John Kemble's Gibraltar Journal

The Spanish Expedition of the Cambridge Apostles, 1830-1831

E. Nye

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137384478
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria europea

The summer of 1830 stirred revolutionary desires in young hearts across Europe. More than a generation of war and political instability had failed to dampen the fervor still felt from the French Revolution. In England the Cambridge Apostles took up the cause of the Spanish émigrés so movingly visible in London where they had sought refuge from the tyranny of Ferdinand VII and his suppression of constitutional rights. The Spanish Expedition of the Cambridge Apostles has always captured our imaginations. Its blend of idealism and daring, of theory and practice, of thought and energy, seems perfectly to fulfill the principles the Apostles steadfastly espoused, a combination of faith and works. The episodes comprised in most accounts of the expedition are symbolic and filled with intrigue: secret meetings, assumed names, hidden messages, contraband, narrow escapes from the authorities, treachery, and finally a bloody execution on the beach at Málaga. A host of newly-discovered documents now enable us to re-examine one of the most intriguing events in British intellectual history.

1

Introduction

I. Romantic Notions of Liberty

Deprived of Apostolic companionship by the departure of Richard Chenevix Trench from Gibraltar in February 1831, John Kemble writes his sister, Fanny:

Richard, who is as a brother to me, returns to his own land to occupy I trust that station which his transcendent talents point out for him; that he leaves us heart whole is not to be thought; but the limited time which he had proposed to remain among us has more than expired, and he thinks it right to return. He will give you all the details which you may wish for; mean time I have taken pains to enter every occurrence in my journal, where you will see all that has befallen us; I shall keep this however for the present by me and shall only take care to have it sent to you in the event of my death. (Appendix 4, letter 6, p. 365)

The author of these lines, the son of Charles Kemble and nephew of Mrs Siddons and John Philip Kemble, had already established a stellar trajectory at Cambridge and would proceed to become a pioneer in Anglo-Saxon studies, publishing the first edition in England of Beowulf (1833–37) and the Codex Diplomaticus (6 vols., 1839–48). Yet when he wrote his sister in 1831, the Spanish government had put a price on his head, and he was struggling with the conflicting calls of love and fame in a remote corner of the empire. The survival of Kemble’s journal from this period and a host of collateral documents in collections around the world finally affords us an opportunity to re-examine one of the most dramatic episodes in British intellectual history, the abortive attempt of the Cambridge Apostles to foment a revolution in Spain near the end of its “Ominous Decade.”

The Spanish Expedition of the Cambridge Apostles has always captured the imagination. Its blend of idealism and daring, of theory and practice, of thought and energy, seems perfectly to fulfil the principles the Apostles espoused from the beginning: a union of faith and works. The episodes comprised in most accounts of the expedition resonate with symbolism and are filled with intrigue: secret meetings, assumed names, hidden messages, contraband, narrow escapes from the authorities, treachery, and finally a Sunday morning execution of several dozen die-hards on the beach at Málaga. The recovery now of so many primary documents invites us to pursue an exercise in historiography, asking how these popular views of events took shape, and how they may even now resist correction. It sounds like the stuff of a Hollywood film, but modern scholarship can do still better.

In outline the episode is simple. After the tyrant King Ferdinand VII of Spain suppressed the constitution in the 1820s, a group of about a thousand exiled families settled in London where they became the object of widespread sympathy. They catalysed a brief renaissance of cultural interest in Spain among literary intellectuals, and especially in the household of the Cambridge Apostle, John Sterling, whose letters and biography have occupied me for many years. John’s father, Edward, leader-writer for the Times, ensured the public visibility of the plight of the émigrés, and at Cambridge, John, as president of the Union Society, did the same. In the late 1820s money was raised in both places with the ambiguous purpose of either relieving the poverty of the exiles or of arming them to launch a revolution on the peninsula. Correspondence with dissident liberales in Spain suggested widespread unrest, even within the army. As 1830 neared, that year of revolutions, the purpose shifted more toward actual insurrection. Juntas were formed in London and elsewhere. Financing and promoting a revolution in Spain suddenly seemed feasible, and the Cambridge Apostles took the lead.

