Washington Irving

by Brian Jay Jones

  “For two weeks past,” Irving wrote in mid-November, “I have been very much at home, fagging at diplomatic business, having to make researches and treat about subjects quite foreign to my usual range of inquiry.” In lengthy dispatches to Webster, he discussed Spain's growing political unrest, addressed rumors regarding the young queen's marriage, and analyzed the latest gossip about Espartero's true ambitions. Irving was that rarest of creatures, a diplomat with a best seller, and his official communications sparkled with thoughtful asides, literary references, and colorful descriptions of Spain's dramatis personae. It was little wonder that Webster immediately put aside all other official correspondence to read the latest diplomatic musings from his minister in Spain.29

  “The minority of the Queen is made a fruitful Source of political agitation,” Irving reported. At issue was the rising tension between Spanish liberals, who were pushing Espartero to adhere to a constitutional amendment preventing Isabella from assuming the throne until she was eighteen, and the Absolutists, who wanted Isabella to assume the throne as quickly as possible. The Absolutists were convinced Espartero wished to delay Isabella's ascendance to extend his own reign as regent and seize control of the government. Irving argued to Webster that Espartero was not that ambitious. “Prone to sink into apathy on ordinary occasions, to let things take their course; and to appear less in intellect than those about him,” was Irving's frank assessment of the regent. If Espartero were riled into action, however, Irving assured Webster that it would take merely “the warning voice of the wary Statesman, to keep him from trampling involuntarily over the boundaries of the constitution.”30

  The marriage of the queen, Irving noted, was the country's other “political perplexity.” It was rumored that King Louis-Philippe was maneuvering for one of his sons to marry Isabella, while others were arguing for the duke of Seville, or Queen Victoria's cousin Prince Leopold. The queen's mother had other plans, promoting her sister Louisa Carlota's son, the twenty-year-old homosexual duke of Cadiz. “All this would be mere diplomatic gossip, of little interest,” Irving concluded thoughtfully, “did not every thing connected with the minority and marriage of the young queen bear upon the vital politics of the nation and affect the future destinies of Spain.”31

  The dramatic affairs of the court Irving could write of with excitement and elegance; economics, however, were another matter. “The statistics of trade about which I have had to occupy myself, are new to me,” he groused to Pierre, “and require close attention for a time to master them.” He found the topic boring and somewhat irritating. It was too much like going over the business ledgers in Liverpool, though he bragged to Sarah that he felt like “a school boy who has mastered a difficult lesson.”32

  There were times, too, when Irving grew frustrated with the lack of clear instructions from Washington, D.C. His annoyance wasn't so much with Webster, but with the political climate in the United States, which seemed to encourage the regular rotation of Cabinet officers and government appointees. The lack of stability in the Cabinet and in the State Department, Irving said peevishly, made it difficult for him and his fellow ministers to do their jobs. “To carry on a negotiation with such transient functionaries is like bargaining at the window of a rail road car,” he wrote. “Before you can get a reply to a proposition the other party is out of sight.”33 Webster resigned from Tyler's Cabinet six months later.

  And there were literary disputes that required his attention. That fall, he was under attack from two different American journals. The first assault, in Graham's Magazine, smeared Walter Scott for “puffing” his own writings by inserting favorable notices of his own work in magazines, then splattered Irving by asserting that “Washington Irving has done the same thing, in writing laudatory notices of his own works for the review and like Scott, received pay for whitewashing himself.”34

  The review in question was the one Irving had written in 1830, at Murray's request, to clear the air about the Agapida fiasco in The Conquest of Granada. “I never made a secret of my having written that review,” Washington told Pierre, and insisted that the article in question was written to be “illustrative, not laudatory of the work.” Pierre was so upset by the attack in Graham's that he wrote the editor a blistering note, demanding an apology. The magazine retracted the article in its December issue, and Washington joked that he was relieved the matter had been resolved by Pierre's righteous indignation instead of his own, “so I retained the smoothness of my temper without a wrinkle.”35

