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Political Condition of Spain—Ford as a Traveller—Life at Seville—Journey to Madrid by Diligence—Don Quixote’s Country—Return to Seville

On September 15th, 1830, Richard Ford wrote from London to his friend Henry Unwin Addington, the British Plenipotentiary at Madrid, announcing his intention to winter in Spain. The letter was sent by the hand of Mr. Wetherell, who had been encouraged by the Spanish Government to set up a tannery at Seville. He imported workmen and machinery, and established his premises in the suppressed Jesuit convent of San Diego. But the Government proved faithless, its promises were unfulfilled, the convent was taken from him, and the unfortunate Wetherell, with many of his compatriots, lies buried in the garden near the dismantled tannery.

Cea Bermudez, whose opinion Ford quotes, was at that time the Spanish Ambassador in England. As Prime Minister under Ferdinand VII. he had proved too Liberal for his master (1825); so at a later period (1832-3) he showed himself, in the same capacity, too Conservative for Queen Christina.

London, September 15 [1830].

Dear Addington,

Mr. Wetherell will take this to Madrid, on his way to Seville, where I am shortly bound myself on account of Mrs. Ford’s health. She is condemned to spend a winter or two in a warm climate, and we have decided on the south of Spain for this year. We shall sail very soon, as a friend of mine, Captain Shirreff, who is appointed Port-admiral at Gibraltar, gives us a passage out.

News we have none, as grass is growing in the deserted streets of London; other news are not safely sent por la delicadeza de las circunstancias politicas. But with them you are well acquainted by the newspapers, which, if you could contrive occasionally to send to me confidentially, and not to be shown, when at Seville, would be the greatest favour our King’s representative could show to one of his humble subjects on his travels.

I am in hopes all will be quiet in Spain. Cea Bermudez thinks so, and hinted to Lord Dudley, who told me, that they were going to do everything that could be fairly expected by the Liberals. I am praying the Queen may produce a son.

I have seen much here of the Consul at Malaga, Mr. Mark; if I am to believe him, Malaga is a second Paradise. The Duke of Wellington says Granada is charming; he has given us a letter to O’Lawlor, who manages his property at Soto de Roma. Washington Irving tells us we shall be able to be lodged in the Alhambra, as he was, which will tempt me to pass next summer there.

It is a serious undertaking to travel into Spain with three children and four women, and a great bore to break up my establishment here, but it must be done.

S[u] S[eguro] S[ervidor],

Richard Ford.

Political conditions, at the time when Richard Ford landed in Spain with his wife and children, threatened the outbreak of civil war. In 1812 the Cortes, sitting at Cadiz, then almost the only spot which was not occupied by a foreign force, had promulgated the forms and phrases of parliamentary government. Few praised, few blamed the new Constitution, which was foreign in spirit and founded on French models; few asked the reason why Plaza de la Constitucion was inscribed on the principal squares. To the mass of the Spanish people, constitutions were parchment unrealities. Caring less for theories of government than for the just administration of existing laws, they gained from the action of the Cortes nothing that they desired. Their deepest convictions were loyalty to the Church and to the Crown, and to these prejudices the Constitution only opposed definitions. Every class that suffered by the proposed reforms was mistrustful, if not hostile. The clergy, the functionaries, the nobles, were either outraged in their opinions, or attacked in their interests, or curtailed of their authority.

When Ferdinand VII. returned to power in March 1814, he pressed his advantage home. A restoration is often worse than a revolution. It was so in Spain. Ferdinand rejected the Constitution, removed the restrictions on his despotism, and restored the Inquisition. But he had gone too far. Don Rafael del Riego stirred to rebellion the ill-paid troops assembled on the Isla de Leon for the unpopular expedition to South America. El Himno de Riego, the Marseillaise of Spain, written by Evaristo San-Miguel and composed by La Huerta, caught the ears of the people; even the Tragala, or Ça ira of Spanish revolutionists, was sung in Madrid, and from 1820 to 1823 the Constitution was forced upon the King. But with the help of France he had regained his despotic authority, and used it with blind ferocity.

