now join to do for their common gain, that which eacli
would have then regarded as a national loss. Eor her
thrice in three generations has Christendom been wasted with
war. On the next signal blast she will no longer be the
guiltless victim, but the guilty cause. Her hands will have
taken down the buckler from the wall and pulled the spear
from the earth. Her hands will have saddled in their stalls
the "pale horse of death and the red of destrutetion," to ride
up to the bridle in Spain's best blood. To Kome she gave a
sword — for Europe she prepares a torch.



19

CIIAPTEPt II.
Review of past History,

The structure of Spain, not a peculiarity of race, has giTen
to events at the remotest periods a consanguineous character.
It is an island with the dimensions of a continent — fortresses
with pasturage grounds — deliles and rocks and mountains,
with arable land for tens of millions of men. As there is
nothing like it in the composition of any other portion of the
earth, so is it unlike it in its fate and histoiy to the remainder
of the human race. Circassia is an inaccessible range, and it
may be a barrier of heroic defence ; Switzerland, a fortress
of rocks, without the substance of a nation, leaving no room
for a throne — a centre of contending interests, sustained by
the jealousy of neighbours more than by the heights of tlia
Alps.

Spain, suri'ounded on three sides by the ocean as a ditch,
on the fourth by the Pyrenees as a rampart, and not exposed
to immediate and constant danger, is armed neither in mind
nor in body against invasion \ defence by the distribution of
the mountains, and the hardiliood and local attachment of the
inhabitants, commences only after she has apparently been
prostrated. She has thus exhibited an unvarying paradox to
the eyes of successive generations, being the easiest of nations
to be overrun, and the last to be subdued.

Here, then, it is not Iberian, Goth, Saracen, or Spaniard,
whose character we have to examine, but it is the influence on
man of a certain configuration of country, where mountain
and plain are mixed together in sufficient dimensions and
extent to present a large mass of human beings, forming a
cliampaign and sea-board kingdom, with the attachments of
mountaineers and their defences.

The attachment to their community and their customs
stiffened them against the centralisation of power, and made*
them hold, in an equal degree their enemy, the government



20 SPAIN.

that invaded tlieir franchises, or the foreigner that occupied
their soil. They did not however divide apart into clans and
cantons : and constituting a general government, there was
the form of monarchy and the practice of republicanism.

The strangers thoughtthat influence over the governmentwas
influence over Spain, but when they pressed upon its weakness,
they only strengthened the unknown Spanish people; therefore
have results belied in every case judgment, and triumph over
her has been a prelude to defeat. In this anti-national con-
dition of their government, the Spaniards have been deprived
in every crisis of the advantage of concerted action, but have
regained that of local and individual resolution.

If an enemy presented itself on the shore of Kent, all
England would rush thither as to the point of defence : broken
there, she would bow the neck. Austria could be subdued at
an Austerlitz, and Paris even taken at a Waterloo. Not so
in Spain: the enemy is at Pampelona; the Biscayan says
" bueno. I shall be ready at Bilboa ;" and so on, district
after district, mountain after mountain. ' The Spaniard
waited at home, as he did in the days of the Scipios, to defend
liis house and his fueros, and does not hold them lost by what
happens elsewhere, whether the victory of an army or the vote
of a Cortes.

This similarity of character, and events at the most remote
periods, is rendered so striking by present circumstances, that
I may be permitted to revert to Carthage and Eome.

To both Republics Spain then stood as she ^vould now to
England and Prance, were she at the time the peninsula of
Ilindostan.

It is to be observed, that that war was not an invasion
of Spain, but a contest in Spain. We derive our impressions
of the event from Eoman writers. Had we the annals of
•Cartilage open to us, we should And that alarms for the
encroachujents of Rome had invested the Carthaginians with
the character of jprotectors. This is proved in the very event
ihat completed the subjection of Spain to Carthi>ge, and that
•occasioned the war between Carthau'e and Rome.



RETROSPECT. 21

Spain then furnislied to Hannibal means for the invasion of
Italy, alike by the occupation of the Roman armies far from
home, and by the auxiliaries who aided him at Trebia and
Thrasymene ; but these would not have availed unless Spain
had furnished other and indispensable resources.

