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Moore v Adam. An Irish Merchant in 1812 Alicante: War, Politics and Business

Moore contre Adam. Un marchand irlandais à Alicante en 1812 : guerre, politique et commerce
Madeline O’Neill
p. 55-74

Résumés

Cet article trouve son origine dans le témoignage d’un incident survenu à Alicante en 1812, incident qui donna lieu à deux poursuites judiciaires pour coups et blessures par un officier britannique devant un tribunal britannique en 1815 et 1816. Thomas Moore, la victime de l’agression, fut également l’auteur d’un témoignage publié à Londres en 1816. Une analyse thématique des événements qui ont encadré cette altercation et du contexte idéologique des principaux protagonistes est menée dans le contexte de la Guerre d’indépendance espagnole (1808-1814). Les thèmes abordés incluent la présence marchande irlandaise en Espagne, le constitutionnalisme, la race, la classe et la politique, la coopération et la dissidence, le libéralisme contre l’absolutisme et les récits plus traditionnels de la religion et de l’identité nationale. La complexité du contexte est renforcée par la relation entre l’armée britannique et les civils espagnols et par l’influence politique des Britanniques à Cadix et Alicante.

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  • 1 Moore v. Adam, Proceedings in a Cause tried in the Court of King’s Bench, December 21, 1815, for Sp (...)

1In Alicante, in the region of Valencia, on the 18 December 1812, a British officer forced his way into the balconied seafront home of an Irish merchant about to sit down to his evening meal and proceeded to order his sergeant to strike the merchant on the head and shoulders with a stick. This attack resulted in a trial in London in 1815 in which the officer was accused of an assault that led to the merchant’s loss of reputation and business. The notes from the trial along with the plaintiff’s footnoted observations and final appendices provided the basis on which to build a conceptual framework for a thematic analysis of both the events that framed this altercation and the ideological contexts of the war in the Iberian Peninsula in 1812.1 This analysis reveals the complex of relationships between Thomas Moore (177?-183?), the Irish Catholic merchant, British subject and citizen of Alicante, and Colonel Frederick Adam (1781-1853), military hero and the fourth son of William Adam (1751-1839) of Blair Adam, the Scottish barrister, politician, judge and Lord Lieutenant of Kinross-shire.

  • 2 The Commission de Govierno is referred to variously in Moore’s testimony as “the Comisario”, “the C (...)
  • 3 See below for further detail on the Constitution. See also 1812 Echoes: The Cádiz Constitution in H (...)

2Their quarrel arose from the urgency of billeting and supplying the allied forces in the city during the French occupation of Spain. Moore’s strenuous objections to the seizure of his home and business premises by the army and the civil authorities brought their differences to crisis point. The third player in this relationship was the junta or Commission de Govierno that represented the municipal authority in Alicante.2 The Commission’s principal objectives were the protection of its interests and maintaining its resistance to the radical reforming Constitution that had just been composed by the Cortes in Cádiz.3 Both the army and the Commission proved hostile to Moore’s resistance to forcible billeting by the military command. The British considered him obstructive while the Spanish authorities saw him as an objectionable agent of a liberal Constitution which they were assiduously attempting to ignore. Moore, on the other hand, regarded himself as a champion of individual freedoms, the inviolability of property ownership and the freedom of the press. These were also the underlying principles of the new Spanish Constitution, all of which were suppressed by a Commission anxious to protect both the allied and their own regional and personal interests. Moore’s multiple identities as British subject, Spanish merchant and member of the Irish Catholic landowning class should have given him cultural access to both authorities; however, he was rejected by both and eventually lost his reputation and his mercantile house. An extra dimension is added to this complex of antipathies by the violence of the altercation between the soldier and Moore, which appeared to be founded, not just on Moore’s resistance to billeting, but on Adam’s personal rancour and disdain for him. Their quarrel led to Moore’s financial ruin, but the officer went on to become a hero of Castella and Waterloo. In 1816 he was appointed the Lord High Commissioner for the Ionian Islands.

  • 4 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 [1992], Yale, Yale University Press, 2012.

3The causes of Moore’s fall are explored within the context of allied-occupied Alicante, at risk of French invasion, divided by polarising liberal and conservative loyalties, and of the wartime disruption of trade and the economy. What conclusions can be drawn from his experience in relation to the status of the Iberno-Irish in early 19th-century Spain? Or the status of Irish Catholics in Britain a few years after the Catholic Relief Acts allowed a growing Catholic bourgeoisie to conduct business even as they continued to experience prejudice?4 How did the Irish merchant manage to fall foul of both Spanish and English civil and legal authorities at the same time? The number of intersecting relationships and contexts in Moore’s story raises more questions than it can provide answers for and holds the potential for a more focused enquiry among the Spanish archives.

  • 5 Charles J. Esdaile, Spain in the Liberal Age: From Constitution to Civil War, 1808-1939, Oxford, Bl (...)
  • 6 Isabel Burdiel, María Cruz Romero, “Old and New Liberalism: The Making of the Liberal Revolution, 1 (...)
  • 7 Fuensanta Hernández Pina, “Constitution, Education and Research”, European Educational Research Jou (...)
  • 8 Scott Eastman, “Soldiers, Priests and the Nation: From Wars of Religion to Wars of National Indepen (...)

4In 1812, Spain was embroiled in a war of independence from the occupying Napoleonic armies. The Spanish King, Fernando VII, was in exile and Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother, reigned in his stead. The peninsula was overrun by the French, Spanish and Anglo-Portuguese armies under the command of Lord Wellington. The governing body of the Junta Central, which had formed in response to the absence of monarchical authority, had decamped to Cádiz. There, it relinquished control to a Council of Regency of its own choosing. This was done to invalidate the claims of the provincial juntas that the Junta Central was not a legitimate governing body. A Cortes, or representative legislative body, was established to draw up a liberal Constitution that had the potential to radically reform Spanish cultural and political life. Charles J. Esdaile described this period as, “one of the most defining moments of modern Spanish history”,5 in which historiography has considered the existence of two Spains, liberal versus conservative and traditional versus radical. However, the reality was less polarising: the membership of the Junta Central had included conservative, liberal, traditional and radical ideologies which often overlapped within the same territory without any clear ideological unity, and if a liberal revolution could have been said to be taking place, it incorporated but did not destroy the old political social, and cultural traditions in the new nation that emerged. The radicalising ideology had some of its roots in French revolutionary ideals, but there were attempts to locate it in the municipal autonomy and privilege of the medieval Spain that rebelled against the Hapsburgs in 1520.6 The power of the Church had been reduced by the abolition of the Inquisition; however, the influence of Catholicism had not been excised from Spanish politics.7 In fact, the liberalism expressed in the Constitution was uniquely shaped by Spanish culture and Catholic religious belief. Because of this, the Catholic Church retained its influence and religion became united with the “evolving rhetoric of the nation”,8 proving that constitutionalism and a Catholic identity were not antithetical.

  • 9 Charles J. Esdaile, Spain in the Liberal Age…, p. 31.
  • 10 Delfina Fernández Pascua, “Ramón Power y Demetrio O’Daly: Diputados a Cortes por Puerto Rico”, in L (...)
  • 11 Fuensanta Hernández Pina, “Constitution, Education and Research”, p. 37.
  • 12 Ibid.