In 1829 Ferdinand, till then childless, had married as his fourth wife, Christina of Naples. The expected birth of a child alarmed the retrograde party of extreme clericals and ultra-royalists which had rallied round the King’s brother and presumptive heir, Don Carlos. At the same time, the Constitutionalists or Liberals, encouraged by the French Revolution of 1830, returned from exile, or emerged from their hiding-places, and risings in favour of political reform agitated the North and the South of Spain. The general unrest was increased by the Civil War in Portugal, where the Liberal adherents of Maria da Gloria, the daughter of Pedro IV., waged war against the Absolutists who supported her uncle Dom Miguel.

Threatened on the one side by reactionary tendencies, and on the other by political innovations, the weak and bankrupt Government rested securely on the torpor of the Spanish people. With all his faults, Ferdinand, fat, good-natured, jocose in a ribald fashion, affecting the national dress, feeding on puchero, an eager sportsman, devoted to smoking his thick Havana cigars, and to his beautiful queen, had few personal enemies. He knew the temper of his country well. He did nothing, and it was the interest of neither party to precipitate the impending crisis. He was “the cork in the beer bottle,” as he said himself, and only when he was “gone, would the beer foam over.” On October 10th, 1830, his daughter Isabella was born. In her favour the Salic law of succession was set aside. Don Carlos retired to Portugal, and the Cortes swore to Isabella the oath of allegiance as Princess of the Asturias and heiress to the throne. Three months later (September 29th, 1833), Ferdinand died. Isabella was proclaimed Queen, under the guardianship of her mother, Doña Christina. Civil war at once broke out, the Liberals supporting Christina, and the Carlists fighting under the standard of legitimacy.

But, apart from disturbed political conditions, the moment at which Ford visited the country was exceptionally favourable. Entrenched behind the Pyrenees, isolated from the rest of Europe, Spain, in lazy pride, watched from her Castle of Indolence the progress of other nations. Few travellers crossed her borders. Travelling carriages were unknown luxuries; it was only possible to post from Irun to Madrid. The system of passports and police surveillance was vexatious. Except on the main lines, the inns were bad, the by-roads were almost impassable for wheeled carriages, the country was infested with robbers, and all these obstacles were magnified by literary travellers. Thus Spain, repelling intercourse with other nations, was thrown back upon herself. Yet this isolation did not unite the separate provinces in any community of national feeling. The contrary was the case. Bound together in provincial clanship, the inhabitants knew themselves and their neighbours, not as Spaniards, but as Arragonese or Castilians, Andalusians or Catalans. The climate, soil, and products of the barren dusty centre did not present more striking variations from those of the rich luxuriant south than did the distinctive dress, language, customs, and habits of the natives of the respective provinces. Here were the sandals, the wide breeches, the bright sash, the many-coloured plaid, the gay handkerchief of the half-oriental Valencian; here the red cap of the Catalan, trousered to the armpits; here the broad-brimmed hat, figured velvet waistcoat, richly worked shirt, and embroidered gaiters of the Leonese; here the filigree buttons, silver tags and tassels which studded the jacket of the Andalusian dandy, who starved for weeks on a crust and onion that he might glitter in a gay costume, for a few hours on a saint’s day, under his blue sky and brilliant sun. And everywhere, in the foreground of every rural scene, stood the ass, the companion and the helpmate of the Spanish peasant.

