fell one by one. All this happened between early April and early November. Forced exile and ruthless repression had begun – once more. On 7 November, Riego himself was executed, which put a symbolic (and tragic) end to the Liberal Triennium. No wonder that along these months an amazing sixteen fresh poems on Spain were published in the radical press. The latest of these responded ruefully to the final, harrowing turn of events in liberal Spain.15 Only four poems in the corpus were published with what are apparently the full names of their authors: W. B. Brough, J. Brayfield, T. J. Brayfield (probably the same person) and John D. Collard, none of whom could be identified. The rest saw the light of day with initials, anonymously, or under pseudonyms. The identities behind initials like ‘N’., ‘B’., ‘R.S’. and ‘W. F. I’. among others are unknown. Leslie P. Pickering claims that ‘To a Spider Running across a Room’ and ‘The Monarchs, an Ode for Congress’, both published anonymously, were written by Leigh Hunt.16 Pseudonyms include Inskip (a village in Lancashire), Brian Borhoime (a medieval Irish king) and, much more importantly, Quevedo Redivivus, a reference to Francisco de Quevedo, the Spanish seventeenth-century poet and satirist, that, as everybody knew, stood for George Gordon, Lord Byron. Allowing for its superior quality, and its main focus on home affairs, Byron’s piece (The Vision of Judgement) is not different in spirit from the rest of the corpus.

15

16

Alberto Gil Novales, El Trienio liberal (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1980), 1–59 remains the most useful introductory monograph on the Liberal Triennium. For the phenomenon seen in a wider perspective, studies include Miguel Artola, La España de Fernando VII, 2nd edn (Madrid: Espasa, 1978), 617–842; Charles Esdaile, Spain in the Liberal Age. From Constitution to Civil War, 1808–1939 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 60–71, and the classic Raymond Carr, España: 1808–2008, 3rd updated edn (Barcelona: Ariel, 2009), 136–52. Lord Byron, Leigh Hunt and the ‘Liberal’ (New York: Haskell, 1966), 21–2.

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Since there are no significant ideological divergences among the different poems, nor among the various radical papers in which they were printed, the central sections of this chapter will analyse the corpus as an engaged answer to the events that provoked its very existence.

1820: Spain and the genius of revolution W. B. Brough’s ‘Spain’, a thirty-line poem in heroic couples which was published in the Black Dwarf, 19 April 1820, is the earliest piece in the corpus. The ‘pride of Castilia’ having ‘flitted away’, Spain fell victim to ‘bigotry’ (together with ‘bigot’, applied to Ferdinand VII, a favourite word in these poems), but things have changed of late: Oh Spain, my dear country, what crime hast thou done, That the stream of thy curses should flow from thy crown? But the angel of Freedom his crest hath uprear’d, And the banner of Truth on the hills hath appeared; And stern retribution hath ta’en down his arms, And the dark soul of Ferdinand’s fill’d with Alarms …

Curiously enough, the poem ends in a dark tone – which turns out to be prophetic: Now grim-visaged death sits waiting for prey, For many a brave one has fall’n in the fray; But happy are those, who obey Freedom’s call, And more happy are they, in her cause who shall fall.

There had indeed been proto-martyrs for the liberal cause (most notably General Juan Díaz Porlier, whose execution in 1815 had hit the British press, poems included) and there would be many martyrs for the same cause (including Riego himself ) starting only three years after those lines were written. ‘Ode to the Genius of Revolutions’, by ‘N.’, the second poem in our corpus, was also published in Black Dwarf, on 2 August 1820.

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A seventy-two-line piece in iambic tetrameter ending in rhyming couplets, this poem follows ‘Spain’ in its use of ‘bigotry’ (once) and ‘bigot’ (three times), with identical meaning. It likewise celebrates ‘freedom’, which now ‘waves her banners’ in that country. As the poem contends: Spain rises, awful and sublime, O’er slavery, error, woe, and crime.

But there is also an interesting novelty: Thou, Genius, too, o’er Italy, Hast waved thy flag of Liberty; And scepter’d tyrants trembling, own That man should bow to God alone.

One of the peculiarities of the Spanish liberal revolution was its knockon consequences, which soon affected the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (Southern Italy and Sicily, with its capital city in Palermo and later in Naples). General Guglielmo Pepe, a carbonaro, who mutinied on 6 July 1820, conquered the peninsular part of the kingdom, and had Ferdinand I sign the Spanish constitution, which was adopted verbatim.17 Significantly, it was only a matter of weeks before these important events found poetical expression in the radical press.

17

‘Ode to the Genius of Revolutions’ is apparently the only poem in the corpus which is mentioned in a modern study (Chase 168, discussing revolutions in Catholic states). For the remarkable international impact of the Cádiz Constitution, see Ramón Arnabat Mata, ‘El impacto europeo y americano de la proclamación de la Constitución de Cádiz en 1820’, Trocadero 24 (2012), 47–64, and the recent studies by Horst Dippel, ‘Can Constitutions Be Translated? The Case of the Cadiz Constitution in German’, in David Hook and Graciela Iglesias-Rogers, eds, Translations in Times of Disruption. An Interdisciplinary Study in Transnational Contexts (London: Palgrave, 2017), 21–44 and Iglesias-Rogers, ‘From Philos Hispaniae to Karl Marx: The First English Translation of a Liberal Codex’, 45–74 in the same volume. Specifically for Italy, see Hook, ‘Distant Disruption: Some Italian Editions of the Costituzione Politica della Monarchia Spagnuola and their Significance’, 75–100 also in the same volume. Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies was uncle to Ferdinand VII of Spain.

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Throughout the 1820s and beyond, the Duke of Wellington, who had lately been appointed Master-General of the Ordnance in the Tory government of Lord Liverpool, experienced a high degree of personal and political unpopularity, which naturally reached the radical press.18 The third poem in our corpus, ‘On seeing the Duke of Wellington and the Marquis of Anglesea, riding together near Charing Cross’ by J. Brayfield, dated 27 August 1820 and published in the Republican on 15 September, is a critical comment on Arthur Wellesley and Henry Paget, seen as representative of a certain type of people: The mighty conqu’rors who aspire to fame, And who by wide-spread ruin raise a name, Who glory in the battles which they gain, And ride exulting o’er th’ ensanguin’d plain; Such men as these my heart can ne’er approve, Terror they cause – but cannot win my love …

Wellington (and Paget) were of course associated in the popular mind with Waterloo, but also with the Peninsular campaign, where the first had acted as supreme commander of the allied Anglo-Portuguese and Spanish forces. The ‘ensanguin’d plain’ of the poem may refer to Waterloo, but also to Talavera, one of the earliest and bloodiest battles in the war, fought indeed on the wide plain north-east of the town and repeatedly reported in the British press of the time. Both supportive and critical voices had used the word ‘plain’ to invoke this battle in different war poems. John Wilson Croker, praising Wellington, had referred in his Battles of Talavera to the Napoleonic eagles, which, ‘sweeping o’er the scattered plain [of Talavera]’, would in vain try to tear ‘the hopes of England and of Spain/With iron talon’. Without ignoring Talavera, Byron did the opposite. His Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage I transformed this epic view into a grisly reference to the servicemen of ‘France, Spain, Albion’ who ‘are met – as if at home

18

For details about this period in the duke’s life, see Rory Muir’s massive Wellington: Waterloo and the Fortunes of Peace 1814–52 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 119–400.

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they could not die – / To feed the crow on Talavera’s plain’.19 Given that these were the two most popular poems on Spain at war (with new editions coming out during the post-war period), our unidentified Brayfield might well be confronting Wellington and Talavera again. The fourth poem in our corpus is ‘Address to Britons’, by T. J. Brayfield (probably the same author), dated on 5 September (that is, only a few days after the ‘Ode …’) and published on the opposite page of the same issue of Black Dwarf. In this twenty-four-line piece in heroic couplets, Spain is specifically mentioned. The poetic voice apostrophizes the Britons: Oh, Britons! why content ye to sing Freedom’s fame, While nothing of Liberty’s left but the name! … What a shame for to boast that Spain has got free, And yet will not strive for your own Liberty?

In other words, Spain is now free, while Britain has ‘tamely submitted’, as the poem further contends, ‘to a tyrannical yoke’. Is this a hyperbole? Probably not: to a radical mind, 1820 Spain had finally got its freedom, while Britain had lost hers. This may be a paradox, but it is a heartfelt one. The fifth and last of our 1820 poems, also published in the Republican, 15 December of that year, is introduced by this paragraph: The following Parody, sung by Braham, [is] in a new piece entitled ‘Zuma, or the Tree of Health’. It is an adaptation of the famous Chanson or Hymn de Marsellois, in words directly applicable to the present contest between Spain and her Colonies.

19

See texts and analyses in Agustín Coletes and Alicia Laspra-Rodríguez, Libertad frente a Tiranía: Poesía inglesa de la Guerra de la Independencia (1808–14) (Madrid: Espasa, 2013), 89–120, 210–24. For Byron and other British poets on the Peninsular War, see Coletes, ‘Byron and the “Spanish Patriots”: The poetry and politics of the Peninsular War (1808–14)’, in Roderick Beaton and Christine Kenyon-Jones, eds, Byron: The Poetry of Politics and the Politics of Poetry (London: Routledge, 2017), 187–99. The duke’s image in Spain at war is analysed by Laspra-Rodríguez, ‘The reception of Wellington in Spain, 1808–14’, in C. M. Woolgar, ed., Wellington Studies V (Southampton: Southampton University Press, 2013), 144–79.

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Then follows a twenty-one-line piece in quatrains, one of which is a refrain. Rather than the usual ‘burlesque song’ sense, parody means here ‘an imitation’, of La Marseillaise in this case. The poem has a long textual story, since it indeed comes from Zuma; or, the Tree of Health: An opera, in three acts by Bishop and Braham (scores) and Thomas Didbin (libretto), first performed at Covent Garden on 21 February 1818. The opera derives in turn from the French tale Zuma ou la découverte du quinquina by Félicité de Genlis, published in 1817, with an English translation the following year.20 A set piece of anti-Spanish Black Legend, Zuma is (in all its versions) a melodramatic story about the wicked Viceroy of Lima, a Carlo di Cinchona [sic], and his malice against Zuma, a young female native, and the oppressed Peruvians at large. These are the opening lines: Peruvians wake to glory! Hark! What myriads bid ye rise! Your children, wives, and grandsires hoary, Behold their Tears, and hear their cries! Shall fell invaders, mischief breeding, With Spanish hosts, a ruffian band, Affright, and desolate the land, While peace and liberty lie bleeding!

And then the refrain runs ‘To arms! to arms! ye brave!’, etc. Leaving aside the anti-Spanish tirade as such, what is interesting about this piece is its use as a radical’s weapon against Spain and its ‘present contest’ with ‘her Colonies’. Contest there was, indeed: by 1820 Spain had retaken control of most areas in the American continent that had rebelled since 1810, especially as a result of General Morillo’s successful 1815 expedition. Riego himself was a senior officer in a second major task force that was getting ready to sail from Cádiz when he staged his uprising, which had the immediate effect of suspending the expedition. This was the beginning of the end for Spanish rule in the American continent, even though efforts by successive governments (including the liberal governments) to regain possession of 20 The French tale was published in Paris, chez Maradan; the English translation in London, Henry Colburn, and the opera also in London, John Miller.

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those colonies would extend as far as 1829, towards the close of Ferdinand’s reign in 1833.21 Ironically enough, the country that had been pictured as the new champion of liberties in the preceding 1820 poems is now seen as the subjugator of its own overseas territories in the one that closes the year – a contradiction with which the radical press seemed unable to come to terms.

1822: Chronicles of a foretold invasion After the 1821 gap, the first poem published the following year, sixth in our corpus, came out in the Examiner, on 28 April 1822, under the title ‘The Cordon Sanitaire’, by ‘B.’. A forty-eight-line piece in quatrains, the poem is written, as it were, from the French point of view. Its title makes reference to the ‘sanitary cordon’, a 30,000-strong military corps deployed in late 1821 along the border between France and Spain by the French government, to prevent the yellow fever that was ravaging Barcelona from spreading into French territory. Soon after this poem was published, the corps first developed into an observation army that took (unacknowledged) charge of halting the spread of Spanish liberalism into France and, soon afterwards, into the large invasion army (the already-mentioned One Hundred Thousand Sons of Saint Louis) that entered Spain on 7 April 1823. The poem begins like this: A SPANIARD to our soldiers cried, – (‘Twas from a Pyrenean brow, In tones of conscious power and pride) – ‘Where is your country’s freedom now?’ He checked their tale of days gone by, Of victories won, – but now forgot – ‘There is but one true victory, ‘TIS TO BE FREE, and you are not’. –

In a way strongly reminiscent of the fourth poem in our corpus, ‘Address to Britons’ seen above, here the poetic voice is a Spaniard who admonishes the 21

See above, n. 9, for details.

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French soldiers for not having won the ‘one true victory’ – freedom. After their initial angry reaction, he succeeds in having them know their ‘real foes’, turn around, help liberty ‘pass the Loire’ and fight ‘the hated Lily of white’. Curiously, this was partly prophetic. On 6 April 1823, when a group of enthusiastic liberals, waving the tricolour and singing La Marseillaise, incited the French soldiers not to cross over the Bidasoa Bridge into Spain, there was initial hesitation among the troops – until they were ordered to open fire on the spirited party.22 The seventh poem is ‘The Patriots’, published in the Republican 3 May 1822. It is a long and rambling piece (260 lines) written in heroic couplets which, very much in the Popean tradition, turn out to be mock-heroic. Abstruse and difficult to follow, the poem is a sustained satire whose main victim is ‘Old Murray’ (to be distinguished, the poem contends, ‘from all the young Murrays’). This could refer to John Murray II the well-known publisher, who was then forty-five (a comparatively old age at the time), while his son John Murray III was only fifteen. In 1822 Murray Sr was the editor of the conservative Quarterly Review, his collection of authors included remarkable Tories like Croker and Southey, and he had just become an official publisher to the Admiralty.23 All of this made him a household target for the radical press and in all probability influenced his decision not to publish Byron’s The Vision of Judgment, as will be seen below. Byron’s Cain (an earlier source of trouble with Murray) is mentioned in the poem, and so is Wellington (another favourite target for radical satire, as we know) several times, one of them in connection with Spain: 22

23

For this and other episodes of the invasion, see the classic Geoffroy de Grandmaison, L’expédition Française d’Espagneen 1823, 6th edn (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1928), plus the modern studies by André Lebourleux, La croisade des cent mille fils de Saint Louis: L’expédition française en Espagne de 1823 (Paris: Dualpha, 2006); Emilio La Parra, Los Cien Mil Hijos de San Luis. El ocaso del primer impulso liberal en España (Madrid: Síntesis, 2007); Emmanuel Larroche, L’expédition d’Espagne 1823: De la guerre selon la Charte (Rennes: PU de Rennes, 2013), and Jean Tabeur, La prise du Trocadéro ou la guerre d’Espagne de Chateaubriand (Paris: Editions SPM, 2014). See, for further details on Murray, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (sv ‘Murray, family of publishers’), Andrew Nicholson, ed., The Letters of John Murray to Lord Byron (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007) and Mary O’Connell, Byron and John Murray. A Poet and His Publisher (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015). A full biography of John Murray II is badly needed.

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Agustín Coletes Blanco But thou resplendent son of Waterloo! Brave votary of Mars and Venus too, How shall I sing of thee, whom all the fair The ablest Captain of the Age declare; Whose prowess nymphs and swains alike approve And hail thee non-pareil in war and love? Though the bold Louis rules his native land, And Spaniards own beloved Ferdinand, But how unlike the pious prince art thou, No saintly wreath shall deck thy rakish brow; His royal fingers wrought one Virgin’s vest, While thine, perhaps, unveiled another’s breast, To prove that beauty needs not care nor cost But ‘is when unadorn’d adorn’d the most’.

Rounded off with a quotation from James Thomson’s Lavinia, this is a satire on what is perceived as the disappointing outcome of Wellington’s victories, which resulted in the restoration of two ancien régime kings, Louis XVIII in France and Ferdinand VII in Spain – a feeling, shared by radicals and liberals, vented in satirical poems ever since the start of the post-war period. And it is also of course a naughty reference, full of innuendo, to Arthur Wellesley’s sexual prowess, a well-known issue at the time, and one that is set against Ferdinand’s apparent meekness: while the British duke undresses virgins, the Spanish king dresses them. Odd as it may seem, the latter also reflects historical fact, or at least a contemporary witness account. According to Fr Blas de Ostolaza, the king’s confessor, Ferdinand ‘se entretenía bordando’ [passed the time embroidering] for one hour every morning, together with his uncle the infante Don Antonio, while he and the royal family were confined at Valençay Castle on Napoleon’s orders. Ostolaza adds that they actually did embroidery for the local church and had it presented to honour Our Lady of the Rosary.24 This will earn Ferdinand the nickname ‘Petticoat Maker’ from the satirical caricature and the radical 24 Ostolaza’s piece is Sermón patriótico-moral, que con motivo de una misa solemne, mandada celebrar el día 25 de julio del año 1810 … dixo el doctor don Blas Ostolaza, diputado en Cortes, capellán de honor y confesor de S. M. C. el señor don Fernando Séptimo (Burgos: Ramón Villanueva, 1814), 31. A similar piece, published anonymously, is

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press, which seem to take turns in this abuse: on 2 April 1820 a print entitled The downfall of despotism, or the beloved & legitimate petticoat maker on his marrow bones!, by S. W. Fores and William Heath, was published in London (see Figure 7.2). It shows Ferdinand VII kneeling miserably at the feet of three stern Spaniards.25 Two years later came ‘The Patriots’ in the way we know, and in 1823 two more items will add to the saga.26

Figure 7.2. William Heath, The downfall of despotism, or the beloved & legitimate petticoat maker on his marrow bones. Published S. W. Fores, 1823. © Trustees of the British Museum

Fernando VII en Valencey. Heroismo de nuestro deseado rey don Fernando VII en la prisión de Francia (Valencia: Estevan; Sevilla: Imprenta Real, 1814), 12. 25 Two of them are army officers, and may be intended to represent the revolutionary leaders Antonio Quiroga and Rafael del Riego. British Museum Print Collection No. 1868,0808.8494. 26 See below, poem 24 in our corpus.

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Our next piece, eighth in the corpus, is The Vision of Judgment. By Quevedo Redivivus, published in the first issue of the Liberal, which saw the light of day on 15 October 1822. Like all other pieces in the journal, it came out without its author’s real name but, as mentioned above, everybody knew that it had been written by Byron. The piece fully qualifies as radical both in content and expression, and in publishing terms it became a turning point in its author’s career. Most of the details are well known.27 Byron dated the MS on 4 October 1821 and sent it to Murray, his regular publisher, four days later, with a letter that turned out to be prophetic: ‘It may happen that you will be afraid to publish it – in that case find me a publisher – assuring him – that if he goes into a scrape I will give up my name or person’.28 Murray was dismayed and clearly reluctant to go ahead with the publication, but so were the marginal publishers that Douglas Kinnaird, Byron’s friend and banker, explored as an alternative, and it was not until the Hunts visited Shelley and Byron in Italy in early July 1823 that a decision was taken to publish The Vision of Judgment in the maiden issue of the Liberal. But now it was Byron’s turn to get dismayed. Apparently, Murray had delivered to John Hunt an uncorrected copy, without its (crucial) preface, and this is what emerged in the Liberal – a rough copy, with an embarrassing errata slip, and no preface. Byron was so incensed at Murray’s responsibility for the outcome that he broke definitively with his long-standing publisher in early November. Be that as it may, Byron was looking for hopeful signs to set against the reactionary nature (as he saw it) of George III’s reign, and liberal Spain was part of this. The Vision of Judgment, an extended poem in 106 ottava rima stanzas (848 lines in all), was his sardonic response to Southey’s poem of the same title, an apotheosis of George III that the Poet Laureate wrote on the occasion of the king’s death on 29 January 1820.

27 See George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Tom McGann, 7 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980–93), vi. 667–73. 28 Byron to Murray, Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 13 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973–94), viii. 232. See Nicholson, ed., 165–470; O’Connell, 143–95, and Clara Tuite, Lord Byron and Scandalous Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 222–5.

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This happened four weeks after Riego had risen in Spain against his own absolute king; or, as the narrative voice in The Vision puts it: In the first year of freedom’s second dawn Died George the Third; although no tyrant, one Who shielded tyrants, till each sense withdrawn Left him nor mental nor external sun …

The poem thus begins as a marker against which to set Byron’s mockery of George and the Tories. The first line actually refers to the Spanish liberal revolution, and is probably intertextual in that a few months before Byron put together his poem Carlile had addressed himself in writing ‘To the Reformers of Great Britain’, dating his piece at ‘Dorchester Gaol, March 5. Year 2, of the Spanish Revolution’. Carlile would keep the habit of dating his writings after the Spanish revolutionary years in subsequent publications.29 Among those aggravated by the British king, who, according to Byron, ‘although no tyrant shielded tyrants’, are the shades of the Spaniards, willing to bring evidence against George III, so that his soul rots away in hell: Besides there were the Spaniard, Dutch, and Dane; In short, an universal shoal of shades From Otaheite’s Isle to Salisbury Plain, Of all climes and professions, years and trades, Ready to swear against the good king’s reign, Bitter as clubs in cards are against spades …

The lawyer in this ‘judgment’ or trial is the archangel Michael, and the prosecutor is of course Byron’s surrogate, Satan, who meets the former ‘with more hauteur, as might an old Castilian poor noble / Meet a mushroom-rich civilian’. In line with other of his political pieces of the period (most notably The Age of Bronze), Byron’s contention here is that the allied victory over 29 Four more addresses followed in the same year: see Richard Carlile, A New Year’s Address to the Reformers of Great Britain. (To the Reformers of Great Britain) [Addresses dated from Dorchester Gaol, 5 March, 23 April, 24 June, 13 October, 20 December] (London: M. A. Carlile, 1821).

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Napoleon (led by the most distinguished general of George III) brought back tyrant kings to former Napoleonic satellite states like Spain, the Netherlands and Denmark. Byron was right: in different degrees, Ferdinand VII of Spain, William I of the Netherlands and Frederick VI of Denmark were certainly autocratic monarchs – to say the least. As far as Spain is concerned, Byron had in this way contributed a piece of political poetry to celebrate the beginning of the Spanish constitutional regime. The last poem that emerged the same year, ninth in our corpus, is ‘The Dogs’, published in the December 1822 issue of the Liberal. The poem, attributed to Byron for no good reason by Pickering,30 is a fairly long piece (fifty-one ottava rima stanzas, 306 lines in all, plus twenty notes) preceded by a preface, ‘To the abusers of the Liberal’, in which the editors claim that they ‘fight, like the Greeks and Spaniards, to obtain the right and the tranquillity of speech’. Similar to ‘On seeing the Duke of Wellington and the Marquis of Anglesea, riding together near Charing Cross’ and ‘The Patriots’, analysed above, the poem is an anti-Wellington satire which, like its two predecessors, includes Spanish elements. The stanzas are introduced by a six-line quotation from the Journal of a Soldier of the 71st Regiment, during the War in Spain, in which the soldier in question recalls how happy (and sad, at the same time) he was when he and four other mates, all equally hungry, were ordered to break biscuit for Wellington’s dogs, since in that way they could get their ‘own fill’ while feeding the hounds.31 The poem’s narrative voice apostrophizes the gods in a mock-heroic way: I SING a matter of some sixty dogs, That dined in the Peninsula on biscuit. Under the old regime the French eat frogs; Under the new some Englishmen would frisk it If they had any thing besides their fogs.

30 Lord Byron, Leigh Hunt and the ‘Liberal’, 21. 31 The anonymous soldier was later identified as a Thomas Pococke. His Journal, published originally in 1819, had been re-issued only a few months before the poem was written (Edinburgh: W. and C. Tait, 1822), which probably explains its having drawn the attention of ‘The Dogs’ author. There is a modern edition, by Christopher Hibbert (London: Cooper, 1975).

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I’d thank Apollo therefore to touch his kit, When I strike up a dance, that I’ve a notion Will set the whole of Puppydom in motion

The rest is an unremarkable satire on the Iron Duke, with scattered references to Spain and the Peninsular campaign both in the text and the footnotes.

1823: Congress, war, execution The first poem published in 1823, number ten in our corpus, is again The Vision of Judgment. By Quevedo redivivus. It came out (for the second time in less than three months) on 1 January 1823, in the second edition of the first issue of the Liberal, mainly launched to make up for the errors and omissions in the poem when published in the first edition of the journal, as explained in the apologetic ‘Advertisement to the second edition’ that now heads up the reprinted issue. There are still errata in the poem, but at least it was this time preceded by Byron’s cherished preface, a fairly long piece (100 prose lines) signed by Quevedo Redivivus. Quite naturally, ‘Quevedo’ writes in the first person, addressing his audience: It is possible that some readers may object, in these objectionable times, to the freedom with which saints, angels, and spiritual persons, discourse in this ‘Vision’. But for precedents upon such points I must refer him to Fielding’s ‘Journey from this World to the next’, and to the Visions of myself, the said Quevedo, in Spanish or translated.

This is an all-out impersonation not often found in Byron. The brilliant Spanish satirist, who had written his own Vision of the Last Judgment (El sueño del juicio final) back in 1605, had been translated into English since 1640 and was influential on Henry Fielding, whom Byron admired. Quevedo was not at all unknown in Byron’s England, as shown by a note in the European Magazine ( July 1822) where he is recommended as one among ‘the most classical writers of Spain, and, therefore, the best models

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for youth’.32 Reviving Quevedo twice in a row actually cost John Hunt an indictment for libel that resulted in a five-year security against any seditious acts and a heavy fine which, ironically, was paid by Byron’s estate – since the poet, who had intended to cover Hunt’s expenses, was already dead.33 Two hundred years earlier, similar gibes had cost the real Quevedo various arrests, heavy fines and long confinements. Byron’s ‘redivivus’ had indeed more than one sense. The eleventh poem in our corpus is ‘To a Spider Running across a Room’, a 102-line long satirical tirade in (predominantly) heroic couplets. It was published in the third issue of the Liberal, January 1823. Like Robert Burns’ famous lines ‘To a Mouse’ (‘I doubt na, whiles, but thou may thieve; / What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!’), the narrator emphatically addresses a spider, whose life he spares because ‘the vermin’s a frank vermin, after all’ while many two-legged ‘spiders’ are much more ‘poisonous’ than the real arachnids. The poem is naturally full of oblique references to human poison-bearers/injectors, most of which are difficult to identify (surely not so much so for contemporary readers). This jibe probably refers to Wellington: He [the spider] skulks; but ‘tis not as ‘dear Ally’ does, To pry and pounce on females, and keep close At fingers only that can pull a nose.

Satirical references to the Peninsular War and Waterloo hero as a womanizer were common at the time (as seen above), and so was abusing his prominent nasal appendage (Byron himself would soon oblige in The Age of Bronze).34 Spain is specifically mentioned in the lines that immediately follow:

32

33 34

European Magazine 82 ( July-December 1822), 52. By then Quevedo’s Sueño had had three different English translations, and one of them (L’Estrange 1667) had been reprinted an amazing eleven times. A fourth translation (B. B. Jones 1823) was published a few months after Byron’s Vision. See Robert S. Rudder, The Literature of Spain in English Translation. A Bibliography (New York: Ungar, 1975), 208–10. See above, n. 27, for details. For this and other references to The Age of Bronze in this chapter, see details in Coletes, ‘Spain and Byron’s The Age of Bronze (1823)’, in Diego Saglia and Ian Haywood, eds,

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Honest the rogue is, in his way, – hey, Groly? – And does not call his snares and slaughters ‘Holy’; Nor like the Russian that insulted Spain, Cry ‘Manners’, and affect the gentleman.

‘The rogue’ in the first line is the spider, which as we know is ‘frank’. ‘Holy’ in the second line refers to the (according to the poem, treacherous) Holy or Quintuple Alliance that had already met at Verona (with Wellington as the British representative) and decided to intervene in Spain. Finally, the hypocritical ‘Russian that insulted Spain’ on the third and fourth lines refers directly to Count Bulgary, the Russian ambassador in Madrid – a devoted absolutist plotter – and indirectly to Tsar Alexander I, his master in Moscow. Not happy at the exclusive assignment of the French to invade Spain, Alexander had offered his associates in the alliance to prepare his own forces in order to assist in case of need. The reaction from the Spanish government included expelling the Russian ambassador. A print by Lewis Marks, Spanish emancipation, or an effectual mode of getting rid of troublesome neighbours, dated 3 January 1823 (only a few days before the poem was published), shows a dignified Spaniard expelling the Russian, Prussian and Austrian ambassadors from his country. A fat and gouty Louis XVIII on the bottom left says: ‘I am come to help you!!!’ – which is actually what happened (see Figure 7.3).35

35

Spain in British Romanticism 1800–40 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 115–38. Byron’s piece was soon reviewed by the radical press, as studied by Michael Scrivener, ‘The Black Dwarf Review of Byron’s The Age of Bronze’, Keats-Shelley Journal 41 (1992), 42–8. See also Jane Stabler, Byron, Poetics and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 172–97, and the recent Bernard Beatty, ‘Poetry, politics and prophecy: The Age of Bronze, The Vision of Judgment and The Prophecy of Dante’, in Beaton and Kenyon-Jones, eds, 93–104. British Museum Print Collection, No. 1868,0808.8573. For details on the Congress of Verona and, in general, the ‘Great Power’ system, see Roger Bullen, ‘The Great Powers and the Iberian Peninsula, 1815–48’, in Alan Sked, ed., Europe’s Balance of Power, 1815–48 (New York: Macmillan, 1980), 54–78; Martyn Lyons, Post-Revolutionary Europe, 1815–56 (London: Palgrave, 2006), 133–5; Alexandra Bleyer, Das System Metternich: Die Neuordnung Europasnach Napoleon (Darmstadt: Primus, 2014), 117–19, and the recent and comprehensive Mark Jarrett, The Congress of Vienna and

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Figure 7.3. J. Lewis Marks, Spanish emancipation, or an effectual mode of getting rid of troublesome neighbours. Published S. W. Fores, 1823. © Trustees of the British Museum

The twelfth poem in the corpus is entitled ‘The Monarchs, an Ode for Congress’ and was also published in the third issue of the Liberal, January 1823. It is a lengthy satirical tirade in heroic couples (118 lines in all) and, as implied in the title, its goal is to abuse and ridicule a Congress of Verona that had already decided to intervene in Spain. Such a rebellious goal was natural in the anti-establishment atmosphere. Another satirical print by Lewis Marks, A hasty sketch at Verona, or the prophecies of Napoleon unfolding, launched in London on 10 February 1823, shows a conference table with Tsar Alexander sitting at the left end, facing Emperor Francis I of Austria; Wellington, the British representative, sits at the near side; an angry Duc d’Angoulême stands before him and, under the table, a tiny Frederick William III sleeps in a cradle inscribed ‘Prussia’. On the table its Legacy. War and Great Power Diplomacy after Napoleon (London: I. B. Tauris, 2016), 309–52.

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is an unfolded map of Spain: Alexander points at it and Metternich, the conference mastermind, warns Francis from behind against the Russian ‘bear’ that ‘has set his Mind on Blood, & his voracious appetite will gorge both East, & West’ (see Figure 7.4).36

Figure 7.4. J. Lewis Marks, A hasty sketch at Verona, or the prophecies of Napoleon unfolding. Published S. W. Fores, 1823. © Trustees of the British Museum

A few months later (probably in June) Longman published, in London, Fables for the Holy Alliance by Thomas Brown the Younger (a pseudonym for Thomas Moore). Fable I, ‘The Dissolution of the Holy Alliance’, which bears the Quevedesque subtitle ‘A Dream’, is Moore’s sharp and hilarious satire on the Quintuple Alliance monarchs who, gathered in an ice palace on the Neva River, are literally dissolved (i.e. melted down) by the strong heat ‘from an angry Southern sun’.37 Though clearly inferior, ‘The

36 37

British Museum Print Collection, No. 1868,0808.8578. Fables for the Holy Alliance, 5.

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Monarchs, an Ode for Congress’ shares the surreal atmosphere and satirical intention of Moore’s piece. An account is made in the ode of a gathering around a ‘festive board’ which includes ‘Fred’ (Frederick of Prussia), ‘Alec’ (Alexander of Russia), ‘Frank’ (Francis of Austria), ‘Des-Huîtres’ (Dix-huit, i.e. Louis XVIII) and ‘The Duke’ (Wellington). The words ‘Spain – they’ll beat her!’ are then heard: But oh! How finished was the happy tone, When brave San Miguel, Spaniard good and true, (His No! to all the monarchs flung, His face on fire, yet laughing too) Read that inspiring Note, with which the Cortes rung!

Actually, the events mentioned in these lines had taken place just a few days before the poem was published. ‘San Miguel’ (in full, Evaristo Fernández de San Miguel y Valledor) was the head of the Spanish exaltado government that took office on 5 August 1822 and, as such, had to deal with many momentous matters during the critical months prior to the French invasion. When the Quintuple Alliance sent an ultimatum to the Spanish government, threatening to invade the country to restore ‘order’, San Miguel famously read before the Cortes, on 9 January 1823, a vehement plea for the Spanish constitutional regime and against ‘the right of any Power to interfere or mix with its affairs’. Thus runs the English translation in The Holy Alliance versus Spain; containing the several notes and declarations of the allied powers, with the firm, spirited and dignified replies of the Spanish Cortes, a booklet ‘by a constitutionalist’ soon afterwards published in London.38 The poem further reflects historical fact in the lines that follow: The freeman’s truth, to freemen only known; Portugal sped it’s chaste-eyed Queen; Writers and Liberty-Boys were seen 38

Ridgway, 1823. The preface, signed by ‘λ’. (the Greek character) is dated 15 February 1823, and the book was soon covered in the Edinburgh Review 38 (February-May 1823), 241. On the peculiar character of this periodical, see Neil Ramsey, ‘Wartime Reading: Romantic Era Military Periodicals and the Edinburgh Review’, Australian Literary Studies, 29(2014), 28–40.

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Peeping their prison-bars between; Brown Italy rejoic’d to hear, And courts leap’d up, and seiz’d their hats for fear.

Albeit using rather abstruse language, this refers to the fact that San Miguel had asked (the still revolutionary) Portugal and Naples for help, thus trying to create a sort of ‘Liberal International’ that would curb the interventionist European powers.39 But, optimistic though these lines look, little was achieved by the initiative – and even less by San Miguel’s parallel attempt to involve Britain as an ally or, at least, a sympathetic mediator between Spain and the powers of the Holy Alliance. The thirteenth poem in our corpus bears the same title as the first one, published nearly three years before: ‘Spain’. Signed by ‘W. F. I’., it was included in the Black Dwarf issue of 19 February 1823. The poem consists of six English sestets in iambic pentameter and is, in this formal sense, more elaborate than others in the corpus. Its tone is also different from most others seen up to this point. The sestets in ‘Spain’ verbalize an emotional and subjective mood, far removed from the harsh satirical tone that prevails in the corpus, and at the same time they construct a short ballad. The start of the poem makes this clear: ‘Tis the mistrel’s harp! – ‘Tis the minstrel’s song! Children, O wake you! Harken! To the warning-voice which steals along! STRANGERS! YOUR MORN MAY DARKEN!

Echoing a situation in which everybody knew that the French invasion of Spain was only a matter of time (it in fact took place less than two months after the poem was published), the poetic voice, using the inclusive ‘we’, addresses the ‘strangers’ and claims that, whether they advance, or whether they retire (this is used as a refrain throughout the poem), ‘we’ have minstrels to rouse spirits, clear streams, a burning sun and, above all, a nation willing to take up arms:

39

Gil Novales, 23–4.

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Agustín Coletes Blanco We have infants that list the bold martial song; Limbs that are sturdier, arm them! Ev’n old age with his harp, WILL join the war throng, Maidens, weave laurels that warm men. Or let them advance, aye, or let them retire, With our freedom’s brightness will Spaniards expire.

Spaniards may die but ‘freedom’, the poem concludes, ‘the light we most love, burns, ne’er, ne’er to expire’. Only five weeks after ‘Spain’ was published, John Hunt launched Byron’s The Age of Bronze, where this renewed ‘spirit of Saragossa’ enjoys pride of place (‘The dawn revives: renowned, romantic Spain/Holds back the invader from her soil again’) – but a more modest ‘W. F. I’. had made the first move. The fourteenth poem in our corpus, ‘A Spanish War Song’, by John D. Collard, is dated ‘Chelsea, Feb. 1823’, and was published in the same Black Dwarf issue, just below the text of ‘Spain’: significantly, poems on this country start being launched in pairs – it would be interesting to know how many were written but did not see the light of day. ‘A Spanish War Song’ is a forty-eight-line long poem in quatrains with a refrain. Fully partaking of the ‘impending invasion’ atmosphere in the preceding poems, the piece is a vehement call to arms addressed to the Spanish people. The central quatrains, complete with refrain, are representative: Can despots bind the soul’s commotion? Or armies bar the march of mind? Go, bid them stem the waves of ocean, Or manacle the passing wind! And tell them, too, in words of thunder, When nations WILL, they MUST BE FREE; That Spain will burst their chains asunder, And die to hold their liberty. March on, march on, My comrades brave, For liberty, Or freedom’s grave.

The next poem, fifteenth in our corpus, is entitled ‘Translation of some French Verses’ and bears the subtitle, in italics, Occasionally heard after

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dark in Paris. It was published in the Black Dwarf, 2 April 1823. There is no reason to assume that this is a genuine translation – false translations (original poems in fact) were a common literary device at the time, used to rhetorically present reality from an ‘alien’ perspective.40 The poem consists of five quatrains in iambic pentameter (thus twenty lines in all), rhyming aabb. This rhyme (double couplets) is unusual, which perhaps points to the same intention to sound ‘foreign’. As for contents, the poem is a particularly insulting satire (touching on blasphemy) whose spur is the words of Louis XVIII on 18 January 1823, when he famously announced that ‘cent mille Français sont prêts à marcher, en invoquant le nom de Saint Louis, pour conserver le trône d’Espagne à un petit-fils de Henri IV’ – and so they did on 7 April 1823, exactly five days after the poem was published.41 The first stanza is a masterclass in parodic degeneration as literary device: The ‘God of St. Louis’ to Spain is he gone? The ‘son of St. Louis’ has girt his sword on; The fools of St. Louis their purses untie; The slaves of St. Louis are ready to die.

