Letters from Spain

The wildest schemes for the destruction of the French division at Madrid were canvassed almost in public, and with very little reserve. Nothing indeed so completely betrays our present ignorance as to the power and efficiency of regular troops, as the projects which were circulated in the capital for an attack on the French corps, which still paraded every Sunday morning in the Prado. Short pikes, headed with a sharp-cutting crescent, were expected to be distributed to the spectators, who used to range themselves behind the cavalry. At one signal the horses were to be houghed with these instruments, and the infantry attacked with poniards. To remonstrate against such absurd and visionary plans, or to caution their advocates against an unreserved display of hostile views, which, of itself, would be enough to defeat the ablest conspiracy; was not only useless, but dangerous. The public ferment grew rapidly, and Murat, who was fully apprised of its progress, began to shew his intention of anticipating resistance.

One Sunday afternoon, towards the end of April, as I was walking with a friend in the extensive gardens of the old royal palace El Retiro, (which, as they adjoin the Prado, are the usual resort of such as wish to avoid a crowded walk,) the sound of drums beating to arms from several quarters of the town, drew us, not without trepidation, to the inner gate of the large square, through which lay our way out of the palace. The confused voices of men, and the more distinct cries of the women, together with the view of two French regiments drawn up in the square, and in the act of loading their muskets, would have placed us in the awkward dilemma whether to venture out, or to stay, we knew not how long, in the solitary gardens; had not a French officer, whom I addressed, assured us that we might pass in front of the troops without molestation. The Prado, which we had left thronged with people, was now perfectly empty, except where some horse-patroles of the French were scudding away in different directions. As we proceeded towards the centre of the town, we were told that the alarm had been simultaneous and general. Parties of French cavalry had been scouring the streets; and, in the wantonness of military insolence, some soldiers had made a cut now and then at such as did not fly fast enough before them. The street-doors were, contrary to the usual practice, all shut as in the dead of night, and but a few groups of men were seen talking about the recent and now subsiding alarm. Among these we saw one shewing his hat cut through by the sabre of a French dragoon. No one could either learn or guess the cause of this affray; but I am fully convinced that it was intended just to strike fear into the people, and to discourage large meetings at the public walks. It was a prelude to the second of May—that day which has heaped the curses of every Spaniard on the head which could plan its horrors, and the heart that could carry them through to the last, without shrinking.

The insurrection of the second of May did not arise from any concerted plan of the Spaniards; it was, on the contrary, brought about by Murat, who, wishing to intimidate the country, artfully contrived the means of producing an explosion in the capital. The old King’s brother and one of his sons, who had been left at Madrid, were, on that day, to start for Bayonne. The sight of the last members of the royal family leaving the country, under the present circumstances, could not but produce a strong sensation on a people whose feelings had for some months been racked to distraction. The Council of Regency strongly recommended the Infante’s departure in the night; but Murat insisted on their setting off at nine in the morning. Long before that hour an extensive square, of which the new Palace forms the front, was crowded with people of the lower classes. On the Princes appearing in their travelling dresses, both men and women surrounded the carriages, and cutting the traces, shewed a determination to prevent their departure. One of Murat’s aid-de-camps presenting himself at this moment, was instantly assaulted by the mob, and he would have fallen a victim to their fury but for the strong French guard stationed near that general’s house. This guard was instantly drawn up, and ordered to fire on the people.