Distinctions of dress were but the outward expression of a variety of deeper differences. To the artist, the historian, the sportsman, and the antiquary,—to the student of dialects, the observer of manners and customs, the lover of art, the man of sentiment, Spain in 1830 offered an enchanting field, an almost untrodden Paradise. In Ford all these interests were combined, not merely as tastes, but as enthusiasms. He revelled in the country and its people with the unflagging zest of his richly varied sympathies. He learned to speak the Spanish of the place in which he happened to be, and of the people with whom he chanced to be talking. The inveterate exclusiveness of the aristocracy, the ingrained mistrust of the lower orders, the professional suspicion of the bandit or the smuggler broke down before the charm of his manners and appearance. Quick to observe, and prompt to adopt, the customs, ceremonies, and courtesies of Spanish society, he found the houses of the grandees at his disposal. Rural Dogberries, jealous of their authority, who could not be driven by rods of iron, submitted to be led by the silken thread of his civility. José Maria, the bandit King of Andalusia, made him free of his country, and over his wide district Ford rode for miles, if not by his side, at least under his personal protection. Even the smuggler, by the fireside of a country inn, laid aside his blunderbuss, and, over a bottle of wine and a cigar, gave him his confidence. He was, in fact, a born traveller. If necessary, he was master of every intonation with which the mule driver of La Mancha can pronounce the national oath. But with him these occasions were rare. He knew that money made the mare and the driver to go, and that a joke, a proverb, or a cigar, was the best oil for reluctant wheels. Travelling mainly on horseback, he was independent of roads. Mounted on “Jaca Cordovese,” threading his way by bridle-paths and goat-tracks, he penetrated to the most inaccessible of the towns which were plastered like martins’ nests against the tawny rocks of Spain. Never looking for five feet in a cat, or expecting more from Spanish inns than they could offer, he encountered every inconvenience with good temper, and accumulated in his wanderings the mass of insight, incident, and adventure, which he stored in his note-books and embodied in his Handbook to Spain.

Ford’s second letter to Addington (November 27th, 1830) announces his arrival, and is dated from “Plazuela San Isidoro, No. 11, Seville,”—the Athens and the Capua of Spain. The house which he occupied seems to have belonged to the Mr. Hall Standish who left to Louis Philippe the fine collection of Spanish pictures which were formerly deposited in the Musée Standish at the Louvre.

We are all safely arrived at Seville, in spite of the Bay of Biscay, and all the dangers and perils

JACA CORDOVESE.

[To face p. 9.

“I [R. F. rode more than 2000 miles on this Horse.”]

supposed to abound in this quiet country by the good people in England. We had rather a long passage—twenty days—but were in a good ship with a good captain, an old friend of mine, who is now employed in cleaning that Augean Stable of jobs and mismanagement—the Bay of Gibraltar. We were as comfortable as the wretched nature of ships will allow of; man-cook, doctor, cow, sheep, and chickens contributed thereunto.

We were right glad to be landed at the Rock, and spent eight or ten days there very agreeably in seeing the lions and monkeys, guns and garrisons, and in going to balls and batteries. When I come to Madrid, I will let you into a few of the secrets I heard at the Rock. The old general[1] and his lady (an old friend of my mother’s) were very civil and good-natured to us. We found their house very agreeable. Having clambered all over the Rock, we began to feel the epidemic under which the garrison labours, namely, bore, and the feeling of being shut up on so small a space. We therefore took an English brig and proceeded to Cadiz.

By the way, before you leave Spain, you should see the Straits of Gibraltar. I never yet have seen any scenery to equal the African coast, so bold and mountainous. Cadiz is charming, clean and tidy, abounding in all good things, the result of a free trade,[2] if you and the Spaniards would but think so. Thence in the steamer to Seville, where we are finally settled in an excellent house which I have taken of Mr. Hall Standish. It has the advantages of a garden, a fireplace, and a southern exposure, which make it perfectly warm; the climate delicious, everybody very civil.

We have brought letters to all the governors and grandees, and one from a gentleman who was of some consequence, the Duke of Wellington, to his old friend, the Marquis de las Amarillas, the beau idéal of a Spanish caballero.[3] We intend spending the winter here.

I am in treaty for a grande chasse near this place, where the assistente goes, and also am about to take the best box at the theatre. You will think I have discovered a mine of gold; but all this may be done for much less than the weekly bills in London, and I hope to save at least half my income.

Pray consider this house at your disposal if ever you may be inclined to come to Seville; I think we shall be able to make you comfortable.