From God to son, from son to fools, from fools to slaves. As if this were not enough, the second stanza targets Angoulême (here, ‘Prince Hilt’), who will not ride a stately stallion but a derisive ‘ass of St. Louis’ – complete with attending pain, ‘for riding once galled his posteriors rarely’ (!). The all-out abuse runs unabated through the poem to its end. The donkey grows ‘faint’ and ‘sick’, for it is ‘no trifling matter to carry a saint’. The persona begs the ass not to ‘tumble down’ since it is a great honour for the animal that from its ‘long ears hangs the crown’, and that it is ‘royalty’ that whacks its back with none other than ‘the spectre’. The poem thus reads like a harsh, unsparing satirical caricature, and it could be inspired by one: on 12 March 1823 (a couple of weeks before ‘Translation of some French Verses’ was published) Samuel Knight released a print by George 40 For this and other borderline cases of ‘translation’, see Coletes, ‘Anglo-Spanish Transfers in Peninsular War Poetry (1808–14): Translating and Zero-Translating’, in Hook and Iglesias-Rogers, eds, 233–56. 41 See above, n. 22.

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Cruikshank entitled The Royal Menagerie on the road to Ruin Spain [sic]. A surreal procession of ‘human animals’ is seen advancing towards Ruin/ Spain. In front marches an ape, the Duc d’Angoulême, dressed ridiculously and tugging at the halter of an ass, the French prime minister Joseph de Villèle, who is braying and pulling a low wheeled platform on which sits a huge over-fat pig, Louis XVIII, who is wearing a tiny crown and saying: ‘The God of St Louis protect us!’ (see Figure 7.5).42

Figure 7.5. George Cruikshank, The Royal Menagerie on the road to Ruin Spain [sic]. Published by Samuel Knight, 1823. © Trustees of the British Museum

Inspired or not, the existence of a shared feeling in favour of the Spanish liberal cause and against its impending doom is beyond question, and may be seen to adopt transtextual profiles – particularly between prints and poems. That some of the latter are re-edited bears further witness to this fact. Such is the case with the sixteenth piece in our corpus, a reprint of 42 British Museum Print Collection No. 1935,0522.6.41.

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‘To a Spider Running across a Room’ originally published in the Liberal, January 1823, which again emerges in the Examiner, 25 May 1823 below the note ‘From the Liberal, No. III’. Far from being a merely mechanical reissue, this is a veritable second edition in that it changes all proper names from roman type into small capitals or italics, deletes or adds commas, and corrects mistakes (for instance, ‘dear Alley’ for ‘dear Ally’). With the partial exception of the piece just considered, the seventeenth poem in our corpus, entitled ‘The Spanish Soldier to His Mistress’ and authored by ‘R.’, is the first to emerge after the French invasion of the country. It was published in the Black Dwarf, 28 May 1823 – that is, five days after a French military corps entered Madrid, and two days after a royalist Regency was set up to rule on behalf of a king who had been (as absolutists claimed) sequestered by his government. A thirty-two-line composition in eight quatrains in iambic pentameter, it has both an elegiac and a hopeful tone. The poetic persona is a Spanish soldier who addresses his mistress thus: Oh! droop not, my darling, though shortly we part, For thy lover to meet toil and danger: Since Spain now has need of each true Spanish heart, To repel the assault of the stranger.

Naturally enough, the lovers are sad at parting company but, hopefully, the soldier further contends, ‘soon, soon, shall the wretched enslavers of France / Turn their insolent boasts into mourning!’ and when this happens, hers will become ‘tears of delight’. ‘Let them flow, and I’ll kiss them, for ever’, he movingly concludes. In 1811, on the occasion of an earlier French invasion, Hispanicus had put together ‘Fernandez e Isabella’ [sic], a 140-line eclogue on the same subject. ‘The Spanish Soldier to His Mistress’ is a poem which thus refreshes, on the occasion of a new conflict, the ‘lovers’ departure’ topos – a classic of all wars.43 The eighteenth poem is also the shortest. It was published in the same Black Dwarf issue as ‘The Spanish Soldier to His Mistress’ just seen, right below its text in fact. The piece is fittingly entitled ‘Impromptu’:

43 On this and other war poems by the unknown Hispanicus, see Coletes and Laspra, 248–63.

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Agustín Coletes Blanco ‘These Spanish rogues must learn to bow’, Exclaim the royal men! Duke d’Angouleme can tell us how, But who can tell us when?

This is just a quatrain, with an iambic rhythm visually reinforced by the use of italics for emphasis, but it has its substance: the message is that the Spaniards may resist the invasion indefinitely; but it also makes the reader wonder about the nature of ’ the royal men’ – for a radical, republican mind no doubt it included monarchs and monarchists of at least three nationalities: French, Spanish, and British. The nineteenth poem in our corpus is ‘To France’, subtitled ‘By a Lover of Freedom’ and signed ‘R.S’. Published in the Republican on 30 May 1823, this piece in four tetrameter quatrains is a sustained imprecation on ‘base, despotic, perjured Gaul’. The poem refers to the Napoleonic invasion of Spain when it claims that the ‘Patriot’s sword’ will ‘plunge in tyrant’s breast again’. It uses strong vocabulary as it desires ‘death in forms terrific’ to be met by the French ‘blood-hunts’ and, like the previous poem, makes generically applicable its anti-monarchic bias: May the cause of Mercy flourish, Truth and Justice aid the brave, Till this earth no more shall nourish Tyrant-King, or burden’d Slave.

‘The Spanish Lady to her Lover’, by ‘W. V. H.’, is the twentieth poem in our corpus. It was published at the back of the Republican for 13 June 1823, an issue whose front was entirely taken by a 14-page long ‘Appeal to the People of Great Britain’ by José Joaquín de Mora (the first known Spanish translator of Byron) who, rather pathetically given the circumstances, claims to have come to plead the cause of his country ‘before a great and generous people, among whom liberty and independence have always found and always will find a firm support’. Sharing the dignified and optimistic tone of Mora’s piece, the poem by ‘W. V. H.’ is, similar to ‘The Spanish Soldier to His Mistress’ seen above, a ‘lovers’ departure’ piece in seven quatrains, written with ease and simplicity. Here, it is the young woman who addresses her young man and gives him courage:

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Go, my love, where glory calls thee, Struggle in mankind’s great cause; Let not thoughts of death appal thee, Whilst you fight for equal laws.

And – she further contends – when Spain has overthrown ‘her base tyrants’, made ‘king and priest craft’s bubble’ vanish and seated reason ‘on her throne’ (a veritable political programme, expressed in very Shelleyan vocabulary!), the lovers’ well-earned prize will naturally be their everlasting bliss ‘in bonds of love united’. The twenty-first poem, ‘A Resolve’, is signed by ‘R. S.’ and was published in the Republican issue for 20 June 1823. Developed along seven quatrains in lines of four anapaests by a poetic voice that speaks in the first person, the firm ‘resolve’ starts like this: No, no, by the power that has form’d me, I never Will yield to the priest and the despot again; I have torn off their shackles and spurn’d them for ever, And Reason alone in this bosom shall reign.

The remaining six quatrains provide more details about this battle between ‘superstition’ and ‘wisdom’, ‘error’ and ‘reason’ in which strong vocabulary (‘Priest and tyrant I hate, and with deep detestation / Reject all their dogmas’) is not at all avoided. The poem does not make specific reference to Spain, but the Spanish spur is evident: the text carries to extreme the tendency towards conceptualizing the French invasion of Spain as a universal struggle between freedom and subjection, a tendency that had already featured in the three preceding poems. ‘The Duke of Angouleme, a Song for Spaniards’, by ‘B.’, is the twenty-second poem in the corpus. It was published in the Examiner on 29 June 1823, just below a long political article entitled ‘The Holy Alliance – England – Spain’, where it is claimed that ‘the millions of Englishmen who petitioned in 1816 for a full and free Representation, cannot be indifferent lookers-on, while the Spaniards are fighting in defence of that very blessing’. Conscience-stirring is what this forty-eight-line poem in endecha-type stanzas purports to be: if the Spaniards, as the poetic persona points out, could

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defeat he who ‘had wings upon his feet’ and ‘was like a lion’ (Napoleon), a minion like Angoulême is no match for them. Using words that are strongly reminiscent of Byron’s similar tirades, both in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (‘awake, ye sons of Spain! awake! advance!’) and in the then recently published Age of Bronze (‘up! up again! undaunted Tauridor!’), the poem calls the Spaniards into action: Awake, ye bold Castilians! Awake, ye men of Spain – Of Arragon, – of Granada! Ye have fought, – fight again! In the flashing of your anger He’ll wither, and the gleam Of your falchions must annihilate The puppet, ANGOULEME.

Sadly though, the French had just laid siege to Cádiz when the poem was published, and within three months, this crucial bastion of the liberal government, a symbol of constitutional liberties, would surrender… to Angoulême. The twenty-third poem marks the turning of the tide in Spanish affairs. It was published by the Examiner, 10 August 1823 under the title ‘A free translation of a letter sent by Prince Hilt to a friend at Paris’. A sixty-three-line piece in nine-line stanzas (a sort of mock-heroic version of the Spenserian form), the poem links naturally with number fifteen in our corpus, ‘Translation of some French Verses, Occasionally heard after dark in Paris’, published four months before as seen above. Both poems might have been written by the same author, since they share the ‘false translation’ device, the harsh satirical tone, and even the reference to Angoulême as ‘Prince Hilt’. In the latter, ‘Prince Hilt’ writes in the first person to his ‘chère amie’ with a sardonic tone and adopting a conqueror’s pose. In Spain, he contends, All folks, misled by false pretences, Are coming to their chains and senses, And all the crowds I see Adore, without the smallest shyness, The Inquisition and my Highness.

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If someone resists, he adds, ‘he’s murdered and defeated’. Meanwhile, the prince passes his time ‘delightfully’ and dotes on ‘Madrid Nobility’ – which is not much removed from reality, as shown in Vue de Madrid, prise près de la porte et du pont de Ségovie, an 1823 French print by Jean Felix Salneuve and C. Le Camus in which a group of Angoulême’s officers are courting some Spanish young ladies in the vicinity of Madrid (see Figure 7.6).44

Figure 7.6. Jean Felix Salneuve, Vue de Madrid, prise près de la porte et du pont de Ségovie. Published C. Le Camus, 1823. © Patrimonio Nacional

44 Significantly, the setting allows the Palacio Real massive building to be seen in the background. The print is included in the album Itinéraire Pittoresque du Grand Quartier général pendant la Campagne de 1823 en Espagne / dédié a son Altesse Royale Monseigneur Le Dauphin et publié par Salneuve, Capitaine au Corps Royal des Ingénieurs Géographes (Paris: Langlumé, 1823), 4. Real Biblioteca, Madrid, ARCH2/ CART/5 (4).

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Summarizing the latest events, he then refers to Mina who, chased after by Moncey, ‘swears in every weather’, and to generals O’Donnell and Morillo, who have already become ‘two glorious traitors’. Perhaps with a nod to Byron, he writes: ‘Though I love the Spanish ladies, / I wish they’d let us into Cadiz!’ Indeed, that was only a matter of time: as mentioned above, the town finally surrendered at the end of September, 1823, a month and a half after this poem was published. The twenty-fourth poem, authored by Inskip, bears the date ‘9th November’, is entitled ‘Spain’ and was also published in the Examiner, 16 November 1823. By then, everything was over. Espoz y Mina, one of the few generals who had put up a spirited resistance to the invaders, signed an armistice with Marshal Moncey. The few garrisons that remained loyal to the government capitulated. Ferdinand VII revoked the Constitution and entered Madrid in triumph. Liberal Spain was no more. The appalling scenario finds poetic response in this six-quatrain dirge in anapaestic tetrameter. Liberty flies away from the ‘land of Romance’ (another possible nod to Byron), where ‘valour’, deemed as ‘Freedom’s Spouse’, is no longer to be seen and ‘bands of Traitors and Cowards advance’. What is more: Round a Throne dark as night, o’er their victims just slain, Kneel the Priesthood, – old Cruelty’s brood; Where the Petticoat Monster, – the Thurtell of Spain, – Sits and grins whilst he’s quaffing their Blood!

This is Shelleyan, violent imagery to describe Ferdinand the newly absolute ruler – a vampiric monarch who kills his subjects and drinks their blood, with the blessing of an equally sinister clergy. To feed gory sensation into English readers, the already familiar allusion to the petticoat-maker king, now become a monster, is reinforced by comparing him to John Thurtell, the amateur boxer who had cruelly murdered solicitor William Weare over gambling debts in the then sensational Elstree murder case (24 October 1823).45 Also significantly, the poem further contends, Liberty ‘Shook her

45 On 2 April 2823 the ‘petticoat maker’ print (see above, n. 25) was reissued in a coloured edition (British Museum Print Collection, No. 1868,0808.8588). On the Elstree

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head as by Mina she fled in her haste, / And beckon’d, and pointed to Greece!’ This may seem just fanciful, but these references to Espoz y Mina and to Greece follow the events quite closely. The general, as mentioned above, had just capitulated (1 November 1823) and was already on his way to England as an exile. Greece, where the struggle for independence had run parallel to the Spanish liberal revolution, was apparently the last stand in the fight for liberty in Europe once the Neapolitan, Portuguese and Piedmontese revolutions, all stemming from the now extinct Spanish revolution, had been forcibly put down one by one. Like a veritable symbol, while the poem was being written in early November the London Spanish Committee, set up earlier in the year to assist the Spanish liberals, was merging into the London Greek Committee, created at roughly the same time to help those working for Greek independence.46 The twenty-fifth and last poem in our corpus is ‘Martyrdom of Riego’. This remarkable piece was published in the Black Dwarf on 19 November 1823. Riego was detained on 15 September and, as mentioned above, executed on 7 November in what was probably the most shameful episode of the Spanish mayhem of the time. The journal’s quick response to the enormity was designed as a death notice. According to the introductory text, the piece was in fact a ‘placard’ that had been ‘posted in various parts of the metropolis’. After a call for revenge (‘the only proper mourning for the fall of the Hero would be the blood of his murderer’), a five-paragraph text is included, edged on all sides by a thick black line which makes it look like an obituary. The text itself is a prose poem, printed out ordinarily but using a wealth of the literary devices (rhythm, repetition, archaisms, etc.) associated with poetry. This is the initial paragraph:

murder, see further Albert Borowitz, The Thurtell-Hunt Murder Case: Dark Mirror to Regency England (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987). 46 For the London Spanish Committee see the recent Saglia, ‘Felicia Hemans, Spain and Cosmopolitan Liberalism’, in Saglia and Haywood, eds, 153, and for the London Greek Committee see Roderick Beaton, Byron’s War: Romantic Rebellion, Greek Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 124–6. A monograph on the London Spanish Committee is sorely needed.

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Agustín Coletes Blanco The horrid die is cast. The enlightened, the patriotic, the virtuous RIEGO hath fallen by the unhallowed hand of the executioner!

Successive paragraphs broaden (references to ‘Despotism’ and ‘Liberty’) and narrow (allusions to the widow and relatives of Riego ‘who are now in England’) the focus on events, to conclude with a plea for a thirty-eight-day mourning, ‘the number of the years that have been granted to the sacrificed RIEGO!’ As could be expected, the piece is followed by two paratexts, a biographical sketch of the deceased and an essay simply entitled ‘Riego’. The latter does not spare strong criticism of the English themselves and their share of responsibility for the untimely death of liberal Spain: We are heartily ashamed of the part in the murder which is entailed upon this country, by the heartless, the hollow, accursed policy of the English administration. Nor are we satisfied with the behaviour of the people of England, who will one day find this blood upon their heads, and upon the heads of their children … The British people are as abject as any race under the sun; and the same army which marched to Madrid, might march to London with as much ease.

As seen at the start of this chapter, three years before these despondent lines were written an early poem in the corpus celebrated the newly free Spain and apostrophized the Britons for submitting to ‘tyranny’. Then poems encouraged the Spaniards in their fight against the French royalist invaders, seen as reactionaries. According to this final piece, Britain had remained apathetic through the period and that made its government and people partly responsible for the comeback of tyranny in Spain. All this forms a coherent body of opinion (so much based on facts that it sometimes anticipated them) and produces a grim, utterly negative balance for a radical mind. That it was expressed in poetry – narrative, emotional, satirical – permitted the combination of fact and abstraction, and made the product readily identifiable and attractive to a reader’s eye. But how much are these sentiments those of radicals and those of general opinion? This is a question which only further research into this largely untrodden field can answer. In any case, it is true that Britain did not come to the rescue of constitutional Spain, which certainly contributed to the collapse of the system. As a side effect, many liberal Spaniards would soon come to Britain

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as exiles to avoid greater evils – and the radical press would welcome them all. But that is another story.

Appendix: The corpus 1820

Brough, W. B. ‘Spain’. Black Dwarf, 5/15 (19 April 1820), 540. N. ‘Ode to the Genius of Revolutions’. Black Dwarf, 5/5 (2 August 1820), 179–80. Brayfield, J. ‘On Seeing the Duke of Wellington and the Marquis of Anglesea, riding together near Charing Cross’. Dated Camberwell, 27 August [1820]. Republican, 4 (September-December 1820), no. 3 (15 September), 89. 4. Brayfield, T. J. ‘Address to Britons’. Dated Camberwell, 5 September 1820. Republican, 4 (September-December 1820), no. 3 (15 September), 88. 5. ‘Parody’. Republican, 4 (September-December 1820), no. 16 (15 December), 576. 1. 2. 3.

1822 6. 7. 8. 9.

1823

B. ‘The Cordon Sanitaire’. Examiner, no. 747 (28 April 1822), 265. ‘The Patriots’. Republican, 5 ( January-May 1822), no. 18 (3 May), 571–6. [Byron, George Gordon, Lord]. ‘The Vision of Judgment. By Quevedo Redivivus’. Liberal, 1/1 (15 October 1822), 15–40 [without the prose preface and author’s last corrections]. ‘The Dogs’. Liberal, 1/2 (December 1822), 245–68.

10. ‘The Vision of Judgment. By Quevedo Redivivus’. Liberal, vol. 1, no. 2, 2nd edn (1 January 1823), 15–40 [with the prose preface and some corrections; see 8]. 11. ‘To a Spider Running across a Room’. Liberal, 2/3 ( January 1823), 177–80. 12. ‘The Monarchs, an Ode for Congress’. Liberal, 2/3 ( January 1823), 188–92. 13. W. F. I. ‘Spain’. Black Dwarf, 10/8 (19 February 1823), 286–7. 14. Collard, John D. ‘A Spanish War Song’. Dated Chelsea, February 1823. Black Dwarf, 10/8 (19 February 1823), 287–8. 15. ‘Translation of Some French Verses. Occasionally heard after dark in Paris’. Black Dwarf, 10/14 (2 April 1823), 487–8. 16. ‘To a Spider Running Across a Room’. Examiner, no. 800 (25 May 1823), 346. [From Liberal, 2/3, with corrections and minor changes; see 11.]

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17. R. ‘The Spanish Soldier to His Mistress’. Black Dwarf, 10/22 (28 May 1823), 786–7. 18. ‘Impromptu’. Black Dwarf, 10/22 (28 May 1823), 787. 19. R. S. ‘To France. By a Lover of Freedom’. Republican, 7 ( January-July 1823), 7/22 (30 May), 704. 20. W. V. H. ‘The Spanish Lady to her Lover’. Republican, 7 ( January-July 1823), 7/24 (13 June), 763–4. 21. R. S. ‘A Resolve’. Republican, 7 ( January-July 1823), no. 25 (20 June), 784–5. 22. ‘The Duke of Angouleme, a Song for Spaniards’. Examiner, 805 (29 June 1823), 419. 23. ‘A Free Translation of a Letter Sent by Prince Hilt to a Friend at Paris’. Examiner, 811 (10 August 1823), 517. 24. ‘Spain’. Dated 9 November [1823]. Examiner, 824 (16 November 1823), 744. 25. ‘Martyrdom of Riego’. Black Dwarf, 11/21 (19 November 1823), 708.

Part II

Cultural Views

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8 The reception of Spanish Old Masters in the Regency era: A reassessment

Abstract This chapter reassesses the reception of Spanish paintings in Britain during the postPeninsular War period, particularly in light of information gathered by the Scottish art dealer William Buchanan (1777–1864). Buchanan was a prominent art importer during the Napoleonic Wars, thanks to the art trade network he created through his agents, including his agent for Spanish artwork, George Augustus Wallis (1761–1847). This chapter uses Buchanan’s memoirs, published in 1824, to evaluate how the art trade affected Britons’ understanding of the Spanish Old Masters. These memoirs, never analysed in depth for this purpose, include correspondence between Buchanan and Wallis, in addition to comments on the movement and dissemination of Spanish paintings. Thus, the chapter seeks to provide new information on various aspects of art collecting and taste that reflect British perceptions of Spanish art in the early nineteenth century.

Spanish painting and the United Kingdom in the early Regency period The initiatives and activities of the Scottish art dealer William Buchanan (1777–1864) are milestones in the reception and perception of Spanish art in Britain in the early nineteenth century. The information found in his memoirs, a first-hand testimony, provides relevant data which reveal an expert’s impressions about the Spanish School of art and painting collection

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preferences during the Regency era.1 By Spanish ‘Old Masters’, I refer to painters belonging to periods previous to the modern period, in particular to Baroque painters such as Bartolomé Esteban Murillo and Diego Velázquez, celebrated in their lifetimes and afterwards still more valued by critics and collectors than other contemporary Spanish painters. The travels and sometimes residence of Murillo and Velázquez in Italy had promoted the circulation of their work outside Spain, making them more popular with collectors. A famous agent of the period, the French Jean-Baptiste Lebrun, declared of Velázquez that the Spanish painter’s reputation had risen dramatically as a result of his travels, ‘au point que toute l’Europe désirait de ses ouvrages’.2 Some other Spanish painters (e.g. José de Ribera) were well regarded, but many of the great Spanish painters, such as the traditionally celebrated Alonso Cano and Francisco de Zurbarán, or mannerists such as El Greco and Luis Morales, were not much appreciated or sought after by British collectors and connoisseurs.3 For instance, the traveller and Hispanist

1

2

3

William Buchanan, Memoirs of Painting with a Chronological History of the Importation of Pictures by the Great Masters into England since the French Revolution, 2 vols (London: R. Ackermann, 1824). For the purposes of this chapter, the ‘Regency era’ in Great Britain is assumed to include the latter part of the reign of George III and the reigns of his successors George IV and William IV, a period characterized by distinctive trends in British culture and society. See Saul David, Prince of Pleasure: The Prince of Wales and the Making of the Regency (London:Abacus, 1999). Jean-Baptiste Lebrun, Recueil de gravures au trait, à l’eau forte et ombrés d’après un choix de tableaux de toutes les écoles, recueillis dans un voyage fait en Espagne, au Midi de la France et en Italie, dans les années 1807 et 1808, 2 vols (Paris: Didot Jeune, 1809), vi. 22. See further Francis Haskell, Rediscoveries in Art: Some Aspects of Taste, Fashion, and Collecting in England and France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976); Xanthe Brooke, ‘British Artists Encounter Spain: 1820–1900’, in Susan Stratton, ed., Spain, Espagne, Spanien: foreign artists discover Spain (New York: The Equitable Gallery, 1993), 32–49; Hugh Brigstocke, ‘El descubrimiento del arte español en Gran Bretaña’, in Brigstocke and Zahira Veliz, eds, En torno a Velázquez. Pintura española del Siglo de Oro (London: Apelles Collection, 1999), 5–25; David Howarth, The Invention of Spain: Cultural Relations between Britain and Spain, 1770–1870 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), and Nicholas Tromans, ‘Between the Museum

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Richard Twiss (1747–1821), when describing some Seville churches after his Spanish tour of 1772–3, demonstrates much knowledge of Renaissance and Baroque painters, but he considers that: [Sevillian churches] contain pictures, which are too tedious to mention, by secondrate painters, such as Pedro Campaña [Pieter Keempeneer], Luis de Vargas, Francisco Zurbaran, Francisco Herrera el Viejo, Alonso Cano, Francisco Pacheco, Pablo de Cespede, Pablo Roelas [ Juan de Roelas], Pedro Villegas, Basco Pereire [Vasco Pereira] … Juan de Valdes and Martin de Vos.4

Several reasons explain the lack of appreciation for particular Spanish painters manifested by Twiss and, later, by Buchanan, in their respective memoirs. The styles and subject matter of these paintings were distant from the preferences of the average British collector, who focused on the Flemish, Dutch and German schools, especially portraits and landscapes.5 Such paintings were cheaper and more easily available in the art market, and their medium-sized format facilitated their circulation. Britons had long admired Italian paintings based on their familiarity with them: many of them travelled to Italy on the Grand Tour, and many British noblemen, bankers, and artists maintained homes there. All this promoted the circulation of Italian paintings. Indeed, Italy was perhaps the main source for British collectors and the art trade in which Buchanan was involved. Italian art had both a reputation and means of supply – quite unlike Spanish paintings, apart perhaps from Murillo’s, which were seen as more Italian than Spanish in style. Lack of understanding of the idiom of Spanish painting also prevented its popularity among British collectors. In addition, familiarity with many

4 5

and the Mausoleum: Showing Spain to Britain’, in Roberta Panzanelli and Monica Preti-Hamard, eds, La Circulation des oeuvres d’art/The circulation of works of art in the revolutionary era, 1789–1848 (Rennes: PU de Rennes, 2007), 323–30. Richard Twiss, Travels through Portugal and Spain in 1772 and 1773 (London: G. Robinson, 1775), 311. Frank Herrmann, The English as Collectors: A Documentary Source Book (London: John Murray, 1999). On collecting, see Krzysztof Pomian, Collectionneurs, amateurs et curieux (Paris: Gallimard, 1987).

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Spanish artists was limited because neither Spanish art literature nor prints of Spanish masters’ work had been widely disseminated outside of the country before the nineteenth century. Both the Imprenta Real [Royal Print], and the Calcografía Nacional [National Chalcography], founded in 1780 and 1879 respectively, were established in Spain rather late, compared to similar European institutions. Spain’s delay in creating them prevented the spread of reproductions of the royal collections and Spanish artworks in general. In addition, the locations of many of these paintings – in enclosed convents, monasteries and palaces – limited access to them for all but a few privileged elites. Lebrun suggests that another factor was the high prices requested for Spanish artworks. Buchanan would add to these reasons the conservative nature of Spain before the Peninsular War, the ‘inquisitorial government’ and the existence in Spain of regulations against the export of paintings, which Buchanan describes as ‘strict prohibitive edicts’. Although these views were shared by Lebrun,6 those restrictions were only introduced with the Floridablanca 1799 Decree and, even so, as shown by the movement of artworks at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, said decree was not as effective as Buchanan and Lebrun claimed. The situation described does not mean that there were not Spanish paintings in British collections before the nineteenth century.7 In the 1720s, Zurbarán’s series of life-size figures Jacob and His Twelve Sons (Auckland Castle) reached Britain and were eventually bought in 1756 by the Bishop of Durham, in whose city it has been kept thereafter. Before the Industrial Revolution spurred the rise of the middle classes, collectors were generally restricted to people and entities of high social status, as they were the only ones that could afford to build an art collection. While, prior to the nineteenth century, a few bankers and merchants

6 Lebrun, Recueil, vol. i, pp. v–vii. 7 See Nigel Glendinning, and Hilary Macartney, Spanish Art in Britain and Ireland, 1750–1920. Studies in Reception in Memory of Enriqueta Harris Frankfort (Woodbridge: Tamesis Books, 2010). Regarding other collections, see Marta Cacho Casal, ‘Portrait Drawings by Francisco Pacheco and the British Nineteenth-century Art Market’, Master Drawings 48/4 (2010), 447–55.

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who had lived in Spain8 collected Spanish art, they were the exceptions. These British amateur collectors were mostly diplomats and aristocrats with political commissions, like the Duke of Buccleuch, Sir Robert Walpole, the Earl of Harrington and Sir Benjamin Keene. Their purchases manifested the preference for Murillo’s paintings mentioned above. Before the Peninsular War, the sale of some outstanding collections was significant. These included the Calonne collection, sold in 1795, which boasted paintings by Luis de Morales, and the Duke of Orléans’ collection, sold in 1798, which included a variety of paintings by Murillo, Ribera and Velázquez. The interest of British collectors in these sales can be explained primarily by their search for Italian and Northern European masters’ works. But the exhibitions prior to the sales ensured direct contact with Spanish paintings and therefore encouraged an increasing interest in them. In addition, beginning in the last decades of the eighteenth century, British collectors had been contributing some of their pieces to exhibitions held at, among other venues, the Royal Academy.9 Accompanied by small catalogues or leaflets which provided information about the pieces presented, these exhibitions contributed to the dissemination of those collections, some of which were displayed with a view to selling them. Other venues where those Old Masters were displayed included art charities, including the British Institution for Promoting the Fine Arts in the United Kingdom, which opened in 1805. Indeed, in 1828 the British Institution (as it was normally shortened to) exhibited some paintings from the Wellington Collection, including Velázquez’s works, while Apsley House (Wellington’s London home) was being redecorated.

8 9

Nigel Glendinning, ‘Collectors of Spanish Paintings’, in Glendinning, Macartney, Spanish Art, 44–63. Francis Haskell, The Ephemeral Museum. Old Master Paintings and the Rise of Art Exhibitions (London: Yale University Press, 2000).

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The Peninsular War and the spread of Spanish collections The Peninsular War had important political as well as artistic consequences. The two were connected, because the war brought Spain to the forefront of European, especially British, attention. Such attention unexpectedly promoted the collection of Spanish art by Britons, for several key reasons. First, the context of war caused general spoliation due to lack of control of the movement of artworks. Secondly, the ‘desamortización’ [confiscation] of 1809 contributed changing the locations of pictures held in ecclesiastic institutions, among others. Finally, an important factor was the sale of collections by Spanish owners, who often sold under pressure, needing the money to survive. The context of war promoted looting and enabled many art merchants and politicians, as well as Napoleon’s generals, either personally or through agents, to purchase artworks for ridiculously low prices or to plunder them and sell them back later in their countries of origin or wherever the art market was stronger. The exportation of art occurred because of the lack of effective regulations against it, despite the Floridablanca Decree that had been re-issued by Joseph Bonaparte in 1809 and which forbade exportation of art and other items connected to/ representing Spain’s national heritage. William Buchanan emerges here as, according to Haskell, responsible for ‘the most authoritative account of what happened in these years’.10 He actively participated in these art transactions via George Augustus Wallis. The artist arrived in Lisbon in October 1807 and remained in Spain until 1812. The outcome of his long Spanish stay is recorded in Buchanan’s Memoirs of Painting, published in two volumes in 1824 (see Figure 8.1).

10 Haskell, Rediscoveries in Art, 27.

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Figure 8.1. William Buchanan, Memoirs of painting with a chronological history of the importation of pictures by the Great Masters info England since the French Revolution, i. Front matter. Printed for R. Ackermann, 1824. Public Domain. [Archive.org]

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The second volume includes forty-six pages of transcriptions of Wallis’ letters, together with his own comments expressed in the third person describing his Spanish experience (see Figure 8.2).

Figure 8.2. William Buchanan, Memoirs of painting with a chronological history of the importation of pictures by the Great Masters info England since the French Revolution, ii. 203. Printed for R. Ackermann, 1824. Public Domain. [Archive.org]

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Buchanan starts his account of Spanish imports by presenting himself as a kind of an ‘art protector’, as opposed to the French generals who were plundering the finest works of the Spanish Old Masters from religious houses. He also refers to the control and interception of some paintings in Algeciras that he had purchased in Italy in order to justify Wallis’ mission in Spain. Buchanan’s memoirs show that he knew what he was looking for or, to be precise, what Wallis should look for on his behalf: always concerned with Spanish Old Masters, he was mainly searching for Murillo’s and Velazquez’s paintings because he knew that those would be easier to sell, for a profitable price, once in the United Kingdom. Contacts were essential in this mission. Buchanan himself provides evidence of this when he refers to James Campbell (another agent and associate), who was employed to go out to Cadiz during the late war in Spain for the purpose of acquiring some fine pictures by Murillo, which were at Seville, one of which, a picture of the Virgin, Infant Saviour and St. Joseph, he obtained through a relation of his in that country.11

Maybe the fact that Buchanan already had experience exporting the many pieces he bought in Italy during the Napoleonic wars facilitated his success in locating, acquiring and exporting paintings from Spain. Also, he might have used sources who understood and could identify the collections and individual paintings which would interest him. For example, his memoirs mention Antonio Ponz’s descriptions of paintings included in Viage de España, which was one of the main sources used by the French in the search for Spanish antiquities and paintings.12

11 Buchanan, Memoirs of Painting, ii. 202. 12 Antonio Ponz, Viage de España (Madrid: Viuda de Ibarra, 1787–93). See Dolores Antigüedad del Castillo-Olivares, El patrimonio artístico de Madrid durante el gobierno intruso (1808–13) (Madrid: UNED, 1999).

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Buchanan’s memoirs: Comments on Spanish artists and art collections Buchanan’s memoirs provide information about changes in the United Kingdom in how the public perceived Spanish art and how available that art had become. It is important to note his views about the context of the war and about Spanish collections, all taken from Wallis’ correspondence. Buchanan refers to difficulties encountered by his associate on many occasions – risks and hardships Wallis had to undergo, including the seizing of his property – in order to contextualize Wallis’ mission and to give it a special value. Buchanan adds that ‘he [Wallis] had to encounter dangers, and to suffer inconveniences and privations of the most serious description, and which he could never have overcome’. The author also instances communication problems that resulted in delays when receiving and sending correspondence. In this connection, Buchanan is also concerned with the risks attached to the transportation of paintings that, in some cases, reached the United Kingdom through France and the Netherlands. Wallis was directly involved in such risks, in one case when he was on his way back home in 1813 and was forced to detour around Germany. Despite communication issues, Wallis managed to make some trips to places close to Madrid, though he could not make it to other cities he intended to visit, such as Granada, Seville and Valencia. He also had problems with money. For instance, he arrived in Lisbon in 1807 only to discover that the banking houses he worked with had fled. A month later, when he arrived in Madrid, the same thing happened with some French houses where he also had credit. In order to resolve this situation, both Wallis and Buchanan made an agreement with William Gordon Coesvelt, a Dutch agent also interested in Spanish art.13 As for Buchanan’s political orientation, it aligned with either French or Spanish authorities, depending on his trading interests. His main concern always was to find paintings worth buying.

13 Buchanan, Memoirs of Painting, ii. 204 and 231, respectively.

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Buchanan emphasizes the large number of pictures that could be found all over Spain, as if they were available for anyone interested in them. He ignores Spanish regulations and the rights of the owners. On the contrary, he gives credit to Napoleon for ‘breaking the fetters of the Inquisition’, which he links to the prohibition of exportation. In this sense, Buchanan describes Wallis’ activity as a positive one because, without it, many of the paintings would still be on the walls of monastic houses or other private places: [Without] the mission of Wallis to Spain, and his industrious researches after works of art, England would never have had an opportunity afforded her of possessing those fine pictures, which, in all probability, would still have been on the walls of the convent of Loeches.14

In this particular case, Wallis asked the French general Horace François Bastien Sébastiani to remove some paintings from Loeches’ convent, a collaboration that involved the general taking two of these paintings. Similarly, Buchanan reports the sale of important collections belonging to the Prince of Peace (Godoy) or to noblemen like the Duke of Alba and the Duke of Híjar, which were put up for sale because their owners were considered traitors by the patriotic government. On many occasions, according to Buchanan, French generals took the opportunity to acquire pieces from these collections before the sales were held. In some cases, the prices demanded for these paintings were quite high, as Wallis states regarding a group of Murillo’s paintings belonging to the Marquis de Santiago collection, gathered by the family Rodríguez de los Ríos Ledesma y Bernal, in Madrid and Aranjuez. These had been previously viewed by the art and literature amateur Elisabeth Vassall Fox, better known as Lady Holland. Buchanan presents himself as having been right to acquire those artworks, but he ignores the regulations and does not worry about the fact that some of the paintings belonged to the most powerful collector in Spain, the Crown. He even refers to the institution to demonstrate the provenance of some paintings, which shows how he took advantage of the chaotic situation created by the war to gain access to those pieces.

14 Buchanan, Memoirs of Painting, ii. 224.

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The Memoirs reveal Wallis’ and Buchanan’s perceptions of Spanish artists, not only those whose works they imported but others, whose work they viewed in other collections. In this description of the Marquis de Santiago collection for instance, Wallis demonstrates his interest, as an artist, in the Spanish School: Of the Spanish Schools we have no idea whatever in England. If they could see the two or three best Murillos of the St. Iago family, and some of the fine pictures of Velasquez [Velázquez], Alonzo Canno [Alonso Cano], Pereda, Zuberan [Zurbarán] … and del Greco [El Greco], really first-rate men, whose works are quite unknown out of Spain, some estimate of the high excellence of this school might then be formed. This school is rich beyond idea, and its painters are all great colourists: some of their colossal works are surprising. If you had time and could bear the horrors of travelling in Spain it would be worth while to visit this country. After all, I must own I have, as an artist, learnt a great deal from this admirable school.15

Apart from Murillo and Velázquez, in this extract Wallis names several artists that were not very well known or esteemed yet. He was actually a pioneer in the appreciation of El Greco, whose paintings were barely recognized in and out of Spain. He specifically values the Spanish School’s artistic approach, using positive terms that would not be common in other British sources until the 1840s. On another occasion, he states that there are other pictures by artists whose works are not well known but which possess great brilliancy and colour, without providing more details about them, though, once again, characterizing Spanish art in pioneering descriptive terms. The entrance of these paintings into the United Kingdom was unprecedented. It was extensive and included an important number of first-rate artworks such as canvasses by Velázquez, The Toilet of Venus (London, The National Gallery, inv. NG2057) and Portrait of a Man, nowadays attributed to Velázquez’s workshop (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. 89.15.29; see Figure 8.3), as well as a group of small pictures taken from the royal palaces that represent domestic subjects, interiors and traditional dances. The latter, however, are not frequently found in Velázquez’s production and were most probably made by other artists. 15 Buchanan, Memoirs of Painting, ii. 229.

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Figure 8.3. Workshop of Velázquez, Portrait of a man. Public Domain. [The Metropolitan Museum of Art]

Wallis also refers to some of Murillo’s religious paintings, Laban Searching for His Stolen Household Gods (Cleveland, Cleveland Museum of Art, inv. 1965.469), Virgin and Child (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. 43.13), which he considers as the ‘finest small picture by that master

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in Madrid’, and a Virgin, Young Christ, and St Joseph. They are all from the Marquis de Santiago collection. He likewise mentions Boys Eating Fruit and six small paintings from the royal palaces (see Figure 8.4).16

Figure 8.4. Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Virgin and child. Public Domain. [The Metropolitan Museum of Art] 16 Buchanan, Memoirs of Painting, ii. 221 and 234.