5This reforming Constitution was designed to reduce the power of the monarchy and destroy the feudal system. Cádiz was known as “the stronghold for the Spanish bourgeoisie”9 and the home of a sizeable Irish community, some of whom were deputies on the Cortes. Santiago Key (1772-1821) and Juan O’Gavan (1728-1858) acted as vice-presidents and, along with Enrique O’Donnell (1769-1834), also acted as signatories of the Constitution. The fourth Irish deputy, Ramón Power (1775-1813), was the Captain-General of Puerto Rico.10 Their presence in Cádiz and their place within the Cortes affirms the influence of the Irish in Spain in the early 19th century. Cádiz was cosmopolitan, educated, religiously and ethnically diverse and dominated by a political discourse incorporating ideas on freedom, nation and political loyalty. Its lively literary and political culture generated animated discussion in cafeterias and gatherings in private homes attended by diverse professional and political groups. These gatherings were often hosted by educated women who occupied a unique position in Cádiz society denied to women elsewhere in Spain. Margarita López de Morla and Frasquita Larrea were notable as representing the liberal and conservative factions and there were women journalists such as Maria Manuela López de Ulloa.11 The city, which was highly literate, possessed twenty bookshops and a critical press described by Hernández Pina as the “birthplace of modern political journalism, with the publication of up to sixty national and foreign newspapers”,12 while El Diario Mercantil published an account of the stock that arrived in Cádiz.

  • 13 Charles J. Esdaile, Spain in the Liberal Age…, p. 33.

6All the above made Cádiz a suitable birthplace for the most liberal Constitution of its time. It restricted absolutism, granted freedom to the individual and the press, protected the inviolability of the private sphere and included universal male suffrage and equality before the law. It abolished all forms of privilege, including the Inquisition, but article 12 affirmed the Catholic nature of the Spanish nation. It did little to address the grievances of its South American empire which eventually led to the revolt of most of Spanish America.13 However, the emerging Latin American nations and the Norwegian Constitution of 1814 went on to use the Constitution of Cádiz as their model.

  • 14 Ibid., p. 22.
  • 15 Isabel Burdiel, María Cruz Romero, “Old and New Liberalism…”, p. 67.
  • 16 Ibid., p. 68.
  • 17 Ibid.

7The reforms of the Cortes were not uniformly adopted by the Spanish administrative regions and few of them possessed the lively liberal discourse or the cosmopolitan intellectualism of Cádiz. Local juntas often functioned autonomously with little reference to the Cortes. This should not have been surprising as prior to the institution of the Cortes the provincial juntas had paid only lip service to the Central Junta.14 As Burdiel and Cruz Romero pointed out, the focus “of political and social life was not so much the nation as the local area or region”.15 This was evident in the junta or Commission de Govierno, which reflected traditional regional, military and religious interests. In contrast, in neighbouring Valencia, the Constitution was endorsed, and the city became the “site of political action for Spanish liberals”16 and the best measure for the social and political impact of liberalism. Valencia was an important centre for trade in manufacturing, textiles and agricultural commodities. It had a strong anti-seigneural movement, the 1813 town council did not include a member of the aristocracy, for example, and Valencian deputies played an important role in the destruction of the social and economic order of the old regime.17 However, it was also in Valencia that a coup took place in 1814, restoring absolutist rule.

  • 18 The Cortes divided Spain into provinces of equal size and appointed a governor to each.
  • 19 Moore v. Adam…, p. 56.
  • 20 Sir Charles Richard Vaughan (1774-1849) was an Oxford educated British diplomat who was first sent (...)
  • 21 Alicia Laspra, “Tupper, Peter Carey”, Guerra e Historica Pública, University of Alicante, online: h (...)

8Moore, who was influenced by contact with Whig liberal society in London and an enthusiastic supporter of Spanish constitutional reforms, was impatient at their lack of infiltration into the authorities in Alicante. According to Moore, despite the circulation of the Constitution in print for the previous seven months, and the appointment of a new governor by the Cortes,18 representing its liberal views, the Constitution “appeared as much unknown at Alicant as on the opposite coast of Africa”.19 The regency-appointed junta or Commission de Govierno which acted as the principal municipal authority continued to exert conservative control over the city. It was composed of seven individuals, the military chief of the province, General Copons, Intendant Xanga Arguelle, two judges, Cozar and Alpuente, two gentlemen named Roca and Baruncha, Padre Rico and P. C. Tupper, a representative of the British Consul who reported back to Sir Charles Vaughan, of the British embassy in Cádiz.20 Tupper was a controversial figure, a wealthy merchant in Valencia in 1803, he was a member of the first Supreme Board of the Kingdom of Valencia in 1808. Appointed British Consul in Valencia in 1812, he collaborated with the allied armies in occupation of Alicante. His reputation as an effective agent was sullied by reports of personal benefit from his office and, by the time of his death, he had amassed a large fortune and a considerable art collection.21 Moore’s distrust of Tupper appears to establish some foundation for these claims. This is necessarily a truncated and simplistic account of the complex conditions that reigned in Spain during this time, but it is enough to illuminate the political and cultural context in which the Moore and Adam conflict took place.

  • 22 Daniel Yépes Piedra, “British Voices and Patriotic Spanish Women in the Peninsular War”, p. 17-18, (...)

9Moore arrived in the eastern seaboard Mediterranean city of Alicante in October 1812 after a five-year absence in London. He had left Spain in 1807, before the forced abdication of Carlos IV, and returned in a time when both Spain and his mercantile house were in crisis. Travelling from the port city of Cádiz, the heart of liberal reform, where he had friends among the sizeable Irish community, he called on the Countess of Bureta, who was celebrated as a hero of the siege of Zaragoza. María de la Consolación Azlor y Villavicencio, the Countess of Bureta, was one of the leaders of the women who took an active part in the defence of the city, installing gun batteries at her home. However, by 1813, she was a refugee in Cádiz.22 Moore was on the way back to Alicante after receiving reports from his partner, Patrick Strange, that his mother’s home on the seafront of Plazuela de Ramiro and one of their warehouses had been occupied without permission by General Don Felipe Keating Roche, a Spanish officer of Irish origins, who currently held rank in both the Spanish and the English army. Moore owned three warehouses with residences attached to two of them. One of them, in the Plazuela de Ramiro, belonged to Moore’s mother, and another was in Baranquet Square. Keating Roche had depleted his mother’s cellars of their wine by intimidating her housekeeper into giving him access and had taken a valuable black velvet cloak that had belonged to Moore’s father to make hats for himself. Moore returned, determined to wrest his properties from the hands of the army.