At Seville Ford remained for the next six months. There he laid the foundations of his unrivalled knowledge of Spanish life. There, sketchbook in hand, he studied the various styles of architecture, both ecclesiastical and civil, of which the city was an epitome, sketching the Prout-like subjects which every turn of the labyrinthine streets afforded. There he studied the ceremonial, origin, and meaning of the religious functions, nowhere more magnificent, and especially of the quaint pageants of Holy Week. He learnt by heart the pictures in the cathedral, the churches, the university, the museum, the private galleries, and picked up for himself not a few of the treasures of Spanish art. Under the crumbling battlements and long arches of the aqueduct at the Plaza de la Carne he watched the Easter sales of paschal lambs, reminded of Murillo by living originals, as the children led off their lambs decorated with ribbons, or as shepherds strode by, holding the animals by the four legs so as to form a tippet round their necks. With much gossip and cigar-smoking he ransacked the shop of the Greek Dionysio, the tall, gaunt bookseller in the Calle de Genoa, for rare volumes, or chaffered with the jewellers in the arcades of the Plaza for Damascene filigree and cinque-cento work, or bargained at the weekly markets of La Feria among the piled-up stalls of fish, fruit, flesh and fowl. At Seville he learned the useful art of ridding himself of the importunity of beggars. There also he masqueraded at the carnivals, flirted with the Andalusian beauties in the Plaza del Duque, and mastered, in the best of schools, the intricacies of the art of bull-fighting. At the fair of Mairena he noted every detail of the glittering dresses of the majos, the dandies who there displayed their finest dresses and feats of horsemanship. He revelled in the colours and costumes, the grouping and attitudes of the washerwomen, who screamed and chattered in the Corral del Conde. He followed with the keenest interest every step in the national bolero at the theatre, every movement of the wilder saraband, danced to the accompaniment of castanets and tambourines by the gipsies in the suburb of Los Humeros. Among the horse-dealers, jockeys, and cattle-dealers, who thronged the Alameda Vieja, he had many friends, and from them probably learned some of the secrets of horse-keeping which he knew to perfection. For his pencil he found endless subjects on the sunny flats beyond the Moorish walls in the groups of idlers, who, under the vine trellises, played cards the livelong day for wine or love or coppers; or in the suburb of La Macarena, the home of the agricultural labourer, where the women, clad in the rainbow rags of picturesque poverty, and the naked urchins, rich in every variety of brown and yellow, gathered in front of their hovels behind their carts and implements and animals.

Of society in Seville he saw as much as there was to be seen. Writing to Addington in November or December 1830, he says:

This place is dull enough for people inclined to balls and dinners; but we are very well pleased. The climate delicious beyond description, open doors and windows, with the sun streaming in. We have had a good deal of rain, but no cold. I have a good fireplace in my sitting-room, which is a rarity here, and indeed is not much wanted. The habits of the natives are very unsocial, never meeting in each other’s houses, and only going to the theatre Thursdays and Mondays. Politics, and a want of money, contribute much to this, and, more, their natural indolence and love of hugger-muggery at home in their shawls and over the Brasero. Their customs are droll and inconvenient. Nothing more so than that of visiting in grand costume, white gloves and necklaces, from 12 to 2; then they dine, and what they do afterwards, God knows. The day is pretty well consumed in doing nothing. However, we dine at half-past 5, and contrive to get a morning for walking, sketching, reading, etc.

The principal people are very civil, especially the Assistente, Arjona, and a General Giron, Marquis of Amarillas, a friend of the Duke of Wellington. They talk politics to me; but that is a subject nobody touches on here.

As far as I can see, mixing much with bankers, canonigos, and grandees, there is no appearance whatever of anything unpleasant, and I am sure at Cadiz still less; either they do not talk about these matters, or do not care. I am inclined to think the latter. I saw a captain of an English brig yesterday, twelve days from Plymouth, who says that everything is quite quiet in the south-west part of England—no burnings or meetings.

I have had no news yet from my Whig friends in London. Now would be the time for me to be looking out for something; but there are ten Pigs no doubt for every Teat, and the Whigs are much more hungry from long abstinence than the Tories who have been sucking away this fifty years. I will venture to opine that they will not meddle with you. Lord Palmerston is a great friend of Lord Dudley’s and they were in office together, and I am sure Lord D. is a good friend of yours. I hope they won’t for all sorts of reasons, and a selfish one of looking forward to paying you a visit at Madrid next April.