My house stood not far from the Palace, in a street leading to one of the central points of communication with the best part of the town. A rush of people crying “To arms,” conveyed to us the first notice of the tumult. I heard that the French troops were firing on the people; but the outrage appeared to me both so impolitic and enormous, that I could not rest until I went out to ascertain the truth. I had just arrived at an opening named Plazuéla de Santo Domingo, the meeting point of four large streets, one of which leads to the Palace, when, hearing the sound of a French drum in that direction, I stopped with a considerable number of decent and quiet people, whom curiosity kept rivetted to the spot. Though a strong piquet of infantry was fast advancing upon us, we could not imagine that we stood in any kind of danger. Under this mistaken notion we awaited their approach; but, seeing the soldiers halt and prepare their arms, we began instantly to disperse. A discharge of musketry followed in a few moments, and a man fell at the entrance of the street, through which I was, with a great throng, retreating from the fire. The fear of an indiscriminate massacre arose so naturally from this unprovoked assault, that every one tried to look for safety in the narrow cross streets on both sides of the way. I hastened on towards my house, and having shut the front door, could think of no better expedient, in the confused state of my mind, than to make ball-cartridges for a fowling-piece which I kept. The firing of musketry continued, and was to be heard in different directions. After the lapse of a few minutes, the report of large pieces of ordnance, at a short distance, greatly increased our alarm. They were fired from a park of artillery, which, in great neglect, and with no definite object, was kept by the Spanish Government, in that part of the town. Murat, who had this day all his troops under arms, on fixing the points of which they were to gain possession, had not forgotten the park of artillery. A strong column approached it through a street facing the gate, at which Colonel Daoiz, a native of my town, and my own acquaintance, who happened to be the senior officer on duty, had placed two large pieces loaded with grape shot. Determined to perish rather than yield to the invaders, and supported in his determination by a few artillery-men, and some infantry under the command of Belarde, another patriot officer; he made considerable havock among the French, till, overpowered by numbers, both these gallant defenders of their country fell, the latter dead, the former desperately wounded. The silence of the guns made us suspect that the artillery had fallen into the hands of the assailants; and the report of some stragglers confirmed that conjecture.

A well-dressed man had, in the mean time, gone down the street, calling loudly on the male inhabitants to repair to an old depôt of arms. But he made no impression on that part of the town. To attempt to arm the multitude at this moment was, in truth, little short of madness. Soon after the beginning of the tumult, two or three columns of infantry entered by different gates, making themselves masters of the town. The route of the main corps lay through the Calle Mayor, where the houses, consisting of four or five stories, afforded the inhabitants the means of wreaking their vengeance on the French, without much danger from their arms. Such as had guns, fired from the windows; while tiles, bricks, and heavy articles of furniture, were thrown by others upon the heads of the soldiers. But, now, the French had occupied every central position; their artillery had struck panic into the confused multitude; some of the houses, from which they had been fired at, had been entered by the soldiers; and the cavalry were making prisoners among such as had not early taken to flight. As the people had put to death every French soldier, who was found unarmed about the streets, the retaliation would have been fearful, had not some of the chief Spanish magistrates obtained a decree of amnesty, which they read in the most disturbed parts of the town.

But Murat thought he had not accomplished his object, unless an example was made on a certain number of the lower classes of citizens. As the amnesty excluded any that should be found bearing arms, the French patroles of cavalry, which were scouring the streets, searched every man they met, and making the clasp knives which our artisans and labourers are accustomed to carry in their pockets, a pretext for their cruel and wicked purpose, led about one hundred men to be tried by a Court Martial; in other words, to be butchered in cold blood. This horrid deed, the blackest, perhaps, which has stained the French name during their whole career of conquest, was performed at the fall of day. A mock tribunal of French officers having ascertained that no person of note was among the destined victims, ordered them to be led out of the Retiro, the place of their short confinement, into the Prado; where they were despatched by the soldiers.