We have standing armies defrayed out of the ordinary
expenditure of the state ; but in ancient times there w-as
iKiither standing expenditure nor the resource of temporary
loans. The nations feebly organised for assault were power-
fully organised for defence; disciplined invasion required
gold in hand. This gold was furnished to Hannibal by the
mines of Spain.

The whole military history of the ancient world is one of
metal. It was the treasure of Susa and Ecbatania that
rendered illustrious the field of Marathon and the narrows of
Thermopylae. It was the mines of Philippi that brought the
subjugation of Greece, and reared the empire of Alexander.
It Avas the treasures of Toulouse that, changing masters,
effected the conquest of Gaul ; so was it the mines of Bar-
celona that brought first the passage of the Alps, and then
the disaster of Cannce.

No sooner was Italy, by means of Spain, ovcrnin, than
Spain rose against Caiihage. In about the same time that
it had taken the three chiefs of the house of Hanno to subject
her to the Carthaginians, the three Scipios transferred her
to Rome. Scarcely had the conquest of Carthage been
effected, than the Spaniards, abandoned and betrayed by the
only power that could have defended them, rose again to
assert her liberty as well as their own, and replied to the
Roman pro-consul that their fathers had left them steel
to defend, not gold to redeem, their inheritance : Rome,
<Ieparting from her wont, found gold jnore useful than steel ;
and Spain could alone say of Rome, that she dreaded less
her arms than her arts. The war commenced with Saguntum,
imd concluded with Numantia, — one population devoting
itself for Rome, the other for Carthage.

On the fall of Carthage, Rome became the world; the



23 SPAIN.

contentions between her factions presented, like the rivaliy
between independent nations, occasions for the assertion of
the liberty of the smaller states. Spain alone judged of
these occasions, and acted in these events. Thus in the
contest of Marius and Sylla, she reappeared on the field,
and during ten years defeated the finest armies and baffled
the ablest generals of the republic. She was indeed under a
Roman leader, but he, a fugitive, whom she invited and in-
vested with command : her triumph was again the shame of
Eome, and Sartorius fell, as Viriathus before him, by the hand
of an assassin.

Next came Coesar and Pompey ; again she was in arms
on the side of the vanquished, offering asylum in her fast-
nesses and defenders in her sons, to the beaten faction. After
the cause was desperate, and Rome and the East in the hand
of • the victor, and the corpse of Pompey on the sands of
Canusium, she arose to restore the contest for Roman
liberty, and Caesar had to win the world a second time on
the plains of Munda, where he avowed he had to fight for
life — not victoiy.

Actium did not close the temple of Janus ; in the midst of
a prostrate world, an army had to be led into Catalonia
and the Asturias ; the benign and benevolent Augustus,,
surpassing the ferocity of his predecessors, suffocated whole
populations in those caverns whence was to issue in a future
generation the avenging genius of a Pelagius. Agrippa, too,
closed his career of victory by that one most dearly pur-
chased, most hardly won, and most mercilessly used, on
Celtiberian soil.

What a contrast with Gaul and 13ritain. The progress
of the Roman arms against these nations was gradual and
sj'-.stematic. The fiercer spirits driven backwards held their
ground ; and into the extremer regions, for centuries, Rome
did not penetrate : they took no share in the play of Roman
faction; when subject, they followed the fortunes of their leaders,
when independent, they equally resisted whatever bore the name
of Roman. Spain, in contradistinction to all the races sub-



EETPtOSPECT. 23

jugated by Kome, with the exception of Greece, thus exlii-
bited a pliability of genius such as might have been expected
in an old and polished state: much as to day, while reputed
a stranger to Eui'ope, she has excelled us in branches where
least we would have expected to find competitors beyond the
circle of our ideas and instniction. She entered with facility
the intellectual existence of her victor, rivalled him in all the
fields of literary and philosophic excellence, and contributed
to the common glory, gi'eatness and refinement, more than
her share of poets, rhetoricians, historians, philosophers and
princes.^ The first stranger admitted to the honours of
Eome was a Spaniard ; and it is in his family mansion pre-
served by the ashes of Vesuvius, that the opportunity has
been best aftbrded to us, of estimating the dignity of a Eoman
patrician.