I am going on Sunday to the Coto del Rey for a week’s shooting, the Assistente having ordered an officer to go with me and see that I have the best of it and good lodgings in the Palacio.

Mr. Williams[4] has a very fine collection of pictures of the Spanish school, which I own disappoints me, a sort of jumble of Rubens and Carlo Maratti. However, I have not seen much yet.

My wife is better already, and the children in a wonderful state of health; we positively live in the open air; the air is good, the water better, and the bread superlative. I don’t see what they want here except money, which is after all something, but nothing to so rich a man as your very humble servant is in Seville.

A later letter (January 1st, 1831) is in the same strain:—

Many thanks for the Galignanis, always most acceptable, whether early or late, many or few. One can’t expect in Spain to keep pace with the march of intellect and English mail. I trust civilisation will be long getting in here, for it is now an original Peculiar People, potted for six centuries, as was well said. Luckily the robbers and roads will stop much advance of improvement. I have too much respect for Ambassadors and their privileges to presume to expect anything out of the way. La forme, il faut s’y tenir. If you can get me a Galignani, well; if not, well. I have a great mind to write to Paris at once, as I see they never touch any of my letters. If they did I should go to Arjona, who is a great friend of mine.

I am just returned from a shooting excursion at the Coto del Rey, where he sent me, with a captain to attend on me; a magnificent sporting country and full of woodcocks.

We go on in our humdrum manner, for there is absolutely no society whatever; dinners of course not, but not even a Tertulia [“at home” or Conversazione]. They meet twice a week at the theatre. The great bore is the visiting for all the fine ladies (what would Lʸ. Jersey or Lʸ. Cowper think of them?). They have condescended to quit their braseros and call on my wife, partly to see the strange monster they conceive her to be, and partly to show their laces, white gloves, and trinkets. They call about 2 o’clock, dressed out for a ball, with fans, and all their wardrobe on their back; visits interminable. Some bring Mr. Fernando White as their dragoman, which is rather droll, as his English is infinitely less intelligible than their Spanish. Then we return the visits, my wife in mantilla and white gloves, according to etiquette. What a contrast between these fine ladies at home and abroad! No Cinderella changes more rapidly. There they are, squatting over their brasero, unwashed, undressed, cold and shivering, and uncomfortable, wrapped up in a shawl in their great barnlike, unfurnished houses; a matted rush and a few chairs the inventory of their chattels. A book is a thing I have not yet set eyes on, nor anything which indicates the possession of those damnable, heretical accomplishments, reading and writing. They are very civil and gracious, and everything is at our disposition, especially as they see we have eyes, hands, and faces, like other mortals. Of course I am considered to be a milor, and am known by the name of the Don Ricardo.

We have had many letters from England; all seem very uncomfortable there about the way things are going on. After all, it will turn out, as I said in England, the only place to be quiet in is Spain. Lady Jersey is broken-hearted; Lady Lyndhurst ruined,—they have just £1200 a year, which won’t pay her coiffeur. Lord Lyndhurst[5] expected to the last to have been Chancellor; Lords Carnarvon, Dudley, and Radnor indignant. The new Ministry thought to be very Grey, too much so.[6] They will cut down all the good things, till, as old Tierney said, it will be a losing concern to come in. Lord Castlereagh used to say, in the good old times, in the dark days of Nicolas, that “the cake was not then too large for the wholesome aliment of the constitution.”

Great doings in the cathedrals, churches, and convents: much bell-ringing, processions, great consumption of incense, torches, and tapers. I wonder how the lower orders manage to keep themselves, as every day seems to be a holiday. The most active branch of commerce is the sale of the water of the Alameda, which seems to agree with the Sevillian as well as it would with a trout.

Everything appears to me to be in a state of profound repose, all dead and still.

