“By Gothic Virtue Won”: Romantic Poets Fighting the Peninsular War

Abstract

So wrote the Marquis of Urquijo to General Cuesta on April 13, 1808, as King Ferdinand VII of Spain, who had come to his father’s throne through the intrigues of Napoleon, now sleepwalked toward his own forced abdication at Bayonne. Urquijo was a prominent member of the Spanish faction, styled afrancesados, who sought to effect constitutional reform by cooperating with the French. And if his image of Spain as a “Gothic edifice” has interesting affinities with the architectural imagery deployed by British writers such as Edmund Burke and William Wordsworth in the 1790s, his picture of national decrepitude resonates still more powerfully with Napoleon’s self-image as the scourge of the “Gothic edifice” of old Europe. Heir to the “rhetoric of national unity” employed by the revolutionaries of 1789 in their campaign against the “byzantine” structures of the ancien regime (Garrioch 2005, 19), Napoleon sought consistently to present his imperial enterprise as a progressive campaign against what Burke had designated “the old Germanic or Gothic custumary” of “every country in Europe” (1796, 110). The “Germanic body” of the Holy Roman Empire, described by Burke as “a vast mass of heterogeneous States, held together by [a] heterogeneous bod y of old principles” (Burke 1797, 19) had been right at the top of Napoleon’s list.

Our Spain is a Gothic edifice, made up of morsels, with as many forces, privileges, legislations, and customs, as there are provinces. Public spirit does not exist in her at all. These causes will prevent the establishment of any government solid enough to be able to unite our national forces.

—trans. from M. de Pradt 1816, 360