  • 23 Joseph Hone, The Moores of Moore Hall, London, J. Cape, 1939, p. 22.
  • 24 Thomas O’Connor, Irish Voices from the Spanish Inquisition: Migrants, Converts and Brokers in Early (...)
  • 25 Three other children were born to George and Katherine, two of whom, a boy and a girl, died of smal (...)
  • 26 John Robert Holsman, Changing Perceptions of Spain in Times of War and Revolution, 1808 to 1838, ma (...)
  • 27 Joseph Hone, The Moores of Moore Hall, p. 34.
  • 28 George Moore, The History of the British Revolution of 1688-9, London, Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme a (...)
  • 29 John Robert Holsman, Changing Perceptions of Spain…, p. 251.
  • 30 Ibid.
  • 31 José Baptista de Sousa, Holland House and Portugal, 1793-1840. English Whiggery and the Constitutio (...)
  • 32 Ibid.

10His family’s long history in Spain included the familiar historiographical tropes of exile, dispossession, religious oppression and military service that characterised the history of the Irish in Spain dating from the 1500s. However, it was not a straightforward story of refuge from religious persecution. His grandfather, John Moore, who originated in minor Irish Protestant gentry in Mayo, had the good fortune to marry Catholic Jane Athy from Renville in Galway, whose family had mercantile links in Spain. Moore’s father, George Moore, the son of this union, availed of these opportunities by trying his luck in Spain where he began his career in a counting house. He ascended the mercantile ranks, running a fleet of ships engaged in trade in wine, grain and kelp, which he maintained for fifty years. He further consolidated his position by marrying Katherine de KilKelly in 1765. Katherine, who had been reared in Bilbao, noted for harbouring a large Irish population, was the daughter of Dominick Kelly from Galway, who had links to the French and Spanish services, making Moore the product of a long history of Irish military and mercantile migrancy. It is unknown whether George Moore was a Catholic when he first came to Spain or whether he converted on arrival.23 However, it was essential to provide genealogical proof of both Catholic and class origins to acquire the Hidalgo status that allowed the Irish the political and trading advantages available to Spanish citizens.24 The success of George Moore’s business allowed him to acquire a substantial property overlooking the bay and to educate his sons, John, George and Thomas, in schools in Liege and the University in Paris.25 They grew up fluent in Spanish, French and English. In 1793, John and George lived in London where they associated with the prominent Whig politicians, British Hibernophiles and Spanish exiles that surrounded the Holland House set.26 George junior was a particular favourite of this society, a member of the exclusive King of Clubs and an intimate of the historian Sir James Macintosh (1765-1832).27 George published his own Whig history of the 1688 “Glorious Revolution” in 1817.28 Macintosh, who was also a friend of Moore’s mother and a supporter of an independent South America, founded a Spanish committee in 1823 in support of the Spanish liberal regime.29 The leaders of the Holland House set, Henry Richard Fox, Lord Holland (1773-1840) (nephew of Charles Fox) and his wife, Elizabeth Vassal Fox (1771-1845), had travelled in Spain from 1802 to 1805 and from 1808 to 1809.30 While they broadly supported Spanish liberalism, Lord Holland was opposed to what he interpreted as the abstraction and idealism in the Constitution. However, they engaged the nationalist liberal theologian, Joseph Blanco White, as a tutor to their son, Henry Fox.31 These social and political contacts placed the Moores at the centre of a prominent group of English political figures sympathetic to Spanish liberalism and Catholic emancipation.32

  • 33 Guy Beiner, Remembering the Year of the French: Irish Folk History and Social Memory, Madison, The (...)
  • 34 Thomas O’Connor, Irish Voices from the Spanish Inquisition…, p. 198.

11Despite his long integration into Spanish society and mercantile life, George Moore moved back to Ireland in 1794 and consolidated his family’s social position by acquiring large amounts of land in Mayo and becoming a powerful, wealthy Catholic landlord. He built a house with a balcony overlooking Lough Carra that echoed his Spanish home. His eldest son, John, joined the United Irishmen and was arrested and sentenced during the Irish rebellion of 1798, dying en route to transportation to Botany Bay.33 George, the middle son, inherited his father’s role as landlord and married into the local aristocracy, while Thomas was responsible for the mercantile house in Alicante. He had attempted to gain complete control from his brother George in a court case which he subsequently lost. This matrix of connections with England, Ireland and Spain gave Moore his complex identity and illuminated aspects of “the broader core narratives of Ireland and England which intersected” with what O’Connor described as the “multi-layered agency”34 of the Irish in Spain.

  • 35 Ibid., p. 2.
  • 36 Ibid., p. 31.
  • 37 Ibid., p. 8.
  • 38 John Robert Holsman, Changing Perceptions of Spain…, p. 27.

12Catholicism allowed their assimilation into Spanish society, acquiring linguistic skills as they did so, which often left them in the unique situation of being brokers between the English and the Spanish, a role that Moore attempted to fill in 1812 Alicante. England and Spain were interdependent in terms of trade despite a long history of mutual religious intolerance and a relationship based on “naval, strategic and religious competition”.35 From 1560 on, the Irish exploited this interdependency by becoming interpreters and go-betweens, combining an identity as Irish and Catholic with that of British subjects and Hapsburg dependents.36 The assimilated Irish spread into Seville, Cádiz and Malaga with involvements in banking, industry and knowledge transfer.37 Bilbao was often the first point of contact and several Irish families remained there and assisted the most recently arrived in the business of integration. The Irish often found employment with the Inquisition as interpreters, as the Spanish maintained a vigilant watch over the English traders fearing heretical infiltration, all the while maintaining the advantages of economics and trade, despite doctrinal differences. The British were protective of the interests of their merchants and encouraged them to trade where they chose. When Catholic freedoms were granted in 1791 Britain, a new generation of politically active middle-class Catholics emerged, who continued to experience social prejudice along with their new freedoms.38 Thus, Moore was in the invidious position of being a Catholic, Irish and British merchant, profiting from his Hidalgo status in Spain but still subject to anti-Catholic prejudice in Britain, while his family alliance with rebellion tainted his reputation with Irish insurrection.

  • 39 Richard E. Willis, “‘An handful of violent people’: The Nature of the Foxite Opposition, 1794-1801” (...)
  • 40 The Battle of Castalla took place in April 1813. The Allied forces led by Sir John Murray defended (...)

13At first sight, Adam appeared to have a less complex set of identifications. He was a career soldier, the son of a Scottish lawyer who was prominent in British politics and, through his mother, he had aristocratic influences as the grandson of Lord Elphinstone. Adam’s father, William Adam, was a member of the Whig Club in 1785. Popular in Whig society, he had links with Whig activists in Scotland and England and he was friends with the Prince of Wales.39 William Adam had a large family to provide for and a considerable debt. In 1809, he had to defend his fourth son, Frederick, against the charge of obtaining his commission by corrupt means, but the slur remained despite his protestations. His other son, John (1779-1825), who served with the East India Company, added to William Adam’s financial woes by getting himself into serious debt from which his father had to extricate him. In December 1812 William Adam continued to influence his son’s career by writing to Wellington asking if Frederick Adam could join Wellington’s staff. Wellington agreed to take him under his command with the caveat that the need for his detachment in Alicante was discontinued. Frederick made his military reputation early and was later considered a hero of Castalla and of Waterloo, his reputation obscuring a former association with corruption.40 By locating Adam in the context of contemporary British politics, threatened conceptually by revolutionary France, militarily by Napoleon’s armies and religiously by the threat of Catholicism, it is possible to understand some of the forces that acted on his intellectual, cultural and religious sensibilities. Catholic emancipation had been rejected by George III despite Henry Grattan’s long campaigns in its favour and anti-Catholic sentiment was prevalent in Wellington’s armies among both the officers and the enlisted men. Allied to racism and xenophobia, the English army often felt hostility towards the Spanish and Portuguese populations they had come to liberate. Adam, despite his Whiggish background, appeared to support some of those sentiments.