An enthusiastic sportsman, Ford found that the neighbourhood swarmed with game—with partridges, hares, rabbits, quail, curlew, and plover. Snipe and woodcock abounded. Within a mile from Seville, he could with ease kill ten couple of snipe in a morning: in every half-acre copse he counted on flushing five or six woodcock. Behind a pasteboard horse, or concealed in a country cart, he stalked the bustards drawn up in long lines on the plains that bordered the Guadalquivir. The Coto del Rey, a royal preserve about thirty miles from Seville, abounded not only with the smaller game of the country, but also deer and wild boars. With most of the smaller winged game he had the field to himself, and his skill, armed with a double-barrelled Purdey, and using detonators, seemed to the countrymen almost demoniacal. The natives themselves rarely fired at game in motion, partly because ammunition was extravagantly dear, partly because, with their flint and steel guns, a quarter of a minute elapsed between pulling the trigger and the discharge of the piece. Spaniards shot rather for the pot than for sport. In partridge shooting decoys were used, and the birds killed on the ground. Hares were shot in cleared runs or on their forms, and rabbits as they paused in creeping to the edges of woods.

In the occupations and amusements which Seville and its neighbourhood afforded, Ford passed his time agreeably enough. Though not yet the vehement Tory that he became in later life, he congratulated himself on having left England, then in the throes of Parliamentary Reform. Nor was he alone in his gloomy forebodings. Even the prospects of Spain seemed to him, by comparison, peaceful. Yet already revolutionary movements were on foot within his immediate neighbourhood. In his next three letters from Seville (February 2nd; February, undated; March 25th, 1831), he refers to the attempts of General Torrijos to stir up a Liberal rising in Andalusia, their failure, and their punishment.

From his safe refuge at Gibraltar, Torrijos had issued a proclamation, calling on the Spanish people to rise against the tyranny of the Government. On January 24th, 1831, he followed up this manifesto by landing near Algeciras with two hundred followers. Confronted by superior numbers, he was compelled to re-embark for Gibraltar. Six weeks later, March 3rd, 1831, his emissaries won over six hundred of the sailors and soldiers quartered at Cadiz. A riot took place: the Governor, Oliver y Hierro, was killed; the movement threatened to become general. But the rising was soon quelled. The mutineers endeavoured to join Manzanares in the hills round Ronda. On their march they were attacked by Quesada, the Captain-General of Andalusia, at Vejer, a Moorish town scrambling up the rocky cliffs from the river Barbate, sixteen miles from Cadiz. “Prodigies of valour” were performed by the royalist troops, whose losses were one man killed, two wounded, and two bruised. The rebels were defeated. A few escaped to the coast; the majority were either killed with arms in their hands or as prisoners. The followers of Manzanares had dwindled to twenty men; Manzanares himself was murdered by a goatherd, and his companions were spared at Quesada’s request. The only results of these badly planned invasions were the creation of courts martial, the multiplication of spies, wholesale executions, and the establishment of a reign of terror.

Quesada, in spite of his magniloquent bulletin, was a man of mark. Under Queen Christina’s regency he was appointed Captain-General of Madrid. Borrow, who speaks of him as “a very stupid individual, but a great fighter,”[7] was yet stirred to enthusiasm by the energy and courage of the “brute bull,” to whom he devotes some of his most picturesque pages. Almost single-handed, Quesada repressed the military riots at Madrid (August 11th and 12th, 1836). “No action,” says Borrow, “of any conqueror or hero on record is to be compared with this closing scene of the life of Quesada; for who, by his single desperate courage and impetuosity, ever stopped a revolution in full course? Quesada did; he stopped the revolution at Madrid for one entire day, and brought back the uproarious and hostile mob of a huge city to perfect order and quiet. His burst into the Puerta del Sol was the most tremendous and successful piece of daring ever witnessed. I admired so much the spirit of the ‘brute bull’ that I frequently, during his wild onset, shouted ‘Viva Quesada!’”[8] A few days afterwards Quesada was murdered by the nationals at a village near Madrid. Portions of his body were brought back to the city, and in the coffeehouse of the Calle del Alcalá the mangled fingers and hand of the murdered man were stirred in a huge bowl of coffee, which was drunk to the accompaniment of a grisly song.