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Explicit reference to their provenances a priori guaranteed their quality and, in consequence, their high value in the art market. All Wallis’ and Buchanan’s comments about Spanish artists are positive and prove their admiration for them. This includes artists hitherto largely unknown who, after Wallis and Buchanan import their work, began to enter market circuits. The scholarly study of sales catalogues shows that before 1809 the percentage of Spanish paintings that entered the United Kingdom amounted to an anecdotal 1 per cent of the total of art importations, while in the decade of 1810 it increased to 60 per cent.17 Some of the names mentioned in Wallis’ texts are spelt incorrectly. Confusion about artists names was quite common and was reflected in sales catalogues of the period, including ones linked to auctions organized by Lebrun. Even in Paris in 1826, at the sale of Vivant Denon’s collection, Velázquez is called ‘Jacques’ instead of ‘Diego’. Nevertheless, Buchanan shows an interest in the authorship of the paintings and provides information about provenance, which are significant steps forward in the recognition of the Spanish School. Buchanan’s attitude discloses that the authenticity of paintings was now a real issue, a concern has evolved from then until the present. Buchanan clarifies one long-standing, confusing issue. He complains that some artists have usually been classed as belonging to the Neapolitan school, noting that Italian writers were willing to identify Spanish artists like Velázquez and Ribera as belonging to their own country: From the political relationship which existed between the courts of Spain and Naples, it sometimes occurs that Spanish painters have been classed as belonging to this school. This is certainly erroneous, and must have taken its origin from a desire on the part of Italian writers to attach as much importance to their own country as they possibly could, by ranking Velasquez [Velázquez] and Spagnoletto [Ribera] as belonging to their own schools.18

Burton Fredericksen, The Index of Paintings Sold in the British Isles during the Nineteenth Century, 2 vols (Oxford: Clio Press, 1990), vol. ii, p. xii. 18 Buchanan, Memoirs of Painting, i. 141. 17

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The classification of the Spanish School as a branch of the Italian one was often found in sales catalogues and other written sources of the time. For example, in the sale catalogue of the Duke of Orléans collection Ribera was identified as belonging to the Italian School. Until the 1840s, when Richard Ford published his Handbook for travellers in Spain, and William StirlingMaxwell published his Annals of Artists of Spain, concern for accuracy on this issue would surface infrequently in British art literature.19 Buchanan’s perceptions and interests were therefore pioneering, as compared to his contemporary specialists in the field.

The destination of the paintings: Collectors and art merchants The paintings gathered by Wallis were mainly intended to be sold either directly to art collectors or to enter the European art market. The art market was more dynamic in the United Kingdom than in Spain. This was not just due to the war. Art market circuits were much more developed in the United Kingdom, and the activity of the now traditional auction houses, Sotheby’s and Christie’s, founded in 1744 and 1766 respectively, was quite stable. Among buyers of Buchanan’s paintings were collectors belonging to high classes of society, such as the Danish diplomat Edmund Bourke.20 He had lived in Spain between 1801 and 1811, so it is not surprising that he already had some notions about and was interested in the Spanish School, as well as in other schools represented in collections he might have seen while in Spain. After Bourke’s death in 1821, many of his paintings were resold in Richard Ford, A Handbook for travellers in Spain (London: J. Murray, 1845). William Stirling-Maxwell, The Annals of the Artists of Spain (London: John Olivier, 1848). 20 See Patricia A. Teter, ‘“English Gold, Corsican Brass, and French Iron”: Opportunities for Collecting Art in Spain during the Napoleonic Wars’, in Roberta Panzanelli and Monica Preti-Hamard, eds, La Circulation des oeuvres d’art/The circulation of works of art in the revolutionary era, 1789–1848 (Rennes: PU de Rennes, 2007), 309–21. 19

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private and public sales and some are lodged today in the Museum of Fine Arts of Budapest. Lord Berwick, a diplomat from the United Kingdom, was also interested in the Spanish School. He had a keen eye. He bought the Virgin and Child from the Marquis de Santiago collection, correctly attributed to Murillo and now housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York (inv. 43.13). There were also British politicians and members of the higher classes interested in Wallis’ paintings. One of them was the Earl of Grosvenor, who bought art pieces attributed to Velázquez and also Murillo’s Laban Searching for His Gods, which is also from the Marquis de Santiago collection. The Marquis of Lansdowne bought another painting by Velázquez, and the Earl of Carlisle also added to his collection some paintings by Velázquez and Murillo. Bankers, such as Sir Thomas Baring, as well as dealers, did the same. Examples of the latter were a Mr Harris of Bond Street, and William Gordon Coesvelt. Apart from collaborating with Wallis, Coesvelt purchased paintings in Spain that were later sold to Tsar Alexander I of Russia. They are now in the Hermitage Museum in San Petersburg, and they include two Velázquez artworks. However, once in the United Kingdom, the paintings that Buchanan had imported did not sell as successfully as he had anticipated. He did have in mind selling them as a whole, but that was not possible, due to the absence of a collector who would be interested in buying a large number of paintings from a little-known school. Indeed, this failure prevented Buchanan from carrying on dealing with paintings of Spanish origin thereafter. However, paintings in the art market, mostly the ones that were not yet well appreciated and valued, were constantly changing hands. This was part of a dynamic system according to which paintings were acquired for financial profit rather than with a view to their collection. This explains the fact that, a few years after Wallis’ mission had ended, some collections that included paintings from Buchanan’s imports were resold in the United Kingdom. Among these was James Campbell’s collection, which included several works by Murillo and was sold in London in 1815. Some French collectors also chose to sell their treasures in the United Kingdom as the art market was stronger there than in post-Napoleonic France. This would be the case with some of the collections described in Buchanan’s memoirs,

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like that of Lucien Bonaparte, who lived in Spain between 1799 and 1800. He had bought and been gifted with a substantial number of important artworks while there.21 The lot was sold in London in 1815, and some of the paintings, such as Velázquez’s The Lady with a Fan, are still in the United Kingdom.22 General Sébastiani’s collection was similarly sold in London in 1815. This included a Murillo painting, formerly kept in Seville, and described as a ‘picture which always possessed a high reputation in Spain’.23 Buchanan’s account is clearly a key element in the study of the reception of the Spanish School in the United Kingdom. Instead of entering and/or leaving the art market and private collections, some of the paintings exported by Wallis returned to Spain once the Peninsular War had ended. That was the case with some artworks transported illicitly, such as ones deriving from the Spanish Royal Collection, probably sold by the French. The situation was quite different from what happened to another treasure, known as ‘King Joseph’s baggage’, now mainly gathered in Apsley House. These pieces remained in the United Kingdom, as they were a gift offered to the Duke of Wellington by Ferdinand VII.24 Many other paintings remained in the United Kingdom, though traces have been lost and their attribution altered. This was indeed common at the time as, for example, with a painting by Ribera that Lady Shelley mentions while describing Spanish paintings in the Wellington collection. According to her diary, she visited Apsley House in March 1819, stating her admiration for a Ribera piece which, by the time the diaries were edited almost one century later, could not be traced in Wellington’s collections.25

21

Manuela B. Mena, ‘Grandes colecciones de pintura española fuera de España’, in Miguel Cabañas, ed., El arte español fuera de España (Madrid: CISC, 2003), 157–69. 22 London, Wallace Collection, inv. P88. 23 Buchanan, Memoirs of Painting, ii. 264. 24 See Rocío Coletes Laspra, ‘Antecedentes de un expolio: testimonios británicos sobre la primera retirada del rey José de Madrid’, Cuadernos de Estudios del Siglo XVIII 20 (2011), 35–58; also Claus Michael Kauffmann and Susan Jenkins, eds, Catalogue of Paintings in the Wellington Museum. Apsley House (London: English Heritage, 2009). 25 Richard Edgcumbe, ed., The Diary of Frances Lady Shelley 1818–73 (London: J. Murray, 1912), 37–8.

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The sudden availability of Spanish paintings in the London art market increased the number and type of collectors and changed the scene thereafter. This availability contributed to the spread of Spanish art in other countries like the United States, for North American collectors and dealers entered the art market circuits some decades later. It is clear that Buchanan’s account is an extremely valuable source of information about knowledge of Spain and Spanish art in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, particularly in Britain. First-hand testimony conveyed in Wallis’ correspondence is the main evidence of this. The topics treated in these letters include the general situation in Spain, especially in connection with travelling, communications and financial dealings and supplies, as well as the art trade, including information about collectors and other agents. Wallis seems to have accomplished his mission quite successfully. As an artist, he could appreciate the features of the Spanish School and value its painters, so Buchanan’s choice was right and, in that sense, positive for Spanish art. However, it was not particularly favourable for collectors or for the Spanish National Heritage as many of those paintings never returned to Spain. Although in most cases the artworks had been bought legally, questions were later raised about the legitimacy of the sales. After several decrees were passed, and the National Heritage regulations in Spain were defined and applied, a repetition of activities such as Buchanan’s and Wallis’ would be impossible to conceive. Indeed, such actions and similar undertakings became, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, increasingly seen as problematic and continue to be seen so today, even as many contemporary examples arise with the repatriation of collections around the world. Buchanan remains, however, a singularly helpful marker in gauging the changing British attitudes to Spain and Spanish art.

Laura Martínez García

9 Revisiting national stereotypes in the 1815 edition of Centlivre’s ‘Spanish Play’ The Busy Body

abstract In the aftermath of the Peninsular War, British attitudes towards Spain continued to be mixed: certain British authors romanticized the Peninsula and its inhabitants, while others complained about the stubborn Spaniards and their unrefined customs. Susanna Centlivre, whose plays are infused with fiercely Whig sympathies, exemplified the latter. Her main ‘Spanish’ play, The Busy Body, a comedy of manners and intrigue, pits Spain against Britain in an attempt to show audiences the foolishness of certain retrograde Mediterranean attitudes and to celebrate the more liberal British understanding of the world. This chapter examines The Busy Body’s depiction of Anglo-Spanish relations, analysing Centlivre’s portrayal of Spain while paying special attention to the history of 1815, when the play was published after its successful performances in Drury Lane and Covent Garden.

An uncomfortable partnership: Anglo-Spanish relations and the Peninsular War The history of Anglo-Spanish relations is filled with the complexities of war and peace, rivalries and alliances, co-operation and competition. The two countries raced to conquer America and become the strongest power on that continent; they competed to control sea-trade; and, over centuries, they confronted each other about their divergent religious beliefs. By the early nineteenth century, when Napoleon controlled the majority of Europe, Spain’s and Portugal’s relationship to Britain had changed little: ‘the days of the Armada were long gone, but Spain remained a traditional old enemy and great imperial and commercial rival of Britain, whilst

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Portugal was an important trading partner and old ally’.1 In 1808, when Centlivre’s The Busy Body was published in The British Theatre,2 Britain was at war with France.3 On 2 May 1808, the Spanish people in Madrid revolted against the French invaders and were soon crushed. Still, the feeling of discontent travelled fast. Soon the northern province of Asturias declared war against Spain’s former ally and revolts spread quickly. In June, an Asturian delegation travelled to London bringing the story of the uprising and looking for support in Asturias’ fight against a now common enemy.4 The news and their carriers were warmly received by the British government, which saw in this uprising its chance to counteract Napoleonic expansion. The general British public, probably less interested in the strategic position of the Iberian nations in the game of war, responded with strong sentiments of Hispanophilia.5 British people saw in this Spanish initiative ‘the starting signal for European resistance against the French Emperor’,6 and they imbued the uprising and all of its accounts7 with romantic visions of Spain, which they construed as an international

Gavin Daly, The British Soldier in the Peninsular War: Encounters with Spain and Portugal, 1808–14 (London: Springer – Palgrave, 2013), 12. 2 Elisabeth Inchbald, The British Theatre, Or, A Collection of Plays, Which Are Acted at the Theatres Royal, Drury Lane, Covent Garden, and Haymarket (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1808). Vol. 10. 3 Daly, The British Soldier in the Peninsular War, 17. 4 Alicia Laspra-Rodríguez, ‘La intervención británica: ayuda material y diplomática’, Revista de Historia Militar, 2 (2005), 61; Charles J. Esdaile, ‘Repercussions of the Spanish War of 1808 on Great Britain’, Cuadernos Dieciochistas, 8 (2009), 60. 5 Diego Saglia, ‘El Gran Teatro de España: La Guerra de la Independencia como espectáculo de la cultura romántica inglesa’, ed. by Alicia Laspra-Rodríguez, El Basilisco Revista de Filosofía, 38 (2006), 55–64; Alicia Laspra-Rodríguez, Intervencionismo y revolución: Asturias y Gran Bretaña durante la Guerra de la Independencia (1808–13) (Oviedo: Real Instituto de Estudios Asturianos, 1992). 6 Christiana Brennecke, ¿De ejemplo a ‘mancha’ de Europa?: la Guerra de la Independencia española y sus efectos sobre la imagen oficial de España durante el Congreso de Viena (1814–15) (Madrid: CSIC, 2010), 12. (My translation). 7 Agustín Coletes Blanco and Alicia Laspra-Rodríguez, Libertad frente a tiranía: poesía inglesa de la Guerra de la Independencia (1808–14): antología bilingüe (Madrid: Espasa, 2013), 23. 1

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stage for universal freedom and human rights.8 Thus, and in spite of the complex history between Spain and Britain, ‘with British strategic interests at stake, and with the cause of Spanish liberty electrifying public opinion at home, Britain came to the aid of the Iberian powers, supporting an old ally in Portugal, but assisting an old enemy in Spain’.9 In spite of the initial enthusiasm felt towards the Iberian cause, the campaign was tortuous both in military and political terms. Relations among the allied governments were ‘never easy’.10 The Portuguese and the Spanish confirmed British suspicions of their jealous natures in their complaints against their ally’s interventionist practices, while the British felt frustrated at the lack of effective management of the huge resources that they were pouring into both countries.11 In Spain, the establishment of a Regency Council and the Constitution of 1812 opened the way to progress toward modernity. However, two years later, the country was doomed to return to absolutism with King Ferdinand VII and his derogation of the Constitution and persecution of the liberals. The end of the war and the Congress of Vienna worsened relations between the Iberian nations and Britain, whose attitude towards Spain and Portugal had reverted to that of the pre-war years, and thus towards the general prejudice that had permeated Anglo-Spanish and, to a lesser degree, Anglo-Portuguese relations in the previous four centuries. In 1814, the Spanish ambassador to France complained that Spain’s international prestige was declining by the day.12 From that year, the year in which absolutism was re-imposed, Europe witnessed a number of rather badly planned plots and pronouncements in favour of the return of the Constitution being frustrated.

Graciela Iglesias-Rogers, British liberators in the age of Napoleon: Volunteering under the Spanish flag in the Peninsular War (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 46. 9 Daly, The British Soldier in the Peninsular War, 13. 10 I. R. Christie, Wars & Revolutions – Britain 1760–1815 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 309. 11 Alicia Laspra-Rodríguez, ‘La ayuda británica’, in La Guerra de la Independencia en España (1808–14), ed. Antonio Moliner (Barcelona: Nabla, 2007), 153–82. 12 Brennecke, ¿De ejemplo a ‘mancha’ de Europa?, 11. (My translation). 8

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After Rafael del Riego’s successful coup in January 1820, Ferdinand VII was forced to look for a political compromise that would allow him to continue as head of state. Thus, in March, he publicly swore allegiance to the Constitution. This made him the first constitutional monarch in the history of Spain and marked the beginning of the Trienio Liberal, a three-year period of constitutional government, fraught with difficulties and obstacles both domestic and foreign. Although the king had sworn to uphold and respect the Constitution, he soon found ways to hinder its precepts and laws, unmolested by the leading European nations in which, after Napoleon’s defeat, anti-liberal, conservative regimes had been established.13 Power-holders in these countries feared the influence of liberal ideas within their own frontiers and wanted to prevent new versions of the French Revolution: the Congress of Verona (October 1822) was convened to prepare an armed intervention in Spain, which finally fell under French responsibility. Defiantly, the Spanish liberal government warned European powers that it would not tolerate external meddling in its national affairs. This warning did not stop an April invasion by the French, which encountered little opposition: The government, entrenched in Cadiz with the king, was easily defeated, and Ferdinand VII’s absolute rule was restored. Although Britain remained neutral throughout these events, news of the rebellions, conspiracies, plots and depositions taking place in Spain was published in English newspapers, along with some less-than-flattering accounts of soldiers who had fought in the Peninsular War,14 all of this adding to a negative portrait of Spain. The European verdict was unanimous: Spain was incapable of peacefully governing itself. Thus, it is not surprising that the romantic appeal and admiration first felt for ‘societies that, when faced with the French invasion, reacted by a nationalist feeling never seen before’,15

13

Angel Smith, ‘The Rise and Fall of “Respectable” Spanish Liberalism, 1808–1923: An Explanatory Framework’, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 22/1 (2016), 58. See also Mark Jarrett, The Congress of Vienna and its Legacy (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013). 14 Daly, The British Soldier in the Peninsular War, 19. 15 Juan Jacob Calvo, Las claves del ciclo revolucionario 1770–1815 (Barcelona: Planeta, 1990), 107 (my translation).

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was transformed into disappointment. This happened once it was confirmed that, as Cobbett had predicted in 1808,16 despite the British effort to bring modernity to the Iberian nations, they would cling to the old regime.

Revisiting Centlivre’s Iberian plays Throughout those tumultuous times of war, peace, treaties and international alliances, literature continued to be one of the most important means of influencing popular opinion about international relations. As Gillian Russell explains, response to contemporary events was ‘played out in the streets, commons and theatres of Britain, as much as it was in the printed media of the period’. In the early nineteenth century, most British playhouses chose to revive old classics, thus ensuring the success of their productions. The works of Susanna Centlivre were among those attempts. Despite being almost ignored by traditional theatrical historiography, Centlivre, according to unequivocal data, was one of the most commercially successful and prolific female playwrights of her time17 and, ‘in terms of stage success, before the twentieth century, Centlivre is second only to Shakespeare’. Thus, it is not surprising to find her plays staged again and again throughout the 1800s. Three of them, namely The Busy Body, The Wonder!: A Woman Keeps a Secret and A Bold Stroke for a Wife were among the most popular plays of 16 17

William Cobbett, Cobbett’s Political Register (London: Cox and Baylis, 1808), 225. Gilli Bush-Bailey, Treading the Bawds: Actresses and Playwrights on the Late-Stuart Stage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009); Jane Milling, ‘Working in the Theatre: Women Playwrights, 1660–1750’, in Bonnie Nelson and Catherine Burroughs, eds, Teaching British Women Playwrights of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century (New York: Modern Language Association, 2010), 15–28; McLaren, ‘Presumptuous Poetess, Pen-Feathered Muse: The Comedies of Mary Pix’, in Ann Messenger, ed., Gender at Work: Four Women Writers of the Eighteenth Century (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1990), 77–113; John Wilson Bowyer, The Celebrated Mrs. Centlivre (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).

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the century and became part of the repertoires of theatre companies in both the United Kingdom and the United States. The Busy Body was performed in London a minimum of 475 times. As Jackie Bratton contends, ‘it was a stock piece at the foundation of most Anglophone theatres’.18 Some of Centlivre’s other plays had also met major success since their first staging. Between 1808 and 1815, during the Peninsular War and much of the subsequent decade, at least one of Centlivre’s plays was being staged either in Drury Lane or Covent Garden or in both theatres at the same time, as well as in other local playhouses (see Table 9.1). More importantly, the plays most often staged during this period were two of her Iberian plays, the already-mentioned The Busy Body (her only Spanish play) and The Wonder! (a curious mixture of Spanish and Portuguese characters and plots). This is a most telling detail, considering the political atmosphere of the time. Table 9.1. Number of performances of Centlivre’s plays in London (1807–14)19 The Busy Body

The Wonder!

1807–8

DL

BT; CG; DL

1808–9

CG

CG

1809–10

CG; DL

BT; CG; DL

1810–11

DL

CG

1811–12

A Bold Stroke for a Wife

BT; DL BT

1812–13

CG; DL

1813–14

BT; CG; DL

DL

Note: DL (Drury Lane); BT (Bristol Theatre); CG (Covent Garden)

18

19

Jackie Bratton, ‘Reading the Intertheatrical, Or, the Mysterious Disappearance of Susanna Centlivre’, in Maggie B. Gale and Viv Gardner, eds, Women, Theatre and Performance : New Histories, New Historiographies (Manchester : Manchester University Press, 2000), 7, 17. Susan Valladares, Staging the Peninsular War: English Theatres 1807–15 (London: Routledge, 2016). Adapted.

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Although Centlivre’s plays had been published several times before, these three appeared in The London Theatre: A Collection of the Most Celebrated Dramatic Pieces, a set of twenty-six volumes each containing four plays, published by Thomas Dibdin between 1814 and 1818. Centlivre’s ‘Iberian’ plays appear in volume II (The Busy Body) and volume XII (The Wonder!), both published in 1815. The secret of the success of Centlivre’s plays in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and their more recent revival well into the twentieth century lies not just in the dramatic skill with which she portrays and links planned and improvised actions but on the ideas that pervade the plays. They feature strong female leads whose struggles for freedom, individuality and fair treatment have been seen, based on Centlivre’s political leanings, as proto-feminist. According to Misty G. Anderson, ‘There is a political edge to romance in these plays that displays a Whig belief in contract and extends it to women’20 and to the merchant and emerging middle class, a general ‘“feminist individualism” … committed to Whig politics, Lockean individual rights, and some freedoms for women’.21 The ‘Iberian plays’ examined in this chapter consolidated her reputation as a playwright. As Donkin argues, ‘the enduring success of plays like The Busy Body, A Bold Stroke for a Wife and The Wonder! A Woman Keeps a Secret was incontrovertible evidence that women could write for the stage successfully’22 – even if Centlivre’s plays were staged with no reference whatsoever to their female author. Gender prejudice was an issue Centlivre had to contend with both in her life and her afterlife: The Busy Body (another play with Spanish elements) was rejected by the actors during rehearsal, and it was even put around the town that the play ‘was a silly thing wrote by a woman, [and]

20 Misty G. Anderson, Female Playwrights and Eighteenth-Century Comedy: Negotiating Marriage on the London Stage (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 94. 21 Laura J. Rosenthal, Playwrights and Plagiarists in Early Modern England: Gender, Authorship, Literary Property (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 206–7. 22 Getting Into the Act: Women Playwrights in London 1776–1829 (London: Routledge, 1995), 25.

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that the Players did not have an Opinion of it’,23 resulting in a very poor attendance on its first night. In spite of its less-than-auspicious start, the play soon became a blockbuster, and it ‘remained popular with theatregoers on both sides of the Atlantic for over one-hundred-fifty years’.24 Hazlitt, for instance, who admired the play and wrote an introduction for its 1819 edition, remarks in his ‘Lectures on the Comic Writers of the Last Century’ (also in 1819) on its extraordinary popularity and the number of its performances. The play skilfully dramatizes the improvised manoeuvres of two young couples trying to overcome the obstacles their elders place in the way of their unions: Miranda and Sir George Airy (the witty couple) see their wish to marry thwarted by her guardian, Sir Francis Gripe, who intends to marry the young heroine himself, so as to obtain her large fortune. Charles, a friend of Sir George and son to Sir Francis Gripe, pines for the love of Isabinda, whose father (Sir Jealous Traffick), who has lived in Spain, is enamoured with the Spanish way of life and particularly, as he sees it, the success of the Spanish in keeping women from men until they marry. Thus, he has sworn to force his daughter to stay inside the house until the man he has chosen for her (Don Diego Babinnetto, a Spanish merchant) arrives to claim her. These are standard comic devices, but the ‘contest’ between Spanish and British social and sexual practices is an important one. Less conventionally, Centlivre fashions a different kind of comic character (ultimately deriving from Ben Jonson’s theatre) in Marplot, a young man under the guardianship of Sir Francis Gripe: he is an incurable gossip described in the dramatis personae as ‘a sort of silly fellow, cowardly, but very inquisitive to know everybody’s business; generally spoils all he undertakes, yet without design’.25 Centlivre cleverly uses Marplot’s stupidity and literalness to overturn the schemes of the lovers, forcing them to

23

John Mottley, ‘A Compleat List of All the English Dramatic Poets – Susannah Centlivre’, in Kristina Straub, Misty G. Anderson, and Daniel O’Quinn, eds, The Routledge Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama (London: Routledge, 2017). 24 F. P. Lock, Susanna Centlivre (Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers, 1979), 63. 25 Melinda C. Finberg, Eighteenth-Century Women Dramatists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 77.

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think on their feet and find new ones. At the same time, audiences liked and like him. Although Marplot was the star of the play and one of the most beloved characters created by Centlivre (she even created a sequel entitled Mar-Plot in Lisbon; or the Second Part of The Busy Body, a play that never reached the success of its predecessor), the play is carried off by the female characters, who set the action in motion and resolve its tensions and conflicts. As contended by F. P. Lock, ‘the Spanish treatment of women, especially of daughters before marriage, gives a great scope for the writer of the comedy of intrigue’26 who can thus justify the escapades and confusing scenes that create the comic atmosphere of the play. More importantly, Spanish customs also function here as tools for commentary on the unfair treatment of women. By including these ‘foreign’ practices and pitting them against the greater freedom that women enjoy in Britain, Centlivre is being true to her Whig, anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic principles, but she is also proselytizing those opinions to a British audience that does not wholly share them. By using Spain as a foil, she makes a feminist case seem also a patriotic one.27 Sir Jealous Traffick, introduced in the dramatis personae as ‘a Merchant that had liv’d some Time in Spain’ and ‘a great Admirer of the Spanish Customs’,28 is suspicious and jealous from the start, and such qualities are constantly insisted upon by the rest of characters.29 Suspiciousness and irrational jealousy are two of the attributes often associated with Spain, and they buttress a stereotype that 1815 readers of this play were newly familiar with, thanks to the hugely popular accounts written by British soldiers who had served in the Peninsular War. Both during and after the 26 Lock, Susanna Centlivre, 65. 27 See Laura Martínez García, ‘A Defence of Whig Feminism in Centlivre’s Portuguese Plays The Wonder! A Woman Keeps A Secret (1714) and Mar-Plot; or the Second Part of The Busy Body (1710)’, Revista de Estudos Anglo-Portugueses, 24/1 (2015), 85–106. 28 Finberg, Eighteenth-Century Women Dramatists, 77. 29 ‘Sir Jealous, whose suspicious Nature’s always on the Watch; nay, even while one Eye sleeps, the other keeps Sentinel’. Susanna Centlivre, ‘The Busy Body. A Comedy’. in The London Theatre: A Collection of the Most Celebrated Dramatic Pieces, 26 vols (London: Whittingham & Arliss, 1815), ii. 55.

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war, British imaginings and attitudes to Spain were largely shaped by these testimonies, written by men whose fresh experience of the Iberian nations was itself coloured by long-standing suspicions of Spanish culture. Daly suggests that ‘three core cultural and intellectual modes informed British … perceptions of Spain and Portugal: the Black Legend, the Enlightenment and Romanticism’,30 a palimpsest which produced both admiration and revulsion towards the Iberian nations. The first mention of Sir Jealous Traffick comes early on in the play (act I, scene I), when Whisper, Charles’s servant, runs in to inform his master that ‘Isabinda’s Spanish father has quite spoiled the plot’,31 which would have ensured the meeting of the two lovers. This negative coupling of the words ‘Spanish’ and ‘spoiled’ activates a connection and an immediate dislike of both the man and the nation he admires. This connection is built into the play. While such negativity might have resonated with British audiences at any time, in 1815, the dislike of the Spanish that some members of the audience would feel was exacerbated, as mentioned above, by contemporary accounts of British soldiers and generals claiming that the Spaniards were not just deeply disorganized, but despondent and unwilling to follow the advice and orders of the British generals. The British public expected and desired a British victory accomplished through successful battles. But the French defeat was mainly accomplished by a new kind of guerrilla warfare which the British could not understand.32 Daly argues that the soldiers’ accounts of the war resulted in a complex, multi-layered portrayal of Spain, where romantic visions of an exotic, picturesque land were bound up with views of a primitive, violent, barbaric and vulgar nation. Such a portrayal boosted British patriotism, since ‘British soldiers were united in their shared sense of superiority over the

30 Daly, The British Soldier in the Peninsular War, 39. 31 Centlivre, ‘The Busy Body. A Comedy’, in The London Theatre: A Collection, ii. 12–13. 32 On the importance of guerilla warfare and its impact on British authors of the time, see Young-ok An, ‘The Guerrilla Chief and the Mountain Girl: Spanish figures in Letitia Landon’s Romance and Reality’, in this volume.

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local peoples, and in much of what they found as repulsive, alienating, confronting, attractive, exotic and romantic’.33 It is difficult to know how far these attitudes would infiltrate an audience’s reaction to Centlivre’s play, since it is concerned with love and marriage rather than with war and politics. It is entirely plausible, though, that when in the next scene Patch, Isabinda’s servant, explains to Miranda, Isabinda’s closest friend, that her mistress is not to be allowed out of the house to meet the young lady, Sir Jealous Traffick’s Spanish practices in social life and love would appear as un-British as recent Spanish practices in war. Sir Jealous’s behaviour could only be explained by his ‘living so long in Spain’. This, of course, is not quite the return to the Black Legend version of Spain after British flirtation with Hispanophilia in the early years of the Peninsular War, but the parallels between religious, political and sexual/social repression are obvious enough. This first less-than-favourable impression of Sir Jealous Traffick is rounded off with a description of his political ambitions, which are anything but honourable: ‘He vows he’ll spend half his state, but he’ll be a parliament man, on purpose to bring in a bill for women to wear veils, and other odious Spanish customs’. While the comic effect of such an exaggerated portrayal of Sir Jealous is quite clear, and although this characterization is also used as a theatrical device that will reinforce the strength of the play, this statement serves another, more serious purpose: by juxtaposing Parliament, which stands for representative rather than absolutist government, and restrictive and repressive ‘Spanish customs’, Centlivre makes a clear political statement, characterizing Britain as a country governed by reason and fairness while portraying Spain as a country ruled by arbitrary and unfair laws. Such a depiction of the two nations was long established, though it would have been less powerful in 1800 than in 1600 or 1700. However, in 1814, such a reading would be given startlingly new confirmation by Ferdinand VII’s un-British absolutism and his restoration of the Inquisition (21 July 1814). Many British audience members would have sympathized

33 Daly, The British Soldier in the Peninsular War, 20.

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with the short-lived liberal-constitutional government of 1812, which resembled the British political system. It is not until the second act that audiences and readers actually meet the Spanish suitor himself. Scene ii opens with Sir Jealous Traffick scolding his daughter for looking out a window and cruelly abusing her by comparing her to a body to be rented: ‘What, in the Balcony again, notwithstanding my positive Commands to the contrary! – Why don’t you write a Bill on your Forehead, to show Passengers there’s something to be let’.34 This coarse comparison of his daughter longing to be free from confinement to a prostitute advertising her wares would have shocked British audiences, and it belies his praise of Spanish customs concerning unmarried women as stemming from greater decorum or courtesy. Doubtless, once again, Centlivre is proselytizing for greater freedom for British women by skilfully associating the restrictions they face with anti-Spanish patriotic sentiment. She is using the technique of déplacement.35 That is, through the displacement of the action to a foreign, exotic location or the inclusion of foreign characters, Centlivre manages to create a comic distance that allows her to comment on the unfairness of British practices without directly criticizing her compatriots. She associates these irrational practices with foreign peoples and lands ‘to heighten the heroine’s confinement and to make the idea of confining women and forcing them into marriages as unattractive as possible to an English audience’.36 This was certainly her original intention, and it is still apparent a century later but, immediately after the Peninsular War, it would have had a much more obvious antiSpanish resonance.

34 Centlivre, ‘The Busy Body. A Comedy’, in The London Theatre: A Collection, ii. 28. 35 Rogério Miguel Puga, ‘A Lisboa Católica, a Mulher Lusa e a Dimensão AngloPortuguesa de Marplot in Lisbon (1710) e A Wife Well Managed (1715), de Susanna Centlivre’, Revista de Estudos Anglo-Portugueses, 20 (2011), 113; Puga, ‘Entre o Terreiro do Paço e Londres: O Jogo de Espelhos Anglo-Português em The Wonder: A Woman Keeps A Secret (1714), de Susanna Centlivre’, Revista Anglo Saxonica, 3/2 (2011), 325. 36 Susan Staves, ‘Susanna Centlivre’, in the Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 427.

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In later plays, Centlivre exploited the technique of displacement more fully: Marplot and The Wonder! are both set in Lisbon, where intrigue and jealousy seem ‘more natural than in London’.37 In The Wonder!, reprinted in 1815 in volume 12 of Dibdin’s collection, Centlivre passionately defends female agency and friendship, while still commenting on the repressive nature of Spanish society. Again, she locates and critiques actions and practices outside Britain as a strategy to criticize her own country. And she keeps poking fun at Britain and the British through the words of pervert Colonel Briton, who compares Spain and Portugal to a nunnery, where women (nuns) are being imprisoned by their guardians (priests), making the temptation of the British ‘to plunder’ all the more appealing: Why faith, Frederic, a man might pass his time agreeably enough within-side of a nunnery; but to behold such troops of soft, plump, tender, melting, wishing, nay, willing girls too, through a damn’d grate, gives us Britons strong temptations to plunder. Ah, Frederic, your priests are wicked rogues; they immure beauty for their own proper use, and show it only to the laity to create desires, and inflame accompts, that they may purchase pardons at a dearer rate.38

The Busy Body, through the comments that all characters make about Sir Jealous Traffick’s behaviour towards his daughter, evidences ‘the general belief … that Roman Catholic nations were stricter in their morals and beliefs, allowing for less freedom, while the British Protestant nation was seen as a place of liberty’39 and rationality. As Lock points out, the image of Spain and Portugal for those promoting the play was based on the notions that ‘tempers are hotter, honour more sacred, jealousy more rife … fathers and brothers exercise despotic control over their wives, daughters and sisters’,40 ideas that, for the reasons mentioned above, arguably took on even more force from 1814 onwards.

37 Lock, Susanna Centlivre, 65. 38 Centlivre, ‘The Wonder! A Woman Keeps a Secret’, in The London Theatre: A Collection of the Most Celebrated Dramatic Pieces. Correctly Given, from Copies Used in the Theatres (London: Whittingham and Arliss, 1815), vol. xii, p. ii. 39 Martínez García, ‘A Defence of Whig Feminism’, 88. 40 Lock, Susanna Centlivre, 96.

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Both Patch and Miranda, two of the raisonneurs of the play, refer to the Spanish customs Sir Jealous Traffick has imported from his stay in the Peninsula as ‘odious’ and ‘rigid’, while Sir Jealous calls them ‘the virtuous Spanish rules’41 and describes the Iberian habit of having young women accompanied by chaperones (duennas) as ‘that incomparable custom of Spain’.42 To this praise of Spanish practices, his daughter, spokeswoman for British rationality and fairness, replies that neither veils nor duennas ensure female virtue, since both can be bypassed or be even more conducive to deceit than women’s access to ‘innocent liberty’.43 The idea that enforcing irrational limitations on women only results in more deceit is a staple of the Spanish plays and one of Centlivre’s most widely used motifs in her attempts to defend her own values. In this chapter, I have explained how different historical circumstances and subsequent changes in British views of Spain caused Centlivre’s plays to resonate differently with early nineteenth-century audiences, compared with those held by early eighteenth-century audiences. But it is important not to analyse plays and audience reactions to them solely by connecting them to political history. Plays have their own histories, and good writers do not write simply to convey their political and religious views. Again, there was never any single governing set of British attitudes to Spain at any time, as essays in this volume make clear. If Sir Jealous’s preference for Spanish practices is ridiculed, he is upstaged by Charles, one of the two heroes pretending to be the Spanish suitor, who makes a courteous speech in perfect untranslated Spanish (at which he is obviously accomplished), which Sir Jealous cannot match, for he quickly turns their conversation back 41 Centlivre, ‘The Busy Body. A Comedy’, in the London Theatre: A Collection, ii. 13, 14, 28. 42 Centlivre, ‘The Busy Body. A Comedy’, in the London Theatre: A Collection, ii, 29. 43 ‘If we had but the ghostly Helps in England, which they have in Spain, I might deceive you if you did – Sir, ‘tis not the Restraint, but the innate Principles, secures the Reputation and Honour of our Sex – Let me tell you, Sir, Confinement sharpens the Invention, as Want of Sight strengthens the other Senses, and is often more pernicious, than the Recreation Innocent Liberty allows’. Centlivre, ‘The Busy Body. A Comedy’, in The London Theatre: A Collection, ii. 29.

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to English. Charles’s expertise is celebrated rather than mocked. It is very unusual to have any sustained passage of Spanish dialogue in an English play. That would have had one resonance in 1715 and quite another in 1815, when many British soldiers and officers had learned to speak Spanish. Moreover, Charles’s expertise in speaking courteous Spanish offers a version of Spain other than the vulgar one presented by Sir Jealous. In a similar way, although Sir Jealous (and Centlivre) take for granted the repressive nature of Spanish sexual customs, any theatre audience would know that the antics involved in climbing a balcony in order to rendezvous with a lover and other similar devices are commonplace in plays set in Spain (especially Seville) rather than England, and hence associated with Eros rather than simply repression. Moreover, if Sir Jealous’s adulation of Spanish practices is mocked and exposed as shallow, it is still taken for granted by characters in the play that it is not particularly odd for an Englishman to admire Spanish culture. To reinforce the point that reading a play solely within its political context can be a limitation, I offer the example of Hazlitt, who writes about The Busy Body in a number of places, detailing what he most likes about it. He never discusses Spanish/British contraries, politics, or any kind of proto-feminism. If he, an ultra-Radical and brilliant critic, who tried to persuade himself that his hero Napoleon’s invasion of Spain was almost justified because of Spanish backwardness and repression, did not pick up the resonances analysed in this essay, it would be foolish to think that his experience was exceptional. But that is not the same as saying that, given the powerful effects of the Peninsular War, Ferdinand VII’s absolutism and widespread liberal horror at how the war and subsequent events played out, some members of the audience in 1815, consciously or semiconsciously, did not react to this extremely popular play – which clearly highlights different readings of what Spain represents – in the way that I have argued. Nor does it negate the likelihood that the play influenced British attitudes towards Spain in a significant way.