  • 41 Gavin Daly, The British Soldier in the Peninsular War: Encounters with Spain and Portugal, 1808-181 (...)
  • 42 Ibid., p. 103, 105.
  • 43 Ibid., p. 92.

14The cultural and religious intolerance held by the military manifested in letters home in which the conditions they found themselves in were described as part travelogue, cultural commentary, and racist rant, expressing the reactions of the English soldiers to an unfamiliar Europe. The attitude of the soldiers to their Spanish hosts was often expressed contemptuously in terms of cultural, linguistic and Protestant superiority. These cultural, military and civil identities were brought into relief when the residents of Alicante found themselves forced to billet the occupying allied army.41 Described in disparaging terms as “cold and haughty” or “indolent and phlegmatic”,42 the Spanish civilians who billeted English soldiers found themselves either treated in a condescending manner or subjected to derision or ridicule. Tensions ran high as billeting was assigned by the quartermaster general in consultation with local magistrates. In theory, towns were divided into districts to house individual regiments and designated houses were marked in chalk with names and numbers, but sometimes a billeting paper was obtained from a local magistrate.43 In practice, an officer often arrived at a house with a large entourage, invaded the premises and selected those rooms he preferred, often ejecting the inhabitants as he did so.

  • 44 Ibid., p. 115.
  • 45 Ibid., p. 100-101.

15Violence often erupted, which resulted in court martials. This occurred more often in the ranks than in the officer class. However, eighty cases related to “breaches of disciplined duty”44 concerned commissioned officers, some of them involving violent assaults against locals over billeting. Things did not improve much when the army was housed. There were complaints about hygiene, nutrition and the furnishings which they considered inferior to their own. These conditions testified to their own greater civility, and they considered their hosts “backward and barbaric”.45 They objected to the garlic, oil and onions in the Spanish diet and only the wine found favour with them. In addition, the English officers, practicing an early form of souvenir hunting, often stole objects from the homes they stayed in.

  • 46 Ibid., p. 217.
  • 47 Pere Gifra-Adroher, “Witness to the Peninsular War: Sophia Barnard’s Travels in Andalusia”, Cuadern (...)
  • 48 The Black Legend refers to a biased set of historical representations of Catholic Spain including s (...)
  • 49 Pere Gifra-Adroher, “Witness to the Peninsular War…”, p. 164.
  • 50 Gavin Daly, “A Dirty, Indolent, Priest-Ridden City: British Soldiers in Lisbon during the Peninsula (...)
  • 51 John Robert Holsman, Changing Perceptions of Spain…, p. 3.
  • 52 Kevin Linch, Matthew McCormack, “Introduction”, in Britain’s Soldiers: Rethinking War and Society, (...)

16This contempt was extended towards the Spanish army which was considered ill-equipped and undisciplined in comparison with the “civilised, industrious, disciplined and free-born”46 nature of the English soldiers. Sophia Barnard, a British traveller to Cádiz in 1810, described the British forces as “neat as print, in even lines”, while “the motley army of Spain” was “without shoes, out at elbow and knees, threadbare, front and rear”.47 A native distrust of Catholicism, a legacy of the “Black Legend”, contributed to many of the negative perceptions that the British held of the Spanish populations.48 The processions, friars, monks and statues of the Virgin Mary that were a part of Spanish Catholicism were regarded with fear and distrust. Sophia Barnard described an image of the Virgin Mary garbed in “velvet, satin gold, silver, and jewels” as resembling “an opera dancer”.49 The British self-identity of Protestant sober industriousness, cleanliness and virtue contributed to the condescension, arrogance and superiority with which they treated the customs and religious practices of the local people.50 This was reciprocated by their Spanish hosts who were equally distrustful of British Protestantism, never failing to ask soldiers if they were Irish, as they believed all Irish were Catholic and treating them with warmth, according to Ensign George Bell of the 34th foot.51 Despite the cultural superiority with which the British army regarded the Spanish military the perceptions of the army in Georgian Britain were complex, contradictory and often negative. It was considered oppressed and oppressor, as an arm of the law and lawless, addicted to violence and an excess of politeness, often considered unqualified and privileged.52 In Alicante, the allied army regarded itself the saviour of the Spanish people and therefore entitled to whatever privilege it could extract from the local population. By the time Moore arrived in Alicante it was a powder keg waiting to ignite, even without the invasion of the French.

  • 53 Moore v. Adam…, p. 1-2, see also p. 331.
  • 54 Letters between General Caamano and Lieut-General Maitland (ibid., appendix, p. 8-9). There had bee (...)
  • 55 Letter from General Caamano to Lieut-General Maitland, 19 September 1812 (ibid., appendix, p. 9).
  • 56 Graciela Iglesias Rogers, “Soldiering Abroad: The Experience of Living and Fighting among Aliens du (...)

17In this politically and culturally charged environment, he obtained an audience with General Joaquin Caamano, the new governor of Alicante. Caamano, a liberal and a hero of Badajoz, had been appointed by the Cortes to secure the Constitution in Alicante and ensure a good relationship between the civil authorities and the British military command. Caamano wished to promote a “good understanding”53 with the English and to billet the English officers with consideration, but he deplored the way that they took the law into their own hands and ill-treated and abused their Spanish hosts. He warned General Thomas Maitland, the officer in command, that civil matters were not a military concern and attributed the present discord between the two to the intrigue of the civil authorities.54 The civil authorities, who were operating an ad hoc system of locating billets for the benefit of the English army, sowed considerable discord among the citizens of Alicante. Caamano, on the other hand, could not obtain funding for his own garrison which he considered deprived of resources by the “quill combatants of the civil departments”,55 who were squandering those resources for their own advantage. Caamano reminded Tupper of his obligations as a member of the Commission de Govierno and warned him that his position within the British Consul did not confer special privileges. The situation was complicated by the failure of the Cortes after 1810 to provide adequate resources for Spanish troops, due to the loss of the South American colonies. This lack forced the officers, notably Ford Whittingham and Keating Roche, Moore’s present nemesis, to use their contacts among the merchants in Gibraltar, Cádiz, Catalunya and Valencia to try and obtain financial assistance. They had been granted funds from the British Treasury for military operations and clothing, but not for hospitals, food or transport and had to find the means of subsistence elsewhere. Keating Roche was already in trouble with the Cortes for taking hostages among the Valencian authorities in search of supplies.56 The further pressures on the civil authorities resulted in a joint action to coerce the city’s merchants to supply funds to maintain the armies and to provide extra billeting.

