During the Romantic period, British representations of what could be called the “matter of Spain” responded to intensifying public interest in the fate of the Iberian Peninsula and its empires in relation to Britain’s ongoing struggle for global dominance. In this struggle, modernization and accompanying discourses of modernity were perceived as crucial to victory. “Modernity” has diverse, often contradictory uses in research, so for clarity I adapt Anthony Giddens’s exposition (Consequences; Modernity; Transformation). This adaptation sees modernity as a contested discourse formulated gradually by certain interests over the long eighteenth century. It centred on self-reflexive autonomous personal identity that enabled “pure” or disinterested relationships ranging from intimacy, conjugality, and domesticity through sociability, community, ethnicity, and “nation” to the “national” chronotope or time-space as persistence of a people in and shaped by a particular land over time. Such relationships in turn supposedly aided successful engagement with modernization’s intensifying relations of risk and trust, new and changing chronotopes, new and expanding abstract or faceless systems and knowledges, and the necessity for disembedding from what was perceived as an outmoded or oppressive locus and re-embedding in one able to accommodate the “modern” and “national” subject. For many in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century this modern location would be the constitutional nation state, variously defined and designed. Together, these tropes constituted modernity not as a lived reality but as a discourse or way of talking and writing—a vision to live by rather than in. Such discourse arguably comprised much of what came to be called “Romanticism”.
This chapter examines some uses of the “matter of Spain” in that discourse in Britain and the Atlantic world in the onset of modernity, focusing on certain salient examples. 1 “Matter” here has the now “obsolete” sense of “[t]he subject of a book, speech, etc.; a theme, a topic, a subject of exposition” (OED, citing last use as 1752), recently and helpfully expanded to mean literature very broadly that is “concerned to define a place and its people in relation to a heroic, even mythical, past… in (and often in response to) a context of contested definitions of political, territorial, or cultural boundaries” (Federico “Chaucer” 301). “Matter” in a similar sense was applied by the twelfth-century French writer Jean Bodel to Rome, (Arthurian) Britain, and France as represented in chivalric literature, though it could also apply to Greece and Troy, while “Spain” had such a “matter” purposely created for it in the fourteenth century by the kings of Castile and later by Charles V to promote themselves and their kingdoms/empires in the context of rival European monarchic and aristocratic cultures (Federico “Chaucer” 301–316; Federico “Writing”). Once circulating, such “matter” could be used by others, at that time or later, in Spain or elsewhere, for their own purposes, as happened in Britain’s onset of modernity.
By mid-eighteenth century Spain was perceived in Britain as a still formidable but unmodernized and hence declining world power. The Scottish Enlightenment historian William Robertson’s account of the reign of Charles V and sixteenth-century height of the Spanish empire, published soon after Spain’s ill-fated intervention against Britain in the Seven Years War of 1756–1763, attributed Spain’s decline to the inability to modernize caused by the establishment of the Inquisition. “In Spain and Portugal,” Robertson wrote, “where the tyrannical jurisdiction of the Inquisition crushed the Protestant faith as soon as it appeared, the spirit of Popery continues invariable; science has made small progress, and the character of ecclesiastics has undergone little change”. This contrasted with “those countries where the members of the two churches have mingled freely with each other, or have carried on any considerable intercourse, either commercial or literary”—Britain was implicitly one of “those countries” (History 3: 450). Spain remained a serious military and imperial rival, however, especially when allied to Britain’s most dangerous competitor, France. Attempts by Spanish afrancesados to emulate French Enlightenment and Revolutionary modernity were reinforced by Napoleon’s intervention in the Peninsula to keep it in his anti-British coalition (Juretschke). In 1808 Napoleon replaced Ferdinand VII with his own brother Joseph, who initiated radical modernization, promulgated a modern constitution, and abolished the Inquisition and other aspects of unmodernity. Britain reinforced its ally Portugal militarily while differing forces of Spanish resistance sought restoration of the Old Regime on the one hand and creation of a modern constitutional state on the other. In 1812 the Spanish junta led by liberales or “independent men” besieged in Cadiz, promulgated their own modernizing constitution (Phillips and Phillips 206–215). This attracted considerable attention in Britain, where reformists saw it as a model for the constitutional nation-state they sought. William Cobbett even asserted that the Cadiz constitution was based “with very few alterations” (Cobbett’s italics) on a draft sent to the junta by the English reformist Major John Cartwright (Political Register 12 October 1811). Expulsion of French forces from Spain enabled the restoration of Ferdinand in 1814, at the price of accepting the Cadiz constitution, which he soon repudiated, prompting widespread resistance and armed revolt in 1820. The ensuing Trienio Liberal restored the Cadiz constitution and inspired self-styled “liberals” across the Atlantic world. But internal Spanish conflicts enabled intervention by a royalist French army sanctioned by the Quintuple Alliance of Britain, France, Russia, Prussia, and Austria, restoring Ferdinand and his antimodernizing policies, while Spanish American provinces pursued armed independence, opening Spain’s former empire to British interests.