María Eugenia Perojo Arronte

10  Coleridge’s criticism of the Don Juan tradition

Abstract Coleridge’s criticism of the Don Juan tradition is inserted within his critique of Charles Maturin’s tragedy Bertram, first published in a series of five letters contributed to the Courier in 1816. The letters were later re-edited as Chapter 23 of Biographia Literaria (1817). Critics have referred to this criticism apropos either of Byron’s rewriting of the Don Juan story or of Coleridge’s criticism of Gothic drama, but its Spanish background has been rather neglected. However, certain textual variants in the Biographia Literaria version, as well as its location after the discussion on drama and national character in the previous ‘Satyrane’s Letters’, reveal its significance. This chapter covers the missing perspective by analysing this criticism in relation to Coleridge’s conflicting Spanish social and literary imaginary, revealing the multi-layered and rich texture of the passage in terms of what may be called the author’s Anglo-Spanish cultural (dis)engagement.

Textual history and background Coleridge was proud of his criticism of the Don Juan tradition, as he wrote in an 1817 letter to the actor Alexander Rae: ‘The comparison yet contrast of the Bertram with the Don Juan I thought most ably conceived and executed’.1 The criticism, inserted within his critique of the gothic drama Bertram by the Irish writer Charles Robert Maturin (1782–1824), had appeared in five letters anonymously published in the Courier in 1816.2 1 2

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Letters, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959), iv. 721. The dates were 29 August and 7, 9, 10, 11 September. The letters have been published in appendix B of the Bollingen Series edition of Biographia Literaria, Samuel

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Coleridge qualified Bertram as an ‘infamous Abortion of Ignorance and Jacobinism’.3 Maturin’s play had been performed in 1816 at Drury Lane with great success and Coleridge thought this had been done at the expense of his play Zapolya, which he had proposed to the Drury Lane Committee through the agency of Lord Byron.4 The critique was finally included in Biographia Literaria, published in 1817, together with the ‘Satyrane’s Letters’, first published in Coleridge’s periodical The Friend in 1809, to complete a second volume which was too short. As is well known, the first volume contains all the philosophical chapters and the second is mostly devoted to criticism. Volume two consists of Chapters 14–24, with ‘Satyrane’s Letters’ appearing just before the critique of Bertram in Chapter 23, which is a composite of the Courier articles. The ‘Satyrane’s Letters’ constitute a good preamble to the ensuing discussion from a literary, political and social perspective. They were occasioned by Coleridge’s trip to Germany in 1798–9. Their main contention is that contemporary ‘sentimental’ drama is a substitute for the older sound ‘poetic’ drama of Shakespeare, Racine and Molière, which emerges as the proper European tradition. No place is left for Schiller or Kotzebue, the models of Bertram. A forensic debate between a ‘plaintiff ’ (ColeridgeSatyrane) and a ‘defendant’, or ‘spokesman of the crowd’, ends with the Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, eds, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), ii. 255–79. The first letter is also included in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Essays on His Times, ed. David V. Erdman, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), ii. 435–44. 3 Coleridge, Collected Letters, iv. 720. According to Jane Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 57, we owe to Coleridge the canonization of the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama. See also Julie Carlson, ‘An Active Imagination: Coleridge and the Politics of Dramatic Reform’, Modern Philology 86/1 (1988), 22–33. 4 After Samuel Whitbread’s death, Thomas Dibdin and Alexander Rae were at the head of it, assisted by Lord Byron, Lord Essex, George Lamb, Douglas Kinnaird and Peter Moore (see Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ii. 209n). As a matter of fact, the performance of Bertram had been decided even before Coleridge’s proposal, as can be seen in Byron’s account of the whole affair. See Alethea Hayter, ‘Coleridge, Maturin’s Bertram, and Drury Lane’, in Donald Sultana, ed., New Approaches to Coleridge: Biographical and Critical Essays (London: Barnes & Noble, 1981), 17–37.

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plaintiff ’s peroration, tinged with Burkean overtones that emphasize the political dimension of the criticism: For the whole system of your drama is a moral and intellectual Jacobinism of the most dangerous kind, and those common-place rants of loyalty are no better than hypocrisy in your playwrights, and your own sympathy with them a gross self-delusion. For the whole secret of dramatic popularity consists with you, in the confusion and subversion of the natural order of things, their causes and their effects; in the excitement of surprise, by representing the qualities of liberality, refined feeling, and a nice sense of honour (those things rather, which pass among you for such) in persons and in classes of life where experience teaches us least to expect them; and in rewarding with all the sympathies that are the dues of virtue, those criminals whom law, reason, and religion, have excommunicated from our esteem!5

The passage is deliberately repeated, practically verbatim, in Chapter 23 as proof of Coleridge’s unwavering principles. The first original Courier letter is only partially reproduced thereby. The excisions deal with the attack against the new Drury Lane Committee, which is more condensed in the Biographia version. The remaining four articles are reproduced in full with some minor emendations. One half of the second letter consists of criticism of contemporary German drama. The Don Juan criticism runs from the remaining part of this second letter all through the third. The fourth and fifth letters are dedicated to Maturin’s Bertram. In the Courier version, the critique is aimed at ‘the illustration of the public taste, and the causes of its vitiation’. It is concerned with German drama, the Atheista Fulminato, and ‘extra political jacobinism’. The excision of the first letter in Biographia Literaria concentrates the interest on the Don Juan and Bertram critiques. From the onset, Chapter 23 is satirically tinged with the language of patriotism. English identity is confronted by an ‘Other’ embodied in grotesque metaphors: ‘the speaking monsters imported from the banks of the Danube’, ‘the […] pernicious barbarisms and Kotzebuisms’ and ‘the emigrants from Exeter ’Change’.6 Coleridge interprets German drama in terms

5 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ii. 190. 6 See respectively, Coleridge, Biohgraphia Literaria, ii. 260 and 208. My emphasis.

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of miscegenation, calling it an ‘Olla Podrida’ [Mixed Pot]7 for its indebtedness to French and English literary traditions. He finally concludes that it ‘is English in its origin, English in its materials, and English by re-adoption’.8 The whole discussion is intended to state the superiority of English dramatic tradition – with Shakespeare at its head – over French and German ones. Coleridge’s indebtedness to August Wilhelm Schlegel’s Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Litteratur (1809–11) is conspicuous. Schlegel avers that only England and Spain have ‘a theatre entirely original and national’. In his canon, both Shakespeare and Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–81) are at the summit of the European tradition: ‘Shakespeare and Calderon, the only two poets who are entitled to be called great’.9 Coleridge’s public references to Spanish drama are rather scarce.10 It is in his private writings – letters, notebooks, marginalia – and in the Table Talk where we can find his fascination with Calderón.11 It is difficult to assess how much Coleridge knew about other Spanish playwrights since his references are

7

‘Rotten pot’, literally, ‘olla podrida’ is a Spanish expression for a stew that mixes a variety of meats, legumes and vegetables. Coleridge must have read about it in Don Quixote, where Sancho refers to the variety of its ingredients: ‘That great dish smoking yonder, I take to be an olla-podrida, and, amidst the diversity of things contained in it, surely I may light upon something both wholesome and toothsome’. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote de la Mancha, 4 vols, trans. Charles Jarvis (London: T. M. Lean, 1819), iv. 138. 8 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ii. 212. David Simpson has argued that Coleridge reinforced his sense of national identity at the expense of others. See his Romanticism, Nationalism and the Revolt Against Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 90. 9 Augustus William Schlegel, Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, trans. John Black (New York: AMS Press, 1965), 342. 10 The only Spanish work he discussed in detail in his lectures was Don Quixote, on which he lectured in 1814, 1818 and 1819. See María Eugenia Perojo Arronte, ‘Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Don Quixote’, Cervantes. Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America, 34/2 (2014), 203–18. 11 I discuss Coleridge’s engagement with Calderón more at length in María Eugenia Perojo Arronte, ‘Coleridge and Spanish Literature’, in Ian Haywood and Diego Saglia, eds, Spain and British Romanticism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 95–114.

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generally rather vague. Lope de Vega (1562–1635) is mentioned together with Calderón in John Payne Collier’s notes of the 1812 Lecture.12 In an annotation to Beaumont & Fletcher dated 1815 and 1816–17, Coleridge states their indebtedness to early Spanish drama, but he speaks in general terms and it cannot be ascertained how far his knowledge went.13

Literary and non-literary sources of Coleridge’s Don Juan The criticism of the character of Don Juan is Coleridge’s only extant public pronouncement on Spanish drama, but it is based on a domesticated version of the Spanish play. Coleridge analyses The Libertine by Thomas Shadwell, which was the first English adaptation of El burlador de Sevilla [The Joker of Seville]. All the information he provides derives from Shadwell’s preface. They both refer to the Spanish play as Atheista Fulminato, which is the title of an Italian anonymous seventeenth-century scenario (Il Ateista fulminato) for one of the many commedia dell’arte versions. El burlador de Sevilla, attributed to Tirso de Molina, underwent a good deal of transformation until Shadwell’s version was performed at Dorset Garden in 1675. The text was transmitted via two versions. One of them is known by the title El burlador de Sevilla – in some editions featuring as El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra [The Joker of Seville and the Stone Guest]. It was printed in Seville in around 1627–9 in a volume with the title Doce comedias nuevas de Lope de Vega y otros autores. Segunda parte.14 The other one, entitled Tan largo me lo fiais, was attributed to Calderón in the first

12 13 14

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures 1808–19. On Literature, ed. R. A. Foakes, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), ii. 511. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Marginalia, ed. George Whalley, 12 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), i. 389. Doce comedias nuevas de Lope de Vega y otros autores. Segunda parte (Madrid: Gerónimo Margarit, 1630).

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edition of around 1635.15 These circumstances have provoked even more confusion regarding the authorship of the play. In an eighteenth-century catalogue of Spanish drama, Vicente García de La Huerta’s Theatro Hespañol (1785), Tan largo me lo fiáis is attributed to Calderón.16 García de la Huerta also published an anthology of Spanish plays (Theatro Hespañol, 1785–6), a copy of which is listed in the catalogue of Robert Southey’s library.17 García de la Huerta is mentioned as an important source in all the histories of Spanish literature available in Coleridge’s time: Friedrich Bouterwerk’s Geschichte der Spanischen Poesie und Beredsamkeit (1804), A. W. Schlegel’s Vorlesungen and Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi’s Littérature du midi de l’Europe (1813). It is tempting to think that Coleridge may have been led to Don Juan through direct or indirect knowledge of some of the Spanish versions, particularly considering that one of them had been attributed to his much admired Calderón, with whom he was already acquainted at the time of composing the critique. However, I do not think that this was the case, or else he would not have repeated Shadwell’s mistakes about the Spanish version. Despite the popularity of Spanish drama among English writers of the Restoration period,18 Shadwell’s models were mostly French.19 The Libertine is based on a French adaptation, Le nouveau festin de pierre ou

15

16 17 18 19

For a discussion about the textual transmission and the debate on the authorship of the play, see Blanca de Oteiza, ¿Conocemos los textos verdaderos de Tirso de Molina? (Alicante: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, 2006) accessed 12 August 2017. Vicente García de la Huerta, Theatro Hespañol. Catalogo alphabetico de las comedias, tragedias, autos, zarzuelas, entremeses y otras obras correspondientes al theatro hespañol (Madrid: Imprenta Real, 1785), 180. Robert Southey, Catalogue of the Valuable Library of the Late Robert Southey …: Which Will Be Sold by the Auction … by Messrs. S. Leigh Sotheby & Co. … On … May 8th, 1844, And Fifteen Following Days (London: Compton & Ritchie, 1844). See Jorge Braga Riera, Classical Spanish Drama in Restoration English (1660–1700) (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009). Gustav Ungerer, ‘Thomas Shadwell’s The Libertine (1675): A Forgotten Restoration Don Juan Play’, in Javier Sánchez, ed., SEDERI 1 (Zaragoza: Librería General, 1990) 222–39, at 225.

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l’Athée fondroyé (1669) by Rosimond, where the cruelty, libertinism and atheism of Don Juan are accentuated, transforming the Spanish aristocrat into a criminal. The Libertine is thus at several removes from its Spanish antecedent. Don Juan Tenorio and his English namesake evade justice thanks to their aristocratic status and courtly connections, and only through Providence do they face retribution. But the Spanish nobleman is a Christian and repents, whereas the English one is an atheist and dies unrepentant. Moreover, Shadwell multiplies the crimes of his main character – murder, rape, incest, and parricide – and also what the character represents by adding the figures of his two acolytes, Don Antonio and Don Lopez. The first scene sets the tone by revealing their avowed libertinism and their godless rationalism, with an enumeration of such horrendous crimes that they hardly leave any trace of verisimilitude in the play. John Loftis has called this exaggeration the ‘reductio ad absurdum’ by which Shadwell achieves his satire upon Hobbesian libertinism.20 This is also Coleridge’s interpretation. He begins his critique by pointing out the satire against ‘the (so called) system of nature, (i.e. materialism, with the utter rejection and moral responsibility, of a present providence, and of both present and future retribution)’. He interprets Don Juan as a product of the imagination, adapting the Schlegelian concept of ‘ideal’ art that he had used in his analysis of The Tempest in Lecture 9 of the 1811–12 course of lectures. The character of Don Juan is ideal because of its incongruous mixture of attractive and undesirable qualities that ‘remove it from the rules of probability’, like Milton’s Satan. He is ‘ideal’ also for the ‘happy balance of the generic with the individual’, which makes him symbolical, that is, instructive, and interesting. His dreamlike nature requires an act of poetic faith: ‘he solicits us only to yield ourselves to a dream […] and meantime, only, not to disbelieve’.21 Coleridge underlines the parallelism with Shakespeare, stating that in the same way as ‘Shakespeare’s male characters’,

20 Quoted by Christopher J. Wheatley, Without God or Reason. The Plays of Thomas Shadwell and Secular Ethics in the Restoration (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1993), 90. 21 See respectively, Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ii. 2, 14, 214–15 and 218.

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Don Juan is powerfully attractive on account of ‘the co-existence of great intellectual lordship with guilt’.22 The gifts of Don Juan enumerated in the Courier version are: ‘Rank, fortune, wit, talent, acquired knowledge, and liberal accomplishments, with beauty of person, vigorous health, and constitutional hardihood, elevated by the habits and sympathies of noble birth and natural character’.23 If Coleridge’s critique is read bearing in mind Byron’s involvement in the Bertram affair, it is not difficult to see in Don Juan a representation of the English poet.24 The above passage is similar to the one in which the members of the Drury Lane Committee are depicted in that it begins with the same words: ‘Rank, fortune, liberal education’.25 Coleridge was fascinated by Byron’s beauty. In a letter dated May 1816, he wrote: ‘He has the sweetest Countenance that I ever beheld – his eyes are really Portals of the Sun, things for Light to go in and out of ’.26 But this fascination soon came to an end. Marilyn Butler has argued that underlying Coleridge’s critique there is a criticism of Byron’s immoral unpunished heroes and that he chose Shadwell’s play because the title, The Libertine, would be taken as

22 Henry Crabb Robinson reports how Coleridge applies this idea to his analysis of Iago (cited in Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ii. 217 and n). 23 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ii. 263. 24 Many critics have seen in Coleridge’s criticism an antecedent for Byron’s Don Juan, beginning with Elizabeth French Boyd, Byron’s Don Juan. A Critical Study (London & New York: Routledge, 1958) and continuing with Jerome McGann, to whom the whole of Byron’s Don Juan is a critical response to Coleridge’s critique of Bertram ( Jerome J. McGann, ‘The Biographia Literaria and the Contentions of English Romanticism’, in Frederick Burwick, ed., Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. Text and Meaning (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989), 233–54. For three studies of Byron’s sources and also the afterlives of his work, see Agustín Coletes-Blanco ‘A Spanish Modernist Echo of Byron’s Don Juan: Pérez de Ayala and his Tigre Juan’, Sara Medina-Calzada, ‘Appropriating Byron’s Don Juan: José Joaquín de Mora’s version of the myth’, and María Eugenia Perojo Arronte, ‘Byron and Unamuno’s Don Juan’, in Peter Cochran, ed., Aspects of Byron’s Don Juan (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2013), 296–307, 308–16, and 317–25, respectively. 25 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ii. 209. 26 Coleridge, Collected Letters, iv. 636 and 641.

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an allusion to Byron’s licentious life.27 In a famous letter to John Murray dated 24 November 1818, just after beginning the composition of his Don Juan, Byron accused Robert Southey of slandering him about being with Shelley ‘in a league of Incest, etc., etc.’ and blamed Coleridge for spreading the offensive rumour.28 Earl Leslie Griggs asserts that there is no proof of Coleridge’s participation in the rumour,29 but perhaps we can take the Don Juan critique as part of his involvement in it. One fact may have aided contemporary readers to see Byron in Coleridge’s depiction of Don Juan. In May 1816 the scandal surrounding Byron’s exile was fuelled by the publication of Lady Caroline Lamb’s roman à clef entitled Glenarvon. Lady Caroline had had an affair with Byron in 1812, but he eventually rejected her. The novel not only satirizes the elite of British society, but Byron, playing a central role as Glenarvon, is exposed as a wicked aristocratic seducer ‘with an occasional touch of the angel’, as John Clubbe notes.30 The novel was widely read in the months after its publication,31 so the Courier letters, published between August and September, appeared in the midst of the scandal. A deliberate manoeuvre by Coleridge to take advantage of Byron’s weak position at this time to satisfy his wounded pride at the rejection of Zapolya is possible. The truth is that Byron had little or nothing to do with it in the way Coleridge had represented it. He had been very kind and generous to Coleridge the previous year, requesting the publication of ‘Christabel’ and ‘Kubla Khan’, encouraging the staging of Zapolya and even lending

Marilyn Butler, ‘Byron and the Emoire in the East’, in Andrew Rutherford, ed., Byron: Augustan and Romantic (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1990), 63–81, at 64. 28 Peter Cochran, ed., ‘Byron’s Correspondence with John Murray, 2: 1816–19’ , n. p., accessed 17 August 2017. 29 Coleridge, Collected Letters, iv. 948n. 30 John Clubbe, ‘Glenarvon Revised – and Revisited’, The Wordsworth Circle 10/2 (1979), 205–17, at 209. 31 See Clubbe, ‘Glenarvon Revised – and Revisited’, 207. Even Goethe read it. It had two stage adaptations in 1819. See Frederick Burwick, Playing to the Crowd. London Popular Theatre, 1780–1830 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 71–86. 27

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him a hundred pounds.32 Just before Byron’s departure for exile, they were still on good terms, but Coleridge was offended when he saw himself portrayed as a drunkard in Canto I of Don Juan.33 His most famous words about Byron appear in an 1824 marginal annotation, where he writes that Byron was ‘a wicked Lord who from morbid & restless vanity pretended to be ten times more wicked than he was’.34 Considering all these facts, the Don Juan-Byron interpretation may not be a far-fetched one. Another aspect of Coleridge’s Don Juan that bears relation to Byron is the character’s powerful masculinity and seductive power. Coleridge’s discourse has a marked subjectivity in this passage: ‘to be capable of inspiring in a charming and even a virtuous woman, a love so deep, and so entirely personal to me!’ The editors of Biographia Literaria have related it to his forbidden love for Sara Hutchinson.35 I agree with this reading, which does not preclude the less literal one suggested by Tim Fulford in his discussion of politics and gender in On the Constitution of the Church and the State.36 Don Juan’s male power and women’s subordination to it can be read as a metaphor of Coleridge’s notion of literary and political Jacobinism, that is, his ideal poet being capable of seducing (ideal) receptive readers on the one hand, and, on the other, the ideal statesman and his (ideal) subdued subjects. However, the opposite perspective in which Don Juan’s seduction of women, with his immoral ethical code, can also represent the perverted codes and demagogical practices of both contemporary conservative rulers and Jacobins in the political sphere and illegitimate writers, such as Maturin, in the literary one, is also a possible one.

32 See Coleridge, Collected Letters, iv. 559, 597, 600, 606, 622, 626, 948. 33 See Don Juan, I, ccv, 1–4. See Coleridge, Collected Letters, iv. 948, 34 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, A Book I Value. Selected Marginalia, ed. H. J. Jackson (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), 181. 35 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ii. 216, 217n. 36 Tim Fulford, Romanticism and Masculinity. Gender, Politics and Poetics in the Writings of Burke, Coleridge, Cobbett, Wordsworth, De Quincey and Hazlitt (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1999), 173–4.

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But something else may have been at work. Coleridge sought to establish his reputation as a philosophic critic through the publication of Biographia Literaria. His attention to the Don Juan tradition may well be part of this. Neither the Schlegel brothers nor Bouterwerk or Sismondi make any reference to the Spanish play. Mozart’s Don Giovanni undoubtedly revived interest in the subject. Coleridge admired his music, although the opera was not staged in England until 1817, one year after the publication of the Courier articles. There is, however, a discussion of Don Juan in Mozart’s opera that dignifies and magnifies it in an unprecedented way. This is E. T. A. Hoffmann’s tale Eine fabelhafte Begebenheit, die sich mit einem reisenden Enthusiasten zugetragen, first issued in 1813 in the journal Allgemaine Musikalische Zeitung and later collected in 1814 in the volume Fantasiestücke in Callot‘s Manier. The dates allow for Coleridge reading it before the composition of the Courier articles. In the same way as Coleridge, Hoffmann characterizes/interprets Don Juan in Miltonic, antithetical terms: Believe me, Nature equipped Don Juan, as if he were her favorite child, with all that raises man towards divinity, above the common crowd, above the standard product, above the inferior article whose only worth is in number and aggregate; and this destined him to conquer, to dominate. A powerful, handsome body, a personality radiating the spark which kindles the most sublime feelings in the soul; a profound sensibility, a quick, instinctive understanding. But the terrible consequence of the fall of man is that the Fiend retains the power to beguile man and prepare wicked pitfalls for him, just when he is striving for that perfection which most expresses his godlike nature. This conflict between the divine and demoniac powers begets the notion of life on earth, just as the ensuing victory begets the notion of life above earth.37

We know that Coleridge was acquainted with Hoffmann and with the tale. In 1822 he published in Blackwood’s Magazine the strange, fantastic tale ‘Historie of the Gests of Maxilian’. This is based on Hoffmann’s ‘Der goldne Topf ’’, which was also included in Fantasiestücke. Coleridge describes 37

E. T. A. Hoffmann, ‘Don Juan’, trans. Christopher Lazare, in Oscar Mandel, ed., The Theatre of Don Juan. A Collection of Plays and Views 1630–1963 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963) 322–6, at 322–3.

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Maxilian as ‘a Cousin-German, of SATYRANE, the Idoloclast,38 indirectly establishing the German connection.39 If Hoffmann was the critical source for Coleridge’s interpretation of Don Juan, the previous ‘Satyrane’s Letters’ from Germany could also be an indirect allusion to its background. Coleridge followed a similar procedure for his criticism of Don Quixote in his 1818–19 courses of lectures. His primary source was also German, the Romantic criticism of Cervantes’s humour carried out by Jean Paul Richter in his Vorschule der Aesthetik (1804). Coleridge adapted Richter’s material to his aesthetic principles and presented the character of Don Quixote as an instance of the symbolic imagination.

Coleridge’s analysis of the character of Don Juan The rest of this chapter will be devoted to answering one question: why did Coleridge use The Libertine for his critique of Bertram? There may be several reasons. As Marilyn Butler noted, the indirect allusion to Byron through the title may have been one of them. Another could be the popularity of a Don Juan pantomime adapted from Shadwell’s play, which Byron refers to in the opening of Don Juan. Robert Southey explains the practice of staging pantomimes as interludes or after-pieces in the performances of conventional plays. He gives a derogatory account of a Don Juan pantomime in his Letters from England by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella (1807).40 In his critique, Coleridge undoes Southey’s negative assessment

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Shorter Works and Fragments, eds H. J. Jackson and J. R. de J. Jackson, 12 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), ii. 964. 39 The source is not acknowledged. See Julian Knox, ‘Coleridge’s “Cousin-German”: Blackwood’s, Alter-Egos, and the Making of a Man of Letters’, European Romantic Review 21/4 (2010), 425–46. 40 The third edition of the Letters was published in 1814. 38

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of the pantomime: ‘Don Juan […] is capable of interesting without poetry, nay, even without words, as in our pantomime of that name’.41 Coleridge may be referring to Don Juan; or, the Libertine Destroyed; A Tragic Pantomimical Entertainment, that Delpini adapted with music by Gluck from a previous production at Drury Lane by David Garrick based on Shadwell’s Libertine. Delpini’s version was premièred at the Royal Theatre in 1787 and was often performed at Drury Lane.42 The details of this adaptation are recorded in Stephen Jones’s 1812 edition of David Erskine Baker’s Biographia Dramatica; Or, A Companion to the Playhouse (1764). Baker notes that versions of the subject can be found in the greatest writers, mentioning Corneille and Molière together with Italian and Spanish versions. He writes a criticism of Shadwell’s play that recalls Coleridge’s own: ‘Yet the incidents are so crammed together in it, without any consideration of time or place, as to make it highly unnatural; then the villainy of Don John’s character is worked up to such an height, as to exceed even the limits of possibility; and the catastrophe is so horrid, as to render it little less than impiety to represent it on the stage’.43 In his discussion, Coleridge seems to be transforming one by one the three points of this neoclassical analysis into a Romantic and moralizing view of the play. He finds the moral of The Libertine not only in its satire against Hobbesian libertinism but in a more explicit juxtaposition with Maturin’s ‘jacobinical’ Bertram. In both plays there is a representation of wicked characters and terror on stage. The action in The Libertine is even wilder but, in a tour de force, Coleridge argues for its moral superiority through his habitual practice of desynonymization.44 He quotes from the scene of the banquet in The Libertine to highlight Don John’s ‘gentlemanly courage’ and 41 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ii. 16. Coleridge wrote to Byron in October 1815 about several projects for the stage, one of them a pantomime (Coleridge, Collected Letters, iv. 606). 42 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ii. 216n. 43 Stephen Jones, Biographia Dramatica: Or, A Companion to the Playhouse, 3 vols (London: Longman, 1812), ii. 370. 44 A practice followed by Coleridge in the development of his most important aesthetic and philosophic concepts. See Seamus Perry, Coleridge and the Uses of Division (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999).

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‘scrupulous honor’.45 He argues that they are presented in both Shadwell’s drama and the ‘Spanish’ Atheista Fulminato ‘in all their gloss and glow […] for the sole purpose of displaying their hollowness […] by demonstrating their utter indifference to vice and virtue, whenever these, and the like accomplishments are contemplated for themselves alone’, remarking that they are often mistaken as the ‘substitutes of virtue, instead of its ornaments’.46 Coleridge had expounded this idea in an 1810 issue of The Friend about Sir Alexander Ball: There exists in England, a gentlemanly character, a gentlemanly feeling, very different even from that, which is the most like it, the character of a well-born Spaniard, and unexampled in the rest of Europe […] It is always the ornament of Virtue, and oftentimes a support; but it is a wretched substitute for it. Its worth, as a moral good, is by no means in proportion to its value, as a social advantage.47

He explained this moral distinction between worth and value in the 1818–19 course of lectures on the history of philosophy: ‘one part of our nature forces us to demand a value in things, that is, their consequences with regard to our happiness. Another part of our nature demands that there should be a worth in things’.48 In a note to her edition of the Philosophical Lectures, Kathleen Coburn relates both concepts to Kant’s distinction between the categorical (worth) and the hypothetical (value) imperatives.49

45 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ii. 221. 46 The editors of Biographia Literaria have found an echo of a speech by Burke in these words (Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ii. 220 and n.). 47 The article appeared on 1 March 1810 with the title ‘Sketches and Fragments of the Life and Character of the Late Admiral Sir Alexander Ball’, in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Friend, ed. Barbara E. Rooke (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), ii. 347–56, at 350. 48 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Philosophical Lectures, ed. Kathleen Coburn (London: Pilot Press, 1949), 364. 49 Coleridge, Philosophical Lectures, 459.

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Don Juan and Coleridge’s interpretation of Spain Both in the Don Juan critique and in the article in The Friend, the moral distinction between worth and value is connected with Spain and national character. I will discuss now what I have called Coleridge’s cultural (dis)engagement with Spain, that is, the curious mixture of his attraction to, even admiration for the Spanish cultural inheritance on the one hand, with the repulsion provoked, on the other, by some aspects of his interpretation of Spain. A high sense of honour and courage were commonplace of the received Spanish character. They appear as part of the chivalric ideal in Bouterwerk’s Geschichte and are further idealized by the Schlegels, particularly in A. W. Schlegel’s criticism of Spanish classical drama in his Vorlesungen. The Biographia Literaria version of the Don Juan critique has a textual variant that pinpoints this issue. Whereas in the second letter of the Courier the sentence that describes Don Juan ends, ‘elevated by the habits and sympathies of noble birth and natural character’, in Biographia Literaria we read ‘national character’ instead.50 The fact is that there were many misprints in the Courier edition and also abundant errata in the manuscript. Since the editors of Biographia do not count this variant as one of the misprints, it must be either a slip of ‘natural’ for ‘national’, later corrected by Coleridge, or a deliberate textual change for the new edition. Although the second reading, that is, ‘national’, is undoubtedly better in semantic terms, the satire against Don John’s natural philosophy in The Libertine makes ‘natural character’ a plausible choice in Coleridge’s first version of the critique. What matters in any case is that he took care to correct it and underline Don Juan’s Spanishness. As noted above, his Don Juan critique illustrates his appropriation of a cultural tradition that he viewed as native and original, free from any extraneous foreign influence. In ‘Letters on the Spaniards’ (1809–10), written in favour of the British intervention in the Peninsular War, he denounces that

50 See respectively, Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ii. 263 and 223. My emphasis.

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‘a Briton […] is already half a Frenchman in his heart’.51 In the ‘Satyrane’s Letters’ Coleridge insists not only on national differences but also on the soundness of a genuine native literary tradition. The accusation, placed on the Germans, of lacking a national drama, somehow paves the way for the use of a Spanish old play as a counterpoint to the Germanized, and therefore contaminated, Bertram. Coleridge’s idea of the Spanish character in ‘Letters on the Spaniards’ foregrounds a favourable image of brave Spanish patriots. However, this idealization soon began to abate. An important factor here was the decree of the Spanish Cortes of 19 June 1811 that refused to open South American trade in exchange for subsidies from Great Britain. Coleridge expresses his disappointment in an article published in The Courier in September 1811. He resorts to Black Legend clichés when he attributes it to the ‘indolence, mismanagement, bigotry, and cowardly selfishness of her landed proprietors’. He adds ‘religious zeal’, ‘national haughtiness’ and ‘national sloth’ to complete the picture.52 It is in the post-war period that his difficulties to engage with Spanish matters are most apparent. But it is then, also, that his interest in Spanish literature, probably triggered by the publications of the Schlegel brothers and their idealization of Spanish classical drama, increases. In his private writings, cruelty recurs as the most salient feature in his characterization of the Spaniards, always related to the Spanish colonization of Latin America. This was not a mere repetition of clichés, since Coleridge tried to give a scientific grounding to his ideas by resorting to contemporary theories of racial distinctions. He drew mainly on Kant and Johann Blumenbach for the idea of degeneracy, which suggested the existence of superior and inferior races after an initial monogenism. In a long passage of 1828 meant as a contribution to a course of lectures given by his friend Joseph Henry Green, Coleridge illustrates racial differences by counterpoising the behaviour of the English colonists in North America to that of ‘the degenerate & idolatrous Spaniards & Portuguese’ in South America. He admits a certain degree of cruelty in the former, but he finds it superseded by that 51 Coleridge, Essays on His Times, ii. 98–9. 52 Coleridge, Essays on His Times, ii. 284.

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of their Hispanic peers.53 Equally, in a marginal annotation to Southey’s History of Brazil, Coleridge expands upon ‘the infernal Atrocities of the first Colonizers of S. America, Spanish & Portuguese’, and replies to the ‘Ultra-liberals’ who instanced similar atrocities committed by the Protestant Dutch, by pointing out a crucial difference: ‘The Dutch Colonists were mostly the Outcasts of their country; but the Spanish & Portuguese the chosen-men of Birth, Talent, high aspirations &c’.54 This passage is tentatively dated in 1823 or 1833. Were 1823 the date, it might have been generated by the fall of the Spanish liberal regime that year and the restoration of absolutism by King Ferdinand VII. As he declared in Biographia Literaria, Coleridge’s interest in Spanish matters continued in later years. In ‘The Historie and Gests of Maxilian’, published in 1822, King Ferdinand VII is described as ‘poising the old indigenous loyalty with the newly-imported state-craft’, in an allusion to the unrest in many Spanish cities after the recent revolution. The circumstance afforded the monarch, in Coleridge’s words, ‘the revenue of a caliph, with the power of a constable’. In a passage from a text entitled ‘Paragraphs on the Catholic Question’, tentatively dated 1827, Coleridge speaks of a ‘Shade of Orientalism in the Spanish character’, attributing it not to the influence of the Arabian conquest but to ‘the soil, scenery and climate of Spain’.55 This idea of the ‘Orientalism’ of the Spanish character is perhaps one of the causes of Coleridge’s ambivalent, even contradictory views since, together with cruelty, he also finds true nobility in aristocratic Spaniards. In a passage from Table Talk for 1822, he argues that Othello was not a black man, but a ‘chivalrous Moorish chief ’, adding: ‘Shakespeare learned the spirit of the character from the Spanish poetry, which was prevalent in England in his time’.56 Related to this idea is his 1823 comment on Edmund

53 Coleridge, Shorter Works and Fragments, ii. 1404–5. 54 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Marginalia, 12 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), v. 106. 55 See respectively, Coleridge, Shorter Works and Fragments, ii. 972 and 1371. 56 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Table Talk, ed. Carl Woodring, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), ii. 31. He had already talked about it in his Lecture

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Kean: ‘He was not a thorough gentleman enough to play Othello’.57 Perhaps it is worth mentioning that Kean had led the role of Bertram in the 1816 performance of the play at Drury Lane. The same ambivalence towards Spain is found in Biographia Literaria, where Coleridge recalls how ‘the cause of Spain […] made us all once more Englishmen’. Despite ‘disappointment’, he is still confident about the future: ‘If superstition and despotism have been suffered to let in their “wolvish” sheep to trample and eat it down even to the surface, yet the roots remain alive, and the second growth may prove all the stronger and healthier for the temporary interruption’.58 The unpremeditated addition of the Don Juan matter in the second volume curiously contributes to the homogeneity of the work on this issue, since Coleridge’s conflicting views of Spain and the Spaniards are repeated in his analysis of the character, depicted in antithetical terms that combine both attractive and repulsive features. Don Juan is presented as an instance of dramatic power and depth embodying a nobility of character proper of a native high-born Spaniard, but he also illustrates the wickedness of the cruel Spanish conquerors. The Libertine fits this negative view of the Spaniards in the depravity of its three wicked aristocratic characters. Moreover, in act 3, scene 2, the two sisters, Clara and Flavia, contrast the freedom and independence of English women with the oppression of Spanish ones.59 Gustav Ungerer argues that the actual target of this dialogue is the criticism of enforced marriages in Restoration England,60 but Coleridge’s reading must have been much more literal and in consonance with his ideas about the situation in contemporary Spain. His annotations of Joseph Blanco White’s Letters from Spain show his concern for the deprivation of liberty suffered by Spanish women.61

4 of the 1813 course and in Lecture 5 of the 1818–19 one (Coleridge, Lectures 1808–19, i. 555 and ii. 314). 57 Coleridge, Table Talk, i. 40. 58 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, i. 189, 190. 59 Thomas Shadwell, Four Restoration Libertine Plays, ed. Rodney Harald Fisk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 46–8. 60 Ungerer, ‘Thomas Shadwell’s The Libertine (1675)…’, 232–3. 61 See Coleridge, Marginalia, i. 504–5.

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At the same time, his choice of a figure that had been widely received as an illustration of the decadence of aristocracy through the works of eminent writers, such as Molière, Corneille, and Lorenzo Da Ponte for Mozart’s music, could be an indirect allusion to his presupposed decadence of contemporary English aristocracy and, by extension, of the members of the Drury Lane Committee. On another level, the depraved atheism of Shadwell’s Don John could also serve as an allusion to contemporary Jacobinism.62 All enemies are thus attacked at the same time. A question remains to be answered: why did Coleridge insist on the Spanish background of the original play when he seemed to have little or no direct knowledge about it? I have argued that it is precisely the Spanish background of the ‘old Spanish play’ that granted its high literary status. Coleridge used the prestige acquired by Spanish classical drama among German critics in the late years to downgrade the poor copies (Bertram) of the copies (Kotzebue’s plays). At the same time, Shadwell’s piece offered him a domesticated version, a safe appropriation that marked the path to be followed, that is, a return to the older models. I hope that the above discussion has proved that whereas the criticism of Bertram is carried out in conventional terms, the discussion about Don Juan is much more nuanced and substantial from many perspectives, as Coleridge asserted in the letter to Rae. Here we can trace Coleridge’s ideas about illegitimate theatre, his poetic principles, central issues in his ethical thought, his political conservatism, matters related to his personal and literary milieus and also what I have called his (dis)engagement with Spanish culture. These are subtly combined to make this piece a significant instance of the author’s critical acumen.

62 Moore finds in Coleridge’s description of Don Juan ‘a stock figure from Jacobinical theatres with overtones of the Godwinian anarchist’ ( John David Moore, ‘Coleridge and the “Modern Jacobinical Drama”: Osorio, Remorse, and the Development of Coleridge’s Critique of the Stage 1797–1816’, Bulletin of Research in the Humanities 85 (1982), 443–64, at 461).

Bernard Beatty

11 Detecting Spanish fictions: Byron’s Don Juan Canto I

Abstract This essay is mainly concerned with trying to place the image of Spain presented in Canto I of Don Juan (1819), but it does so by addressing two apparently small problems: why is Byron’s heroine, Donna Julia, said to think in French? And, if Don Juan, Byron’s hero, rushes from his house in Seville into an adjacent wood, is there a wood for him to rush into? The answer to the first question involves an examination of Byron’s allusions and sources for the episode in French, Spanish, and English literature. The second question is answered in a similar way but with especial reference to the presentation of Spain on the English stage. Then the essay broadens out into a larger account of representations of Spain and Spanish history in English culture which, in turn, I link to the dazzling interplay between Fiction and Truth which is central to Don Juan and is set in motion in the first (Spanish) canto.

It is not too difficult to write about the first canto of Don Juan (1819) through the customary devices of interpretation and contextualization. Sometimes, however, there are advantages in following the procedures of detectives or sleuths rather than literary critics or historians. Characteristically, detectives are on the lookout for anomalies in a given crime scene such as an out of place object, statements of fact that seem improbable, or differences between witness accounts. Adopting such an outlook and looking for both clues and anomalies, I admit to being puzzled by two things in the Spanish canto of Don Juan. Solutions to these puzzles will, I hope, throw considerable light on the curious mixture of fact and fiction in the canto which, in turn, suggests a strikingly different reading of Spain from that in Byron’s other works. It redirects that emphasis on history which it is natural that such a volume as this will privilege and which Byron’s poetry often claims to prefer to

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Imagination: ‘It is the fashion of the day to lay great stress upon what they call “Imagination” and “Invention” the two commonest of qualities – an Irish peasant with a little whisky in his head will imagine and invent more than would furnish a modern poem’.1 The two puzzles that provoke detective investigation are these. Why does Donna Julia, Byron’s Spanish heroine, think in French? And why is there a wood adjacent to Seville?