No wonder, then, that the first important public retelling of this episode appeared in Thomas Carlyle’s Life of John Sterling (1851). Carlyle is a superb storyteller and often a careful historian, but if the two motives conflicted, he always preferred a good story. The Life of Sterling is exactly this, a morality tale about the danger of wasting one’s talent if, like Sterling and other Apostles, one falls under the charms of a speculative thinker like Coleridge. This is far too simplistic a version of Sterling’s life, of course, but in the biography Carlyle’s chapters on the Spanish Expedition immediately follow his parodic chapter on Coleridge, the most often anthologized section of the book. Having caricatured Coleridge there, Carlyle dissected the perverse influences Coleridge had on his disciples, Sterling and the other Apostles. Carlyle writes:

Nor, with all the Coleridgean fermentation, was democratic Radicalism by any means given up;–though how it was to live if the Coleridgean moonshine took effect, might have been an abstruse question. Hitherto while said moonshine was but taking effect, and colouring the outer surface of things without quite penetrating into the heart, democratic Liberalism, revolt against superstition and oppression, and help to whosoever would revolt, was still the grand element in Sterling’s creed; and practically he stood, not ready only, but full of alacrity to fulfil all its behests. (LS (1851) 83)

Carlyle explains the Cambridge intellectual’s passion for aiding revolutionaries as compensation for Coleridgean abstraction, moonshine. But the papers collected here show that the passion is far deeper, more complex, and personal, involving echoes and typologies of the French Revolution and Peninsular Wars, a strong English commitment to self-determination and its exportation to other peoples – even predominantly Catholic and southern European ones – and admiration for the stoicism and nationalism of the charismatic leaders of the Spanish exiles, especially General José María de Torrijos (1791–1831).¹ One of the simplest lessons of the Spanish Expedition is that freedom is a condition of the spirit, not just a form of government. And this is a strongly Coleridgean notion, embraced widely among the early Cambridge Apostles.

The plot of Carlyle’s biography of Sterling follows the young intellectual’s submission to the influence of a series of false gods, ending in Sterling’s seemingly tragic inability fully to acknowledge the true one, Carlyle himself. After Coleridge, Sterling falls under the charms of General Torrijos, Carlyle says. This casts the whole Spanish affair into the form of what Carlyle later calls hero-worship. He describes vividly the arrival in London of Sterling’s second cousin, Robert Boyd, with time on his hands, a £5000 inheritance, and military ambitions, who procured a ship and, in exchange for promises of promotion by Torrijos after the revolution, began outfitting it with guns and ammunition to carry the exiles home to battle. The night of their proposed departure 29 July 1830, the schooner – ironically named the Mary though she would bear no saviours – was apprehended on the Thames by demand of the Spanish Envoy, and Sterling and Trench made a narrow, though very colourful, escape.

For Carlyle this initial calamity set up the paradigm for the later events of the Spanish Expedition: treachery, discovery, and failure. Yet the July Revolution in Paris produced a climate much more conducive to the expatriate’s cause in Spain, and after the debacle on the Thames they regrouped in Paris, securing substantial funding in the ensuing weeks. If money could foment a revolution in Spain, this project should have succeeded. In Carlyle’s account John Kemble is never named but identified as one of “the young Cantabs” (113) or “the young Cambridge democrats” (89). Nor, apparently, did Carlyle realize that three weeks before the capture of the Mary, Kemble had safely embarked from Falmouth, well supplied with funds raised in England for the junta in Gibraltar, and by this time was already growing aware of the divisions and distrust there that would ultimately doom the campaign. A few days ahead of Kemble, Tennyson and Hallam had crossed to France and were approaching the Pyrenees with messages and contraband.² Tennyson excused his absence by telling his family he was consulting a physician in London, and Kemble said he was attending a theological study session at the home of fellow Apostle, William Bodham Donne. Though this may seem amusing, it was not play-acting. Lives depended on their secrecy. In a letter to Lord Aberdeen after the capture of the Mary, Sterling offered to surrender himself in forfeit for the imprisoned Spanish crew (see Appendix 3). Fortunately the offer was ignored. If we require any reminder how high the stakes were for which they played, we need only examine Antonio Gisbert’s painting of the final scene on the beach at Málaga (see cover).