Ignorant of the real state of the town, and hearing that the tumult had ceased, I ventured out in the afternoon towards the Puerta del Sol, where I expected to learn some particulars of the day. The cross streets which led to that place were unusually empty; but as I came to the entrance of one of the avenues which open into that great rendezvous of Madrid, the bustle increased, and I could see an advanced guard of French soldiers formed two-deep, across the street, and leaving about one-third of its breadth open to such as wished to pass up and down. At some distance behind them, in the irregular square which bears the name of the Sun’s Gate, I distinguished two pieces of cannon, and a very strong division of troops. Less than this hostile display would have been sufficient to check my curiosity, if, still possessed with the idea that it was not the interest of the French to treat us like enemies, I had not, like many others who were on the same spot, thought that the peaceful inhabitants would be allowed to proceed unmolested about the streets of the town. Under this impression I went on without hesitation, till I was within fifty yards of the advanced guard. Here a sudden cry of aux armes, raised in the square, was repeated by the soldiers before me; the officer giving the command to make ready. The people fled up the street in the utmost consternation; but my fear having allowed me, instantly, to calculate both distances and danger, I made a desperate push towards the opening left by the soldiers, where a narrow lane, winding round the Church of San Luis, put me in a few seconds out of the range of the French muskets. No firing however being heard, I concluded that the object of the alarm was to clear the streets at the approach of night.

The increasing horror of the inhabitants, as they collected the melancholy details of the morning, would have accomplished that end, without any farther effort on the part of the oppressors. The bodies of some of their victims seen in several places; the wounded that were met about the streets; the visible anguish of such as missed their relations; and the spreading report that many were awaiting their fate at the Retiro, so strongly and painfully raised the apprehensions of the people, that the streets were absolutely deserted long before the approach of night. Every street-door was locked, and a mournful silence prevailed wherever I directed my steps. Full of the most gloomy ideas, I was approaching my lodgings by a place called Postígo de San Martin, when I saw four Spanish soldiers bearing a man upon a ladder, the ends of which they supported on their shoulders. As they passed near me, the ladder being inclined forward, from the steepness of the street, I recognized the features of my townsman and acquaintance, Daoiz, livid with approaching death. He had lain wounded since ten in the morning, in the place where he fell. He was not quite insensible when I met him. The slight motion of his body, and the groan he uttered as the inequality of the ground, probably, increased his pain, will never be effaced from my memory.

A night passed under such impressions, baffles my feeble powers of description. A scene of cruelty and treachery exceeding all limits of probability, had left our apprehensions to range at large, with scarcely any check from the calculations of judgment. The dead silence of the streets since the first approach of night, only broken by the trampling of horses which now and then were heard passing along in large parties, had something exceedingly dismal in a populous town, where we were accustomed to an incessant and enlivening bustle. The Madrid cries, the loudest and most varied in Spain, were missed early next morning; and it was ten o’clock before a single street-door had been open. Nothing but absolute necessity could induce the people to venture out.

On the third day after the massacre, a note from an intimate friend obliged me to cross the greatest part of the town; but though my way lay through the principal streets of Madrid, the number of Spaniards I met, did not literally amount to six. In every street and square of any note I found a strong guard of French infantry, lying beside their arms on the pavement, except the sentinel, who paced up and down at a short distance. A feeling of mortified pride mixed itself with the sense of insecurity which I experienced on my approaching these parties of foreign soldiers, whose presence had made a desert of our capital. Gliding by the opposite side of the street, I passed them without lifting my eyes from the ground. Once I looked straight in the face of an inferior officer—a serjeant I believe, wearing the cross of the Legion d’honneur—who, taking it as an insult, loaded me with curses, accompanied with threats and the most abusive language. The Puerta del Sol, that favourite lounge of the Madrid people, was now the bivouac of a French division of infantry and cavalry, with two twelve-pounders facing every leading street. Not a shop was open, and not a voice heard but such as grated the ear with a foreign accent.

On my return home, a feeling of deep melancholy had seized upon me, to which the troubles of my past life were lighter than a feather in the scale of happiness and misery. I confined myself to the house for several days, a prey to the most harassing anxiety. What course to take in the present crisis, was a question for which I was not prepared, and in which no fact, no conjecture could lead me. My friend, the friend for whose sake alone I had changed my residence, had a mortal aversion to Seville—that town where he could not avoid acting in a detested capacity.53 Some wild visions of freedom from his religious fetters, had been playing across his troubled mind, while the French approached Madrid; and though he now looked on their conduct with the most decided abhorrence, still he could hardly persuade himself to escape from the French bayonets, which he seemed to dread less than Spanish bigotry.