Spanish heroines and French thoughts Byron lets us inside his Spanish heroine’s thoughts and feelings as she moves hesitantly towards an affair with the handsome young Juan which disturbs her Catholic conscience. Momentarily she imagines that her husband might die and that this would solve the problem: But just suppose that moment should betide, I only say suppose it – ‘inter Nos’ (This should be ‘entre Nous’, for Julia thought In French, but then the rhyme would go for nought.) (I, 669–72)

There is a curious collusion of narrator and Julia here for both ‘suppose’ Don Alfonso’s death as a possibility and both do so in a conversational manner which uses another language. The juxtaposition of the narrator’s Latin phrase and Julia’s French thoughts highlights both the oddity and the collusion which is further heightened by Byron’s comically outrageous claim that he uses Latin because of the necessities of rhyme whereas the long ‘O’ of ‘nōs’ is not an exact rhyme for the short ‘O’s of ‘cross’ and ‘loss’ which precede it. But the question arises – why should Julia not only think in French but put a French motto ‘Elle vous suit partout’ (I, 1582) on her last letter to her lover?

1

Lord Byron: The Complete Miscellaneous Prose, ed. Andrew Nicholson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 143–4.

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It is true that many Spanish aristocrats in the eighteenth century knew French, some went to France to complete their education and, in some cases, French mademoiselles lived with aristocratic families to teach French to the girls. For all that, there is no suggestion of this in the text and the Spanish aristocracy did not talk to one another in French and therefore, we may presume, they did not think in French. Spanish habits were, in this respect, quite unlike those in the Russian and many German courts. Why, then, does Byron call attention to this since, when we first meet Julia, it is her unFrench origins and character that are foregrounded? The darkness of her Oriental eye Accorded with her Moorish origin; (Her blood was not all Spanish, by the bye – In Spain, you know, this is a sort of Sin.) (I, 441–4)

Julia, here, resembles Goya’s magnificent portrait of Doña Isabel de Porcel (1805) who does not look in the least like a contemporary French beauty such as Madame Recamier partly because she looks as though she thinks and feels in Spanish rather than French. Doña Isabel, like Donna Julia though slightly younger, had a husband who was twenty-five years older than her. I suggest that there are two answers. The first derives from Byron’s own experience. Byron wrote long letters to his mother describing his experiences in Portugal and Spain in 1809.2 He reveals that he stayed in Seville in a house owned by two attractive and unmarried women, one of whom was called Donna Josepha. They flirted, perhaps more, and Byron remembered her parting words: ‘Adio tu hermoso! me gusto mucho’ [you beautiful man! I like you a lot]. In the same letter, he records meeting another attractive woman in Cadiz called Signorita Cordova who ‘understood a little French’ so they conversed in that language, and then she offered to teach him Spanish. This may partly explain Byron’s association of a beautiful Spanish woman with the French language.

2

Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie Marchand, 12 vols (London: John Murray, 1973–81), i. 220–1.

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We hear no more of Miss Cordova, but in 1817 Byron wrote Donna Josepha: A Fragment of a Skit on the Separation. We only have a page or so of this though Byron sent a text of some 100 pages to Moore who, presumably, destroyed most of it for the same reasons that he destroyed Byron’s memoirs.3 It formed a novel which satirized his separation from his wife in 1816 but Byron transfers the setting to Spain. He fictionalizes himself as Don Julian residing in Seville, Josepha represents his wife (just as Donna Inez partly does in Don Juan) and her father is called Don Jose (which is the name of Donna Innez’s husband in Don Juan). These fictional memoirs are clearly based on those of Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian whose Jeunesse de Florian, ou Mémoires d’un Jeune Espagnol was published posthumously in 1807. Byron certainly knew this text.4 Florian describes the first eighteen years of his life but sets it in Spain and changes French names into Spanish. One of his characters is a ‘Don Juan’. This does not help us directly with why Julia thought in French but it reveals a complex tangle of memories, facts, and persons who are treated as fictions and transplanted to Spain. Florian is in Spain but thinks in French. Byron’s Don Julian is in Spain but thinks in English. Byron said that the narrator of Canto I might be thought to be ‘either an Englishman settled in Spain – or a Spaniard who had travelled in England – perhaps one of those Liberals who have subsequently been so liberally rewarded by Ferdinand of grateful memory – for his restoration’.5 The larger question here is whether Byron’s Seville is in Spain at all or, indeed, in anything other than a fictionally controlled time and place. I will return to this but it is worth pressing Julia’s French thoughts a little further. Why is Julia called Julia? One answer would be the many poems written by Thomas Moore (as Thomas Little) which are addressed ‘To Julia’. Byron knew many of these by heart. Yet Byron presented himself as Don Julian in his ‘Donna Josepha’ and, interestingly, the names of all the Spanish 3 See Miscellaneous Prose, 347. 4 Miscellaneous Prose, 347. 5 Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–93), v. 83.

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characters in the first canto, including Julia, can be found in Le Sage’s Gil Blas which Byron knew well.6 Le Sage’s novel has Spanish characters but its use of theatrical characters and situations (loose women and cuckolded husbands) is linked with Molière and French sensibility. These two very different precedents could readily be associated with Juan’s ardour towards his Julia and the comic theatrical scenes with her cuckolded husband but it would not fit the delicate, self-conscious, poised but also posing, Julia who writes the letter. And it is on this occasion that Byron again connects her with French sentiment and sensibility. It has occurred to many, therefore, to connect Byron’s Julia with the situation and character of Rousseau’s Julie.7 Byron was fascinated by the novel and by Rousseau himself but his attitude to both was ambiguous and his Julia, as opposed to Rousseau’s, depends upon the ambiguity. We are clearly supposed to sympathize with Julia’s alienation from her husband and attraction towards Juan even when she hides her obviously erotic motivation from herself. But the Julia of troubled amorous infatuation (stanzas 55–121), who resembles Julie falling in love, is quite different from the quick-thinking adulteress who hides Juan in her bed whilst magnificently haranguing her husband for his false (but, of course, true) accusation of infidelity (stanzas 136–80). Byron clearly has in mind Fielding’s Molly Seagrim in Tom Jones who, like Julia, similarly harangues Tom whilst her lover is hiding in the room only to be discovered. The first has some relation with Rousseau’s enamoured Julie who, like Julia, is primarily aware of the feelings aroused in her by her lover rather than her feeling for him.8 Molly Seagrim is comic and vulgar in comparison. 6 7

8

See Peter Cochran’s online edition of the Canto , p. 10, n. 46. For example Nicola J. Watson, ‘Transfiguring Byronic Identity’, in At the Limits of Romanticism, eds Mary A. Favret and Nicola J. Watson (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), 11–32, 19 and Helen Stark, ‘“Rousseau’s Ground”: Locating a Refuge for the Libertarian Man of Feeling in Julie, or the New Héloise and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau and British Romanticism, eds Russell Goulbourne and David Higgins (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 185–206, 192. See for instance Julie’s statement in her eighteenth letter in the third part of the novel: ‘j’aimais dans vous moins ce que j’y voyais que ce que je croyais sentir en

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And both these Julias are clearly not the same as the sophisticated woman who, like Rousseau’s Julie and the original Eloisa, examines herself and her situation in a letter and adopts an anguished but supremely articulated renunciation (192–8). The French seal put on this letter takes us back to the earlier Julia who ‘thought in French’ but whereas the former struggles between conscience, consciousness, and impulse, the letter-writer articulates this exactly as though Julia’s self-consciousness, like that of Julie, is in some other calmer place than that of the divided spirit which she declares herself to be: My breast has been all weakness, is so yet: I struggle, but cannot collect my mind: My blood still rushes where my spirit’s set. (I, 1553–5)

The rhyme here, and throughout the letter, is always masculine whereas the stanzas surrounding it have the poem’s customary use of prominent feminine rhymes. This alteration in verse form mirrors the set apartness which now characterizes Julia. The reader’s attitude, wonderfully close to her consciousness as she writes, does not quite acquiesce in her own self-judgement for we are both more and less sympathetic to her than she implies. This is partly because there is a gap between her vocabulary (‘my blood still rushes’) and both the ‘neat crow-quill’ with which she writes and the ‘gilt-edged paper’ upon which she writes. The latter has connections with Rousseau himself since he famously describes himself in his Confessions as writing the first two parts of his Julie on ‘the finest gilt-edged paper’.9 If we look for a clue to explain this, and the relationship between the two, or perhaps, three Julias, a letter of Byron helps us. Writing to John Murray on 6 July 1821, Byron complains that his mistress, Teresa Guiccioli, dislikes Don Juan because it arises from the wish of all women to exalt the sentiment of the passions, and to keep up the illusion that is their empire.

9

moi-même’. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloise (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1960), 319. The Confessions of J.-J. Rousseau, ed. Janet B. Kopito (New York: Dover, 2014), 451 [‘le plus beau papier doré’].

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I never knew a woman who did not protect Rousseau, nor one who did not dislike de Grammont, Gil Blas, and all the comedy of the passions when brought out naturally.10 The references to Grammont and Gil Blas are significant. Their sexual realism is set against the ‘sentiment’ of Rousseau. Grammont was a Frenchman who married an English woman and had affairs with many others in Restoration London, his memoirs (1713) were written by an Irishman (Anthony Hamilton) living in France in French, but were translated (1714) by a Frenchman (Abel Boyer) who lived in England. Gil Blas is a Spanish picaresque hero who has many sexual engagements, but the novel is written by a Frenchman who owes much to Spanish sources. Hence, English (Irish), French and Spanish sensibilities cross over here rather than being sharply distinguished. It would be a mistake, too, to see Canto I, or Don Juan as a whole, as simply rubbishing ‘the sentiment of the passions’. Rather Byron, as is his wont, wishes to keep shifting focus so that we have multiple versions of the same events, analogous perhaps to the way Picasso forces us to see a body from different perspectives which cannot normally be seen at once. More broadly still, a poem which, with whatever qualifications, clearly celebrates ‘the sentiment’ of Juan and Haidee’s passions as well as ‘the comedy of the passions’ in the farcical bed scenes in Canto I and Canto VI, is concerned with playing one against the other rather than privileging one viewpoint. But this is true, in embryo, of Canto I itself. After all, if ‘the sentiment of the passions’ is meant to sound literary and poetic, the phrase ‘comedy of the passions’ calls attention to sexual interchange as pure theatre rather than plain fact. Byron, like the Julia of the letter, often tells us than he ‘cannot collect his mind’. His is, perhaps, an extreme condition, but Byron agreed with his master, Alexander Pope, that it is also the human condition for we are all, in Pope’s diagnosis in his Essay on Man (ii, 13), ‘Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confus’d.11 Pope, of course, wrote Eloisa to Abelard (1717) which exposes exactly the same chaos of thought and passion as Julia’s (‘My 10 11

Byron’s Letter and Journals, viii, 148. The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen, 1965), 516.

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blood still rushes where my spirit’s set’) and is in the form of an extended letter. It was a favourite poem of Byron’s and he sympathizes with Julia in much the same way that Pope sympathizes with the original Eloisa. But whereas Pope has a single frame for his poem and a single setting, the frame of Byron’s Seville and of his Julia shifts between English, French, and Spanish sensibilities. But here again, it is important not to interpret this as simply a clash between cultures. When Byron describes a bull fight in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (I, stanzas 68, 71–80) he is concerned to emphasize its unEnglishness. He does so by juxtaposing these stanzas and this kind of recreation with an account of how Londoners spend their Sundays by driving out of town to play pub games and drink (I, stanzas 68–70). Here, Cadiz is most definitely not London. But Seville in Don Juan is English and French as well as being Spanish. Julia is of Moorish blood, behaves like a comic Spanish character on an English stage, thinks in French, and lives in an unmarked Seville where, apart from scattered references to Catholicism, she may as well be in England. Indeed Peter Graham has argued that this is where the first Canto is really set.12

Spanish woods in fact and fiction Following the thread of Julia’s French thoughts, then, leads us straight into the mystery of Seville’s wood. Juan, we are told, ‘Tormented by a wound he could not know’ (I, 691), changes mood as a result of both puberty and Julia: Silent and pensive, idle, restless, slow, His home deserted for the lonely wood (I, 689–90)

12

Peter Graham, Don Juan and Regency England (Charlottesville: Virginia University Press, 1990), 26–8.

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The vocabulary of this stanza and subsequent stanzas is partly Petrarchan but includes a four-line quotation from Campbell’s Gertrude of Wyoming (1809), I, 697–700. Curiously, the poem has a ‘Julia’ in it. The juxtaposition of house and wood, which strikes the reader as strange (if they advert to it at all and most readers don’t) in Byron’s Seville, is commonplace here: A valley from the river shore withdrawn Was Albert’s home, two quiet woods between, Whose lofty verdure overlooked his lawn (II, 1–3)

The heroine retreats to such an adjacent wood to read and day dream exactly as Juan does and, like him, she is about to fall in love: Apart there was a deep, untrodden grot Where oft the reading hours sweet Gertrude wore (IX, 73–4)

This ‘grot’ is later called a ‘dark green wood’ (XIV, 121).13 What seems natural enough in past Pennsylvania is harder to account for in Byron’s version of Southern Spain. It is true that there are woods a few miles from Seville but none are adjacent to the city now, nor, so far as I can ascertain, were any adjacent to the city then, and there is no sense in the poem that Juan journeys any distance. Byron tells us that Juan’s house is near the Guadalquivir (I, 64) and Juan could, after all, wander beside its banks, but Byron does nothing with this (it is the only detail given of the city) since he is here not interested in actual topography. The Guadalquivir is there for a convenient comic rhyme with ‘river’ rather than to substantiate place. We might find this odd since Byron is, as Stephen Cheeke has eloquently argued, the great poet of place.14 In particular, Cheeke argues throughout that Byron writes out of a represented ‘being-there’. But the phantom wood into which Juan flees is not really ‘there’ at all. The only way that Byron tries to give it local substantiality is by calling it a ‘cork forest’ (I, 716) which is

All references are taken from The Complete Poems of Thomas Campbell, ed. J. Logie Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1907). 14 Stephen Cheeke, Byron and Place: History, Translation, Nostalgia (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 13

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recognizably Hispanic, but not likely to be found immediately adjacent to a large city. It is quite likely that Byron is remembering his ride through the Sierra Morena, which was real enough, and perhaps he also remembered Don Quixote, who slept in one of its cork forests in Chapter XXV of Don Quixote. He may even be fusing the fictions of Cervantes and Campbell together, for in the next line he tells us: ‘There poets find materials for their books’. In Byron’s case, it is clearly the other way round. He has begun with books for he is clearly thinking of Gertrude’s recourse to an adjacent ‘dark green wood’ in order to cope with hidden sexual longings (implicit in Campell’s text, explicit in Byron’s) as a parallel to his Juan’s psychology and he transfers Gertrude’s fictional and readily available Wyoming wild forest to Byron’s fictional cork forest, with perhaps a glance at Cervantes. If we had approached the first Canto of Don Juan by Byron’s first intended route – the original Preface – then we might be surprised by this. Just as Juan’s metaphysical moonings in a wood satirize Wordsworth’s ‘selfcommunion with his own high soul’ (I, 722), so his Preface is a parody of the celebrated Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. Byron quotes Wordsworth’s injunction to imagine the speaker of The Thorn to be ‘the captain of a Merchantman or small trading vessel – retired on a small annuity to a country town – etc etc’ (81). Byron, in his turn, with the scathing exuberance of a Jonathan Swift, asks us to imagine that the following epic narrative is told by a Spanish Gentleman in a village in the Sierra Morena on the road between Monasterio and Seville – ‘sitting at the door of a posada with the curate of the hamlet on his right hand, a segar in his mouth, a jug of Malaga or perhaps “right Sherris” before him on a small table containing the relics of an olla podrida … and the other … is watching the beautiful movements of a tall peasant girl … Not far off a group of French prisoners are contending with each other at the grated lattice … his fingers beat in tune against the bars of his prison to the sound of the Fandango which is fleeting before him …’15 Jerome McGann comments perceptively on this passage: ‘Byron’s imaginative scene from Spain is in fact a memory-picture based upon Byron’s

15

Complete Poetical Works, McGann, v. 83.

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personal experience in 1809’ (McGann references William A. Borst’s Lord Byron’s First Pilgrimage (1969) and Hobhouse’s Recollections here). Byron means to ridicule Romantic theories of imagination and the poetry based on them.16 Though this is insightful, I have often observed that the phrase ‘in fact’ introduces something which, though it may contain factual elements, is by no means simply ‘the facts’. I think that this applies here. Certainly Byron is recalling actual memories and this is the biggest distinction between the ‘Spain’ of the Preface and the ‘Spain’ of Canto I which, unlike Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage I, eschews personal memories in favour of a notional English or Spanish narrator who claims to know the characters but never reveals much knowledge of the town. Certainly, too, Byron is customarily concerned with defending the notion of poetry as addressed to the world and about the world rather than proceeding wholly from and to the imagination. But the deliberate use of Spanish words here, such as ‘Malaga’, ‘olla podrida’, ‘Fandango’, unimaginable in Canto I, is strongly reminiscent of his technique in his Oriental Tales, where he uses words like ‘chibouk’ and ‘pilaff ’ to give an impression of authenticity and strangeness which, nevertheless, calls attention to the self-consciously stylized fictionality of their settings. The over-elaborated details are there to make us laugh at Wordsworth’s expense rather than to admire Byron’s greater realism. Similarly, though the French prisoners and the beautiful girl may well have existed in 1809 and persisted in Byron’s memory, the general impression of the passage is of a tourist’s Spain (‘beautiful movements of a tall peasant girl’, ‘grated lattice’, ‘prison’, ‘Fandango’). The relation between Fiction and Truth is fundamental to Don Juan. It is Byron’s constant preoccupation. Sometimes the one is set against the other in simple satirical relation but at the beginning of the poem Byron declares that he wants a hero, dismisses a long list of actual recent heroes (I, stanzas 2–4) and then chooses the great Spanish fictional hero Don Juan in preference to them to illumine actual social worlds, just as he chose a version of the other European dark figure in his Faustian Manfred to illumine an interior world. This deliberate use of a fiction as a means of

16

Complete Poetical Works, MccGann, 684–5, n. 53.

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examining various kinds of social and even ontological realities is justified at the end of the poem: Truth’s fountains may be clear – her streams are muddy, And cut through such channels of contradiction, That she must often navigate o’er fiction. (XV, 702–4)

An example of ‘such channels of contradiction’ is the tension between the ‘sentiments’ and the ‘comedy’ of the passions which Byron partly presents as differences between male and female readings of Life. These, too, are a major concern of the poem and they begin in Byron’s largely fictional Seville where we apprehend the love affair from both Julia’s sentimental and the narrator’s comic point of view and neither of these is stable or privileged.

English versions of Spanish history Why then does Byron begin his poem in Spain and what kind of Spain is it? Here, I can only outline what is fairly well known but needs to be kept constantly in mind for, like Byron himself, to try and answer this question we need to be aware of the fashioning of the history of both ‘real’ and ‘fictional’ Spain which, as in Canto I, can be both distinguished from each other and fruitfully blurred. Histories, as commonly understood – certainly by Byron long before the cult of theoretically unsubjective data as their only basis – are stories. And stories are told by someone to someone else. Spanish readings of Spanish history are unlikely to be same as English readings of Spanish history. But both Spanish and English versions of Spanish history will be strongly influenced by fictions as well as by historical events and characters. The distinction is real but, for Byron as we have seen, history can itself be formed by fictions – to some extent it inescapably is – and fictions can illumine facts and represent Truth’s ‘muddy streams’ more completely than modern histories since:

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Apologue, fable, poesy, and parable, Are false, but may be render’d also true. (XV, 705–6)

How then would Byron have received Spain as an historical and spatial entity in, say, 1809 when he first visited and wrote about it? I would distinguish three obvious streams of influence. The first is an English version of ‘the Black Legend’, which, in this case, derives specifically from English history though influenced by wider Protestant propaganda. Most English people, even now, know something of the Spanish Armada, but almost no one remembers that Philip II was, de iure uxoris, King of England as well as Spain. Hence the Armada was presented and remains understood simply as an invasion by a foreign power intent on destroying English liberties and restoring Catholicism. The time scale of England’s change into its own version of Protestantism has been much extended by recent historians.17 It is clear that the Reformation was widely resented for many years under the Tudors, but works like Foxe’s Booke of Martyrs detailing anti-Catholic horror stories based on Queen Mary’s persecution of Protestants, which went through four editions in 1563, the cult of Queen Elizabeth and, finally, the Gunpowder Plot (1605) gradually cemented a view of England as distinct from Lutheranism and Calvinism but resolutely Protestant. Spain was seen as the embodiment of tyrannical Catholicism. This reading of history persisted well into the nineteenth century. Byron is marked by it in his scornful references to Portuguese and Spanish Catholicism in Canto I of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (I, 259–60, 682–3, 711–17) which contrast with his much more favourable attitude later to Italian Catholicism.18 Nevertheless he never seems to have invested much imaginative energy in this version of Spain, unlike Shelley whose Laon and Cythna, published as The Revolt of Islam in 1817, is openly nourished by it. 17

18

See especially Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992) and his Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). His revisionist reading of the long survival of forms of Catholicism in Tudor England has been widely accepted. See Bernard Beatty, ‘“Something sensible to grasp at”’: Byron and Italian Catholicism’, in Byron and Italy, eds Alan Rawes and Diego Saglia (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 112–29.

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Theoretically Shelley’s poem is set in Greece and Constantinople and its villains are vaguely Moslem. Nevertheless, just as Voltaire ostensibly attacked what he saw as the murderous intolerance of Islam in his drama Le fanatisme, ou Mahomet le Prophète (1736/1741) but was as much or more concerned with what he saw as the intolerance of Catholicism, so Shelley’s most obvious object of hatred is Catholicism with a strong Spanish tinge for his poem has a peculiarly unpleasant Catholic priest who is always labelled ‘Iberian’, and his hero and heroine are burned alive at the stake. Shelley began by writing horror stories (Zastrozzi in 1810 followed by St Irvyne in 1811) and his age’s relish for horror stories, such as M. G. Lewis’s The Monk (1796) which was set in Madrid, revived the old Protestant anti-Spanish nightmares set in motion by Foxe’s Book of Martyrs but which were now enjoyed primarily as a kind of illicit pleasure though still inciting religious and moral indignation. The second strand or stream is much more immediate than this and opposed to it. The Peninsular War forced an update in English thinking about Spain. They were now our allies and could be represented in English modes of thinking as a long independent people strongly and heroically resisting a tyrannical invader rather than being one themselves. The war similarly forced Byron to change his thinking about Napoleon whom he had idolized. Now he asks indignantly And must they fall? the young, the proud, the brave, To swell one bloated Chief ’s unwholesome reign? (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage I, 549–50)

Characteristically Byron uses two vocabularies, which would normally be opposed, to support Spain’s resistance to Napoleon. The first of these is Burkeian Conservative: Awake! ye sons of Spain! awake! advance! Lo! Chivalry, your ancient goddess cries (I, 405–6)

The second is revolutionary: How many a doubtful day shall sink in night? Ere the Frank robber turn him from his spoil, And Freedom’s stranger-tree grow native of the soil. (I, 925–6)

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The first appeals to a revival of the energies of Spain’s traditional past, the second appeals to Spain’s provisional future in which, as it were for the first time, the Liberty tree might be accepted by Spanish soil and Spanish hearts. Both derive from English perspectives (Tory and Whig/Radical respectively). This division partly corresponds to a division in the third way in which Byron would have encountered the notion and fact of Spain. This is through art, especially poetry, theatre and novels. When, for instance, he addresses Spain in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage I: ‘Oh, lovely Spain! renown’d, romantic land!’ (387), he knows perfectly well that present events in the Peninsular war feature guerilla warfare, and uncontrolled violence not least by ‘unsexed’ women (I, stanzas 50, 54–7), rather than knights behaving gallantly in order to win their fair ladies’s favour. More to the purpose, in Don Juan he acknowledges that Cervantes smiled Spain’s Chivalry away; A single laugh demolished the right arm Of his own country; – seldom since that day Has Spain had heroes. (XI, 81–4)

Romance and anti-Romance in Spain Spain, therefore, is, pre-eminently, the home of Romance and antiRomance. This is why Byron begins his poem in Seville which was defended at the Battle of Cabra by El Cid (the present 1927 statue of the legendary hero was not, of course, present in Byron’s Seville) and it was also the home of Don Juan who has a certain murkily heroic presence in Tirso de Molina’s play but is a comic villain in the popular pantomime versions of Shadwell’s The Libertine which Byron refers to in the opening stanza of his poem. Sentiment and comedy joust again. Byron’s poem, like Juan’s Seville, depends upon the interplay between fact and fiction and between Romance and anti-Romance worlds.

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What is significant here is that Byron simply bypasses the first two images of Spain (Black Legend and recent warfare) and places Juan in effect in a series of theatre sets though deliberately seeking out a whole series of disparate literary placings (Rousseau’s and Fielding’s novels are unlikely bedfellows after all) to complicate matters further. Diego Saglia has written comprehensively and convincingly about what he rightly calls ‘the theatrical matrix’ of Canto I.19 Byron loved the theatre and anyone who went regularly, as he did, would be familiar with Spanish settings, especially Seville, for dramatic actions of all kinds but especially to do with ‘the comedy of the passions’. Saglia writes: The presence of comedic Spain on the English stage well into the early nineteenth century was ensured by the lasting success of such plays as Susannah Centlivre’s The Busybody, Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Duenna (1775) and Hannah Cowley’s A Bold Stroke for a Husband (1783). With its capacious baggage of stereotypes, Spain was an inexhaustible source of amusement for British theatre audiences.20

It would be hard to underestimate this ‘inexhaustible source’. For example, The Duenna (an opera with libretto by Sheridan), which was set in Seville, was enormously popular with audiences for over fifty years, praised by critics (Hazlitt called it ‘a perfect work of art’)21 and adored by Byron. It was written by an Irishman and some of the music was borrowed from Italian sources but it is based loosely on a Spanish honour drama. In addition, everyone knew that the plot echoed Sheridan’s elopement with a society beauty just as prominent features of Byron’s Donna Innez were recognized immediately as those of Byron’s wife. The opera’s setting in Seville is both real and notional. Its comic action depends upon the existence, however guyed in the play, of strict honour conventions just as Byron’s canto does.

Diego Saglia, ‘“Don Alfonso” and the Theatrical Matrix of Don Juan’, in Aspects of Byron’s Don Juan, ed. Peter Cochran (Newcastle on Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2013), 240–54. See further Laura Martínez-García chapter in this volume. 20 Saglia, 246. 21 William Hazlitt Lectures on the English Comic Writers (London: Bell and Daldy, 1869), 228. 19

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Byron likes playing games with genre. It is hard to characterize the genre of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage or Don Juan. But Byron does not simply fit the accepted modern assumption that ‘Romantic’ poets either dissolved traditional genres or sought out revivals of forgotten or disparaged ones for he was self-consciously and increasingly pro-Classical in the debate between the two terms that was articulated in his lifetime. Don Juan was begun at more or less the same time that Byron embarked on his deliberate programme of writing classical tragedies – all of which fictionalize versions of history – to reform what he saw as the degenerating taste of his contemporaries and it is, in its different way, part of the same purpose. I propose therefore, and advance it as a conclusion to this essay, that we should see Byron’s use of Seville in Don Juan in three ways. The first has, precisely, to do with Byron’s strong sense of genre. He wishes to sharply distinguish the Spain of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage from that of Don Juan. The first is rooted in history, Romance, current politics, and modern styles of warfare. The second is rooted in theatrical conventions, styles, and expectations, in novels – sentimental, picaresque, and comic, and in English and Italian satirical traditions. Byron’s purposes here are openly polemical. In relation to art, he wishes to refuse and defuse that turn to the wholly imagined and to interior worlds which he sees as characterizing the increasingly admired poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Keats, etc. We could say that Imagination, as conceived by these poets, both transcends and founds the best kind of human consciousness. Such a view dislikes ‘fictions’ and the distinction between facts and fictions. Byron wishes to reinstate the fictional, recognized as fictional, as a means of talking about actual human life. Roughly speaking, he sees this as ‘Classical’. Theatrical Seville will, in its openly comedic action, standard setting, and allusions to different kinds of novels, nevertheless represent characteristic human sexual behaviour in both its irresistible ardour, glamour, absurdity, and capacity for self-deception. Crucial, therefore, to this undertaking will be a play on the relationship between Romance and anti-Romance worlds which can be most naturally situated in Spain. From Spain, the figure can be taken to a series of deliberately varied fictional but geographically and (to some extent) historically placed societies as test cases of this relationship. Byron’s Spanish hero will

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end up, not as Tirso de Molina’s Juan does, back home again in order to end and judge his escapades, but in Byron’s London and a version of Byron’s home where the play between fiction and reality, Romance and antiRomance worlds, initiated in the first Canto, will be set out most explicitly in the theatrical farce of Fitz-Fulke’s ghostly seduction of Juan, the fictional realism of Lady Adeline, and the transfigured Romance figure of Juan’s final love – Aurora Raby, who is a devout Catholic. This is a reversal of the pattern where an English or French author transfers his actual memories to a fictional Spain. Here, Byron uniquely brings his Spanish hero who, apart from having strong sexual impulses, in no ways represents Byron, to England and his own (fictionalized) home. In relation to Spain, what Byron is doing in Canto I is to, as it were, normalize Spain. The savagery of the Peninsular War had shocked English opinion much as that of the Civil War a century later had a similar effect. On the one hand, ‘romantic’ plucky Spain was defending itself against invasion: on the other, the peculiarly haphazard savagery of the conflict and its inability to be mythologized into decisive heroic battles was consciously or unconsciously linked with the image of Spanish cruelties customary in Protestant and Nationalist propaganda since the sixteenth century and always latent in English consciousness. But the even greater savagery of the most decisive battle of them all – Waterloo – had to some extent both situated and displaced these memories. Byron was, in The Age of Bronze written four years after Canto I, to hail Spain in the 1820s as a possible model of freedom in Metternich’s Europe.22 In Don Juan I, his task is different but parallel. The poem has sufficient Spanish tweetings to satisfy the English reader that he or she is somewhere else as, for instance, in Julia’s self-undermining complaint: ‘Is it for this I scarce went anywhere,/Except to bull-fights, mass, play, rout, and revel?’ (I 1179–80). But the familiarity of a plot and characters based on honour, love, and farce being set in a recognizably theatrical Seville, coupled with the liberal use of wider European 22 For an excellent account of Byron’s Spanish politics in his The Age of Bronze, see Agustin Coletes Blanco ‘Spain and Byron’s The Age of Bronze’, in Diego Saglia and Ian Haywood, eds, Spain in British Romanticism 1800–40 (London: Palgrave, 2017) 115–38.

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literary allusions especially from the novel, together with that established interchange where life in Seville represents life lived elsewhere (in France, Switzerland, or England for example), nullify the exceptionality of Spain. Even Julia admits that she has had Italian, Russian, and Irish admirers as well as Spanish ones (I, stanza 149). It is as though the Black Legend and the Peninsular War had never happened. Spain is a normal place. At the end of the poem, that most famous of Spanish fictions – Don Juan (albeit turned inside out by Byron so that he is more like Mozart’s Cherubino than his Don Giovanni) – chats on equal, easy and friendly terms with an educated English aristocrat – Lord Henry Amundeville (XVI, stanzas 35–6). Both characters are fictions, though of rather different kinds, but they represent a possible rapprochement between two peoples and a revisionist reading of English/Spanish relations which is quite different from that set out a decade earlier in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage I. In 1823, Byron will publish his The Age of Bronze, which looks to a radically altered Spain as a possible emblem of political freedom in Metternich’s Europe.23 In a letter to John Murray on 16 February 1821, Byron writes that he means to eventually make Juan ‘a cause of divorce in England’.24 Since, as we have seen, the first canto of Don Juan seems to have originated in a literary revisiting of the circumstances of his separation from his wife which loomed large in his memoirs and which formed the plot of his projected novel set in Spain, it seems quite likely that Byron, at a much earlier stage than 1821, had some sense of this development. This would mean that there would have been a clear, though inverted, pattern from, perhaps, the outset. Don Juan will begin with an English (or Spanish/English) voice within Seville and a character based recognizably in part on Byron’s wife. Juan will cause the separation of Julia from her husband. At the end of the poem, Byron will take his Spanish hero to a version of his own house where he will disrupt the marriage of Lord and Lady Henry Amundeville. The crossovers between Spanish and English life mirror the crossovers between fact and fiction at the beginning and end of the poem which Byron sets against, 23

See further Roderick Beaton, ‘“The lightning of the nations”: Byron, the Shelleys and Spain’, in this volume. 24 Byron’s Letter and Journals, vii. 78.

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I think, the repudiated cult of ‘Imagination’ and ‘Invention’ which he associates with his more Romantic contemporaries and with an Irish peasant ‘with a little whisky in his head’. But Seville is the originating matrix here which Byron chooses for his adroit handling of the insight that Truth ‘must often navigate o’er fiction’. These conclusions are, perhaps, too weighty to emerge from a detective’s investigation into a Spanish woman speaking French and the appearance of a wood that isn’t there. But then literary critics, often as foolish as Don Quixote, tend to aim high.

José Ruiz Mas

12  Marianne Baillie’s knowledge of Spain

abstract Marianne Baillie (c. 1795-c. 1830), an English post-Peninsular-War Romantic poet, travelled on the Continent and in Portugal between 1818 and 1823. The result of these journeys were her two popular travel accounts First Impressions on a Tour upon the Continent in the Summer of 1818, through Parts of France, Italy, Switzerland, the Borders of Germany, and a Part of French Flanders (1819) and Lisbon in the Years 1821, 1822 and 1823 (1824). She never visited Spain and had only ever met two Spaniards, according to her accounts; however, many references to its customs, politics and literature (especially the latter) are found in her works. I will argue that Baillie’s knowledge of Spain came mostly from literary sources such as Cervantes’s Don Quixote (in English translations), Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18), Lesage’s Le diable boiteaux (1707) and L’Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane (1715–35, read by her in French or in English) and Dryden’s The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards (1672).

Marianne Baillie’s Spanish sources The purpose of this chapter is to ascertain to what degree Marianne Baillie (c. 1795-c. 1830), an aspiring English post-Peninsular-War Romantic poet and travel writer, was familiar with Spain and Spanish culture through her accounts of travelling in continental Europe between 1818 and 1823. Her relatively meagre familiarity with Spain, a country she never visited, is based mostly on literary sources such as Don Quixote in English translations, Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,1 Lesage’s Le diable boiteaux and 1

Lord Byron [Gordon George Byron], Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. The Poetical Works of Lord Byron (London: Oxford University Press, 1946 [1812–18]), 179–252.

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L’Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane,2 and Dryden’s The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards.3 Baillie’s allusions and references to Spain (occasionally in connection with the political events of the post-Napoleonic period in Europe) are helpful to researchers of Anglo-Spanish relations as they depict aspects about Spain which were widely known by a large part of the nonHispanophile literati of Britain at that time. Marianne Baillie, née Wathen (c. 1795-c. 1830),4 was born in Jamaica to George Wathen (1762–1849), a junior army officer turned actor and stage manager. As an adult Baillie resided in Portugal for two and a half years in the early 1820s. Her husband Alexander Baillie had been sent there for unexplained work reasons in the service of Thomas Pelham, the 2nd Earl of Chichester (1756–1826), a Whig politician and ex-Home Secretary under Prime Minister Henry Addington (1801–4). He was the current Joint Postmaster-General (1807–23) at the time when the Baillies were in Portugal. This was not Baillie’s first time on the Continent.5 As a result of the post-Napoleonic European peace, she had toured central Europe in 1818 in the company of her husband, an experience which produced a travel account titled First Impressions on a Tour upon the Continent in the

2 3 4

5

Alain René Lesage, Le diable boiteaux (Paris: Veuve Barbin, 1707) and L’Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane (in Journal littéraire de La Haye, 1715–35). John Dryden, The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards: in Two Parts [etc] (London: T. N. for Henry Herringman, 1672). There does not seem to be absolute agreement on Baillie’s date of death: Arthur H. Grant, ‘Baillie, Marianne’ in Leslie Stephen, ed. Dictionary of National Biography (New York: MacMillan, 1885), ii. 418, mentions both 1830 and 1831. Rosemary Mitchell – ‘Baillie, Marianne (1795?-1831)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2008) accessed 28 February 2016, opts for 1831. I include both possibilities: c. 1830, in José Ruiz Mas, Women’s Travel Writing in Iberia (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013), vol. i, p. xxx. For an account of her literary production and her little known life, see Grant, Dictionary of National Biography, 418–19; Mitchell, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , and Ruiz Mas, Women’s Travel Writing in Iberia, i, pp. xiii–xv.

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Summer of 1818, through Parts of France, Italy, Switzerland, the Borders of Germany, and a Part of French Flanders (1819).6

Baillie’s travels on the Continent In the account of her travels in central Europe, Baillie gives little personal information about herself. She concentrates on narrating her experiences and describing her reflections on the sights visited, always in the company of her husband and a Mr W. (perhaps her father or any other relative), throughout a period of two and a half months, from August to October 1818. The author is still a young married (childless) lady, around twenty-three years old, who travels for leisure and cultural purposes as part of what appears to be a Grand-Tour-like journey with her husband, who acts as a tutor would with his pupils. She cannot avoid comparing the customs, landscapes, people, monuments and facilities that she finds in France, Italy, Germany and Switzerland with those of England. In these comparisons, everything English usually comes out on top. For instance, when describing prisons abroad, Baillie is happy to observe that the England system is superior in its benevolence to most other systems. Baillie behaves at all times as a well-off traveller, conscious of her social, economic and national superiority with respect to the inhabitants of the countries that she visits, staying at the best hotels and expecting cleanliness and excellent service and food in whatever lodgings she and her companions took. She also enjoys rubbing shoulders with members of the upper class irrespective of their nationalities: apart from numerous British aristocrats, who are only identified with the initial letters of their surnames, she delights in meeting several European celebrities, such as Leopold of Coburg, Princess Potemkin, Princess Bariatinsky, etc. However, she behaves like any other 6

Marianne Baillie, First Impressions on a Tour upon the Continent in the Summer of 1818, through Parts of France, Italy, Switzerland, the Borders of Germany, and a Part of French Flanders (London: John Murray, 1819).