Carlyle misreports their travels, severely underrates the passion Kemble and the others expended in earnest, and construes the expedition as a sort of school prank gone wrong. In fact the revolutionaries were much closer to success in Spain than Carlyle realized, and Torrijos was no Don Quixote. Kemble never lost his profound admiration for the General’s courage, charisma, and cunning. But the channels of communication between the leaders and the sympathizers on the mainland were seriously flawed. Ships literally passed in the night, signals were missed, uprisings misfired, and the Spanish authorities punished rebels mercilessly. Torrijos’ band was infiltrated and betrayed. The final episode at Málaga is described fatalistically by Carlyle as though it happened swiftly in a night and a day, but in fact the capture of Torrijos, Boyd, and the other conspirators occurred 2 December 1831, nine days before their execution. The records of their final hours are heartbreaking. Boyd’s last letter which survives in several copies and has been published is mistakenly regarded by one recent scholar as “surely a forgery.” “Quite simply it is too good an exit for the young Irish hero–heaven-sent inspiration for Donizetti to bring his curtain down on a lachrymose opera.”³ Kemble had returned to England the previous May and escaped this denouement, but his friendship and correspondence with Boyd had continued despite having discovered themselves rivals for the attentions of the alluring Francisca (see 27 April). The executions haunted Kemble, Sterling, and the other Apostles.

Kemble’s journal records the arrival in Gibraltar of Lieutenant Robert Boyd with General Torrijos on 5 September 1830 where Boyd was instantly prized for his military experience. Raised in a prominent Ulster family he had been posted to India as an Ensign in the 65^th regiment of Native Infantry in the Bengal Army, 5 April 1825, and was promoted to Lieutenant a year later. Carlyle states that Boyd had left the army at the outset of the Spanish Expedition, but records show he resigned finally 9 November 1831, just a month before his execution.⁴ In fact, in his final hours he asked to be supplied with his scarlet officer’s uniform, a fact overlooked by Antonio Gisbert in his striking tableau of 1888.⁵ It is too easy to reduce Boyd, Kemble, and Trench to impulsive Byronists, ready to die for their cause. Yet under the dominance of Carlyle’s interpretation, that has been their fate.

The capture of an English officer among the Spanish revolutionaries at Málaga created a diplomatic stir. The British Consul in the city, William Mark, pursued every avenue to obtain a pardon and later recovered the body for burial in the newly consecrated Cementerio Inglés. These and many other details emerged in response to a question in Parliament three years later. In the summer of 1834 the fugitive Don Carlos arrived in London aboard a British warship seeking asylum after an unsuccessful claim to the throne in the wake of the death of his brother, Ferdinand VII. Parliamentary tempers flared, for in the entourage was General Vicente Gonzalez Moreno (1778–1839) who had entrapped Boyd along with the Torrijos band and executed him against all protests of the consul. What right had the butcher of Málaga to asylum in Britain? The London newspapers had printed a charge against Moreno (The Times, Thursday, 19 June 1834) and a rebuttal by Moreno defending his actions (first in The Courier and then The Times, Friday, 27 June 1834).⁶ The House debate on 27 June 1834 demonstrated that Boyd had not been forgotten. His defenders included the fiery Daniel O’Connell. They demanded justice, however belated. According to O’Connell, “this wretch [Moreno] had polluted the Press of this country by his name affixed to an attempted vindication of this horrid deed.” Andrew Carew O’Dwyer, member for Drogheda, protested “the assassination of Mr. Boyd” in putting his questions to the Foreign Secretary. Viscount Palmerston had been prepared with an answer, but his account as reported in Hansard is error ridden. “The circumstances of General Torrijos’s entry into Spain were well known,” he began. “In 1831 General Torrijos went from this country.” Yet Kemble’s journal shows what anyone acquainted with the London junta would have known, that Torrijos left England the previous summer and arrived in Gibraltar in September of 1830, admittedly in a disguise that may have deceived the British authorities there. Palmerston must have sensed the deficiency of his information, for he agreed to lay before the House the official correspondence surrounding Boyd’s “detention and execution” and to accept the evidence offered by Boyd’s defenders that he had been lured to his death by a treacherous Spanish official, now seeking asylum in Britain and yet apparently immune from punishment. It is astonishing that Carlyle ignored this rich store of evidence.

The ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1. Introduction
• 2. John Kemble’s Gibraltar Journal
• 3. Appendix 1: The Dunedin Letter Album
• 4. Appendix 2: Thoughts on the Foreign Policy of England by Jacob Sternwall, London: James Ridgway, Piccadilly, 1827
• 5. Appendix 3: The Events Surrounding the Seizure of the Schooner Mary
• 6. Appendix 4: John Mitchell Kemble to Fanny Kemble: Letters in the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, W.b. 596
• 7. Appendix 5: The Testimony of Doña Luisa Saenz de Viniegra de Torrijos, Vida del General José María de Torrijos y Uriarte (2v, Madrid: Manuel Minuesa, 1860)
• 8. Appendix 6: Málaga and After: Selections from Bodleian Library MS. Eng. lett. b.4 40476
• Bibliography
• Index