The periods of the Visigoths and of the Moors, although
those which confer upon Spain its historic value and ro-
mantic character, do not in respect to our subject afford such
salient features as the earlier and more recent periods, save
indeed that both found the conquest easy, and the retention
difficult ; nowhere else Were the barbarian occupiers of the
Roman provinces expelled — nowhere else have the Saracens
been driven back. Under these catastrophes, Spain as usual
seemed to recover force and life from those very changes tliat
in ordinary cases cause the fall of empires, and in the midst
of those external circumstances which denote the decline of a
people.

No sooner had the crowns of the kingdoms of the Peninsula
been united and the Moors expelled, than Spain was, as it
were, ravished from herself by the union of her crown witli
the imperial diadem. Prom that time '* this noble coinitry
has been the appanage of some foreign family without having
been conquered by one of them." This is the period in her

* Quinctilian, Columella, Pomponius Mela, Florus, Luciau,
Seneca, Hadrian, Trajan Theodosius the Great &c.



U SPAIN.

history which represents the centralized power gathered in
from the plains, as opposed to the decentralizing and retentive
faculties of her mountains.

Neither under the Austrians nor under their Bourbon suC'
cessors, did the encroachments of the central government
reach to that point that the villager got sight of his enemy ;
therefore Europe mistook the power of Spain to do injuiy
to others, and her might to defend herself. The indifference
of the people was construed " power of the crown." When
the most ambitious of mortals — the most daring and cunning
, of his age. King of Spain and Eoman Emperor, held as hope-
less captive, the King of France — well might Europe trem-
ble for her liberties, and apprehend that the dream of univer-
sal empire was about to become a reality. It was dispelled
by no diplomatic combinations or warlike efforts. For its
accomplishment it wanted only in the breasts of Spaniards
the lusts or tlie slaveiy that constitute the character of a con-
quering people or form the implements of an ambitious king.
The victorious armies of Charles were defeated by the Cortes,
which refused supplies for a war which it judged neither
necessary nor just.

The successor of Charles, however, found resources in-
dependent of the Cortes : though no longer master of
Austria, Portugal was added to the Spanish crown with all her
commerce : in the religious strifes in which he engaged,
he had the faculty of arousing the bigotry of his people.
Here, however, the internal rights and local independence of
another portion of his dominions were the safeguard of neigh-
bouring states, and the treasure of American, as the blood of
European Spain were engulphed in the Netherlands. Soon
afterwards Catalonia's resistance enabled Portugal to eman-
cipate herself. Nor was it possible even here, in reference to
so near a neighbour, to arouse the evil passions of the Spanish
people.

And with all these events before us, the present generation
neither knows that Spain has rights, or that it has internal



BETROSPECT. 25

freedom : neither do they know that it is these, and not the
fictitious adjustment of the dimensions of states, that are the
curb upon ambition, and the foundation of peace.

From groundless fears regarding the ambition of Spain
under the first two raonarchs of the Austrian line, Europe
passed into an equally erring judgment of her decline of
the fifth and last. Tliey treated her at the close of the seven-
teenth centuiy as in the present day they treat Turkey ; they
called her a corpse, and they coalesced to ensure the demise
by a division of the carcase. England, France, and Austria
signed, in anticipation of the death of Charles II ' in whose
person they seemed to consider Spain to exist, the infamous
act called the Partition Treaty, and the commencement of
such crimes in Europe.

The folly of the design was soon shown to be equal to its
iniquity. Spain, thus menaced, accepted a French prince.
The treasures of England were squandered, — in vain she
poured forth her blood and that of Germany, and the war
ended by a Treaty to sanction the settlement which they had
taken up arras to prevent. Spain, too, whose maritime power
Iiad previously been extinguished, regained strength in her
struggle with the mistress of the seas, the benefit whereof was
transfeiTcd to England's rival — France, and cooperated in
Avresting from England her North American possessions :
it was again placed at the disposal of France during the
first short war at the beginning of the French Eevolution.
The naval power of both was indeed broken by England, and
that of Spain utterly extinguished at the battle of Trafalgar.
It was for France that this sacrifice was made ; it was on
Spain that fell the penalty, and England rejoiced in the injury
that she had done her, as being the most effective means of
weakening France.