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British ‘tourist’ of the period, going to the usually recommended places and expecting the good service and quality of accommodation befitting a guest who pays well. She sometimes complains that her route is too packed with British travellers who, like her, are taking advantage of a recently pacified post-Napoleonic France to criss-cross and visit Europe. Indeed, like so many other ‘tourists’, in France she looks forward to visiting Mont Blanc, and she does not miss any opportunity to comment on sites which remind her of Napoleon every time she sees one, which happens quite often. In Italy, she revels in artistic feasts and in Switzerland she enjoys breathing in the invigorating air of its mountains and valleys. Despite the fact that during her travels Baillie does almost the same as other well-to-do practitioners of the Grand Tour, she perceives herself as different from them, describing herself as a ‘contemplative English traveller’,7 proud of her intellectual capacity. She feels that, even though she sees herself only as a woman, of less ability and education than her male peers, she is mature enough to transmit her travel experiences to her compatriots. However, her inevitable awareness of her own youth and immaturity in the world of letters may justify the frequent allusions that she makes to the commonly read or popular books of the time to support her impressions and reflections, as well as to her husband’s opinions. Indeed, she usually describes French, Italian, Swiss or German sights and situations by comparing them to similar descriptions employed by leading British and French writers such as Goldsmith, Burke, Scott, Shakespeare, Milton, Voltaire, Rousseau, La Fontaine, Molière, Sterne, Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, Madame de Staël, and above all Byron – whom she labels as her favourite British writer, a man of ‘distinguished’ and ‘powerful genius’.8 Additionally, Don Quixote is her favourite foreign book. Whereas the above mentioned authors are quoted by Baillie only once or twice each, Byron and his Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage are referred to in First Impressions on seven occasions. As for characters from Don Quixote, these are used on four occasions to describe people whom she sees in her Central European rambles. The fact that Baillie uses Don Quixote several times in the narrative of a number of travel 7 8

See Marianne Baillie, First Impressions on a Tour, 301, 257. Marianne Baillie, First Impressions on a Tour, 277, 284.

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experiences that do not take place in Spain, where its characters might have been more naturally employed, may point to the relatively common knowledge of Cervantes’s novel in British literary circles at the time. It was well known in the eighteenth century.

Baillie’s travels in Portugal In the early 1820s Baillie resided in Portugal. She moved to Portugal in 1821 and spent two and a half years there in order to accompany her husband in his professional (most probably diplomatic) activity, whatever this may have been. Whereas the poet had read abundantly about France, Italy, Switzerland and Germany before and/or during her Grand Tour through Europe, she knew very little about Portugal when she arrived there. Mourão is conscious that, after all, for Baillie and other British travellers of the time, travelling to Portugal ‘did not have the same cultural currency as visiting Italy, France or Switzerland, countries that had been a part of the itinerary of the Grand Tour since the eighteenth century’.9 Indeed, in 1821 Baillie travelled to an off-the-Grand-Tour-track country in the Iberian Peninsula most reluctantly, suspecting that it was going to be for a long period of time. As a way of letting off steam and passing abundant hours of forced leisure in Lisbon and Cintra between 1821–3,10 Baillie, who at the time was in her late twenties, wrote a series of sixty-five letters to her mother in England. These form the basis of her Lisbon in the Years 1821, 1822 and 1823, published in two volumes only one year after her departure from there,

9 10

Manuela Mourão, ‘“The Finest Production of the Finest Country upon Earth”: Gender and Nationality in the Writings of Nineteenth-century British Women Travelers to Portugal’, European Romantic Review, 27/6 (2016), 769–89. ‘Cintra’ is the way that Baillie spells ‘Sintra’.

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in 1824.11 According to Oliveira Martins,12 the indisputable interest of Baillie’s Portuguese travelogue is that ‘it is a work written by a woman, within a tradition in which the act of travelling and writing about it was at the time traditionally reserved for men’; indeed, ‘the first work about Portugal to be actually written by a woman’. According to Mourão,13 Baillie, as well as other nineteenth-century British lady travel writers in Portugal (namely Julia Pardoe and and Dorothy Quillinan),14 used a discourse of nationality by which Britain, a northern European country, was portrayed as superior to a southern Mediterranean country. Baillie’s collected letters are almost completely devoid of personal family details about herself or her husband, despite being addressed to her own mother. If the letters were really sent by post to her mother, they must have been deliberately deprived of any personal information as well as any possible indiscretion concerning the political situation of Portugal in their preparation for publication. These letters inform both Baillie’s mother and her British readership about her lonely days in Lisbon, which she hated for the horrid odours and want of cleanliness, and in Cintra, a quieter and healthier residential area for the upper classes. She coincides completely with Byron’s perception of Portugal as described in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and in his letters.

Lisbon in the Years 1821, 1822 and 1823 (Edinburgh: John Murray, 1824), in Ruiz Mas, ed., Women’s Travel Writing in Iberia (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013). This edition is the one quoted hereafter. A second edition was published in Edinburgh in 1825. Translated into Portuguese by Albano Nogueira as Lisboa nos anos 1821, 1822 e 1823 (Lisboa: NB, 2002). 12 Isabel Oliveira Martins, ‘Marianne Baillie’s View of Portugal or British Femaleness Abroad’, in Mihaela Irimia and Andrea Paris, eds, Literature and the Long Modernity (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2014), 323–35. 13 Mourão, ‘“The Finest Production of the Finest Country upon Earth”: Gender and Nationality in the Writings of Nineteenth-century British Women Travelers to Portugal’, 770. 14 Pardoe and Quillinan were authors of Traits and Traditions of Portugal Collected during a Residence in that Country (London: Sanders and Otley, 1833) and Journal of a Few Months’ Residence in Portugal and Glimpses of the South of Spain (London: E. Moxon, 1847) respectively. 11

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Indeed, with the exception of the town of Cintra, both Byron and Baillie saw filth everywhere they looked.15 Baillie loathed her life of solitude and boredom, especially during the first half of her Portuguese stay, and suffered Portugal’s backwardness and generalized filthiness due, at least in part, to the devastation caused by the Peninsular War (1807–14). She abhorred anything Portuguese, the people, their religious bigotry, ignorance and ugliness. The only exception to this rule were the unfortunate nuns who, she relates, despite their attractive eyes, were forcedly secluded against their will in their prison-like convents. Baillie’s anti-Catholicism is everywhere in her pages, which does not surprise since it was then the standard view, and is doubtless connected with her homesickness for Protestant England. Baillie scarcely managed to learn Portuguese beyond a limited amount of words and expressions. She only used English and French with her acquaintances and servants. She tried hard to mingle solely with the aristocracy, the high army ranks and the diplomats (both Portuguese and British), and very rarely with the common local population. Her chronic boredom was offset by learning how to play the guitar, writing poems (which would later be printed, not ‘published’, in Trifles in Verse 1825),16 drawing, going on some excursions to convents (she seemed to have a soft spot for them) and her friendship with Contessa de Anadia,17 an outgoing

15

16

17

For Byron’s influential perception of Lisbon, Sintra and Portugal in general, see João Almeida Flor, ‘A Portuguese Review of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’. In F. De Mello Moser, ed., Byron: Portugal, 1977 (Coimbra: Byron Society, 1977), 59–74. Also Agustín Coletes Blanco, ed George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron. Cartas y poesías mediterráneas (Oviedo: KRK, 2010) and ‘A Young Lord Passes Judgment: National Characters in the Letters, Poems and Other Writings of Byron’s Mediterranean Tour (1809–11)’, Alicante Journal of English Studies, 27 (2014), 25–40. A reference to this ‘unpublished’ collection of poems as well as some imprecise information on First Impressions on a Tour is provided in John Martin, A Bibliographical Catalogue of Books Privately Printed (London: J. & A. Arch, Payne and Foss, 1834) i. 231. D. Maria Joana de Sá e Menezes (1779–1859), the daughter of Simão Paes do Amaral, 2º Sr de Abrunhosa e Vila Mendo and wife of 1º Visconde de Alverca. José Ruiz Mas, Women’s Travel Writing in Iberia, ii, 261. She resided in Quinta de S. Joaõ dos Bem Casados (Amoreiras, Portugal), ‘onde dava grandes festas’ [where she threw great

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Portuguese aristocrat who introduced her to the social atmosphere of the higher classes, irrespective of their nationalities. The day in 1823 when the Baillies received a letter granting the couple and their two little children permission to return home to England was probably one of the happiest in her life. Their return coincides with the end of the Earl of Chichester’s office as Joint Postmaster-General. Baillie nevertheless took advantage of her stay in Portugal and subsequent letters to narrate the complex political situation in which the country was immersed in the early 1820s, making her first-hand account an historical document of prime value. Indeed, she witnessed the arrival in Lisbon of King João VI and his court from Brazil, the disagreements of the different members of the Royal Family with the imposed Constitution and the newly proclaimed Cortes, the discrepancies between the King and his Spanish wife Queen Carlota Joaquina, and the conflicts between the King and his sons Dom Pedro, Regent and later Emperor of Brazil, and Dom Miguel, aspirant to absolutist rule as King of Portugal. She also witnessed the burial of the Queen Mother Dona Maria I, the revolt of Prince Miguel – the ‘Villafrancada’ – for the abolishment of the liberal Constitution, the British and French diplomatic struggle to try to influence the King’s political decisions, the first political and military steps taken by the Brazilian colony towards its independence from Portugal, and the Portuguese administration’s first reactions. Baillie knew very little about Portugal when she arrived there with her husband in 1821. However, Baillie’s deeper knowledge of Spain does not rely on any specialized reading which she may have carried out throughout her literary education, but on the shared knowledge of Spain and things Spanish that a non-Hispanophile such as herself would have readily acquired in early nineteenth-century Britain. Her allusions and references to Spain may be helpful to researchers of Anglo-Spanish relations as they allow them to know the amount of ‘Spanishness’, which was shared by a large part of the British public opinion.

parties] (my translation), Pedro Beltrão, As duas condesas. A vida atribulada de Isabel e Mância, mãe e filha (Alfragida: Oficina do Livro, 2016), n. p.

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Cervantes Baillie’s references to Don Quixote are usually predictable and somewhat superficial. If she saw an awkward fille de chambre having difficulties to serve customers in the hotel, she would describe her as a ‘Maritornes’. When she was pestered by ‘dirty, squalid, frightful creatures’ (i.e. beggars) running by the side of the carriage, she described them as ‘Sancho Panza and his goblins’ thus, surprisingly, equating their scruffy and ugly looks with Don Quixote’s humble squire.18 When she saw windmills ‘which spread their long arms abroad in every direction’ as part of the flat, treeless and uninteresting landscape of Douay, she could not but think of Don Quixote. Once, while the horses of the retinue were being changed, the travellers met with a postilion who, she writes, was the living image of Don Quixote. She is ‘such an enthusiastic admirer of the latter’, she adds. Although Baillie is in France, she cannot but take advantage of this fortunate encounter with such a literary and picturesque type to describe what she imagined Cervantes’s hero looked like, a most peculiar Don Quixote indeed: ‘the loose shamoy leather doublet, brown beaver Spanish-looking flapped hat; long, black greasy hair, hanging in strings about his scraggy neck and doleful visage; the wild, eager, prominent, dark eyes, &c. – all was complete!’19 When Baillie wrote Lisbon in the Years 1821, 1822 and 1823, she was already acquainted with Cervantes’s masterpiece. In July 1821, on her first journey from Lisbon to Cintra, Baillie and her family and retinue of servants stopped at a public house for some refreshment for their horses and for themselves. She described their host as ‘a round visage, quick-eyed, greasy wight, bustled out to receive us, as nimbly as his rotundity of form would allow’. According to her, ‘might have passed for the twin brother of old friend Sancho Panza’.20 The French postilion in First Impressions who had reminded Baillie of Don Quixote had now turned into the knight’s squire. The term of endearment ‘my old friend’ used for the literary character of 18 Baillie, First Impressions on a Tour, 27. 19 See respectively, Baillie, First Impressions on a Tour, 123, 352, and 69. 20 Baillie, Lisbon in the Years 1821, 1822 and 1823, i. 38.

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Sancho implies a familiarity with Cervantes’s work acquired during the years following her publication of First Impressions in 1819 to the time when she was writing her Portuguese letters, from 1821 onwards.21 Her deeper acquaintance with Cervantes’s characters in the 1820s is also confirmed by her observation, expressed in a footnote where she states that she herself had noticed that throughout the novel Sancho Panza was always designated as ‘Sancho’, without mentioning his surname. This is true in the case of Peter Motteux’s English version, for in other popular versions of Don Quixote of the period, such as that of Charles Jarvis’s, the name ‘Sancho’ often appears accompanied by his surname, invariably spelt as ‘Pança’. If Baillie had been able to perceive this peculiarity about Sancho’s name, it is evident that she had fully read Don Quixote.22 However, the most revealing portrayal of this Sancho-like Portuguese publican is his description as ‘a rascally don peasant, stuffed with garlic’.23 Paradoxically enough, this description does not appear in the original Spanish novel with reference to Sancho, but Baillie finds that it is pertinent to use it in order to provide a visual and picturesque portrait of this

21

According to Arantza Mayo and J. A. G. Ardila, ‘The English Translations of Cervantes’s Works across the Centuries’, in J. A. G. Ardila, ed. The Cervantean Heritage. Reception and Influence of Cervantes in Britain (London: Modern Humanities Research Association and Manley Publishing, 2009), 56–7, Don Quixote was not the object of any new English translations during the Romantic period, therefore its readers had to rely ‘on the many good translations produced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – mostly Shelton’s, Motteaux’s, Jarvis’s, and Smollett’s’. 22 For a thorough study on Don Quixote’s English versions, see Jaime Cunchillos, ‘Traducciones inglesas del “Quijote” (1612–1800)’, in Julio-César Santoyo and Isabel Verdaguer, eds, De clásicos y traducciones. Versiones inglesas de los clásicos españoles: los siglos XVI y XVII (Barcelona: Promociones y Publicaciones Universitarias, 1987), 89–114. Also Carmelo Medina Casado, ‘Traducciones del Quijote al inglés y su influencia en la novela inglesa’, in Rafael Alarcón Sierra, ed., ‘No ha mucho tiempo que vivía’: De 2005 a ‘Don Quijote’ ( Jaén: Universidad de Jaén, 2005), 411–52. See also J. A. G. Ardila, ‘The Influence and Reception of Cervantes in Britain, 1607–2005’, and Frans de Bruyn, ‘The Critical Reception of Don Quixote in England, 1605–1900’, both in J. A. G. Ardila, ed., The Cervantean Heritage. Reception and Influence of Cervantes in Britain, 2–31 and 32–53, respectively. 23 Baillie, Lisbon in the Years 1821, 1822 and 1823, i. 38.

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Portuguese character. She combines three Iberian clichés with her British cosmology: Peninsular natives are often rascals; they are proud and have airs and graces (hence the use of ‘don’ to refer to a mere peasant-looking publican of a lower social class), and they eat plenty of garlic as part of their daily diet (and presumably smell of it). Baillie’s Quixotic quote, albeit imperfectly remembered, implies that she may be quoting from memory: ‘a rascally don peasant, stuffed with garlic’ appears as ‘How now, opprobrious rascal! Thou peasant stuffed with garlic’ in Motteux’s popular translation of Don Quixote. The poet must have read the passage in one of the many editions of Motteux’s version, The History of the Renowned Don Quixote de la Mancha, either from the one published in 1700–3 (in 4 vols) or from the one published in 1803 (in 5 vols),24 but little else can be ascertained for sure. Baillie’s references to Don Quixote do not end here. When seeing the mountains in the whereabouts of Cintra for the first time, she shows off her knowledge of the Spanish novel and says that these ‘serras’ (Portuguese for ‘mountain ranges’) remind her of the romantic descriptions made by Cervantes of the Serranía de Ronda and Sierra Morena and therefore excite her imagination: ‘methought I could even see Sancho mounted upon Dapple, that “son of his soul”, as he so pathetically calls him, and the gaunt “knight of the woeful countenance”’. It is significant that ‘Dapple’ is the name given in English translations to Sancho’s donkey, yet the adjective ‘rucio’ (meaning with spots on its fur) that Sancho uses repeatedly through the novel in the original Spanish to refer to his beloved ass is not its real name, as the donkey is never given a name in Cervantes’s original novel. In the first translation of Don Quixote (1615), Thomas Shelton turned the adjective into the animal’s name, ‘Dapple’ (thus alluding to the spotted skin of the donkey) and other English translators followed suit in their versions, including Motteux. Baillie also includes a brief reference to Cardenio, an obligatory character

24 This is the edition I have consulted. After his 1803 Don Quixote, Motteux published The History of the Ingenious Gentleman, Don Quixote of la Mancha (Edinburgh: Hurst, Robinson and Co, 1822). The above passage was written by Baillie in a letter dated July 1821, therefore this 1822 edition is out of the question as a possible source.

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in any Sierra Morena-like landscape such as the one she describes as part of the mountainous area between Lisbon and Cintra.25 The well-known designation of Don Quixote as ‘el caballero de la triste figura’ was translated by Motteux as ‘the knight of the woeful countenance’, which Baillie borrowed and used in her travel account. This further confirms her familiarity with Motteux’s English version. The English translations of Don Quixote available to a British readership before 1821 were that by seventeenth-century Thomas Shelton, who labelled the protagonist as the ‘Knight of the Ill-Favoured Face’, and those by eighteenth-century Charles Jarvis and Tobias Smollett, who employed ‘the Knight of the Sorrowful Figure’ and the ‘Knight of the Rueful Countenance’ respectively. Curiously enough, a different case is Baillie’s use of ‘Sable Mountain’ for Sierra Morena. Shelton had left the place name in its original Spanish, ‘Sierra Morena’, and Motteux spoke of the range as the ‘Black Mountains’, but Jarvis used the term ‘Sable Mountain’. The fact that she uses Jarvis’s term in her travel epistolary suggests to that she was also probably familiar with Jarvis’s translation of Don Quixote, titled The Life and Exploits of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha. Jarvis’s version, which enjoyed immense popularity among British literati and common readers, was widely published during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: to my knowledge, in the period spanning 1801 and 1823 there were nine different editions, but once again, there is not enough information to favour a specific edition that Baillie might have read.26 Baillie’s familiarity with Jarvis’s version of Cervantes’s novel is further confirmed by a quotation that she included in the second volume of her Portuguese collection of letters. She describes the luxuriant hair of the Portuguese seventeen-year-old daughter of her friend Condessa de Anadia.27

25 See respectively, Baillie, Lisbon in the Years 1821, 1822 and 1823, i. 61, 61–2. 26 The following are the different editions, all of them published in London, between 1801 and 1823: 1801 (William Miller); 1805 (W. Servis); 1809 (C. Whittingham, the edition I have consulted); 1809 (W. Lewis,); 1810 (Miller); 1811 (Lackington, Allen, and Co.) 1819 (T. M’ Lean); 1821 (W. Wilson), and 1822–30 (Crissy & Markley). 27 As a result of her imperfect knowledge of Portuguese, Baillie sometimes spells her friend’s aristocratic title as ‘Condeça d’Anadia’ and sometimes as ‘Contessa’, and sometimes she opts for ‘Countess’, in English.

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The extreme length of her hair and her ‘dark Spanish eyes’ (although she was Portuguese) electrified the audience of friends who were being entertained by the countess in her palace. To describe the beauty of the condessinha’s hair in the most literary manner, Baillie writes that she reminded her of ‘one of Altisidora in Don Quixote, whose ringlets were said to “Brush the ground”’.28 Indeed, in Jarvis’s translation Altisidora is made to sing a song to the knight errant which includes, among others, the following four verses: I’m a virgin, neat and clean, And, in faith, not quite fifteen; Tall and strait [sic], and very sound, And my ringlets brush the ground.29

Lesage The second most fruitful literary influences in Baillie’s Portuguese travel account as far as the image of Spain is concerned are Alain-René Lesage’s L’Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane (1715–35) and Le diable boiteaux (1707).30 As both works are only superficially dealt with in her book, it is almost impossible to ascertain if she knew them in the original French – she knew how to read and speak French – or in Tobias Smollett’s English translation

28 Baillie, Lisbon in the Years 1821, 1822 and 1823, ii. 89. 29 Miguel de Cervantes, The Life and Exploits of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha, trans. Charles Jarvis (London: C. Whittingham, 1809), ii. 391. 30 For further information on the influence of Lesage’s Le diable boiteaux in English literature, see Lewis M. Knapp, ‘Smollett and Le Sage’s The Devil upon Crutches’, Modern Language Notes, 47/2 (1932), 91–93. Also John P. Kent, ‘The Diable Boiteux in England: The Tonson Translation and the Fake Chapter’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 68 (1974), 53–63.

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(The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane, 1748 or successive editions).31 The poet shows ample evidence that proves that she was acquainted with L’Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane, but not so much with Le diable boiteaux. From the former she borrowed some of Lesage’s Spanish characters to describe Portuguese ones whom she had come across during her stay in Portugal. Though depicted by Lesage ‘à la française’, these allegedly Spanish types were taken by Baillie as real images of Spain’s archetypal features. When she started off on her journey to Lisbon in an open two-wheeled carriage, she described it as ‘very like those old-fashioned vehicles to be seen in the prints of the earlier editions of Gil Blas’.32 Another example of her knowledge of Lesage’s book is that in order to criticize the inefficiency of Portuguese doctors, who, needless to say, she did not trust, she remembered the famous ‘Spanish’ fictional character of Doctor Sangrado, taken from Lesage’s work, and his unorthodox practices based on always bleeding patients, always forcing them to drink large quantities of water and forcing them to refrain from drinking wine: We do not hear a very encouraging account of the learned faculty of this country; with some honourable exceptions, they seem to have made little progress since the days of Doctor Sangrado, of deathless memory, and his plan, which in the time of Gil Blas was so much approved in Spain, is now the fashion here [in Portugal].33

Lesage’s Le diable boiteaux (1707) is mentioned indirectly. This is a Gallicized, free rewrite of Luis Vélez de Guevara’s picaresque novel El Diablo cojuelo (1641). It is about a devil (Asmodeus) who transports the mortal protagonist of the work (Zambullo) from house to house to learn about the most intimate foibles of different characters of the society of the time. When Baillie attends an entertaining soirée at the home of a Portuguese aristocrat, she is lucky to sit next to a friend who specializes in gossip. She describes him as ‘invaluable to [her] as a sort of diable boiteux – his perfect Alain-René Lesage, The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane, translated by the Author of ‘Roderick Random’ [i.e. Tobias Smollett] (London: J. Rivington, R. Baldwin, T. Longman, R. Horsefield, S. Crowden, R. Low, C. and R. Ware, and T. Caslon, 1748). 32 Baillie, Lisbon in the Years 1821, 1822 and 1823, i. 7. 33 Baillie, Lisbon in the Years 1821, 1822 and 1823, i. 29. 31

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knowledge of the world in general, and of that of Lisbon in particular, afforded [her] the most piquant species of amusement’.34 The popularity of this term in the Romantic period is shown by the fact that Byron referred to himself as le diable boiteaux, the lame devil, due to his deformed foot.35 Far from knowing Vélez de Guevara’s original novel, it is most likely that Baillie knew about this devilish character from a popular comedy of the same title by the Frenchman Florent Carton Dancourt (1707), staged the same year that Lesage’s novel was published, or from a successful comic opera of the same name by another Frenchman, Nicolas Favart (1782). It could also have been from Tobias Smollett’s English translation, titled The Devil upon Crutches (c. 1748), or from any other English version.36

Byron and Dryden There is only one allusion to Don Juan in Baillie’s work. She uses it, as it was often and still is used, to refer to an acquaintance of hers who is notably successful with women.37 No specific reference is made to Byron’s Don Juan, published between 1819 and 1824.38 Byron’s Childe Harold’s

34 Baillie, Lisbon in the Years 1821, 1822 and 1823, ii. 215. 35 Benita Eisler, Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 13. 36 The eighteenth-century versions of Vélez de Guevara/Lesage’s novel were the following: anonymous translator, The Devil upon Two Sticks [incomplete] 1708; [complete] 1729; Tobias Smollett, The Devil upon Crutches, 2 vols (London: J. Osborn, 1750); anonymous translator, The Devil upon Two Sticks, 2 vols (Edinburgh: A. Donaldson and J. Reid, 1767). William Combe, The Devil upon Two Sticks in England, 2 vols (1790–1), in George Watson, The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), ii. [1660–1800]). This novel was not re-edited in the nineteenth century. 37 Baillie, Lisbon in the Years 1821, 1822 and 1823, ii. 15. 38 Tirso de Molina’s more serious and brutal type of womanizer depicted in El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra (1630) was not known in English translation

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Pilgrimage is mentioned a few times in Baillie’s travel accounts. It is likely that she was well acquainted with the poem. Naturally, she pays more attention to Byron’s Portuguese experiences than to his Spanish ones. Baillie coincides with Byron’s perception of Portugal and its people as described in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which adds to its likely influence on her anti-Portuguese prejudices. Baillie’s last literary reference comes from Dryden’s play The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards (1672). The context of this work was the following: Portugal was in a state of political turmoil in the 1820s. Attempts to expel the old absolutist king who was now ruling in a constitutional manner were numerous. With the quotation: ‘To make, and to unmake a king!’39 Baillie summarizes the situation as a constant struggle of the current king to preserve his crown as long as possible and the young absolutist heir to be enthroned as soon as possible. She probably borrowed the quotation from Dryden’s play, when she writes that the protagonist, Almanzor, is made to say ‘Empire, thou poor and despicable thing, / When such as these make or unmake a king!’ (act I, scene ii, 10).40 This is the only ‘Spanish’ quotation in Baillie’s diaries where she subtly implies a connection between literature and the current political situation in post-Peninsular War Portugal and Spain. She seems to be pointing at the constant struggle between absolutist

in the nineteenth century. The popular operas based on the Spanish libertine such as Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1787) and Giuseppe Gazzaniga’s Don Giovanni Tenorio, o sia Il convitato di pietra (1787), or the ballet version titled Don Juan ou Le Festin de Pierre (1761), with a libretto by Ranieri de Calzabigi, music by Christophe Willibald von Gluck and choreography by Gasparo Angiolini, could have constituted, though this is unlikely, or extremely difficult to ascertain, other possible sources of knowledge for Baillie of the Don Juan archetype. Molière’s Don Juan is also atheistic. The play was certainly known. 39 Baillie, Lisbon in the Years 1821, 1822 and 1823, ii. 184. 40 I cannot completely disregard the possibility that Baillie may be borrowing the quote from John Gower’s Confessio Amantis: Book 7, ed. Russell A. Peck and trans. Andrew Galloway, 3 vols (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2004 [c. 1390]), (c. 1390): ‘it was more goodly thing / To make than un don a king, / To him which pouer hadde of both’ vii. 3237–9.

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and constitutional members of the Portuguese royal family to ‘make or unmake kings’, and more indirectly at the absolutist/constitutional ups and downs of Ferdinand VII in Spain. Baillie is also acquainted with another widespread cliché about Spain that was popular in Britain. She mentions Ferdinand VII’s Inquisition as a retrograde step, when alluding to the king’s restoration of the Spanish Inquisition in January 1815. It had been abolished by Napoleon in the Chamartín Decrees of 1808. The presence of the Inquisition in any English account of Spanish affairs was almost obligatory. Baillie is no exception.

Spanish culture Baillie uses several Spanish place names. She mentions ‘the province of Galicia in Spain’, ‘Sierra della Ronda’ in a somewhat Italianized manner: Talavera, famous for its colourful pottery, and Seville, in reference to a famous popular saying which she alludes to and which could be ‘Quien no ha visto Sevilla no ha visto maravilla’, the Spanish equivalent to ‘Quem não tem visto Lisboa não tem visto coisa boa’. Her use of Spanish loanwords is limited to well-known terms such as ‘contrabandistas’, ‘hidalgo’, ‘infanta’ (occasionally wrongly transcribed as ‘infant’) and ‘cachucha’,41 the Andalusian dance which is accompanied by castanets. Her use of these Spanish words could be attributed to her acquaintance with earlier English travel accounts on Spain or British soldiers’ memoirs on Peninsular War Spain which may already have formed part of the British collective memory of all things Spanish. The English poet only mentions one of these books, Moyle Sherer’s Recollections of the Peninsula;42 however, in these memoirs See respectively, Baillie, Lisbon in the Years 1821, 1822 and 1823, i. 178, 87, 61, 104, 207, 9, 140. ii. 153. i. 173, 215. 42 Moyle Sherer, Recollections of the Peninsula. Campaign of the Left Wing of the Allied Army, in the Western Pyrenees and South of France, in the Years 1813–14; under FieldMarshal the Marquis of Wellington (London: Longman and Co., 1823). 41

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Spain is given very limited space, as its protagonist participated in battles on Portuguese soil and was later taken to France, where he suffered imprisonment. Baillie also refers to the Spanish custom of chichisbeo, spelt in the Italian manner (cicisbeo).43 During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the cicisbeo consisted in the assiduous attention of a gentleman to a married woman with her husband’s consent. Baillie and other British travellers and members of the ‘establishment’ did everything in their power to stop this relaxed ‘Catholic’ fashion that had become so popular among the upper social classes and the royal courts in southern Mediterranean countries, from spreading into the British Isles.44 She is wrong to believe that cicisbeo was an exclusively Spanish custom.45 After its import from Italy and France it did indeed become fashionable in Spain in the early eighteenth century and a few decades later in Portugal.46 A Portuguese gentleman had informed 43 Baillie, Lisbon in the Years 1821, 1822 and 1823, i. 137. 44 Ruiz Mas, ‘El chichisbeo italiano y español visto por los viajeros británicos de los siglos XVIII y XIX’, in Giovanni Doloti, Encarnación Medina Arjona and Mario Selvaggio, eds, Entre L’Italie et L’Espagne: les arts du voyage (Roma: Edizioni Universitarie Romane, 2017), 155–73. 45 Despite what Baillie affirms, cicisbeo was also relatively common practice in Portugal. Indeed, in the anonymous play Precipicio de Faetonte, performed in Lisbon in 1738 and collected in Theatro Comico Portuguez ou Collecção das operas Portuguezas (Lisboa: Irmão Thaddeo Ferreira, 1788, 356–468), one of the protagonists is Chichisbeo, the servant of Faetonte. 46 As well as the Protestant authorities in Britain, Portuguese and Spanish Catholic moralists and seventeenth and eighteenth-century Spanish poets reacted against this fashion’s alleged immorality and lack of concern for the institution of marriage. In Chapter III of Gerónimo Giriberts’s Nacionales Centellas, que a impvulsos de vn verdadero Afecto, para Gloria del Altissimo (instruyendo á dos Almas) disparò la Pluma (Cervera: Imprenta de la R. Universidad, 1728), titled ‘De la Modestia’, the Spanish priest described its practice in the most critical terms, labelling it as ‘tan opuesto a la modestia’ (200), ‘infernal’ (203, 210), ‘cosa muy desvergonzada … ajeno al zelo Catholico, que prohiba el cielo’ (211), ‘diabólico’ (211, 213), ‘vaya al diablo’ (217). The military governor of Barcelona and poet Eugenio Gerardo Lobo (1679–1750) criticized its practice in a series of poems collected under the title ‘Contra el Chichisveo’ in his Obra poética, del Excmo. Señor Don Eugenio Gerardo Lobo (Madrid: Imprenta de Miguel Escribano, 1725), 247–66. More information on

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Baillie that ‘the bed-rooms [in Spain] are frequently without doors, a slight curtain only covering the entrance to each’.47 For the Portuguese and for the British in general, she implies, Spanish ladies are far from being reserved, as it is customary for them to allow their admirers into their private chambers when they are visited at home. However, Baillie praises the enchanting wife of the Spanish ambassador extraordinary in the Lisbon court for not having an appendage (in other words, she is not a practitioner of Spanish chichisbeo), as was but too common with the ladies of her country. As a way to reinforce her ‘Englishness’, Baillie also describes herself as ‘a sober English woman’ and therefore disapproves of this particular fashion which she believes to be almost exclusively Spanish. Curiously enough, although Baillie had little, if any, previous first-hand knowledge about Spanish ladies, she comments on their ever beautiful eyes by praising the ‘dark and richly fringed hazel eyes’ of the Spanish diplomat’s wife. Baillie is also glad to ascertain that ‘like most Spanish women, … [she is] full of fire and animation’ but this is the first Spanish lady that she has ever met in person. Her admiration for this unnamed but qualified representative of Spanish women brings about her remarks on the cordial enmity existing between Portuguese and Spanish ladies. The English writer seems to support the latter, as she is witness to the cold, almost impolite reception that the Spanish ambassadress was given by the Portuguese ladies of the court. Is this generalized antipathy due to the Spanish lady’s extreme beauty and elegance, or was she an innocent victim of the Portuguese political distrust of Bourbon Spain? Baillie, discrete as always, does not say. The remaining cultural references to Spanish life and customs that Baillie mentions in her Portuguese letters have all been wrongly assimilated or misunderstood. She begins by misinterpreting the information she has received about the Gallegos, that is, the inhabitants of Galicia, in northwest Spain, whose patron-saint, she assures us, is St Amaro, hence their frequent pilgrimage to the shrine of the saint in the whereabouts of social practices in eighteenth-century Spain is provided by Carmen Martín Gaite, Usos amorosos del dieciocho en España (Madrid: Anagrama, 1972). 47 Baillie, Lisbon in the Years 1821, 1822 and 1823, i. 158.

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Lisbon.48 St Amaro was in fact a French pilgrim of the thirteenth century who died and was buried in Burgos, on his way to Santiago de Compostela. St Amaro is indeed venerated in Galicia, but the patron saint of the region is St James. Baillie’s most relevant cultural slips in connection with Spain start with her inability to repeat and remember Spanish names stating, ‘I dare not attempt to spell their names, the guttural sound of which renders the task hopeless to a foreigner’. She writes about the difficulty of pronouncing Spanish phonemes, finding them too harsh for an English ear, and the presumably formal complexity of long Spanish names and surnames, which are full of prepositions and articles. At a very early stage in her Portuguese stay, July 1821, Baillie wrongly believed that the Portuguese courtesy title ‘Dom’ was spelt ‘Don’. Later, in her second volume she still errs in her opinions about the use of ‘Don’. She believes it is universal in Spain, unlike Portugal. This is incorrect, as it is widely known that in Spain this title was reserved for men of letters with a bachiller degree, priests, royalty, any level of nobility and men who held relevant political or military positions. However, she believes that in Spain ‘is generally held by the younger sons of the higher ranks of nobility, and likewise by those persons who trace their descent from ancient Spanish families’,49 a misguided opinion that she expressed in August 1822, one year after her arrival in the Iberian Peninsula. Had it not been for the British participation in the Peninsular War, Spain would have been virtually ignored during the Romantic period. In the eighteenth century, both Portugal and Spain had been left aside from the educational Grand Tour, and in post-Peninsular War times it was still a daring journey to be made by a woman. Baillie’s knowledge of Spain, a country she never visited, not even when she was residing in Portugal, was mostly based on written sources, more specifically on Don Quixote, English and French literature and to a lesser extent on hearsay. This inevitably led to misconceptions. I have serious doubts that the English poet had really read Don Quixote in full by 1819, despite claiming that the novel was a favourite of hers. By 1823 she had not read a single primary source 48 See respectively, Baillie, Lisbon in the Years 1821, 1822 and 1823, i. 137, ii. 222. 49 See respectively, Baillie, Lisbon in the Years 1821, 1822 and 1823, i. 137 and 18; ii. 141.

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about Spain, with the possible exception of Don Quixote in two different English translations, the versions of Motteux and Jarvis, as proved in some quotations and references she includes in her account, and little else. As for other cultural data on Spain, she had acquired them through the eyes of British or French authors. This is the case with Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and probably his Don Juan; or Sherer’s Recollections of the Peninsula. About Spain’s Moorish occupation, she may have acquired a few ideas from Dryden’s play The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards, and her knowledge of picaresque life and Spanish mores seems to be influenced by the Frenchman Alain-René Lesage’s Le diable boiteaux and the famous and no less influential L’Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane. Baillie’s discretion, uninspected opinions, and English patriotism are three of the main traits perceivable in her travel writings, especially in her Portuguese letters. Her aspiration to rub shoulders with the upper classes in her foreign journeys, her conscious collaboration with her husband’s political/diplomatic career in Portugal, make her a relatively careful diarist. With the odd exception of The Conquest of Granada, most literary and cultural references to Spain in her writings are devoid of any political intention. This will surprise the modern reader considering that the turbulent politics of post-Napoleonic Europe could scarcely be ignored. It probably reflects her own lack of interest in politics as an individual and a woman of her time. Despite the relevance of the Peninsular War in British current affairs, Baillie does not know (or does not wish to acknowledge that she knows) much about the subject or its consequences. As I have shown, her perception of Spain is derived from written sources, topical hearsay, and the common prejudices of an English woman of her class at that time. In this sense it may seem to be limited and superficial but, precisely as such, it is helpfully representative of what was probably the kind of ‘knowledge’ about the Iberian Peninsula which predominated in the Regency era.

Nanora Sweet

13 Spanish Orientalism: Felicia Hemans and her contemporaries

Abstract While Romantic Orientalism evokes the Near East, Spanish Orientalism is at least as present in British Romantic writing, informing works by noted writers – for instance, Byron and Coleridge – and by authors at the margins of gender, religion and race, such as Felicia Hemans and Blanco White. The discourse of Spanish Orientalism brings shaping power to history, through gender performance, religious conversion, and imperial reversal. Concerning millennial forms of empire and faith, in Old World and New, its study is newly compelling. Here, it is approached in world-historical terms and then by a closer materialist dialectic among Spaniard and Moor, Catholic and Protestant and orthodox and liberal, while featuring highly coloured figures like the sentimental Moor, the brutal but remorseful Goth, and the woman warrior at the barricades.

The Orientalism of Spain gave mysterious consciousness and chiasmic energy to British Romanticism’s ‘cult of the South’.1 Iberia and Spain in particular supplied the British Romantic writer, conservative or liberal, with an especially provocative mix of Christian conquest, Catholic cru-

1 In Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), Marilyn Butler suggested that this label for writing based in Peninsular, Italianate, Hellenic, and Oriental texts and topics resulted from a ‘superficial’ and ‘wartime consensus’ of ‘sympathy with the peoples of the Mediterranean’. Yet as she later details, British writers and culture leaders were substantially and intellectually involved with these ‘peoples’ after 1815 (117). For this cult or discourse, with more on Coleridge, Southey, Hemans, Blanco White and Byron, see Diego Saglia’s pioneering Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000).