But my mind has dwelt too long on a painful subject, and I hope you will excuse me if I put off the conclusion till another Letter.

LETTER XIII

Seville, July 30, 1808.

Whether Murat began to suspect that his cruel method of intimidating the capital would rouse the provinces into open resistance, or whether (with the unsteadiness of purpose which often attends a narrow mind, acting more from impulse than judgment,) he wished to efface the impressions which his insolent cruelty had left upon the Spaniards; he soon turned his attention to the restoration of confidence. The folly, however, of such an endeavour, while (independent of the alarm and indignation which spread like wildfire over the country,) every gate of Madrid was kept by a strong guard of French infantry, must have been evident to any one but the thoughtless man who directed it. The people, it is true, ventured again freely out of the houses: but the public walks were deserted, and the theatres left almost entirely to the invaders.

Yet it was visible that the French had a party, which, though feeble in numbers, contained some of the ablest, and not a few of the most respectable men at Madrid. Nay, I firmly believe, that had not the Spaniards of the middle and higher classes been from time immemorial brought up in the strictest habits of reserve on public measures, and without a sufficient boldness to form and express their opinions; the new French Dynasty would have obtained a considerable majority among our gentry. In the first place, two-thirds of the above description hold situations under Government, which they would have hoped to preserve by adherence to the new rulers. Next, we should consider the impression which the last twenty years had left on the thinking part of the community. Under the most profligate and despicable Court in Europe, a sense of political degradation had been produced among such of the Spaniards as were not blinded by a nationality of mere instinct. The true source of the enthusiasm which appeared on the accession of Ferdinand, was joy at the removal of his father; for hopes of a better government, under a young Prince of the common stamp, seated on an arbitrary throne, must have been wild and visionary indeed. As for the state of dependance on France, which would follow the acknowledgement of Joseph Bonaparte, it could not be more abject or helpless than under Ferdinand, had his wishes of a family alliance been granted by Napoleon. It cannot be denied that indignation at the treatment we have experienced strongly urged the nation to revenge; but passion is a blind guide, which thinking men will seldom trust on political measures. To declare war against an army of veterans already in the heart of Spain, might be, indeed, an act of sublime patriotism; but was it not, too, a provocation more likely to bring ruin and permanent slavery on the country, than the admission of a new King, who, though a foreigner, had not been educated a despot, and who, for want of any constitutional claims, would be anxious to ground his rights on the acknowledgment of the nation?

Answers innumerable might be given to these arguments—and that I was far from allowing them great weight on my mind I can clearly prove, by my presence in the capital of Andalusia. But I cannot endure that blind, headlong, unhesitating patriotism which I find uniformly displayed in this town and province—a loud popular cry which every individual is afraid not to swell with his whole might, and which, though it may express the feeling of a great majority, does not deserve the name of public opinion, any more than the unanimous acclamations at an Auto da Fé. Dissent is the great characteristic of liberty. I am, indeed, as willing as any man to give my feeble aid to the Spanish cause against France; but I feel indignant at the compulsion which deprives my views of all individuality—which, from the national habits of implicit submission to whatever happens to be established, forces every man into the crowd, so that nothing can save him but running for his life with the foremost.

I repeat, that I need not an apology for my political conduct on this momentous occasion. Feelings which will, indeed, bear examination, but on which I ground no merit, have brought me to the more honourable side of the question. Yet I must plead for candour and humanity in favour of such as, from the influence of the views I have touched upon, and in some cases, with a more upright intention than many an outrageous patriot, have opposed the beginning of hostilities. The name of traitor, with which they have been indiscriminately branded, must cut them off irrevocably from our party; and even the fear of being too late to avoid suspicion among us, may oblige those whom chance or the watchfulness of the Madrid Government, has hitherto prevented from joining us, to make at last, common interest with the French.

