... banner of revolution, the army of Ballesteros, which, since the 
capitulation of his chief [was] still concentrated at Priego, 10 
leagues north of Malaga. On this his second Cadiz expedition *”* 
he* was made prisoner by one of General Molitor’s corps, 
surrendered to the apostolical band, and sent to Madrid there to 
be executed, on the 7th November, four days before Ferdinand’s 
return to the capital. 

“Non por su culpa cajé Riego: 
Por traici6n 
De un vil Borbón.” 

(“Not by his fault fell Riego but by the treason of a vile 
Bourbon.’’) . 

When Ferdinand on his arrival at Madrid was waited upon and 
congratulated by the officers of the bands of the Foi*” they 
having withdrawn, he exclaimed in the midst of his court: “It is 
the same dogs but with different collars”. 

The number of friars who in 1822 had mustered 16,310, 
amounted in 1830 to 61,727, being an increase of 45,417” in the 
course of 8 years. From the Madrid Gaceta we see that in the 
single month from the 24th August to the 24th September 1824, 
1,200 persons were shot, hanged, and quartered, and then the 
barbarous decree against Comuneros,*” Freemasons, etc., had not 

yet been divulgated.* The University of Sevilla was closed for 
years, but in its stead a governmental school of bullfighting was 
established. 

Frederick the Great, conversing with his War Minister, asked 
him, which country in Europe he thought most difficult to ruin? 
Perceiving the minister to be rather embarrassed, he answered for 
him: 

“It is Spain: as its own government has for many years endeavoured to ruin 
it—but all in vain.” 

Frederick the Great seems to have prognosticated the reign of 
Ferdinand VII. 

The failure of the Revolution of 1820-1823 is easily accounted 
for. It was a middle class revolution and, more especially, a town 
revolution, while the country, ignorant, lazy, wedded to the 
pompous ceremonies of the church, remained passive observers of 
the party strife they did hardly understand. In the few provinces 
where they exceptionally took an active share in the struggle, it 
was rather on the side of the counter-revolution,—a fact not to be 
wondered at in Spain, “that storehouse of ancient customs, that 
repository of all, elsewhere forgotten and past by”, a country 
where, during the war of independence peasants were seen using 
spurs taken from the armoury of the Alhambra and armed with 
halberds and pikes of curious and ancient workmanship, which 
had been wielded in the wars of the 15th century. Besides it was a 
feature peculiar to Spain that every peasant who had a noble 
ensign cut in stone over the door of his miserable cabin, 
considered himself a nobleman and that thus the country people, 
generally, if poor and plundered, did never groan under that 
consciousness of abject degradation which exasperated them in the 
rest of feudal Europe. That the revolutionary party did not know 
how to link the interests of the peasantry to the town movement, is 
avowed by two men, both of whom acted a principal part in the 
Revolution, by General Morillo and by San Miguel. Morillo, who 
cannot be suspected of revolutionary sympathies, wrote from 
Galicia to the Duke of Angouléme: 

“If the Cortes had sanctioned the bill on the seignorial rights, and thus despoiled 
the grandees of their properties in favour of the multitude, Your Highness would 

adopted on October 12, 1824.— Ed. 

have encountered numerous, patriotic and formidable armies, which would have 
organized themselves, as they did in France, under similar circumstances’’. 

On the other hand San Miguel (see his Civil War of Spain, 
Madrid. 1836) tells us: 

“The greatest error of the liberals consisted in their not considering that by far the 
majority of the nation were indifferent or hostile to the new laws. The numerous 
decrees published by the Cortes with a view to ameliorating the material condition of 
the people, were unable to produce so immediate results as were required by the 
circumstances. Neither the abolition of half the tithes, nor the sale of the monastic 
estates, contributed to ameliorating the material condition of the lower agricultural 
classes. The last measure, on the contrary, by throwing the land out of the hands of 
the indulgent monks into those of calculating capitalists, impaired the position of the 
old farmers by causing higher rents to be imposed upon them, so that the superstition 
of this numerous class, already wounded by the alienation of sanctified patrimony, 
became exaggerated by the suggestions of material interests”. 

The revolutionary town population thus estranged from the 
mass of the nation, were therefore forced, in their struggle with 
the Grandees, the rural clergy, the monastic power, and the crown 
which represented all these antiquated elements of society, to 
depend altogether on the army and its chiefs. The very position 
thus usurped by the army in the revolutionary camp, together 
with its isolation from the masses, made it an instrument 
dangerous for the hands that wielded it, but inoffensive to the 
enemy it was to strike. Finally, the upper rank of the middle-class, 
the so-called Moderados, became soon lukewarm and then traitors 
to the Cause of the Revolution, lulling themselves, as they did, into 
the hope of getting their reign established by means of a French 
intervention and thus enjoying the fruits of a new society without 
painstaking and without admitting the plebeians to participate in 
them. 

The positive result of the Revolution of 1820-1823 was not 
limited to the great fermentation which expanded the minds and 
renewed the character of some large classes of the nation. The 
second restoration, in which the antiquated elements of society 
assumed such shapes as to become insupportable to, and 
incompatible with the national existence of Spain, was itself a 
product of the Revolution. Its principal work was to whet the 
antagonism to such a point as to make all compromises impossible 
and a war to the knife inevitable. According to Lord Liverpool 
himself, there never was an extensive political change attended 
with less violence or bloodshed than the Spanish Revolution 

during 1820-1823." When we behold, therefore, the civil war of 
1833-1843 *” exterminating the antiquated elements of Spanish 
society,” with fire and sword and disgracing itself by acts of 
cannibalism, we must not attribute the savage inexorableness of 
that epoch to the peculiar character of the Spanish race, but to the 
same force of circumstances that imposed upon France the reign 
of terrorism. While the French centralised and, therefore, 
abbreviated the reign of terrorism, the Spaniards, true to their 
traditions, decentralised and, consequently, procrastinated it. 
Conforming to Spanish tradition, the revolutionary party was not 
likely to prove victorious by subverting the throne. With them, to 
be successful, the Revolution itself needed to appear as a 
competitor for the throne. The struggle of the two societies ought 
to assume the form of a struggle of opposite dynastic interests. 
The Spain of the 19th century did her revolution with ease; when 
she was allowed to give it the form of the civil wars of the XIVth 
century. It was Ferdinand the Seventh who gave to the Rev- 
olution a royal name—that of Isabella, while he leagued to 
the counter-revolution the Don Quixote of the Auto-da-fé, Don 
Carlos. Ferdinand VII proved true to his character to the [end].‘ If, 
during his whole life, he had cheated the liberals by false promises, 
should he not indulge the sport [when cheating the serviles on his 
death-bed? *” As to religious matters, he had always been a sceptic. 
He was unable to [con]vince himself that any one—even the Holy 
Ghost—should be so silly as to speak the truth.