  • 57 Moore v. Adam…, p. 1.
  • 58 The term liberales represented the radical reforming party in Spanish politics, while the serviles (...)
  • 59 Moore v. Adam…, p. 12. Lord Frederick Bentinck was the brother of Lord William Bentinck, who became (...)

18Within this complex of competing priorities, Caamano was sympathetic to Moore’s case and on 11 October 1812, he ordered Keating Roche to vacate his premises on the Plazuela de Ramiro. He then held a joint meeting to discuss billeting with the quartermaster general of the British army Major Lang, the alcade, or local mayor, Count Soto Ameno, and Moore, who was requested to act as an interpreter. Moore saw this as an opportunity to remedy “the dissensions and animosities that appeared to reign uncontrolled”57 in Alicante between the military and civil populations and the liberales and the serviles58. In fact, it was to have the opposite effect and Moore was to become a principal actor in the dissent he claimed to deplore. His initial meetings with Lang were cordial and Lang agreed that his property should be returned to him. This relationship came to an end when Lord Frederick Bentinck approached Moore with some embarrassment and told them that the army had heard that he “stood ill with the Junta59 and they did not want his help fearing further dissent with the Spanish authorities. From that point on, Moore encountered hostility from the occupying army. His one ally, General Caamano was recalled to Cádiz by the Cortes, due, in Moore’s opinion, to negative reports made by Tupper, as Caamano had a combative relationship with the Commission de Govierno, who resisted any changes that might be imposed by the Constitution.

  • 60 Ibid., appendix, p. 10.
  • 61 Ibid., note 95, p. 223.

19The relationship between Moore and the Commission followed a similar route. Desperate for funds, the Commission held a meeting, at which Moore was not present, during which they obliged the local merchants to raise the sum of 180,000 rials. Moore objected to what he saw as “intimidation”60 of the merchants to obtain funds. He suspected that both the civil and military authorities were co-operating in corrupt activities and attributed much of the blame to Tupper and Vaughan, the representatives of the British Consul. He was determined to oppose and expose them and refused funding to the Commission and billeting to the army unless his conditions were met. Believing that “[m]en of large independent property do not sink all their ideas of civil liberty into passive obedience”,61 Moore reminded them that article 4 of the Constitution stated that that nation was bound to maintain and protect by law not only the civil liberty but the property rights of the individual. However, as it turned out, both the Commission and the army were largely indifferent, if not hostile, to the Cádiz Constitution.

  • 62 Ibid., p. 295.
  • 63 Ibid., p. 76.
  • 64 Ibid., p. 73.

20Despite his difficulties with the authorities and the impositions of billeting that made his warehouses unfit to carry out their business, Moore continued to trade with both the English and Spanish commissaries during the period of November and December of 1812. During this time, at the request of Chiva, the Minister of Finance, Moore extended loans of 5,000 pounds, 3 shillings and 10 pence to the Spanish government and supplied both the army hospital and the Spanish garrison the combined sum of 4,513 pounds, 5 shillings and 8 pence.62 His activities reveal the reach of his economic influence and his ambiguous relationship with the Spanish authorities and the British military command. Despite his ongoing disputes over billeting, he negotiated with Francis Daniel, the English commissary, to supply wine from the Huerta to the army.63 As was his custom he accepted bills on the British Treasury that were offered as payment. However, a scrutiny revealed anomalies in the proffered bills, and he feared that he might run into difficulties getting them honoured by the Treasury. Accordingly, he sent copies querying their legitimacy and the correspondence that he had with Daniel to both Baring’s Bank (which had underwritten the Napoleonic wars) and the Treasury. He also sent duplicates for the scrutiny of the Commander-in-Chief in Alicante. Infuriated at Moore’s actions, Daniel caused difficulties over the storage, collection and transportation of the wine, while he contacted other wine merchants, circulating stories about Moore’s sanity. He had the mercantile tribunal seize a delivery of fish to Moore from Messrs. James Hunter and Co. of Greenock valued at 3,000 pounds.64

  • 65 Ibid., p. 38.
  • 66 Ibid.
  • 67 Ibid., p. 42.
  • 68 The Inquisition Unmasked by Antonio Puigblanch, an attack on the Inquisition, was published in Engl (...)
  • 69 Sir Charles Vaughan (1774-1849), the British diplomat assigned to the embassy in Cádiz, was the aut (...)
  • 70 Moore v. Adam… p. 42.
  • 71 Ibid., p. 18.
  • 72 Ibid., p. 39.

21It was around this time that Moore first encountered Colonel Frederick Adam, the newly-appointed British adjutant, although he had heard of Adam while he was in Cádiz and the local gossip that described Adam as “a haughty tyrannical man”.65 However, on first acquaintance Moore found Adam “gentlemanly and attentive”66 and after some social calls, hoping to make an ally of him, he offered him accommodation in his house. During these early amicable exchanges, Adam hinted to Moore that he had liberal sympathies which he had to conceal as those political sentiments he held in common with his friends were “contrary to those of the persons in power in England”.67 Emboldened by this admission, Moore confided his belief that the English army was ignorant and intolerant of the workings of the junta and contemptuous of the Spanish army and townspeople. He sent Adam a translation of the Preliminary Discourse to the Spanish Constitution and the Inquisition Unmasked, along with gifts of Claret and Madeira.68 Thinking Adam a kindred spirit, he informed him of the differences between the Spanish municipal and military authorities. He may have gone too far by including a note with the gifts suggesting that the agents of the British government, Vaughan, from the British Embassy in Cádiz, and Tupper, wished to prevent one and encourage the other.69 Moore suggested that Adam might learn Spanish and even found him a teacher. To encourage Adam’s understanding of Spanish feeling about the war with France, he showed him a private letter that he had received from his friend, the Countess of Bureta, while he was in London. Adam would have known of the Countess from Vaughan’s pamphlet, published in 1809, as the Narrative of the Siege of Zaragoza, making the countess as well known in England as she was in Spain. Adam voiced some reservations at the sentiments expressed in the letter, which he felt were of “the sentiments of the old school”.70 This honeymoon period in Adam and Moore’s embryonic friendship came to an abrupt end when Moore made complaints about some British officers that he had taken into his home. Adam reacted angrily saying that he would “hear nothing against a British officer”71 and responded with froideur to Moore’s attempts to explain the workings of the Spanish municipal and military authorities. He told Moore that the only way to teach a Spanish officer “was with a thick stick”.72 Moore responded in kind, advising Adam that he was ill-informed and warned him that no good would come from his attitude. The relationship deteriorated further with Adam’s pointed enquiries into the nature of trade in Alicante and the type of imports and exports that were involved. Their encounters suggest that Adam admitted to a radicalism he did not possess in order to assess where Moore stood politically. The events that followed the rancour that replaced their earlier amiability indicate that this might have been the case. There is no doubt that Moore’s actions were provocative and even arrogant, but the intensity of Adam’s responses reveals the depth of his animosity for the Irish merchant.