To escape from Madrid, after the news of the insurrection of Andalusia had reached that capital, was, in fact, an undertaking of considerable difficulty, and, as I have found by experience, attended with no small danger. Dupont’s army had occupied the usual road through La Mancha, and no carriages were allowed by the French to set off for the refractory provinces. My decision, however, to join my countrymen, had been formed as soon as they took up arms against the French; and though my friend shuddered at the idea of casting his lot with the defenders of the Pope and the Inquisition, he soon forgot all personal interest, in a question between a foreign army and his own natural friends.

There were no means of reaching Andalusia but through the province of Estremadura, and no other conveyance, at that time, than two Aragonese waggons, which having stopped at a small inn, or venta, three miles from Madrid, were not under the immediate control of the French police. The attention of the new Government was, besides, too much divided by the increasing difficulties of their situation, to extend itself beyond the gates of the town. We had only to make our way through the French guard, and walk to the venta on the day appointed by the waggoners. But if a single person met with no impediment at the gates, luggage of any description was sure to be intercepted; and we had to take our choice between staying, or travelling a fortnight, without more than a shirt in our pocket.

Thus lightly accoutred, however, we left Madrid at three in the afternoon of the 15th of June, and walked under a burning sun to meet our waggons. Summer is, of all seasons, in Spain, the most inconvenient for travellers; and nothing but necessity will induce the natives to cross the burning plains, which abound in the country. To avoid the fierceness of the sun, the coaches start between three and four in the morning, stop from nine till four in the afternoon, and complete the day’s journey between nine and ten in the evening. We, alas! could not expect that indulgence. Each of us confined with our respective waggoner, within the small space which the load had left near the awning, had to endure the intolerable closeness of the waggon, under the dead stillness of a burning atmosphere, so impregnated with floating dust, as often to produce a feeling of suffocation. Our stages required not only early rising, but travelling till noon. After a disgusting dinner at the most miserable inns of the unfrequented road we were following, our task began again, till night, when we could rarely expect the enjoyment even of such a bed as the Spanish ventas afford. Our stock of linen allowed us but one change, and we could not stop to have it washed. The consequences might be easily foreseen. The heat, and the company of our waggoners, who often passed the night by our side, soon completed our wretchedness, by giving us a sample of one, perhaps the worst, of the Egyptian plagues; which, as we had not yet got through one-half of our journey, held out a sad prospect of increase till our arrival at Seville.

There was something so cheering in the consciousness of the sacrifice both of ease and private views we were making, in the idea of relieving our friends from the anxiety in which the fear of our joining the French party must have kept them—in the hopes of being received with open arms by those with whom we had made common interest at a time when every chance seemed to be against them—that our state of utter discomfort could not at first make any impression on our spirits. The slip of New Castille, which lies between Madrid and the frontiers of Estremadura, presented nothing that could in the least disturb these agreeable impressions; and the reception we met with from the inhabitants was in every respect as friendly as we had expected. An instance of simple unaffected kindness shewn to us by a poor woman near Móstoles, would hardly deserve being mentioned, but for the painful contrast by which the rest of our journey has endeared it to my memory.—Oppressed by the heat and closeness of our situation, and preferring a direct exposure to the rays of the sun in the open air, we had left our heavy vehicles at some distance, when the desire of enjoying a more refreshing draught than could be obtained from the heated jars which hung by the side of our waggons, induced us to approach a cottage, at a short distance from the road. A poor woman sat alone near the door, and though there was nothing in our dress that could give us even the appearance of gentlemen, she answered our request for a glass of water, by eagerly pressing us to sit and rest ourselves. “Water,” she said, “in the state I see you in, is sure, Gentlemen, to do you harm. I fortunately have some milk in the cottage, and must beg you to accept it.—You, dear Sirs,” she added, “are, I know, making your escape from the French at Madrid. God bless you, and prosper your journey!” Her sympathy was so truly affecting, that it actually brought tears into our eyes. To decline the offer of the milk, as well as to speak of payment, would have been an affront to the kind-hearted female; and giving her back the blessing she had so cordially bestowed upon us, was all we could do to shew our gratitude.