  A more serious allegation, however, came from the pages of the Southern Literary Journal, in which critic Severn Wallis accused Irving of plagiarizing Navarette in The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. It was a malicious charge, with no real merit, and Washington complained bitterly to Pierre of the unfairness of Wallis's claims. Washington had footnoted Navarette liberally in his work, and had publicly acknowledged his debt to the historian. Beyond that, Washington wasn't sure what more he could do. “What I am as an author,” he told Pierre, “the world at large must judge. You know what I am as a man, and know, when I give you my word, it is to be depended upon.”36 Washington had no stomach for jumping into such a skirmish; fortunately, his old editor Lewis Clark leapt to his defense in the pages of Knickerbocker.

  Hurt, though not surprised, by the attacks, Washington blamed the media's need to generate controversy to sell newspapers. “I have been so long before the public that the only way to make anything new out of me is to cut me up,” he told Pierre with a sigh. Still, he recognized that the scuffle was mostly bluster, and joked to Pierre's wife that he could always argue that critics had him confused with someone else. “I begin to think I'll give out that I am not the Washington Irving that wrote that farrago of literature they are occasionally cutting up,” he wrote, “and that I have never followed any line of life but diplomacy, nor written anything but despatches.”37 The literary crisis passed.

  His boys returned to Madrid in mid-November, sunburned, healthy, and only slightly disappointed they hadn't been harassed by robbers.38 He was glad to have them back. Only days later, Irving stood in a long line at the palace with Hamilton, Ames, and the rest of the diplomatic corps, ready for an audience with the queen on St. Isabella's Day. Protocol required that ministers line up according to the length of their service, and after only four months in Madrid, Irving was already third in line, behind the ministers of England and Portugal.

  Irving was fascinated by the young queen and appreciated that, despite her constitutional responsibilities, she was still a child. Watching her trying to remember the appropriate responses as she received the long line of somber ambassadors and ministers, Irving could only feel sorry for her. “I had been so interested in contemplating the little sovreign that I had absolutely forgotten to arrange any thing to say,” he recalled, “and when she stood before me I was, as usually with me on public occasions, at a loss.” He fumbled for words, then turned his sputtering to his advantage. “I expressed my regret that my ignorance of the Spanish language rendered it so difficult for me to address her as I could wish,” he told his niece later. The queen smiled, shook her fan coquettishly, and Irving backed out of the room with a relieved bow. He had made an impression.39

  That winter, the Catalonian region erupted in violence. The dispute was financial—“wherever money is to be made there is a Catalan,” Irving remarked—but it was enough to make the leadership in Madrid nervous, and Espartero and his troops marched to Barcelona to restore order. With a constant hail of mortar fire, they pummeled the city into submission, destroying more than four hundred buildings. Even as martial law prevailed in subjugated Barcelona, things were strangely calm in Madrid, where a loyal national guard kept the peace. As he and his boys sipped tea and played backgammon by the fire in their pink-walled salon, Irving dictated long accounts of the action, which Hamilton transcribed as fast as he could into dispatches for Webster.

  Irving enjoyed the drama, but his diplomatic duties and their corresponding social
obligations were starting to weigh on him. He could sympathize with the queen, who, as she attended yet another royal event, yawned behind her fan as the evening wore on. His official duties left him scant time to write and sapped him of energy. “I have been a little fagged of late by close study of some diplomatic questions, and the preparation of papers and letters for this government and the government at home, and I went to bed rather nervous,” he told Sarah Storrow. He was also having nightmares again, something that hadn't happened since the early 1820s, when he had nearly collapsed under the strain of completing Tales of a Traveller.40

  His frazzled nerves didn't escape the notice of his sister Catharine, who expressed concern about him shouldering their family's financial burdens. Irving realized then he had complained too much. “She ought to know that it is this which spurs me on to cheerful activity of mind and body and gives an interest to existence,” he said. For all his carping about money and his anxiety over his stalled pen, Irving was proud to support his family:

  Had I only myself to take care of I should become as inert, querulous and good for nothing as other old bachelors who only live for themselves, and should soon become weary of life, as indeed I have been now and then, when every thing went smooth with me and I had only to think of my own enjoyment: but I have never felt such real interest in existence, as desirous to live on, as of late years, since my life has become important to others: and I have never felt in such good humor with myself as since I have began to consider myself a “pere de famille.”41

  Seeing those words on paper was a release; Irving suddenly began writing again, working with obsessive regularity through Christmas and the new year. Nor did he neglect his official duties—and there was plenty for him to report. Espartero had returned from Barcelona, and his reception in Madrid, Irving wrote glumly, was “rather cold.” Irving blamed the media for the public's poor perception of the regent, arguing that the newspapers had used the bombardment of Barcelona to paint Espartero as a bloodthirsty despot. But Irving entertained some doubt. “I am a novice in these scenes of political intrigue and may ultimately discover Espartero not to be the well meaning man that at present I think him,” he admitted. “As long as he stands faithfully by the throne of the little queen, who has my strongest sympathies,” he concluded, “I shall wish him well.”42

  Irving's pen scratched away, writing his life of George Washington, lengthy dispatches to Webster, and even longer letters to Sarah Storrow. It was a pace that would have worn down even a younger man; Irving's health began to fail. What started as a slight cold gradually worsened. In late February 1843 came collapse. “I have foolishly overtasked myself and must abide the penalty,” Irving told Sarah Storrow. The inflammation and herpetic lesions that hadn't bothered him since 1822 returned with a vengeance, covering his entire body with a painful rash. Ordered by his doctor to neither read nor write, he glumly put away the pages of his Washington biography. Even the weight of his clothing was agonizing against his skin. Irving retired to his bed, where he huddled naked under light sheets, issuing orders and dictating dispatches.43

  It had never been this bad. He lost his appetite, and after being bled by a doctor, could barely sit up. Hamilton attended to him diligently, “with incessant assiduity, and with a womans kindness,” Irving told his sister approvingly. “I cannot speak too highly of his conduct.”44 Despite his misery, he remained at his post, and ignored his doctor's advice to leave Madrid for the healing waters of a spa.

  Over the next month, Irving sent Hamilton to the shops and cafés in the surrounding neighborhoods to gauge public support for Espartero. The news wasn't good; the regent had little support in the Spanish legislature, but rather than fight for his measures against a hostile majority, Espartero took the drastic step of dissolving the body and ordering new elections. Those elections didn't go his way. Facing an increasingly hostile majority in government and a skeptical public, the regent's hold seemed tenuous—and Irving was anxious to see how it played out. To his disappointment, however, he did so without Brevoort and Ames, who left the legation to return home.

  By spring Irving began to feel better. He put on his boots and tramped around in a nearby meadow, though even the slightest effort at writing or bookkeeping inflamed his hands so badly he could hardly hold a pen. Hamilton continued to troll for information on the streets and among the diplomatic corps, then wrote dispatches with Irving late into the evening. Espartero continued to flounder. “I fear that the efforts of his enemies will drive him to the wall,” Irving said, “and place him in a position wherein he cannot act constitutionally.”45

  He was right about one thing: the regent's support was gone. By early June, there were revolts and uprisings in nearly every region of the country. A clash between Espartero and his opposition was inevitable, and Irving wondered whether Spain could endure. “If he falls,” Irving speculated, “matters will very likely be in a state of chaos and anarchy for a time until a new government is formed.” Whatever happened, Irving didn't want to miss a moment of it. “I should be loth to leave [my post] in the present critical state of the Country,” he wrote.46