22Moore continued to resist forced billeting, although he made provision for some officers and men to stay in his warehouse in Baranquet, where they treated his property with disrespect, tying their horses to the staircase and using his warehouse as storage for grain and artillery carts. Moore employed the services of the local press, the Diario, to insert articles from the press in Cádiz on the promise of taking 100 copies daily. He also attempted to have a part of the political composition of the Constitution printed as well, but he was refused by the printer. After the recall of Caamano, his successor Don Luis Riquelme ordered the printer not to accept anything from Moore. Undeterred, Moore purchased a political press that had belonged to the junta in Valencia and circulated his own Diario, printing articles about the conditions in Alicante in an attempt to influence public opinion against the English army and the local authorities. Not averse to fanning the flames of religious tension when it suited him, he offered a reward for the identity of a person who had recently assaulted a priest carrying the sacrament. In allusive and ironic terms, Moore inferred that an English soldier was responsible. Moore then barricaded his house against entry from the street and refused the authority of a billeting paper presented to him by the Reverend King who requested lodging in Moore’s home in Ramiro. Adam returned with King, forcing his way into Moore’s home and threatened him with a horsewhipping if he submitted any more articles concerning the army in the local press.

  • 73 Ibid., p. 129.
  • 74 Ibid., p. 144.

23Forced to accept the billeting of King, on the 18 December, two days after the Cortes appointed Wellington to the command of the Spanish army, Moore wrote a letter to the English general suggesting in an ironic tone that the soldiers who were billeted in his house might be the deserters that Adam had written of in an earlier article in the Diario. Adam intercepted the letter, and incensed, he called to Moore’s mercantile house. He was accompanied by Roquefeuille (who had identified Moore to Bentinck as a dissenting element), Captain Hatzenbuller and Sergeant Power, whom he had armed with a stick. Entering without invitation, he found Moore inside, about to eat his evening meal, where he confronted him over the letter. Faced by Moore’s intransigence, he ordered Power to beat him with the stick, saying: “Lay on him, Power”.73 The sergeant struck Moore four times on the head and shoulders, before Adam told him to stop. Moore attempted unsuccessfully to defend himself, he was badly shaken, but he managed to threaten legal action. Ignoring him, Adam took over Moore’s house for his own use and made public the news of Moore’s humiliation. Moore retaliated by placing a sign on his door written on the piece of paper Adam had presented as a billeting authority, saying that the house had been quartered by open violence: “Alojado a viva fuerza”.74 He then placed a notice in the Diario describing the incident and demanding the identity of the authority who had permitted the forcible entry and possession of his house. Moore considered that Adam acted with calculated fury and that the event was planned to humiliate him, executed with the knowledge of the municipal authorities and the army.

  • 75 Ibid., p. 295.

24Worried for his personal safety as threatening articles had been submitted to the Diario, Moore feared that he had incurred the enmity of a great many people because of his attempts to expose corruption within the Alicante authorities. He left Alicante on 19 December for the convent of Orito on the way to Monforte. The convent offered an hospicio or inn for travellers, but Moore took a room in the convent itself as he feared reprisal. In the period that followed, his German bankers refused his business due to the actions of Ford Whittingham, who, taking advantage of Moore’s situation, called to his bankers and, presenting a bill from Sir Henry Wellesley, demanded that it be honoured by Moore’s account. The bank felt obliged to pay it, but they asked Moore to remove his business. His warehouse of fish from Greenock was confiscated along with the wine that he had purchased, and the army used his establishments as they pleased as soon as he was removed from them. One of them was turned into a military hospital and never returned to him. A business with profits that amounted from the years 1807 to 1812 to 42,000 pounds was ruined, according to an estimate made by Patrick Strange, Moore’s business partner.75 Moore’s spirits were very low at this point, and he claimed that he contemplated suicide before he decided to leave Alicante early in 1813. Returning in 1814, he sent a courier to Cádiz with bills, accounts and instructions to call the attention of the Cortes and Wellington to matters in Alicante, but he gained little support, as absolutism had been restored by then.

  • 76 The material in these final paragraphs on the trial in London is derived from notes taken by Mr. Gu (...)
  • 77 Christopher Alan Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914, Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, 200 (...)

25On his return to England, he took a legal case against Adam in 1815 and, with the unsatisfactory outcome of that case, he took another in 1816 on the basis that the presiding judge in 1815 had been misdirected.76 The records from the first trial reveal the cultural and religious schisms between Spain and Britain during this period. Within the context of debates on Catholic emancipation and British Protestant identity, liberal constitutionalism and what Christopher Alan Bayly described as the post-war “re-emerging state systems of 1815”77 that replaced an ideological radicalism, it was unlikely that Moore would regain his previous position.

26Closeted from public scrutiny, the trial failed to gain the attention of the popular press, a failure that Moore attributed to censorship imposed by the authorities. Considering that the case featured the son of the president of the Scottish Jury Court and a military hero in the aftermath of Waterloo, it is both surprising that it escaped public notice and at the same time unsurprising that it might, as Moore suspected, have been suppressed.

  • 78 Philip Harling, “The Law of Libel and the Limits of Repression, 1790-1832”, The Historical Journal, (...)
  • 79 Moore v. Adam…, p. 274.

27Ostensibly, the trial was an attempt to retrieve the damage to his business which Moore ascribed to his loss of reputation resulting from Adam’s actions, a loss that he claimed was of more importance than financial compensation. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a loss of reputation due to a published defamatory or presumed seditious account by another, if not disproved, could incur large legal penalties as well as legal responsibility for the costs of the trial, which left the defendant financially ruined and possibly in prison.78 Lord Ellenborough, the Lord Chief Justice, presiding over the trial, was a veteran of such cases and a legendary bully. He described Moore as a British merchant with a “splendid and large establishment”79 who blocked up the entrance

  • 80 Ibid., p. 239-240.

[…] through his back door and fold[ed] his arms and sa[id] I have come from England not to fight the battles of Spain and of England and of Europe, but with new lights of the new philosophy, with improved doctrines upon the subject of government, with more correct notions how authority ought to be exercised.80

  • 81 Ibid., p. 143.
  • 82 Ibid., p. 222.

28By being so described, Moore was represented to the court as the leader of the discontents against the British troops and a major obstacle to billeting and supply.81 This led Moore to suspect that Ellenborough and the defence had a shared understanding. Frustrated by his lack of ability to appeal to public opinion, which could in some cases generate sympathy for a perceived victim, Moore expressed his anger and contempt in his published notes after the trial. It was necessary, wrote Moore, “[…] for a British Jury to recal [sic] military men to a sense of their duty to the community, and to prevent them trampling on the rights of their fellow-citizens”.82 He pointed out that

  • 83 Ibid., p. 223.

Men of large independent property do not sink all their ideas of civil liberties into passive obedience, but men who owe their superiority over their fellow-creatures merely to the sword, and expect to support that superiority only by following the dictates of another supposed superior Being, are generally ready to trample upon all the rights of citizens because they think they risk little or nothing in doing so.83

  • 84 Ibid., p. 232-233.
  • 85 Ibid., p. 171.

29However, Moore’s critique was expressed in a post-war period where the court would hear no wrong of Adam or the army. It was protective of its rights and not its obligations and eager to support the return of the Spanish monarch. According to the court, Spain was in a “perilous and miserable condition”84 in the absence of its sovereign and there were divisions among the authorities about the “conduct of the Cortes and the conduct of the war” and a “good deal of discussion” on the authority of the Cortes during the “exile and imprisonment of their sovereign”.85 With heavy irony Moore credited the army with returning Spain to its former feudal status:

  • 86 Ibid., note 106, p. 233.