British newspapers followed these events closely with news reports, verbatim dispatches, copies of documents, and “opinion” pieces, often cast in terms of conflicts between modernity and unmodernity and different versions of modernity in Spain, and focusing on Spanish constitutionalism and national resistance, in both of which Britain had interests. Such coverage was augmented by travelogues and surveys describing social, economic, political, topographical, historical, antiquarian, literary, religious and other aspects of the Peninsula in relation to modernity. Writers included Richard Twiss, William Dalrymple, John Dillon, Alexander Jardine, Henry Swinburne, Jean-François Bourgoing, Richard Croker, Robert Southey, Alexandre Laborde, Philip Thicknesse, Christian Fischer, Joseph Blanco White, John Milford, and Maurice Keatinge, and military travelogue writers (see Fernández Herr). Historiographies reinforced these accounts, including Robert Watson’s often republished History of the Reign of Philip II (1777), John Talbot Dillon’s History of the Reign of Peter the Cruel (1788), Charles Hereford’s History of Spain (1793), John Bigland’s History of Spain (1810), and William Coxe’s Memoirs of the Kings of Spain (1813), while new editions of William Robertson’s works kept his analysis of Charles V and the Spanish golden age in circulation. There were numerous surveys and accounts of the Spanish empire. A stream of books covered related topics, including documents and commentaries on diplomatic and commercial relations, anecdotes of Peninsular “customs” and “manners”, views of “the Arabian antiquities of Spain” (James Murphy, 1813), accounts of Moorish Spain (George Power, 1815), surveys of the Spanish empire, critiques of the Inquisition (Joseph Blanco White; Juan Antonio Llorente), narratives of the Peninsular War, descriptions of Spanish prison conditions, and accounts of the Spanish revolution of 1820. These books usually focused on policies and practices of and resistance to modernization in relation to Spain’s historic unmodernity.
Writers of belles-lettres versified, fictionalized, and allegorized these topics. Poems included Felicia Browne’s England and Spain (1808), William Lane’s Loyalty and Freedom (1808), John Wilson Croker’s The Battles of Talavera (1809), William Magness’s The Battle of Salamanca (1812), Preston Fitzgerald’s Spain Delivered (1813), Robert Southey’s Roderick, The Last of the Goths (1814), John Merivale’s Orlando in Roncesvalles (1814), and the first canto of Byron’s Don Juan (1819). Novels included: M. G. Lewis’s The Monk (1796); Elizabeth Meeke’s The Spanish Campaign; or, The Jew (1815); Christian Isobel Johnstone’s Clan-Albin: A National Tale (1815), linking contemporary Spain, Scotland, and Ireland; and Alexander Dallas’s Felix Alvarez; or, Manners in Spain (1816). Dramas included: Sophia Lee’s tragedy Almeyda, Queen of Granada (1796); Robert Mayow’s “historical play” The Abdication of Ferdinand; or, Napoleon at Bayonne (1809); and Walter Savage Landor’s Count Julian (1812). Books for youth included Spain Yesterday and Today (1816) by “A Lady” and Frances Jamieson’s Stories from Spanish History: for the Amusement of Children (1820). Sensational down-market chapbook fiction included Lermos and Rosa; or, The Fortunate Gipsey and The Perilous Cavern; or, Banditti of the Pyrenees. There were street ballads and graphic news engravings and satires referring to Spanish affairs. Even the Cosmorama, a popular London show, included Spanish scenes by then familiar through literature. Among the lower ranks, Spanish affairs were followed with intense interest as an ongoing sensational narrative and Spain was known through the stories of the many returning common soldiers, constituting a British folklore of Spain (see, for example, the autobiographies of John Binns, Thomas Carter, and William and Robert Chambers).
In today’s academic practice such diverse genres are commonly treated separately and separately from Spanish and other representations of the matter of Spain, but for British observers at that time all could be used in formulating a matter of Spain in their own interests, and certain topics prominent in journalistic and travelogue-survey accounts recurred in literary representations. One such topic, already noted, was the Inquisition, its history, its supposed corrupting effects on individual subjectivity and social relations, its implication in the struggle for modernity, and its use as a synecdoche for certain kinds of unmodern and anti-modern regimes. A related topic was popular “patriotic” resistance to supposedly alien, incorrect, or excessive forms of modernity. This topic was exemplified in the figure of the guerrilla (a term that entered English) as a hero who was “popular” in several senses: as a man of the common people and of the “people” as an ethno-cultural entity over time, or what came in this period to be seen as the “folk”; as a supposed repository of the national character and culture and foundation in everyday life of the nation-state; and as a figure widely accepted and supported by the “people”. An associated figure was the individual, past or present, historical or fictional, exemplifying the modern subject as foundational unit of a proleptic modern constitutional nation-state based on an electorate and government of such sovereign subjects. Frequently this figure was represented as possessing excessive subjectivity and selfhood, in two different forms: on one hand, the man or woman of passion, from erotic love to patriotism; and on the other hand, the national leader as rebel, guerrilla, or apostate, and consequently refugee and exile. The most important topic, however, was internal division of various kinds that weakened nations and empires, exposing them to external subversion or destruction. In this struggle ...