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elty and Moorish resistance, based on religious conscience and fomenting consciousness at the leading edge of historical change. In the 1790s Robert Southey began his ambitious history of Portugal and later recounted the Peninsular War. In prose he would also chronicle ‘the Cid’ and his role in the Christian Reconquest (1808), and in poetry King Roderick and his Gothic kingdom’s fall to the Moors (1814).2 In 1797 S. T. Coleridge drafted his play Osorio, set in a sixteenth-century Spain at its pinnacle of world empire, but troubled by Moorish resistance, the infiltration of Dutch Protestantism, and in reaction, Castilian Inquisition. These challenges must have seemed analogues for Coleridge’s own engagements in the 1790s with European philosophy and Unitarian dissent in a Britain stressed by revolution abroad, repression at home, and world war.3

Spanish Orientalism, world-historical Spain, medieval and modern, imperial and confessional, dominated the major work of Felicia Hemans.4 In 1808, at the age of fourteen, with brothers at war on the Iberian Peninsula, she published her epic England and Spain; Or, Valour and Patriotism. In 1819, now with Byron’s publisher John Murray, she filled nearly half her first narrative volume with a three-canto tale of the fall of Granada, ‘The Abencerrage’. In 1823 her Reconquest ‘dramatic poem’ ‘The Siege of Valencia’ dominated its volume. In 1825 her three-part Old World/New World epic of religious and exilic consciousness

2 3 4

For the role of Southey’s Chronicle of the Cid in Hemans’s ‘The Siege of Valencia’, see Benjamin Kim’s Wordsworth, Hemans and Politics, 1800–30: Romantic Crises (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2013), 128–41. Osorio was influenced by Schiller’s Sturm und Drang drama Die Räuber; although set in Germany, this play gives its politically divided family the name of ‘Moor’. On Hemans’s Hispanist work, see Saglia, Poetic Castles, passim, and Sweet, Chapter 4 (175–239), ‘The Bowl of Liberty: Felicia Hemans and the Romantic Mediterranean’, Doctoral Dissertation, University of Michigan, 1993.

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‘The Forest Sanctuary’ gave its name to a volume whose shorter poems included ‘Moorish Bridal Song’. Thomas Percy had published Moorish ballads in 1775, and Hemans’s own variations included love ballads at the Christian-Muslim frontier that punctuated ‘The Siege of Valencia’ and formed the coda to ‘The Abencerrage’; others appeared independently, for instance ‘Songs of the Cid’ in the ‘Siege’ volume and ‘Songs of Spain’ in her 1834 National Lyrics, and Songs for Music. For her narrative in ‘The Abencerrage’, this daughter of a Liverpool trading family was able to draw on the original Spanish of Ginés Pérez de Hita’s Guerras civiles de Granada (Book I). As important for Hemans’s Hispanist work were Byron’s wartime cantos and post-war Oriental tales – and Schiller’s Reformational dramas, with their deployment of women and men undergoing crises at frontiers of empire and faith.5 An Anglican who was a friend to Unitarians, Hemans was drawn like the sometime Unitarian Coleridge and their mutual friend Blanco White to crises of faith set in Inquisitional Spain: their works are echoed in ‘The Forest Sanctuary’, as is Wordsworth’s epic of traumatized post-war consciousness, The Excursion.6 For these writers, reversals of religious consciousness – Christian to (and from) Muslim, orthodox to (and from) liberal – signalled worldhistorical change, whether at Gothic Spain’s fall to the Moors, or during the Iberian Reconquest, or the Counter-Reformation or the post-Napoleonic period – all forms of imperial change in the Mediterranean world and beyond. These crises were provocatively and materially configured as reversals in gender and destiny, in folklore or court literature: whether at a nexus of betrayal and rape in the fall of Gothic Spain to the Moors in 711,

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On Hemans’s Schillerian drama see Gary Kelly, ‘Felicia Hemans, Schillerian Drama, and the Feminization of History’ in Women’s Romantic Theatre and Drama: History, Agency and Performativity, eds Lilla Maria Crisafulli and Kier Elam (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2010), 85–99. For a detailed and post-colonial reading, see Saglia, ‘“O My Mother Spain!”: The Peninsular War, Family Matters, and the Practice of Romantic Nation-Writing’, English Literary History 65 (1998), 363–93. For a fuller treatment of this poem see my ‘The Forest Sanctuary: The Anglo-Hispanic Uncanny in Felicia Hemans and José Maria Blanco White’. Romanticism and the Anglo-Hispanic Imaginary (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), 159–82.

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or in the courtship in ballads of Moor by Christian, or with the defence of traditionally Moorish Saragossa by a Maid in 1808. Coleridge, Southey, and Hemans were intrigued by the Spanish émigré cleric and future Unitarian convert José Blanco White, whose scope was not solely Iberian, or Ibero-British, but pan-Atlantic – and thus, in this moment of shifting empire, world-historical. For him, the key to imperial reversal would be race, from the cruel premise of pureza de sangre in Reconquest Spain to the succession of New World slaveries, Amerindian and black African.7 Coleridge’s Remorse and Blanco White’s writings on religious conversion and suppression in Spain influenced Hemans’s 1825 epic of consciousness ‘The Forest Sanctuary’, whose characters are sixteenthcentury Spaniards tormented by auto-da-fé or death by water or a strange New-Worldly heaven. As Hemans wrote to a mutual friend, this poem (in 169 variant Spenserian stanzas) was ‘suggested to me by some passages in […] Mr. Blanco White’s delightful writings’, specifically his fictive Letters from Spain (1822).8 Blanco’s Letters are notable too for their sensitivity to the abuse of women’s subjectivity, in auricular confession and convent life.

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On Blanco White’s political writing and cultural work, alongside Saglia see Almeida’s project: ‘Blanco White and the Making of Anglo-Hispanic Romanticism’, European Romantic Review 17 (October 2006), 437–56; ‘“Esa gran nación, repartida en ambos mundos”: Transnational Authorship in London and Nation Building in Latin America’, in Romanticism and the Anglo-Hispanic Imaginary 53–80 (71–7), and Reimagining the Transatlantic, 1780–1890 (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2011), 106–31. See also Martin Murphy, Blanco White: Self-banished Spaniard (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989) and ‘Joseph Blanco White, 1775–1841’ in NineteenthCentury Literature Criticism, ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau, 305 vols (Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Cengage, 2015), i. 151. Almeida shows that behind the threat of religious Inquisition lay dehumanization by race; that is, by the necessarily gendered business of birth, thus furthering the impact of gender on Spanish Orientalism. Saglia pursues a different but related approach to miscegenation in ‘“O My Mother Spain”’, 369, 372). Quoting a letter excerpted in Henry F. Chorley, Memorials of Mrs Hemans, 2 vols (London: Saunders & Otley, 1836), i. 105. For further introduction and the text of the poem, see Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems, Letters, Reception Materials, ed. Susan J. Wolfson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 268–322. Blanco’s Letters from Spain itself remains under-studied.

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Hemans also quotes substantively from Blanco’s unattributed 1823 review of Quin’s A Visit to Spain in the Quarterly Review, which uses the occasion of reviewing to confront and critique the Inquisition.9 Blanco’s troubled consciousness penetrates ‘The Forest Sanctuary’, a rare first-person and male-centred work for Hemans. Expanding into a tri-continental epic of consciousness, ‘The Forest Sanctuary’ is fuelled by reversal of gender from poet to narrator, and within narrator to an equivocal masculine maternity.10 Initially, it is the experience of a reversal called conversion, goaded by state religion, that links these Anglo-Hispanic portrayals by Coleridge, White and Hemans, and points to the productive instability of Britain’s Spanish Orientalism. This is not to suggest that there were no immediate material reasons – economic, military, and political – for the magnetism of this discourse. Religious consciousness itself, in these works by Coleridge, Blanco White and Hemans, was crucially political and heightened by the civil disabilities faced by Dissenters in Britain – and the even greater threats faced by sceptics in Spain under the Inquisition, which was reinstated in 1815 (Blanco had seen an auto-da-fé during childhood, before becoming a cleric, then himself captivated by Rousseau).11 Economically, Britain conducted an active trade with Portugal: during the 1790s Southey made two lengthy visits there, the first to an uncle who was chaplain to the English manufactory in Lisbon. Arguably, Hemans’s wine-importing family (her grandfather the consul for Austrian Tuscany) would have traded with Portugal: a precocious child, she studied Spanish and Portuguese, later publishing translations from these and other romance languages.12 Spain was highly proprietary about trading rights, especially in America (Blanco White’s

Anon. [Blanco White], Rev. A Visit to Spain, by Michael J. Quin, Quarterly Review 29 (April & July 1823), 240–75. 10 On procreation, or the lack of procreation, in this work, see Charlotte Sussman, ‘Epic, Exile and the Global: Felicia Hemans’s The Forest Sanctuary’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 65.4 (March 2011), 481–512. 11 Murphy, Blanco White: Self-banished Spaniard, 5. 12 Translations from Camoens, and Other Poets (London: John Murray, 1818). Portugal merits its own attention here. 9

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Irish-Spanish family in Seville did manage trade with Britain). Post-war, the merchants of Hemans’s birthplace found themselves eagerly eying Latin American resources and markets ‘hitherto closed to British enterprise’. For instance, the Gladstone brothers in Liverpool pursued a lucrative trade in South American hides. British railway schemes in South America became legendary, while its financial exuberance there courted instability and precipitated the crash of 1825.13 For military reasons, writers in ‘the cult of the South’ would come upon Iberian subject-matter before that of Italy or Greece. By 1808 Spain’s populist juntas were resisting Napoleon and opening a wedge in his control of the Continent soon entered by British troops under Sir John Moore and later the Duke of Wellington. Moore’s 1808 campaign ended in the brutal retreat from Corunna, but Wellington would resume the fight and enter France by 1814.14 Meanwhile, Napoleonic blockades meant that Byron’s ‘Childe Harold’ travels would take him through Iberia rather than France: Lisbon first, then Cintra, scene of English concessions to French forces, then into Spain past renewed fighting at Talavera and to Saragossa: there he noted the proud parading of ‘the Maid of Saragoza’ who ‘all unsex’d’ had held the barricades for the Junta (st. 54–6). Of course Spanish damsels of softer airs had their turn in the canto – as did the great topos of ‘la Cava’ in 711, the legend of Gothic King Roderick raping Florinda in Toledo, followed by her father Julian’s joining the Moorish invasion – and

Quoting J. A. Picton, Memorials of Liverpool, Historical and Topographical, 2 vols, 2nd edn (Liverpool: Walmsley, 1903), i. 291. See D. M. Platt, Latin America and British Trade (New York: Harper/Barnes, 1973) and my ‘“Hitherto closed to British enterprise”: Trading and Writing the Hispanic World circa 1815’, European Romantic Review 8.2 (Spring 1997), 139–47. For the argument that Southey and Hemans portrayed a Spanish America of ‘erasures and omissions’ even as Britain exploited it financially, see Rebecca Cole Heinowitz, ‘The Spanish American Bubble and Britain’s Crisis of Informal Empire, 1822–26’, in Romanticism and the Anglo-Spanish Imaginary 183–212 (193). 14 See further Alicia Laspra-Rodríguez, Wellington’s final mission in Spain (Spring 1814), in this volume. 13

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Iberia’s Muslim Middle Ages (st. 35).15 Hemans’s brothers, George and T. H. Browne, served under Wolfe and Wellington on the Peninsula: George endured the retreat at Corunna in late 1808, to furlough at home shocked in body and mind. Hemans’s second juvenile book, the 1808 England and Spain,16 had included a progress of empire from Spain to England, but her 1812 The Domestic Affections was darkened by George’s suffering, and the wartime depredations experienced by both sexes.17 Politically, then, Spain was of great importance to the English: as Hemans surveyed in her youthful England and Spain, imperial sway in Spanish America was shifting to Britain and its informal practices of trade and financing. Politics was most marked on the liberal side: for the drafting of the Constitution of 1812, Lord and Lady Holland and Lord John Russell travelled to Spain. Back in London, debate continued at Holland House, where Blanco White was a visitor and for a time tutor in the family. The post-war Bourbon restoration in Spain threatened renewed control of the colonies, but the army mutinied in 1820 and the revolt of the liberales gave Spain (and its colonies) a constitutional monarchy. When French troops invaded in 1823 with the encouragement of Austria, Prussia and Russia, and tacit permission of Britain, Bourbon rule returned to Spain. But its New World colonies had seized the moment for independence. In 1825 they were hailed and embraced as Britain’s trading partners, most memorably

Citations to Byron are from Byron, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), here to pages 40 and 35. 16 On England and Spain, see Evan Gottlieb, Romantic Globalism: British Literature and Modern World Order, 1750–1830 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2014), Chapter 3 (also on Scott), and Juan Sánchez, England and Spain and The Domestic Affections: Felicia Hemans and the Politics of Literature, Studies in Romanticism 53 (Fall 2014), 399–415. 17 See Barbara D. Taylor, ‘Felicia Hemans and The Domestic Affections, and Other Poems; or Mrs Browne’s Publishing Project’, Women’s Writing 21.1 (February 2014), 9–24 (20–2). The elder Browne’s memoir The Napoleonic War Journal of Captain Thomas Henry Browne, 1807–16, ed. Roger Norman Buckley (London: Bodley Head, 1987) covers his Peninsular War experience (127–278). 15

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by the revisionist Tory George Canning in his August 1825 ‘Appeal from the Old World to the New World’.18 Synchronically, then, religion, trade, war and politics all figure in British Romantic engagement with Spain and Iberia. This in itself yields the rich matter from stage and page in Britain, in politics and otherwise in the public sphere of the period and nation. Such matter, as Saglia notes, is troubled by effects like the reproductivity that to him appears to threaten Reconquest Spain in Hemans’s ‘The Siege of Valencia’ with pureza de sangre19 – effects uncontainable in a synchronic discourse, of stage and page, at the national level. It is diachronically, in a longer view, that forces of gender and sexuality (and race) find their place and that they, like religion, endow and empower the world-historical form empire. At any rate, empire and not nation is the form invoked by Hemans in her 1808 England and Spain and traced in the 1812 cantos of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: empire with its cycles of conquest and reconquest between Christian and Muslim at either end of the Mediterranean. Even as Hemans and Byron allude to Iberia’s conquest by the Moors in 711, and to the Peninsula’s completed Reconquest by Christians at Granada in 1492, they have their eyes on instability in the present – as Saglia indicates more recently about Hemans’s 1823 book, whose title like a clothesline holds both ‘The Last Constantine’ and ‘The Siege of Valencia’.20 Simultaneously, Hemans and Byron view Constantinople as the site of similar reversals past and present (it was, after all, the site of Rome’s conversion to Christianity): fallen in 1453 to Muslim Turks, ‘But not for long!’ Hemans hopes in ‘The Last Constantine’ (1823).21 And these world-historical reversals are fuelled In Sweet, ‘The New Monthly Magazine and the Liberalism of the 1820s’, Prose Studies 25.2 (April 2002), 151–3 (159), later in Romantic Periodicals and Print Culture, ed. Kim Wheatley (London: Frank Cass, 2003), 147–62. 19 Saglia, ‘“O My Mother Spain”, 369–73. The notions of public sphere and national frame are drawn from Jűrgen Habermas and Benedict Anderson. 20 Saglia, ‘Felicia Hemans, Spain and Cosmopolitan Liberalism’, Spain and British Romanticism, 1800–40, eds Diego Saglia and Ian Haywood (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2018), 139–55. 21 I cite Hemans from the much-republished The Poetical Works of Mrs. Felicia Hemans (Philadelphia, PA: Grigg & Elliot, etc., 1835, etc.), where ‘The Last Constantine’ appears 179–93 (quoting st. 104, p. 191). 18

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by religion and registered here in terms of gender, its subjectivity and sexuality. The ‘last Constantine’ is feminized in defeat, an exemplar of the art of dying well, a provocateur of feminization: he ‘implores forgiveness’ and is answered by his people’s ‘gush of tears’ (st. 71–2). If the last Byzantine emperor is feminized in defeat, the fall of Granada, Islam’s last stronghold in Iberia, to Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492 was followed by the feminizing ‘Moor’s last sigh’ on the part of the retreating King Abdullah (Boabdil to the Christians).22 All of this is subject to the undertow of sexual outrage and gender reversal and marks this ‘Orientalism’ as a gendered discourse.23

Spanish Orientalism, dialectical In tighter, drier terms, Romantic Spanish Orientalism forms a gendered dialectics that mirrors cultural debate keyed to British culture, closer to Marilyn Butler’s ‘particularized historical method’ than to Habermas or Anderson.24 Here, for British Romantic writers the frontier between Christian and Moslem becomes a figure for their own transactions of disestablishment and re-establishment of cultural institutions. Although these will undergo some reversal, there are two sources of value in this Anglicized 22 Hemans, 119; note 35, 127. See Saglia, ‘The Moor’s Last Sigh: Spanish-Moorish Exoticism and the Gender of History in British Romantic Poetry’, Journal of English Studies 3 (2001–2), 193–215. 23 Subsequent critiques of Edward Said’s Orientalism have established gender as key to its making: see for instance Jane Miller, in Seductions: Studies in Reading and Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 118–19. As Said points out, Orientalism is a revelation of Western political postures rather than Islamic or Asiatic culture. However, the Spanish Orientalism configured here differs from Said’s, in that it is a dialectic marked by instability and chiasmus and knotted with differences granted it by class, gender, and the religious interests in British culture – rather than a Foucauldian discourse cohering into epistemes. 24 Butler, ‘Against Tradition’, in Historical Studies and Literary Criticism, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Madison: University Wisconsin Press, 1985), 25–47.

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‘matter of Spain’: the interest-calculating, statist code of a Castilian soldier like the Cid in support of Christianity; and the unstable subjectivity of the ‘sentimental Moor’, Moslem yet chivalrous and all but (liberal) Christian in values. For meritocratic, re-establishing Tories like Scott and the later Southey, the Spaniard, however Catholic, is curator of an established Christian church, and the Moslem Moor is a benighted enemy subject to a sublime crusade. For more disestablished or disaffected writers like the early Coleridge and Hemans and Byron, the chivalric, ‘sentimental’ Moor recuperates the best values of an English, even Protestant liberalism; and the Spaniard in his sanguinary Catholicism and sexual cruelty is exposed as illiberal. Subject to conversion as he is, poised over the instabilities of conquest and Christianization, the Moor begins to seem like the locus of reform (of Nonconformism, even Reformation) and disestablishment. His gender counterpart is the sublime ‘maid of Saragossa’, elsewhere the ‘Zegri maid’, who seizes arms when they are dropped by the sentimental Moor. Castilian and Moor are, then, the terms of this dialectic, a binary that, especially when worked with by the more disaffected writer, is bound for destabilization and reversal of value. There are five moments in the workings of this historiography; as these are narrated, their potential for political, religious and gender reversal becomes clear. These moments attach themselves to watershed dates in Spanish history: the defeat of Roderick the Goth by the Moors in 711; the development of the Castilian code under the eleventhcentury hero the Cid; the fall of the last Moorish city, Granada, in 1492, followed by the consolidation of the Castilian state and the Inquisition; the proscription of the Moors by Philip II in 1567, followed by civil war; the popular uprisings against Napoleon in 1808, followed by urban juntas, the constitution of 1812 and the revolt against Bourbon restoration in 1820. The narrative begins in 711 when Spain passes from Gothic to Moorish domination and enters the Middle Ages. Already the narrative is strongly shaped by the disposition of women: King Roderick loses Spain for Christianity because he rapes Florinda, daughter of his own ally, Count Julian, which prompts an invasion from North Africa. Walter Scott’s The Vision of Don Roderick (1811), Robert Southey’s Roderick, the Last of the Goths (1814) and W. S. Landor’s Count Julian (1812), for instance, develop

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this opening moment.25 In Scott, Roderick shows only an incomplete remorse for his politically disastrous transgression, and in Southey a remorse hard-won and of some use in rear-guard resistance against the Moors. In the workings of this dialectic, Roderick the Goth will become conflated with the figure of the Castilian, and the ‘remorse’ of this cruel Spaniard will establish a subjective style later available to the Castilian. The inadequacy of this remorse forms the crux of Coleridge’s play by that name. Southey’s The Chronicle of the Cid (1808) introduces into this Anglicized discourse the hidalgo hero whose relationship with the Moors epitomizes the interest-calculating, statist approach to frontier life. Rodrigo Díaz, or the Cid, played any number of pragmatic and contradictory roles with regard to the Moors: mercenary, ally, enemy, plunderer, colonizer, lord. Indeed, it is from the Moors that this hero gains the name the Cid, which means lord in Moorish Arabic. A supporter of the state who never gains aristocratic status but who exacts a Magna-Carta-like due process from his king, the Cid was attractive to an English Tory, especially one like Southey whose own government position validated a meritocracy – and permitted negotiation.26 Expelled by the king of Castile and forced to fight independently against the Moors, the Cid conquers Valencia as his own, gains ascendancy over his king, and marries his daughters to princes. As Benjamin Kim has underscored, the Cid’s rigorous practice of exogamy has included earlier marriages for these daughters in which they are beaten by their husbands and abandoned at roadside for their lower station. The Cid’s single-minded martial zeal typifies the Castilian code in works like Hemans’s ‘The Siege of Valencia’; but in her lyric sequence ‘Songs of the Cid’ (1823) she explores those moments when, in life, this hero is feminized by banishment and when, in death, he leads a retreat from his

25

Blanco White’s great twentieth-century follower, Juan Goytisolo, continued this moment with his 1970 Reivindicación del conde don Julián. 26 Robert Southey, The Chronicle of the Cid, introduced by V. S. Pritchett (New York: Heritage, 1958). On the Cid and due process see Southey (68); on the Cid as a ‘selfmade man’ with a ‘democratic spirit’ see Pritchett (25). On Southey’s negotiations as Laureate, see Michael Gamer, Romanticism, Self-Canonization and the Business of Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 156–96.

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beloved Valencia, an armoured corpse at the head of his own funeral procession. This ghastly procession becomes a counter-example to Hemans’s work elsewhere (especially in The Restoration of the Works of Art to Italy), where processional under the sign of the feminine is a means of establishing continuity between life and death; still hinting, as in ‘The Forest Sanctuary’, that performances of gender cross thresholds of temporality, re-birthing into death. In this work, Hemans also emphasizes too the sublimity of black female archers, who alone among the Moors give the Cid’s forces pause: an example, if brief, of the potential for gender reversal at the site of race.27 Hemans’s ‘The Abencerrage’ and its principal source, Book I of Pérez de Hita’s Historia de las Guerras civiles de Granada, illustrate the popular third moment of this Spanish dialectic, the fall of Granada in 1492; and Hemans factors out the gendered, world-historical dialectic enacted there.28 In their last efflorescence before defeat, the Moors engage in chivalric display, then split into warring factions. The Abencerrages (Abencerrajes in Spanish, Abencerrages as culturally appropriated), quintessential sentimental Moors, are known for their chivalry and their generosity to Christian captives. A rival family, the Zegries (Zegríes in Spanish, Zegries as culturally appropriated), suspects Abencerrage loyalty and persuades the king that an Abencerrage has seduced the queen Sultana. Accused of treason, the Abencerrages are called to the Alhambra to be slain one by one by the king, until their remnant turns to flee to Castile and conversion. Pérez de Hita’s Abencerrage or sentimental Moor displays a full sequence of displacements toward the liberal and the feminine: Blanco White-like, he is chivalrous, generous, enamoured, converted, persecuted, emasculated. While the Abencerrages recuperate a liberal Christianity for Spain, the

27 ‘The Songs of the Cid’, Hemans, 197–200; for the Negress archers, see 200n. 8. 28 Ginés Pérez de Hita, The Civil Wars of Granada [I], translated by Thomas Rodd (London: Ostell, 1803). On Pérez de Hita and the tradition of the sentimental Moor, see María Carrasco-Urgoiti, The Moorish Novel (Boston, MA: Twayne/Hall, 1976). For more on Hemans’s longest non-dramatic work (1,566 lines, forty-three notes), see my ‘Gender and Modernity in The Abencerrage: Hemans, Rushdie, and “the Moor’s Last Sigh”’, in Felicia Hemans: Reimagining Poetry in the Nineteenth Century, eds Nanora Sweet and Julie Melnyk (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001), 181–95.

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Zegries embrace the propensity for conquest and war that has marked Spanish Catholicism at its worst. The Spanish dialectic has reached its most developed form, each side containing its own instabilities: masculine, sublime, Castilian, Catholic, Zegri, vengeful/remorseful on one side, feminine, beautiful, Moorish, Protestant, Abencerrage and subject to conversion on the other. Pérez de Hita’s aesthetic of colour, fragment, procession and song matches Hemans’s aesthetic of the beautiful elsewhere; and as in that aesthetic, the tourneys of the Granadines serve to lead toward dissolution and death and beyond. Like the exogamous structures that lie behind Hemans’s aesthetic (and that when practised between Spaniard and Moor flirt with ‘miscegenation’),29 Pérez de Hita’s narrative comes to crisis over the disposition of women and finds denouement in feminization. King Boabdil’s sister, for instance, was married (exogamously) to an Abencerrage slain by the king. Now exposed by widowhood, she pleads for mercy and is answered by the king’s knife. In the central plot of Guerras civiles I, Boabdil’s queen is tried for adultery with an Abencerrage: as a result, she converts to Christianity, and her Castilian champions enter Granada to begin the conquest of the city. When Boabdil flees, he weeps in the topos of ‘the Moor’s sigh’, only to be scorned by his mother ‘That as he knew not how to defend his country like a man, he did well to weep for it like a woman’.30 Pérez de Hita’s narrative has been termed by Carrasco-Urgoiti as the first prose imitation of Ariostan romance, and its inlaid Moorish ballads collude with that poetic narrative to engender history and feminize the Moor. This engendering and reversal on the site of ‘race’ is well illustrated by the love ballad in Guerras civiles in which a Spanish king courts a Moorish warrior. King John I addresses a Moor with Christian associations, in effect an Abencerrage (‘From a noble Moor, my father, / And a Christian captive sprung’). Pointing to the glories of Granada, the Spanish king declares, ‘If 29 Saglia, ‘“O My Mother”’, 369. 30 Pérez de Hita, translated by Rodd 382. This wording is varied by Hemans and Letitia Landon in their versions of this discourse. See Hemans (119, 127 note 35) and Landon, ‘The Sultana’s Remonstrance’, The Poetical Works of Letitia E. Landon, ed, William B. Scott (London: Routledge, [1880]), 266.

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you chuse to keep Granada, / You must now become my bride’. The Moor replies, expressing hopes that will be belied by history: Don John I am already marry’d, And no widow left forlorn, The Moor I serve he loves me dearly, Dearer far than any born.31

The concern with widowhood here foreshadows the exposure endured by the Moorish king’s sister (as by women in a number of Hemans’s narratives), just as the marital trust displayed is betrayed in Boabdil’s trial of his wife. Marriage and its failures allegorize the Moorish civil war; but of course a successful marriage on Don John’s terms would emulate the equally repellent Castilian state consolidation under Ferdinand and Isabella, whose marriage literally was the state. Perhaps for these reasons, Hemans’s heroine in ‘The Abencerrage’ will resist marriage, and she and her beloved will be joined by poetry (a site of evolving critique) rather than by politics (and its statist disposition of women). In the fourth moment of this narrative, the Moors are still present in Spain but increasingly driven underground. Proscription of Moors (now Moriscos) and Jews by the Spanish state proceeds apace, culminating in Philip II’s sweeping edict of 1567 and the ensuing civil war. It is in this period that the Moor actually becomes the ‘sentimental’ Moor, his spirit embraced by the very culture that is exterminating him. Pérez de Hita himself fought against the Moors in the sixteenth-century civil war while in the same moment speaking on their behalf. Moorish ballads became popular for their unusually subjective, encoded style, rather as African-American blues have been embraced by Euro-American culture; and these ballads, collected by Percy and read in Rodd’s 1803 translation of the Guerras civiles, played a part in the eighteenth-century and Romantic ballad revival.32

31 32

Pérez de Hita, Guerras civiles, 26. See especially Thomas Rodd, introduction, The Civil Wars, by Pérez de Hita (xiv– xv); Carrasco-Urgoiti (45–50); Thomas Percy, trans., comp., Ancient Songs Chiefly on Moorish Subjects (ms.) 1775, ed. David Nichol Smith (Oxford: Milford-Oxford

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In his 1813 dramatization of this moment in Osorio revised as Remorse, Coleridge achieved a popular and critical success unparalleled in British Romantic drama; and this play strongly influenced both Byron and Hemans.33 In Coleridge’s play, a Moorish sensibility becomes available to a Protestantism more radical than Southey’s, an ecumenical pantheism that was Coleridge’s own advanced Unitarianism in the 1790s. In keeping with the civil war motif of this material (Abencerrage vs Zegri, Castilian vs Moor), Coleridge’s plot turns on the struggle between two brothers for their father’s ward Teresa, a woman in effect already exchanged but as yet unbetrothed – a woman exceptionally vulnerable to male rivalry and revenge. One brother, Ordonio, prosecutes the Inquisition under the Castilian code, while the other, Alvar, preaches tolerance, disguising himself as a Moorish ‘fakir and practicing magic of a dizzyingly beautiful sort. A Unitarian in proscribed Moor’s clothing, Alvar, the second son, suggests for Coleridge the religiously inflected civil disabilities still extant in the England of the 1790s.34 Certainly, Teresa (especially given her saint’s name) is in some way the soul of Spain, courted by a King John/Don Roderick figure on the one hand and an Abencerrage, half-Christian, half-Moor, on the other. Alvar and Teresa become implicated in encouraging Moorish revolt; in the meantime, the forcibly converted Moor Isidore evolves into a Coleridgean ‘sentimental Moor’: his unwillingness to murder shows his superiority to Ordonio, and his vertiginous Coleridgean dreams in a cave presage his death at Ordonio’s hand. Once Moorish men are sentimentalized and defeated, there is room for sublimity and triumph by women; and this is one of the chief lessons that Hemans learns from Coleridge. Teresa senses her own sublimity: ‘More

University Press, 1932); J. G. Lockhart, trans., comp., Ancient Spanish Ballads (Edinburgh: Blackwood; London: Cadell, 1823). 33 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Remorse, The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1912), ii. 812–83. See Maria Eugenia Perojo Arronte, ‘Coleridge’s criticism of the Don Juan tradition’, in this volume. 34 Carrasco-Urgoiti’s comment on the Moor is revealing: ‘excluded from almost every type of legitimate ambition’ (119).

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than a woman’s spirit’ (4.2.33). Isidore’s widow Alhadra marshals revolt and, in revenge for the murder of her husband, dispatches Ordonio, alluding to her Zegri blood and abjuring ‘women’s anguish’ (5.1.245).35 The last moment of this Spanish dialectic emerges circa 1800. Travellers wander the Alhambra, site of the feminized Moor.36 After 1808, reportage of the War of Spanish Independence feels the touch of female sublimity in the figure of the Maid of Saragossa. In Childe Harold 1.54–8, Byron sketches a popular version of her heroism, while Southey’s account in The History of the Peninsular War forms one of that book’s notable passages: ‘Augustina Zaragoza, a handsome woman of the lower classes … sprung forward over the dead and dying … fired off a six-and-twenty pounder’. With the Saragossans thus roused, ‘the French were repulsed’.37 Saragossa was famously a Moorish kingdom in the Middle Ages, at one point retaining the Cid in its service. Added to the dynamics of gender and race in this moment are those of class: the ‘lower-class’ Maid continues the pressure of a class-based economic analysis on the Spanish dialectic, a pressure initiated by the Cid’s hidalgo struggles and continued in Pérez de Hita’s understanding of the Moors as fellow members of an artisan class that at some level resists proscription.38 The Maid, then, links Spanish Orientalism to the 1808 War of Independence

Another important text on this sixteenth-century moment is Book II of Pérez de Hita’s Guerras civiles, never translated into English and not alluded to by Hemans or other English writers on Spanish topoi. Nonetheless, it usefully rehearses the civil war that completes Coleridge’s moment, renews the Don Roderick motif of remorseless rape, and most of all, features the sublimity of the common people, especially women. On Guerras civiles II, see Carrasco-Urgoiti, 124–44; in her description, Pérez de Hita’s ‘common people’, especially the women, are ‘either sublime or inhumanly cruel’ (129). 36 An important instance is Henry Swinburne, whose Travels through Spain, In the Years 1775 and 1776 (London: P. Elmsley, 1779) contains elaborate drawings of the Alhambra; Hemans refers often to Swinburne’s work. 37 Robert Southey, The History of the Peninsular War, 3 vols (London: Murray, 1823), i. 408. 38 On Pérez de Hita’s social and racial status and its political and literary importance, see Carrasco-Urgoiti, 74–9. 35

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and to what is perceived as an internalized Moorish spirit and the only force on the Continent able to resist Napoleon. In ‘The Abencerrage’, Hemans will work to recuperate for her similar Zegri heroine both a rationalism that would do justice to the most pragmatic Castilian and the power of resistance and persistence signalled by that repository of Orientalist subjectivity, the Moorish ballad. The Spanish Orientalism of British Romanticism enlisted a majority of its most noted male writers, while the salience of gender in this discourse seems to have made it especially productive for the woman writer Felicia Hemans. At the same time, the embrace by several of these writers of émigré Spaniard Blanco White suggests a lack, a hunger among them for a foreignness in Anglo-Hispanic relations fraught with political and existential hazards for Britons and Spaniards alike. This might suggest that Linda Colley’s argument that British identity during this time was shaped against foreign forces, has but partial force.39 Overall, Spanish Orientalism does suggest that gender and race and their entanglements remain, pace identity backlash, the keys to reading Romantic writing, British and international. We are encouraged to read farther and deeper in such writers as Hemans and Blanco White and Ottobah Cuguano and more; and beyond the anthology favourites of these writers’ still better-known contemporaries. As it seems, Spanish Orientalism (derived here from Said, however ‘off-licence’) makes Romantic writing more readable, more revelatory: be that as worldhistorical ‘progresses’ under banners of Cross and Crescent, or as one more dialectic at work within culture, mystified and mundane.

39

Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837, rev. edn (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).

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310 Bibliography Secher, Reynald, A French Genocide: The Vendée, trans. George Holoch (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003). Shadwell, Thomas, Four Restoration Libertine Plays, ed. Rodney Harald Fisk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Shaw, Philip, ‘Leigh Hunt and the Aesthetics of Post-War Liberalism’, in Philip Shaw, ed., Romantic Wars: Studies in Culture and Conflict, 1793–1822 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 185–207. Shelley, Mary, Letters, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1944). Shelley, Percy Bysshe, Letters, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964). , The Major Works, eds Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). , Valperga, ed. Michael Rossington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Sherer, Moyle, Recollections of the Peninsula. Campaign of the Left Wing of the Allied Army, in the Western Pyrenees and South of France, in the Years 1813–14; under Field Marshal the Marquis of Wellington (London: Longman and Co., 1823). Simal, Juan Luis, Emigrados: España y el exilio internacional, 1814–34 (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales, 2012). Simpson, David, Romanticism, Nationalism and the Revolt Against Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Smith, Angel, ‘The Rise and Fall of “respectable” Spanish Liberalism, 1808–1923: An Explanatory Framework’, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 22/1 (2016), 55–73. Southey, Robert, Catalogue of the Valuable Library of the Late Robert Southey …: Which Will Be Sold by the Auction … by Messrs. S. Leigh Sotheby & Co. … On … May 8th, 1844, And Fifteen Following Days (London: Compton & Ritchie, 1844). , The Chronicle of the Cid, introd. V. S. Pritchett (New York: Heritage, 1958). , The Collected Letters of Robert Southey, eds Lynda Pratt, Tim Fulford and Ian Packer, Romantic Circles (2009). , ‘The History of Europe for 1808’, The Edinburgh Annual Register for 1808 1/1 (1810), 1–459. , ‘The History of Europe for 1809’, The Edinburgh Annual Register for 1809 2/1 (1811), 1–797. , ‘The History of Europe for 1811’, The Edinburgh Annual Register for 1811 4/1 (1813), 1–437. , History of the Peninsular War, 3 vols (London: Murray, 1823). , A Letter to William Smith, Esq. M. P. from Robert Southey (London: John Murray, 1817).

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312 Bibliography Tabeur, Jean, La prise du Trocadéro ou la guerre d’Espagne de Chateaubriand (Paris: Editions SPM, 2014). Taylor, Barbara D., ‘Felicia Hemans and The Domestic Affections, and Other Poems; or Mrs Browne’s Publishing Project’, Women’s Writing 21.1 (February 2014), 9–24. Temple, Laura Sophia, The Siege of Zaragoza and Other Poems (London: William Miller, 1812). Teter, Patricia A., “‘English gold, Corsican brass, and French iron”: Opportunities for Collecting Art in Spain During the Napoleonic Wars’ in Roberta Panzanelli, and Monica Preti-Hamard, eds, La Circulation des oeuvres d’art/ The circulation of works of art in the revolutionary era, 1789–1848 (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2007). Thomas Brown, the Younger [pseud. Thomas Moore], Fables for the Holy Alliance, Rhymes on the Road, &c. &c. (London: Longman, 1823). Thorslev, Peter, ‘Post-Waterloo Liberalism: The Second Generation’, Studies in Romanticism 28/3 (1989), 437–61. Tromans, Nicholas, ‘Between the Museum and the Mausoleum: Showing Spain to Britain’, in Roberta Panzanelli, and Monica Preti-Hamard, eds, La Circulation des oeuvres d’art/The circulation of works of art in the revolutionary era, 1789–1848 (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2007). Trudeau, Lawrence J., ed., ‘Joseph Blanco White, 1775–1841’, Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism (Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Cengage, 2015), 1–151. Trueba y Cossío, Joaquín Telesforo de, The Romance of History: Spain (London: Edward Bull, 1830). Tuite, Clara, Lord Byron and Scandalous Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Twiss, Richard, Travels through Portugal and Spain in 1772 and 1773 (London: The Author, 1775). Ungerer, Gustav, ‘Thomas Shadwell’s The Libertine (1675): A Forgotten Restoration Don Juan Play’, in Javier Sánchez, ed., SEDERI 1 (Zaragoza: Librería General, 1990), 222–39. Valladares, Susan, ‘British Women Writers of Peninsular Fiction’, in Diego Saglia and Ian Haywood, eds, Spain in British Romanticism 1800–40. (Gewerbestrasse: Palgrave, 2018), 195–213. , ‘Romantic Englishwomen and “the Theatre of Glory”: The Role of the Peninsular War in Forging British National Identity’, Moveable Type: Journal of the Graduate Society, Department of English, University College London [online journal] (Summer 2008) , 105–20. , Staging the Peninsular War: English Theatres 1807–15 (London: Routledge, 2016).