Happy! thrice happy nation! relieved from the perilous and miserable condition in which it was, under the Cortes in 1812. The new lights have been extinguished, the ancient and venerable standard of the Green Cross (the Banner of the Inquisition) is once more unfurled, and the bravery of a British army and its chief […] has restored […] to the disconsolate villages, their believed friars, with the Inquisition.86

30Moore slyly undermined Britain’s assumption of superiority towards Spain by drawing analogies between the Spanish accusations of heresy that carried the implicit threat of the Inquisition and the British threat of libel, both of which he identified as agents of oppression and a curb on the freedoms of intellectual discourse. By this means, Moore cast Britain, despite her assumption of Protestant liberal superiority, in the same light as a perceived politically backward Catholic Spain.

  • 87 Ibid., p. 220.
  • 88 Ibid., p. 242.
  • 89 Ibid., p. 110.
  • 90 Ibid., p. 282.

31The defence described Moore with heavy irony as a merchant “not to be compared with any the world has ever seen, for honour and integrity”87 and further defined him as “this philosopher, this champion of the Constitution, this man who is to act up to the law”.88 It could be said that Moore’s lawyer further diminished his reputation by claiming that Adam found Moore “too loathsome to be touched by an officer of his rank”89 and offered an ignominious chastisement to a British merchant in the beating he received from a man of inferior rank. Moore asserted his moral probity by describing himself as acting in the character of a British merchant who did not owe his success to any disgraceful intrigue, but to his own industry, honour and perseverance, who had contributed to the resources of Great Britain without which the armies of the defendant would have been unavailing.90 In this way, he activated the prevailing tropes of liberal independence of thought and action. Nevertheless, when it came to trial in the British courts Moore’s efforts to obtain redress for his losses proved equally unavailing.

 

  • 91 Sönke Bauck, Thomas Maier, “Entangled History”, InterAmerican Wiki: Terms-Concepts-Critical Perspec (...)
  • 92 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837, p. 333.
  • 93 Ibid.
  • 94 Moore v. Adam…, p. 221.

32This article has avoided using Moore’s experience to construct a schematic representation of events, but the confluence of national, cultural and religious opinion that found a nexus in his person makes this micro-historic episode in occupied Spain available as an interesting study of the currents of national identity and prejudice that intersected in 1812 Alicante. Against a background of the crossing of national British, Spanish, and Irish narratives, cultural, religious and political tensions are made evident, making this article an entangled history of social movements, communities, knowledge exchange, warfare and migration.91 It foregrounds liberal politics in Spain, their uneven distribution and effect throughout the peninsula and the great debate spurred by the creation of the Constitution of Cádiz in 1812. Questions of personal liberty, protection of property, freedom of the press, equality and the abolition of privilege, gained urgency throughout Europe and beyond. It challenged British constitutionalism in an era in which Catholic emancipation was increasingly regarded by English intellectuals as an inevitable move, but Protestantism remained overwhelmingly the national identifier. There was, as Colley observed, a “longstanding and still prevailing view that Catholic loyalty was suspect due to a religious allegiance to Rome”.92 In 1812, the British army was not just at war with Catholic France but fighting in Spain where the Inquisition regarded Protestantism as heresy. The identity of the English forces, according to Colley, resided in anti-Catholic Protestantism.93 Within this context where Protestantism was a symbol of identity and loyalty then Moore’s opposition to the army in a time of war was likely to be regarded as disloyal. Could this have been a trigger for Adam? Regarded by the court as an officer of rank and merit, an honourable man from an estimable family living a life of service and spending every hour in military camp, far from the luxury of home, did Adam find the Catholic merchant’s assertion of his rights quite intolerable?94

  • 95 Ibid., p. 39.
  • 96 Ibid., p. 51.

33Hearing no ill of a British officer, he displayed cultural and religious superiority in his reply to Moore’s injunction to learn to understand the workings of the Spanish military and civil authorities, “A Spanish officer learns best by the blow of a thick stick”.95 Adam demonstrated a similar contempt for the merchant, requiring that the blows be delivered by a social inferior. Lest it be thought that a shared Catholicism brought advantages, it has to be noted that Keating Roche, the officer who occupied Moore’s mother’s house, was Irish and, as he claimed, “Catholic since Adam!”, but he showed a marked reluctance to quit Moore’s family home on the basis of a shared Irish Catholic identity.96 The currents of cultural and religious prejudice were unchecked by an effective central authority leaving the British military free rein to extract whatever they willed from the citizens of Alicante. Unprotected, despite, or perhaps because of, his multiple identities, Moore became a pariah in both mercantile and military circles. This marginalisation was continued in Britain where he was viewed as a leader of those who obstructed enforced billeting, despite his earlier attempt to assert a role in the encounters between the Irish and the English in Spain as a linguistic intermediary and a cultural guide, thus providing the social emollients that would facilitate a more amicable relationship between the Spanish authorities and the occupying English. Such a role had placed the Irish, as it was pointed out in the introduction, at the centre and not the margins of the broader core narrative of Ireland and England. Moore’s suggestion to Adam that the army did not understand Spanish politics and culture and was unaware of the warring elements between traditional monarchism and the more radical and egalitarian approaches, allowed him to exploit this blind spot. Nevertheless, the jostling of national boundaries in Alicante during this period makes it impossible to create firm hegemonic nationalising binaries. It was possible to be Irish, Catholic and British and be on several opposing sides.

  • 97 Leandro Prados de la Escosura, Carlos Santiago-Caballero, “The Napoleonic Wars: A Watershed in Span (...)

34As a further caveat to a totalising interpretation: many Irish merchants lost business as a result of the Spanish war of independence and what was alleged to be the subsequent socio-economic depression.97 Further investigation of the economic affairs in Alicante might reveal a more complex picture. What emerges from this case study of cultural, national and economic entanglements, is a picture of an educated multilingual, somewhat arrogant merchant of Irish, Spanish and British background who attempted to save a successful wine business under volatile wartime conditions. The extraordinary confluence of events in this case study and in its meticulous recording by its author and principal actor gives an insight, not just into Irish mercantile agency within the context of Spanish liberalism, but also into the transnational influence of Irish Catholics in Europe and the nuanced and hostile Anglo-Irish relationships away from both Ireland and Britain. It is also revelatory of the political, legal and economic status of an Irish Catholic business class in early 19th-century Britain. The connection of this Irish mercantile family with the prominent and powerful Whig factions of the late 18th and early 19th century sheds further light on an emergent Catholic landlord class with a role in both the 1798 rebellion and conservative Catholic solutions to Irish political independence.