Now again was the judgment of Europe to be exercised ;
Spain was again but a corpse : such was the judgment of
England on the one side, and of Napoleon on the other. It
was a country which he could outrage at his pleasure, whose
fortresses he could occupy Avithout a struggle, whose princes

2



2G SPADT.

lie could kidnap like the negroes of Guinea, on whose throne
he could place, as on those of the Eiu'opeans, a puppet \nth
a crown. The result was that Napoleon went to Elba.

Between 1690 and 1807 no change had taken place, there-
fore, in the material condition of Spain, and no improvement
ill the perceptive faculties of Europe,



27



CIIAFIEIl III;
Formation of. Faction, Constitution o/" 1 8 1 2.

Up to the close of the great continental war there had been a
total absence of political difTerences ; the opposition to Govern-
ment had been by province, and then of a practical kind only ;
there had never been a Revolution. The people had met by a
stubborn though isolated resistance every encroachment of the
Crown, and had fortunately never been exposed to usurpations
by a Parliament. Thus had been preserved less o'oliterated
than elsewhere the footsteps of early freedom. The people
were, indeed, indolent and ignorant, but tliere was amongst
them contentment and equality, a fair distribution of the goods
that they possessed, no depreciation of one class by misery, or
elevation of another by pride of station or wealth ; sedulous
politeness linked together the classes of society, and kept open
running the fountain of charity with its twofold blessings.

Madrid was not properly a metropolis. To the foreign
families who had slipped into the occupation of the tlu'one
this city was as a permanent camp, to which they retired
from Spain, and whence they commanded but did not
govern it. A vast mass of functionaries were employed in
the central government and inhabited Madrid, but Madrid
contained no manufactory of laws, and the agents of the
Government never took out of the hands of the locally elected
magistrates the administration either of province, city, dis-
trict, or village. Thus did the Government remain distinct
from the people, and the people, being admitted to no share
in it, preserved at least their character ; they remained men of
Valencia, Estremadura, of Seville or Saragosa.

This original framework was preserved by a variety of cir-
cumstances, — the mighty chains of mountains to which I have
referred, the absence of roads and the difficulty of communica-



28 SPAIN.

tion, differences of dialect and of costume, and corresponding
animosities ; in fact, the administrative physiognomy was of a
remarkably oriental character. While the internal dissensions
of the other countries of Europe invited the progress of the
French revolutionary arms, or paralysed the resistance to her cf
the great military Governments, no more effect was produced
by the new and exciting doctrines on the Spanish than on the
Turkish people. Yet after these Governments had been seve-
rally discomfited and collectively reduced, Spain, which was
deemed sunk in the darkest night of ignorance and superstition,
rose single-handed, and astounded, without enlightening, the
Europe she saved. When Spain commenced this enterprise
she was without a king, an army, or a navy ; her entire central
administration was in the hands of the Erench, together witli
her capital, the head of her church, and the chiefs of her
nobles : she was deprived of all that visibly constitutes
power, and this precisely was her strength. Then reappeared
the Spain of Saguntum and Numantia, and, nearer to our
times, of Barcelona and Saragosa, — names which will yet be
fresh when European Civilisation will have departed to the
same place as the Koman sword and the J\Ioorish scimitar.

Between the commencement and the close of the struggle,
that is to sa}^ from 1808 to 1815, the country was occupied
with very different matters than politics, and under any cir-
cumstances the time was too short to allow of any marked
change in doctrine or opinions, which are necessarily of slow
growth ; and yet shortly afterwards the Peninsula is so trans-
formed that we find it engaged in a devolution. It is essential
to note, since we transfer to this country the notions which we
entertainof others, that there never had here been a Eevolution,
and that it was here the people, and not the Government, who
rose to resist the Erench. We have, therefore, a phenome^jon
to account for, one wholly unparalleled; it is rendered
the more inexplicable by the fact, that in the short interval
between the period when theoretical principles were wholly
unkrown and that at Avhich a I^evolution was accomplished
and a Constitution introduced, the people having been engaged



CONSTITUTION OF lSi3. 29

in a desperate war against an enemy who was the patron of
so-called liberty, in their minds must have been associated
constitution with invasion, despotism with independence :
but, in fact, the infection that was repelled by the braced
arm and the rigid muscle in 'the front of the battle, penetrated
from behind by the flaccid and ignoble parts.