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Notes on contributors

Young-ok An is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Luann Dummer Center for Women at the University of St Thomas, Minnesota, USA. Among her publications are edited books and articles on Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Byron, Letitia Landon and Felicia Hemans, published in Criticism and Studies in Romanticism. Her book-length project, ‘The Female Prometheus: Myth, Gender and Authorship’, investigates romantic revisions of Prometheanism in Blake, Byron, the Shelleys, Wollstonecraft, Felicia Hemans, and Letitia Landon. She is also working on the interplay between gender and the aesthetics of Hemans and Landon. Roderick Beaton is Emeritus Koraes Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature at King’s College London, a post he held from 1988 to 2018. He has published widely on Greek literature and culture from the twelfth century to the present day. His books include An Introduction to Modern Greek Literature (2nd edn, 1999), Byron’s War: Romantic Rebellion, Greek Revolution (2013) and, as co-editor with Christine Kenyon Jones, the essay collection Byron: The Poetry of Politics and the Politics of Poetry (Routledge 2017). He is a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA). Bernard Beatty is Senior Fellow in the School of English at the University of Liverpool and Associate Fellow in the School of Divinity at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of two books and has edited three collections of essays on Byron. He has written on Romanticism, the Bible, many major authors, and aspects of literary theory. He was editor of the Byron Journal from 1986 to 2004. Recent publications have been about Shelley and the theatre, Byron, Pope, and Newman, Browning and Newman, Romantic Decadence, and Byron’s temperament, Byron and

316

Notes on contributors

Italian Catholicism, Byron and neo-Classicism. Pending publications deal with Byron’s ‘dramatic monologues’, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, and a volume of selected essays. Agustín Coletes Blanco is Professor of English Studies at the University of Oviedo. He is also Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of Hull. He has published widely on literary and cultural reception, British travellers in Spain, and Byron. He is the editor and Spanish translator of Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, Byron’s Mediterranean Letters and Poems and, together with Alicia Laspra-Rodríguez, English Poetry of the Peninsular War. Recent work includes ‘Byron and the Spanish Patriots’, in the essay collection Byron: The Poetry of Politics and the Politics of Poetry (Routledge 2017), ‘Anglo-Spanish Transfers in Peninsular War Poetry (1808–14): Translating and Zero-Translating’, in Translations in Times of Disruption: An Interdisciplinary Study in Transnational Contexts (Palgrave 2017) and ‘Spain and Byron’s The Age of Bronze (1823)’, in Spain in British Romanticism 1800–40 (Springer 2018). Rocío Coletes Laspra is a Junior Curator (national museums, Spanish Ministry of Culture). She holds an MA in Museum Studies from l’École du Louvre and is an International Doctor with an Award for Excellence in Art History. She has been Research and Teaching Fellow in the Department of Art History at the University of Oviedo and has worked for several art galleries, museums and other cultural institutions in Spain, France, Ireland and the United Arab Emirates. Her main interests are Orientalist painting and the art sales market in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. Recent publications include Spanish translations from French and English specialist works in Art and Art History, chapters in essay collections and articles in Cuadernos de Estudios del Siglo XVIII and Anales de Historia del Arte. Silvia Gregorio Sainz is a junior lecturer in the English Department at the University of Oviedo and also works in an English language school. She holds a BA with an Award for Excellence and a PhD in English Studies, as well as an MA in Contemporary History and an MA in TEFL. Her research focuses on Anglo-Spanish relations in the first half of the nineteenth

Notes on contributors

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century, particularly during the Peninsular War and its aftermath. Recent publications include ‘The Bishop of Santander in the 1808 British press: An unusual tracking’ (Spagna Contemporanea 2014) and ‘The siege and destruction of Castro Urdiales according to British sources: The role of the British allies in the defence of the Cantabrian town’ (2015). Alicia Laspra-Rodríguez is Associate Professor of English Studies in the English Department at the University of Oviedo. She was a Fulbright Scholar in New York University, where she obtained a Diploma in American Studies. She has published widely on Wellington and on early nineteenthcentury Anglo-Spanish relations. She is the editor and Spanish translator of several manuscript collections of English and French documents relating to the Peninsular War and, together with Agustín Coletes, English Poetry of the Peninsular War. Recent work includes ‘“A True Translation”: Translation as a Weapon in the Peninsular War (1808–14)’, in Translations in Times of Disruption: An Interdisciplinary Study in Transnational Contexts (Palgrave 2017); ‘Presse, politique et poésie anglaise de la Guerre d’Indépendance’, in La poésie, vecteur de l’information au temps de la Guerre d’Espagne (PU Provence 2017) and ‘Wordsworth’s Spain, 1808–11’, in Spain in British Romanticism 1800–40 (Springer 2018). Laura Martínez García is a junior lecturer and researcher at the University of Oviedo. She obtained her PhD with a thesis on sexual identities on the Restoration stage and was Visiting Scholar at the universities of Manchester, UMASS and Reading. Her main research interests are related to dissenting sexualities in the seventeenth century and she is currently doing research on the history of climbing sexualities from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Recent publications include ‘Staging Male Vulnerability in the Restoration Stage: Jealousy and Cuckoldry in The Country Wife (1675)’, El Genio Maligno (2017); ‘Nel Gwyn’s many afterlives: Taming the “Protestant Whore” in 21st C popular fiction’, ANTAE Journal (2016) and 17th and 18th C English Comedies as a New Kind of Drama: A Foucauldian Interpretation of Family Relations, Sexuality, and Resistance as Psychological Power (Edwin Mellen 2015).

318

Notes on contributors

Sara Medina Calzada is a junior lecturer and researcher in the English Department at the University of Valladolid. She holds a PhD in English Studies and her research focuses on the historical and cultural relations between Britain and the Hispanic world in the nineteenth century and, more specifically, on the reception of British literature in Spain and representations of Spain in Britain. Her main publications include an analysis of the reception of Thomas Moore in the Hispanic world (forthcoming), two book chapters on José Joaquín de Mora’s rewriting of Byron’s Don Juan, and several articles on Anglo-Hispanic literary relations in the Romantic period. María Eugenia Perojo Arronte is Associate Professor of English Studies in the English Department at the University of Valladolid. Her main fields of research are eighteenth-century and early nineteenthcentury literature and literary theory, and the cultural exchange between Great Britain and Spain during that period. Her publications include S. T. Coleridge, Kubla Khan y el reto de la poesía (1998), chapters on the reception of Coleridge in Spain in The Reception of Coleridge in Europe (2007) and, more recently, ‘Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Don Quixote’ (Cervantes 2014) and ‘Coleridge and Spanish Literature’, in the essay collection Spain in British Romanticism 1800–40 (Springer 2018). José Ruiz Mas is Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Granada, where he teaches English literature. His main areas of research are Anglo-Spanish relations and English travel writing on Spain and the Mediterranean. He is the author of Libros de viajes en lengua inglesa por la España del siglo XX (2003), English Travel Literature on Cyprus (1878–1960) (2004, with E. Demetriou), Guardias civiles, bandoleros, gitanos, guerrilleros, carabineros, contrabandistas y turistas en la literatura inglesa contemporánea (1844–1994) (2011) and an edition of Marianne Baillie’s 1824 book Lisbon in the Years 1821, 1822 and 1823 (2 vols, Women’s Travel Writings – Iberia, Pickering & Chatto, 2013). Juan L. Sánchez is Assistant Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research interest in the role of Spain in the development of British Romantic literature has led to several publications on the topic

Notes on contributors

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and a book manuscript exploring the influence of Spain on British conceptions of the modern liberal state. His latest contribution in this field is ‘Southey, Spain, and Romantic Apostasy’, in the essay collection Spain in British Romanticism 1800–40 (Springer, 2018). Nanora Sweet, Associate Professor Emerita, University of MissouriSt Louis, writes on Hemans and her context. Co-editor of Felicia Hemans (Palgrave, 2001) and Felicia Hemans in the Wider World (Women’s Writing 21.1, 2014), she contributed entries to the Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (1999) and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004). Recent publications include ‘The Forest Sanctuary: The Anglo-Hispanic Uncanny in Felicia Hemans and José Blanco White’ (British Romanticism and the Anglo-Spanish Imaginary, 2010), ‘Staël the Poet’ (Germaine de Staël: Forging a Politics of Mediation: SVEC 12, 2011), and ‘Felicia Hemans’s Edinburgh Noctes’ (‘An Unprecedented Phenomenon’: Romanticism and Blackwood’s Magazine, 2013).

Index*

Abencerrages (Sp. ‘Abencerrajes’)  272–3, 282–5, 287 absolutism  7, 12, 21, 97, 102–3, 106, 108–9, 124, 127, 133, 195, 203, 207, 325 Addington, Henry  250 Agar y Bustillo, Pedro  9 Álava, General Miguel Ricardo  13, 21 Alba, Duke of  183 Albaro (Italy)  120 Alexander I, Tsar of Russia  153–6, 189 Algeciras 181 Alien Bill  43, 46, 66–8 Anadia, Countess of  255, 260 Anglesea, Marquis  141, 150, 169 Anglona, Prince of  6, 14–15 Angoulême, Duke of  123, 138, 154, 159–60, 162–5, 170 Apsley House  177, 190 Aranjuez 183 art charities  177 art collections  176, 182, 188 Bonaparte 190 Calonne 177 Campbell  181, 189 Orléans  177, 188 Santiago  183–4, 186, 189 Wellington  177, 190 art market  175–8, 187–91 Austen, Jane  78, 80

*

Austria  4, 23, 112, 114, 118, 137, 150, 153–4, 275, 277 Aylmer, Matthew W., Lord  32 Baillie, Alexander  250, 256 Baillie, Marianne  249–69 Baker, David Erskine  221 Ball, Alexander John  222 ballads  72, 157, 238, 273–4, 283–5, 287 Barcelona  37, 39, 144, 266 Barco, Diego del  34–5 Baring, Sir Thomas  189 Bathurst, Henry, Earl  6, 32, 34, 37, 38, 40 battles  60, 79, 141, 163, 202, 246, 266 of Cabra  243 of Talavera  141 of the Pyrenees  3, 83, 88 of Vitoria  32 of Waterloo  246 Bayonne  4, 8, 31 Beaumont, Francis  213 Bennet, Henry Grey  67 Bentham, Jeremy  93–5, 98, 101, 121, 123, 126, 130 Berwick, Lord  189 Bidasoa River  3, 6, 138, 145 Birch, J. F.  27 Black Legend  98, 143, 202–4, 241, 244, 247 Blanco White, José María  86, 96, 226, 271–5, 277, 281–2, 287 Blaquiere, Edward  93–109, 122–4, 133

The editors would like to express their gratitude to Sara Rato and Enol Ordóñez, POETRY’15 interns, for their help in building this index.

322 Index Blessington, Lady  73, 75 Bonaparte, Joseph  97, 178 Bonaparte, Lucien see art collections Bonaparte, Napoleón see Napoleon, Emperor of the French Borbón, Antonio Pascual de  146 Bordeaux 19 Bouterwerk, Friedrich  214, 219, 223 Bowring, John  93, 121–3, 125 Brayfield, J. (also ‘T. J.’)  138, 141–2, 169 British Institution, London  177 Brough, W. B.  138–9, 169 Brougham, Henry  48 Buccleuch, Duke of  177 Buchanan, William  173–6, 178–84, 186–91 Bulgary, Count  153 Burdett, Francis  53–4, 69 Burke, Edmund  211, 218, 222, 242, 252 Burns, Robert  152 Byron, Lord George Gordon  44, 73, 75, 79–80, 89, 91, 94, 111–27, 131, 136, 138, 141–2, 145, 148–53, 158, 162, 164, 166–7, 169, 209–10, 216–18, 220–1, 229–55, 263–4, 269, 271–3, 276–80, 285–6 Cádiz  38, 138, 164, 166, 181, 196, 231, 236 Cádiz Constitution see constitutions Cádiz Cortes see Spain, Cortes Cádiz massacre  98, 133 Calais 123 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro  212–14 Calonne see art collections Calzabigi, Ranieri de  164 Campbell, James see art collections Campbell, Thomas  237–8 Candia (Piedmont)  114 Canning, George  119, 124, 278 Cano, Alonso see Spanish school of painters

Cantabria  24–5, 27–8, 30, 33–5, 38–9, 41 Capel-Coningsby, George see Essex, Earl carbonari  71, 80–1, 88, 112, 118, 125–6 Carlile, Richard  131, 135, 149–50 Carlisle, Earl  189 Carlota Joaquina, Queen of Portugal  256 Caroline of Brunswick, Queen Consort of the United Kingdom and Hanover  129, 131–2, 134 Castro Urdiales (Cantabria)  28, 41 Catholicism  19, 21, 82, 98–9, 103–4, 140, 201, 205, 225, 230, 236, 241–2, 246, 255, 266, 271, 280, 283 Cato Street  131, 134 Centlivre, Susanna  193–4, 197–207, 244 Cephalonia 125 Cervantes, Miguel de  212, 214, 220, 238, 243, 249, 253–61 Chamartín, Decrees of  265 Ciscar, Francisco  9 Christie’s (auction house)  188 Coesvelt, William Gordon  182, 189 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor  60, 75, 79, 210–27, 245, 271–5, 280–1, 285–6 Colindres (Cantabria)  35 Collard, John D.  138, 169 Collier, John Payne  213 Collier, Sir George  32–3 colonies  18, 78, 108–9, 115, 142–4, 181, 224–5, 256, 277 ‘Concert of Europe’  117, 119–20 constitutions  8–12, 14–18, 21, 43–4, 47, 50, 55, 62–3, 67–9, 80, 85, 87, 93–4, 97–109, 111–16, 118, 120, 122–7, 129, 132–4, 137–8, 140, 150, 156, 164, 166, 168, 195–6, 204, 216, 256, 264–5, 277, 280 Corneille, Pierre  221, 227 courtship narratives  73, 75, 90, 274 Covent Garden Theatre  143, 193–4, 198 Cowley, Hannah  244

Index Croker, Sir John Wilson  141, 145 Cruikshank, George  160 Da Ponte, Lorenzo  227 Dancourt, Florent Carton  263 Delpini, Charles Anthony  221 déplacement  204 desamortización 178 Díaz Porlier, Juan  97, 139 Dibdin, Thomas John  199, 205, 210 Dorchester Gaol  131, 149 Doz, Juan  40 Dresden 4 Dryden, John  76, 249–50, 263–4, 269 Dundas, Sir David  36–8 Duppa, Richard  61 Durham  176, 197 Eguía, General Francisco  9 El Greco see Spanish school of painters Elío, General Francisco Javier  14, 97 Elizabeth I, Queen of England  241 Enlightenment  53, 202 Espoz y Mina, Francisco  166–7 Essex, Earl  210 exaltado (radical-liberal)  107, 137, 156 false translations  159 Favart, Nicolas  263 Ferdinand I, King of the Two Sicilies  140 Ferdinand VII, King of Spain  6–19, 23, 36, 40, 48, 80–1, 85, 88, 97–8, 103, 106, 108, 112, 116, 129, 133, 137–40, 144, 146–7, 150, 166, 190, 195–6, 203, 207, 225, 232, 265 Fernández de San Miguel y Valledor, Evaristo 156–7 Fielding, Henry  151, 233, 244 Fletcher, Francis (and John Beaumont) 213 Florian, Jean-Pierre Claris de  232 Floridablanca Decree  176, 178

323 Ford, Richard  188 Fores, S. W.  147, 154–5 France  3–4, 6–8, 15, 36–7, 39, 49–51, 61, 76–8, 94, 117–20, 122–3, 126, 137, 141, 144, 146, 161–2, 170, 182, 189, 194–5, 231, 235, 247, 251–3, 257, 266, 276 Francis I, Emperor of Austria-Hungary 154–6 Frederick VI, King of Denmark  150 Frederick William III, King of Prussia  154, 156 Freire, General Manuel  6, 14–16, 98, 133 Galicia  265, 267–8 Gamba, Count Pietro  112, 124 García de La Huerta, Vicente  214 Garrick, David  221 Gazzaniga, Giuseppe  264 Genlis, Félicité de  143 Genoa  117, 120, 124 George III, King of Great Britain and Ireland  131, 148–50, 174 George IV, King of Great Britain and Ireland, 131–2, 174 Germany  76, 122, 134, 182, 210, 220, 251, 253, 272 Giriberts, Gerónimo  266 Grenville, Richard, Marquis of Buckingham  67–8, 74 Gluck, Christoph Willibald  221, 264 Godoy, Manuel  183 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von  217 Gower, John  264 Goya y Lucientes, Francisco de  231 Grammont, Michel de  235 Granada  164, 182, 272–3, 278–80, 282–4 Grand Tour  175, 251–3, 268 Grant, J. P. 67–8, 76 Greece  76, 94, 111–12, 114, 117, 119–27, 134, 167, 242, 276 Grey, Charles, Earl  68

324 Index Grosvenor, Robert, Marquis of Westminster  68, 189 Guiccioli, Alessandro, count  111–2 Teresa Guiccioli, Countess  111, 234 Gunpowder Plot  241 Hampden Clubs  130 Harrington, Earl  177 Heath, William  147 Hemans, Felicia  71–2, 75, 78–80, 86, 88, 167, 271–87 Híjar, Duke of  183 ‘Hispanicus’  80, 161 Hispanophilia  194, 203, 250, 256 Hobbes, Thomas  215, 221 Hobhouse, John Cam  123–4, 239 Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus 219–20 Holland, Lady see Vassall Fox, Elisabeth, Lady Holland Holland, Lord see Vassall Fox, Henry Richard, Lord Holland Holland House  86, 277 Holy Alliance  94, 137, 153, 155–7, 163 Holy Office see Inquisition Hope, General William Johnstone  32 Horner, Francis  68 Hostalric (Gerona)  39 Hunt, Henry ‘Orator’  130 Hunt, John  135–6, 148, 152, 158 Hunt, Leigh  44–5, 113, 135, 138, 148, 150 Hutchinson, Sara  218 Iberian Peninsula  4, 102, 109, 125, 153, 253, 268–9, 272 Ignatios, Bishop  123 Inquisition (Spanish)  62, 97–9, 113, 164, 183, 203, 265, 272–5, 280–5 infante Don Antonio see Borbón, Antonio Pascual de Ioannina 122

Italy  74–8, 81, 84–5, 88, 90, 112–14, 120, 125–6, 136, 140, 148, 157, 174–5, 181, 241, 251–3, 266, 276 Jaca (Huesca)  37 Jacobinism  48–9, 67, 69, 130, 210–11, 218, 227 Jarvis, Charles  258, 260, 262, 269 Jenkinson, Robert Banks, Lord Liverpool  10, 141 João VI, King of Portugal  256 Jones, Stephen  221 Kant, Immanuel  222, 224 Kean, Edmund  226 Keene, Sir Benjamin  177 Kinnaird, Douglas  112, 120–1, 124, 148, 210 Knight, Samuel  159–60 Kotzebue, August Friedrich Ferdinand von  210, 227 Lamb, Lady Caroline  73, 217 Glenarvon  73, 217 Lamb, George  210 Lameth, Charles M. F., Count  35–7, 40 Landon, Letitia Elizabeth  71–91, 283 Landor, Walter Savage  280 Lansdowne, Marquis  189 Laredo (Cantabria)  26, 28, 32, 34–6, 41 Lebrun, Jean-Baptiste  174, 176, 187 Leipzig 6 Leith, General Sir James  27 Lesage, Alain-René  249–50, 261–3, 269 Lewis, Matthew Gregory  242 Liberal Party  62, 70, 130 liberal revolutions Greece  111–12, 114, 119–27, 134, 167 Piedmont  114, 126, 134, 167 Portugal  120, 134, 156–7, 195 Russia  120, 134

Index Spain  71, 84–5, 87, 90, 93–5, 97–109, 110–27, 129–70, 191, 196, 246–7, 265, 275, 277 Two Sicilies  112, 134, 140 Liberal Triennium (Sp. ‘Trienio Liberal’) 80, 98, 104–7, 111, 117, 129, 133, 137–8, 196 ‘Liberales’, British  43–70, 105, 125, 136 liberals  8–14, 16, 19, 21, 48–9, 93, 97, 101, 108–9, 114, 122, 134, 145–6, 167, 195, 225, 232 Lisbon  178, 182, 205, 253–7, 260, 262–3, 265–8, 275–6 Livorno 122 Lobo, Eugenio Gerardo  266 Loeches (convent)  183 Lombardy 113 London Greek Committee  94, 111, 121, 123, 167 London Spanish Committee  167 Lope de Vega y Carpio, Félix  213 Louis XVIII, King of France  64, 117, 120, 146, 153, 156, 159–60 Louriotis (Luriotti), Andreas  122–4 Mackintosh, Sir James  67 Madrid  3, 5, 7–10, 13–4, 16–21, 40, 94–5, 97, 103, 112–3, 121–3, 125, 137–8, 153, 161, 165–6, 168, 182–3, 186, 190, 194, 242 ‘Maid of Saragoza, the’ see Zaragoza y Doménech, Agustina (‘Agustina de Aragón’) Maria I, Queen of Portugal  256 Marks, Lewis  153–5 Marseillaise, La (hymn)  143, 145 Martínez de la Rosa, Francisco  9 Mary I, Queen of England  241 Maturin, Charles Robert  209–11, 218, 221 Mavrokordatos, Alexandros  122, 125, 127 Mazzè (Piedmont)  114

325 Mendizábal, Gabriel de  29, 31 Metternich, Klemens  155, 246–7 Miguel I, King of Portugal  256 Milton, John  70, 76, 215, 219, 252 Milton, Lord ( Joseph Damer)  68 Mina see Espoz y Mina, Francisco Missolonghi 125 moderados (conservative-liberal)  137 Molière, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin  210, 221, 227, 233, 252, 264 Moncey, Bon Adrien Jeannott de  166 Moore, Sir John  276 Moore, Peter  210 Moore, Thomas  155–6, 232 Mora, José Joaquín de  76, 95–6, 162, 216, 318 Morales, Luis see Spanish school of painters Morillo, General Pablo de  143, 166 moriscos (Moors converted to Christianity) 284 Moscow 153 Motteux, Peter  258–60, 269 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus  219, 227, 247, 264 Murillo, Bartolomé Esteban see Spanish school of painters Murray, Sir George  40 Murray (II), John  145, 148, 217, 234, 247, 272 Murviedro (Valencia)  37, 39 Naples  83–4, 112–14, 126, 134, 140, 157, 187 Napoleon, Emperor of the French  3–8, 12, 18, 23–9, 36, 39, 41–51, 61, 78, 82, 89, 93–7, 108, 117–18, 120–2, 130, 134, 141, 146, 150, 154–5, 162–4, 173, 178, 181–3, 188–9, 193–6, 207, 242, 250–2, 265, 269, 273, 276, 280, 287

326 Index Neapolitan school of painters  187 Netherlands, the  150, 182 Neva River  155 Newport, Sir John  67 O’Donnell, General Enrique José  14, 166 Old Masters (Spanish)  173–91 Olivenza 18 One Hundred Thousand Sons of Saint Louis see Spain, 1823 French invasion Orientalism, Spanish  225, 271–87 Orléans, Duke of see Art collections Ostolaza, Fr Blas de  146 Owen, Robert  57–8 Owenson, Sydney  50–1 Paget, Henry see Anglesea, Marquis Paine, Thomas  130 Palermo 140 Pamplona  6, 32, 94 Pardoe, Julia  254 Paris  8, 10, 13–14, 18, 39, 50–1, 94, 143, 164, 187 parliamentary reform  52–3, 55, 59, 63, 69 Pasha, Ali  122 Peace, Prince of, see Godoy, Manuel Pedro IV, King of Portugal  256 Pelham, Thomas  250 Peninsular War  3–6, 24–6, 30, 39, 41, 46, 60, 76–80, 82, 84, 87, 89, 93, 97, 102, 104, 108, 118, 121, 142, 152, 159, 173, 176–8, 190, 193, 196, 198, 201–4, 207, 223, 242–3, 246–7, 249, 255, 264–5, 268–9, 272, 277 Peñíscola (Valencia)  4, 37, 39 Pepe, Guglielmo  134, 140 Percy, Thomas  273, 284 Pérez de Hita, Ginés  273, 282–4, 286 Peterloo Massacre  98, 129–33, 135

‘Petticoat Maker’ see Ferdinand VII, King of Spain Philiki Etairia (secret society)  122 Philip II, King of Spain  241, 280, 284 Pisa  113–14, 122–3 Ponz, Antonio  181 Pope, Alexander  145, 235–6 Portugal  3, 6, 8, 18, 60, 62, 79, 101, 193–4, 202, 205, 231, 249–50, 253–6, 262, 264, 266, 268–9, 272, 275 Prince Regent see George IV, King of Great Britain and Ireland Prussia  4, 23, 137, 153–4, 277 Pyrenees  37, 78, 83, 120 Queipo de Llano, José María see Toreno, Count Quevedo, Francisco de  138, 151–2, 169 Quillinan, Dorothy  254 Quintana, Manuel José de  9 Quintuple Alliance see Holy Alliance Racine, Jean-Baptiste  210 radical press  44, 98, 129–70, 132 radicalism  45, 57–8, 130 Rae, Alexander  210–1, 227 Ravenna  111–14, 118 Regency Era (British)  73, 75, 173–91, 269 Ribera, Diego de, Spagnoletto see Spanish school of painters Rickman, John  61 Riego, Rafael del  97–8, 105, 107, 109, 115, 129, 132–4, 137–9, 143, 147, 149, 167–8, 170, 196 Roberts, Emma  76 Robinson, Henry Crabb  216 Rodríguez de los Ríos Ledesma y Bernal, family see Santiago, Marquis of Roland, Mme Jeanne Manon (née MarieJeane Philippon)  51, 64 Romilly, Sir Samuel  67–8 Ronda (Andalucia)  259, 265

Index Rosimond, Claude de La Rose  215 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques  233–5, 244, 252, 275 Royal Academy (London)  177 Russell, Lord John  277 Russia  4, 23, 77, 120, 134, 137, 153, 155, 231, 247, 277 St Pée sur Nivelle  6 St Peter’s Fields, Manchester see Peterloo Massacre sales catalogues  187–8 Salneuve, Jean Felix  165 San Carlos, Duke of  10–12, 14–15, 17–18, 28 San Fernando de Figueras (Gerona)  39 San Llorente, Juan José  35–6 San Miguel see Fernández de San Miguel y Valledor, Evaristo ‘sanitary cordon’ (Fr. ‘cordon sanitaire’)  144, 169 Santander  4, 24–5, 27–8, 34, 36, 40–1 Santiago, Marquis de see Art collections Santoña (Cantabria)  4, 23–41 Saragossa (Sp. Zaragoza)  94, 104, 158, 274, 276, 280, 286 satire  74, 119, 135, 145, 215, 221, 223 caricature 155 poetry  146, 150–1, 155, 159 Savenay (France)  65 Scott, Honoria  82 Scott, Sir Walter  71, 73, 79–80, 252, 277, 280–1 Sébastiani, General Horace François Bastien  183, 190 sentimentality  74, 80, 87, 91, 210, 240, 245, 271, 280, 282, 284–5 Seu d’Urgell  137 Seville  175, 181–2, 190, 207, 213, 229–32, 236–8, 240, 243–8, 265, 276 Schiller, Friedrich  210, 272–3

327 Schlegel, August Wilhelm  212, 214–15, 219, 223–4 Shadwell, Thomas  213–16, 220–2, 227, 243 Shakespeare, William  76, 197, 210, 212, 215, 225, 252 Shelley, Lady Frances  190 Shelley, Mary  75, 86, 111–27 Shelley, Percy Bysshe  44, 111–27, 136, 148, 163, 166, 217, 241–2 Shelton, Thomas  258–60 Sherer, Moyle  265, 269 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley  244 Sidmouth, Lord (Henry Addington)  69 Sismondi, Jean Charles Léonard de  214, 219 ‘Six Acts’  131, 135 Smith, William (MP)  56, 63 Smollett, Tobias  258, 260–1, 263 Sotheby’s (auction house)  188 Soult, General Jean de Dieu  36, 39–40 Southey, Robert  43–70, 73, 75, 79, 145, 148, 214, 217, 220, 225, 245, 271–2, 274–6, 280–1, 285–6 Spain 1808 French invasion  82, 108, 161–2, 207, 246 1809–1814 Regency  7, 9, 195 1812 Constitution (Cádiz Constitution) see constitutions 1823 French invasion  102, 107, 123, 138, 144–5, 156–8, 161–3, 196 absolutist Regency  137, 161, 256 Cortes  7, 9, 12, 14, 17, 21, 22, 59, 62, 71, 80–1, 84, 86–7, 95, 98, 103, 107, 125, 156, 224, 256 imaginary  84, 90, 209 national heritage  178, 191 Spanish America  77, 81, 108, 116, 143, 193, 224, 225, 274–7 Spanish school of painters  173–91

328 Index Stäel, Madame Germaine de  71, 91, 252 Stamp Act  131 Stewart, Robert, Viscount Castlereagh  8, 10–11, 13–14, 16–19, 48, 119 Stirling, William  188 Stuart, Charles  16, 19 Suchet, Louis-Gabriel  40 Sullivan-Bart, Sir Henry  36–7 Sweden 4 Téllez, Fray Gabriel see ‘Tirso de Molina’ Theotokópoulos, Doménicos see El Greco ‘Tirso de Molina’  213, 243, 246, 263 ‘Thomas Brown the Younger’ see Moore, Thomas Thomson, James  146 Thurtell, John  166–7 Toreno, Count  9, 37, 41 Tortosa (Tarragona)  37, 39 Tory  21, 22, 61, 69, 86, 91, 119, 130, 141, 243, 278, 281 Toulouse  3, 10, 13–14, 36, 39–40 translations  47, 76, 95, 97, 121–2, 142, 152, 156, 159, 168, 249, 258–61, 263, 269, 275, 284 Tuscany  113–14, 275 Twiss, Richard  175 ‘ultra-liberals’  49, 53, 59, 68, 207, 225 ‘ultra-royalists’  3, 21, 49–50, 137 United States of America  18, 77, 99, 116, 121, 191, 224 utopianism  57, 130 Valençay Castle 146 Treaty of  7, 33 Valencia  8–10, 14, 97, 182, 272–3, 278, 281–2 Vassall Fox, Elisabeth, Lady Holland  183, 277

Vassall Fox, Henry Richard, Lord Holland  67, 96, 122, 277 Vega, Andrés Ángel de la  12, 21 Velázquez, Diego de see Spanish school of painters Vélez de Guevara, Luis  262–3 Verona, Congress of  109, 117, 119, 122, 137, 153–5, 196 Vienna, Congress of  117, 195 Villèle, Joseph de  160 Vitoria  28, 32 Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet  242, 252 Wallis, George Augustus  173, 178, 180–5, 187–91 Walpole, Sir Robert  177 War in the Vendée (Fr. ‘Guerre de Vendée’) 64–5 Waterloo, battle of  45–6, 141, 146, 152, 246 Weare, William  166 Wellesley, Arthur see Wellington, Duke of Wellesley, Henry  3, 7–11, 13–14 Wellington, Duke of  3–27, 30–3, 36–41, 119, 121, 141–2, 145–6, 150, 152–4, 156, 169, 177, 190, 276–7 see also art collections Wells, John  33, 35 Whig  45–6, 63, 67, 69, 85–6, 122–3, 193, 199, 201, 243, 250 Whitbread, Samuel  67, 210 William I, King of the Netherlands  150 Wollstonecraft, Mary  51 Wordsworth, William  73, 91, 238–9, 245, 273 Wynn, Charles  62 Zaragoza y Doménech, Agustina (‘Agustina de Aragón’)  286 Zegries [Sp. Zegríes]  282–3 Zurbarán, Francisco de see Spanish school of painters

CULTURAL HISTORY AND LITERARY IMAGINATION EDITED BY CHRISTIAN J. EMDEN & DAVID MIDGLEY EDITORIAL BOARD: RODRIGO CACHO, SARAH COLVIN, KENNETH LOISELLE AND HEATHER WEBB This series promotes critical inquiry into the relationship between the literary imagination and its cultural, intellectual or political contexts. The series encourages the investigation of the role of the literary imagination in cultural history and the interpretation of cultural history through literature, visual culture and the performing arts. Contributions of a comparative or interdisciplinary nature are particularly welcome. Individual volumes might, for example, be concerned with any of the following: •

The mediation of cultural and historical memory,

•

The material conditions of particular cultural manifestations,

•

The construction of cultural and political meaning,

•

Intellectual culture and the impact of scientific thought,

•

The methodology of cultural inquiry,

• Intermediality, •

Intercultural relations and practices.

Acceptance is subject to advice from our editorial board, and all proposals and manuscripts undergo a rigorous peer review assessment prior to publication. The usual language of publication is English, but proposals in the other languages shown below will also be considered.

For French studies, contact Kenneth Loiselle



For German studies, contact Sarah Colvin



For Hispanic studies, contact Rodrigo Cacho



For Italian studies, contact Heather Webb

Vol. 1 Christian Emden & David Midgley (eds): Cultural Memory and Historical Consciousness in the German-Speaking World Since 1500. Papers from the ­Conference ‘The Fragile Tradition’, Cambridge 2002. Vol. 1. 316 pp., 2004. ISBN 3-03910-160-9 / US-ISBN 0-8204-6970-X Vol. 2 Christian Emden & David Midgley (eds): German Literature, History and the Nation. Papers from the ­ Conference ‘The Fragile Tradition’, Cambridge 2002. Vol. 2. 393 pp., 2004. ISBN 3-03910-169-2 / US-ISBN 0-8204-6979-3 Vol. 3 Christian Emden & David Midgley (eds): Science, Technology and the German Cultural Imagination. Papers from the C ­ onference ‘The Fragile Tradition’, C ­ ambridge 2002. Vol. 3. 319 pp., 2005. ISBN 3-03910-170-6 / US-ISBN 0-8204-6980-7 Vol. 4 Anthony Fothergill: Secret Sharers. Joseph Conrad’s Cultural Reception in Germany. 274 pp., 2006. ISBN 3-03910-271-0 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7200-X Vol. 5 Silke Arnold-de Simine (ed.): Memory Traces. 1989 and the Question of German Cultural Identity. 343 pp., 2005. ISBN 3-03910-297-4 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7223-9 Vol. 6 Renata Tyszczuk: In Hope of a Better Age. Stanislas Leszczynski in Lorraine 1737-1766. 410 pp., 2007. ISBN 978-3-03910-324-9 Vol. 7 Christian Emden, Catherine Keen & David Midgley (eds): Imagining the City, Volume 1. The Art of Urban Living. 344 pp., 2006. ISBN 3-03910-532-9 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7536-X Vol. 8 Christian Emden, Catherine Keen & David Midgley (eds): Imagining the City, Volume 2. The Politics of Urban Space. 383 pp., 2006. ISBN 3-03910-533-7 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7537-8 Vol. 9 Christian J. Emden and Gabriele Rippl (eds): ImageScapes. Studies in Intermediality. 289 pp., 2010. ISBN 978-3-03910-573-1 Vol. 10 Alasdair King: Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Writing, Media, Democracy. 357 pp., 2007. ISBN 978-3-03910-902-9 Vol. 11 Ulrike Zitzlsperger: ZeitGeschichten: Die Berliner Übergangsjahre. Zur Verortung der Stadt nach der Mauer. 241 pp., 2007. ISBN 978-3-03911-087-2

Vol. 12 Alexandra Kolb: Performing Femininity. Dance and Literature in German Modernism. 330pp., 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-351-4 Vol. 13 Carlo Salzani: Constellations of Reading. Walter Benjamin in Figures of Actuality. 388pp., 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-860-1 Vol. 14 Monique Rinere: Transformations of the German Novel. Simplicissimus in Eighteenth-Century Adaptations. 273pp., 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-896-0 Vol. 15 Katharina Hall and Kathryn N. Jones (eds): Constructions of Conflict. Transmitting Memories of the Past in European Historiography, Culture and Media. 282pp., 2011. ISBN 978-3-03911-923-3 Vol. 16 Ingo Cornils and Sarah Waters (eds): Memories of 1968. International Perspectives. 396pp., 2010. ISBN 978-3-03911-931-8 Vol. 17 Anna O’ Driscoll: Constructions of Melancholy in Contemporary German and Austrian Literature. 263pp., 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-0733-8 Vol. 18 Martin Modlinger and Philipp Sonntag (eds): Other People’s Pain. Narratives of Trauma and the Question of Ethics. 252pp., 2011. ISBN 978-3-0343-0260-9 Vol. 19 Ian Cooper and Bernhard F. Malkmus (eds): Dialectic and Paradox. Configurations of the Third in Modernity. 265pp., 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-0714-7 Vol. 20 Kristina Mendicino and Betiel Wasihun (eds): Playing False. Representations of Betrayal. 355pp., 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-0867-0 Vol. 21 Guy Tourlamain: Völkisch Writers and National Socialism. A Study of Right-Wing Political Culture in Germany, 1890–1960. 394pp., 2014. ISBN 978-3-03911-958-5 Vol. 22 Ricarda Vidal and Ingo Cornils (eds): Alternative Worlds. Blue-Sky Thinking since 1900. 343pp., 2015. ISBN 978-3-0343-1787-0

Vol. 23 Henriette Steiner and Kristin Veel (eds): Invisibility Studies. Surveillance, Transparency and the Hidden in Contemporary Culture. 388pp., 2015. ISBN 978-3-0343-0985-1 Vol. 24 Bernd Fischer and May Mergenthaler (eds): Cultural Transformations of the Public Sphere. Contemporary and Historical Perspectives. 349pp., 2015. ISBN 978-3-0343-0991-2 Vol. 25 Marjorie Gehrhardt: The Men with Broken Faces. Gueules Cassées of the First World War. 309pp., 2015. ISBN 978-3-0343-1869-3 Vol. 26 David Walton and Juan A. Suárez (eds): Contemporary Writing and the Politics of Space. Borders, Networks, Escape Lines. 302pp., 2017. ISBN 978-3-0343-2205-8 Vol. 27 Robert Craig and Ina Linge (eds): Biological Discourses. The Language of Science and Literature Around 1900. 448pp., 2017. ISBN 978-1-906165-78-9 Vol. 28 Rebecca Waese: When Novels Perform History. Dramatizing the Past in Australian and Canadian Literature. 272pp., 2017. ISBN 978-1-906165-84-0 Vol. 29 Udith Dematagoda: Vladimir Nabokov and the Ideological Aesthetic. A Study of his Novels and Plays, 1926–1939. 222pp., 2017. ISBN 978-1-78707-289-3 Vol. 30 Bernard Beatty and Alicia Laspra-Rodríguez (eds): Romanticism, Reaction and Revolution: British Views on Spain, 1814–1823. 342pp., 2019. ISBN 978-3-0343-2249-2