  He didn't have to wait long. On June 21 the regent held a levee at which he assured the diplomatic corps of his loyalty to the queen and to Spain's constitutional monarchy. Later that afternoon, Espartero and his men rode out for Valencia, vowing to suppress the insurrection there and uphold order. “The political affairs of Spain have gone on from bad to worse,” Irving wrote in his official account of the day's events.47

  With the departure of the regent and his guard from Madrid, two opposing armies angled toward the capital. Madrid hunkered down; its gates were closed and guarded, shops were shuttered, and the city remained lit at all hours. “I was advised not to stir out; as one may get involved in tumults, at such times,” Irving said. But the longer he watched the troops outside his window on Calle Victor Hugo, the more frustrated he was at being cooped up indoors. “I could not resist the desire to see something of a city in a state of siege, and under alarm,” he confessed to his niece. He leapt into his carriage and drove up and down the Prado, craning his neck out the window like an anxious schoolboy to take in all the excitement. “The houses were illuminated from top to bottom,” he reported, “groups were gathered about every door: and troops were patrolling in every direction…. I never saw Madrid under more striking and picturesque circumstances.”48

  Over the next several days, as troops drilled and cannons boomed near the gates, Irving wandered the streets on foot, peeking in closed shop windows. With the newspapers shut down during the siege, information was at a premium, so he buttonholed passing soldiers and asked for any details on the approaching armies. Looking out his window at night, he saw bayonets glinting under the street-lights and heard the snap of gunfire. “It has been extremely interesting to me,” he wrote.

  Had his own government known of Irving's reckless behavior during the siege of Madrid, he might have been recalled out of concern for his own safety. Irving seemed unfazed by the violence around him, but he worried that the encroaching armies might mount a direct attack on the palace to kidnap or kill Isabella. He sent a note to the royal family, offering to bring himself and a number of his fellow ministers to the palace to surround the queen and her sisters in a high-ranking human shield. That offer—which would have alarmed the American government had it known of it—was refused.49

  In late July came word that two of the regent's generals were riding hard with troops for Madrid to intercept the approaching armies. It was only a matter of time before the inevitable clash, but Irving was denied the dramatic ending. “The question is decided,” he wrote glumly to interim secretary of state Hugh Legaré on July 22. “The armies met yesterday morning; a few shots were exchanged when a general embracing took place between the soldiery, and the troops of the Regency joined the insurgents.”50 Just like that, it was over; Espartero was finished. Hearing in Seville of the defeat of his armies in Madrid, the fallen regent went into exile in Eng
land.

  “All is confusion and suspense here,” Irving reported. With Espartero gone, Spain fell into the hands of General Joaquin Narváez and his insurgents, who scrambled to cobble together a new government. Irving held out hope for maintaining the constitutional monarchy, but without Espartero, he was ambivalent. He and the Mexican minister had presented themselves to the new regime in a show of recognition of the legitimacy of the new government, but Irving was skeptical of its success. “Most heartily do I wish, for the sake of Spain, that a government may be formed capable of carrying on the affairs of the nation in a durable and prosperous manner,” he wrote to the new secretary of state, Abel Upshur, “but I fear there are too many elements of discord in a state of fermentation to permit such an event.”51

  In August Irving dutifully stood in yet another long line with the diplomatic corps in the royal Hall of Ambassadors as Narváez and the members of the new Cabinet addressed the queen. It was their intent, said new prime minister Joaquín López, to negate the need for a regent by formally declaring Isabella of age on October 10, 1843, her thirteenth birthday. Isabella read her scripted response, and the room erupted in cries of “Viva la Reina!” It was the sort of spectacle Irving normally would have enjoyed, but he was disgusted by the sycophantic courtiers and old nobility who now bowed and scraped before the throne. “It was curious,” he wrote caustically, “to see Generals kneeling and kissing the hand of the Sovreign, who but three weeks since were in rebellion against her government, besieging her capital and menacing the royal abode where they were now doing her homage.”52