While the Spanish people were on their rugged sierras,
their smiling vegas shrivelled by the breath, and their fair
cities levelled by the tread of war, a few black-coatecl me^
had assembled in a church, travestied into a theatre, in an
alley of a remote city, guarded by the fleets of an Ally. This
assemblage, aloof from danger and undistracted by care, was
not engaged in procuring supplies, or in furnishing to their
struggling countrymen clothing or ammunition, — they were
framing a Constitution ; in other words, they were passing-
a decree of annihilation upon the rights, the customs, and
corporations of the Peninsula, for its separate kingdoms had
their Constitutions and their several Cortes. The crime of
the Burgundian and Bourbon despots had amounted to no
more than this, that they did not convoke them ; the self-
appointed Conclave of Cadiz undertook to destroy them.

When the Parliament of London absorbed into itself that
of Edinburgh and that of Dublin, not only were separate acts-
required from the body incorporating and the bodies in-
corporated, but Treaties also were entered into, and conditions
established : the measures propped up by these forms were
enacted in the eye of the nations themselves, but they were
still held to be invalid by the lawyers of. the greatest wciglit
of their respective times, and denounced as suicidal by the
patriots of highest name. What woidd have been said had
some Chartist Convocation decreed of their own authority a new
law for the three kingdoms, which was to supersede all their
laws and to extinguish their three Parliaments by the erection
of a new and distinct body ? Such was the Constitution of
Cadiz, and so absurd was it felt to be, that it fell stillborn.

If this new Constitution had been the wisest ever conceived
and the justest ever possessed, no less would this character of



30 SPxVIN.

violence attacli to it ; but it was at once the most foolisli and
the most violent of legislative measures ; it was a mere tran-
script of the dreams of the previous century, which had placed
the enemy against whom they were struggling in the hands
of a despot, who had practised against Spain the basest of
felonies, and had found in the French nation the docile
instruments of his malignant will.

In fact, the self-appointed gentlemen who assembled in the
church of San Telipe Neri, were doing nothing more or less
than preparing to impose on Spain after she should have
triumphed the yoke of the enemy she had vanquished, — and
worse than the yoke of that enemy, for the rrencli would
have respected, even as victors, those local privileges and
general rights which the old despotic monarchs of Spain had
been unable to subdue.

The king returned and swept away the idle fiction ; but as the
Constitution had sprung from one of the European factions, so
did he call in the doctrines of the other to counterbalance it.
Now no longer content with that despotic authority which had
hitherto prevailed, he embodied therewith centralisation and
uniformity. The failings in the character of the monarch found
neither guidance nor restraint in those who surroimded him, anrl
whose habits had ceased to be Spanish ; and the ]3eople who,
unlike those of Germany, had neither made conditions in su]>-
porting their monarch, nor expected advantages as a conse-
quence of their triumph, were taught to believe that there
must be some virtue in the Constitution when they discovered
so much vice in those who hated it. Thus in four years was
Spain, always indiflerent to what passed at Madrid or wliicli
had reference to its central Government, thoroughly disgusted
at the existing state of things, and prepared to accept with
favour any change.

So far, the direct agency of no foreign Government appears,
but now the necessary elements for foreign intrigue had been
created in the engenderment by imitation of the contrarieties,
which in the other countries of Europe have sprung from real
causes, and required centuries for their development.



81



CHAPTEH lY.
Bevolf of the Ma de Leon,

In the coarse of the year 1819, troops had been collectecl
in the arsenal of Cadiz, called Isla de Leon, destined for the
re-conquest of the American colonies : they were neither
recruits nor regiments, but composed of soldiers di-afted from
the whole army, with the view of purifying it of restless
spirits engendered by the war of Independence and of dan-
gerous opinions evolved by contact with the French. The
expedition had been planned no less for the safety of old
Spain than for the recovery of the new. But instead of
instantly despatching this menacing corps, it was retained in
a confined and inattractive cantonment, and lay for many
months in an inaction that must have disorganized the best
disposed and best officered troops. The principle that had