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Notes

1 Moore v. Adam, Proceedings in a Cause tried in the Court of King’s Bench, December 21, 1815, for Special Damages, in Consequences of an Assault Committed at Alicant, in Spain. Taken Verbatim in Short-Hand by Mr. Gurney. Respectfully Dedicated to Lord Ellenborough and to the Public: With a Preliminary Statement and Notes by the Plaintiff. To Which Is Added an Appendix: Containing the Brief and Instruction Given by the Plainfiff to His Leading Counsel Mr. Sergeant Best, London, R. S. Kirby, 1816.

2 The Commission de Govierno is referred to variously in Moore’s testimony as “the Comisario”, “the Commission” or “the Comission”. For the sake of consistency, “Commission de Govierno” will be used throughout the text. Provincial juntas were appointed by the Junta Central to act as local authorities. They were to be composed of seven elected individuals who were added to the Ayuntamientos, or existing municipal authorities, composed of the mayor and aldermen, who enforced municipal regulations. They frequently obstructed the instructions of the Junta Central and acted independently and in their own interests.

3 See below for further detail on the Constitution. See also 1812 Echoes: The Cádiz Constitution in Hispanic History, Culture and Politics, Stephen G. H. Roberts, Adam Sharman (eds.), Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013.

4 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 [1992], Yale, Yale University Press, 2012.

5 Charles J. Esdaile, Spain in the Liberal Age: From Constitution to Civil War, 1808-1939, Oxford, Blackwell, 2000, p. 40.

6 Isabel Burdiel, María Cruz Romero, “Old and New Liberalism: The Making of the Liberal Revolution, 1808-1844”, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, vol. 75, no. 5, 1998, p. 65-80; Mark Lawrence, “Peninsularity and Patriotism: Spanish and British Approaches to the Peninsular War, 1808-14”, Historical Research, vol. 85, no. 229, 2012, p. 456.

7 Fuensanta Hernández Pina, “Constitution, Education and Research”, European Educational Research Journal, vol. 12, no. 1, 2013, p. 36-39. It has to be noted that the Inquisition did not disappear, it was to emerge in 1814 with the restoration of Ferdnando VII and the traditionalists.

8 Scott Eastman, “Soldiers, Priests and the Nation: From Wars of Religion to Wars of National Independence in Spain and New Spain”, Estudios Interdisciplinarios de Americá Latina y el Caribe, vol. 22, no. 1, 2011, p. 23; 1812 Echoes: The Cádiz Constitution

9 Charles J. Esdaile, Spain in the Liberal Age…, p. 31.

10 Delfina Fernández Pascua, “Ramón Power y Demetrio O’Daly: Diputados a Cortes por Puerto Rico”, in La presencia irlandesa durante las Cortes de Cádiz en Espana y América, 1812: política, religión y guerra / The Irish Presence at the Cortes of Cadiz: Politics, Religion and War, Enrique Garcia Hernán, María del Carmen Lario Oñate (eds.), Valencia, Albatros Ediciones, 2013, p. 159-178.

11 Fuensanta Hernández Pina, “Constitution, Education and Research”, p. 37.

12 Ibid.

13 Charles J. Esdaile, Spain in the Liberal Age…, p. 33.

14 Ibid., p. 22.

15 Isabel Burdiel, María Cruz Romero, “Old and New Liberalism…”, p. 67.

16 Ibid., p. 68.

17 Ibid.

18 The Cortes divided Spain into provinces of equal size and appointed a governor to each.

19 Moore v. Adam…, p. 56.

20 Sir Charles Richard Vaughan (1774-1849) was an Oxford educated British diplomat who was first sent to Spain in 1808 and again as the Secretary of the Legation which became the embassy in Cádiz, charged with supplying information on Spanish politics to the British government.

21 Alicia Laspra, “Tupper, Peter Carey”, Guerra e Historica Pública, University of Alicante, online: http://www.guerra-historia-publica.es/recursos/192 (my thanks to Cristina Pizano-Flores for her help in translating this text).

22 Daniel Yépes Piedra, “British Voices and Patriotic Spanish Women in the Peninsular War”, p. 17-18, online: https://www.academia.edu/6132115/British_Voices_and_Patriotic_Spanish_Women_in_the_Peninsular_War.

23 Joseph Hone, The Moores of Moore Hall, London, J. Cape, 1939, p. 22.

24 Thomas O’Connor, Irish Voices from the Spanish Inquisition: Migrants, Converts and Brokers in Early Modern Iberia, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016; Samuel Fannin, “Spanish Archives of Primary Source Material: Malaga, Cadiz, Cordoba, Granada, Seville” and “Spanish Archives of Primary Source Material: Bilbao and La Coruna”, Irish Genealogical Research Society, online: https://www.irishancestors.ie/the-irish-in-spanish-archives-102; Óscar Recio Morales, “Irish Émigré Group Strategies of Survival: Adaptation and Integration in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Spain”, in Irish Communities in Early-Modern Europe, Thomas O’Connor, Mary Ann Lyons (eds.), Dublin, Four Courts Press, 2006, p. 240-266.

25 Three other children were born to George and Katherine, two of whom, a boy and a girl, died of smallpox in Alicante, while the third, Peter, was kept in care for his entire lifetime.

26 John Robert Holsman, Changing Perceptions of Spain in Times of War and Revolution, 1808 to 1838, master’s thesis in history, University of Dundee, 2014, p. 252.

27 Joseph Hone, The Moores of Moore Hall, p. 34.

28 George Moore, The History of the British Revolution of 1688-9, London, Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1817.

29 John Robert Holsman, Changing Perceptions of Spain…, p. 251.

30 Ibid.

31 José Baptista de Sousa, Holland House and Portugal, 1793-1840. English Whiggery and the Constitutional Cause in Iberia, London, Anthem Press, 2018, p. 33-48; C. J. Wright, “Holland House Set (act. 1797-1845)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online, 22 September 2005, https://0-doi-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/10.1093/ref:odnb/93786.

32 Ibid.

33 Guy Beiner, Remembering the Year of the French: Irish Folk History and Social Memory, Madison, The University of Wisconsin Press, 2007, p. 6, 159, 181, 270, 271.

34 Thomas O’Connor, Irish Voices from the Spanish Inquisition…, p. 198.

35 Ibid., p. 2.

36 Ibid., p. 31.

37 Ibid., p. 8.

38 John Robert Holsman, Changing Perceptions of Spain…, p. 27.

39 Richard E. Willis, “‘An handful of violent people’: The Nature of the Foxite Opposition, 1794-1801”, Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, vol. 8, no. 3, 1976, p. 236-254.

40 The Battle of Castalla took place in April 1813. The Allied forces led by Sir John Murray defended Alicante against the French advance led by General Suchet. Frederick Adam successfully defended the pass in Biar, giving Murray time to prepare to meet Suchet, resulting in a victory for the allies.

41 Gavin Daly, The British Soldier in the Peninsular War: Encounters with Spain and Portugal, 1808-1814, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, p. 120.

42 Ibid., p. 103, 105.

43 Ibid., p. 92.

44 Ibid., p. 115.

45 Ibid., p. 100-101.

46 Ibid., p. 217.

47 Pere Gifra-Adroher, “Witness to the Peninsular War: Sophia Barnard’s Travels in Andalusia”, Cuadernos de Ilustración y Romanticismo, no. 18, 2012, p. 167.

48 The Black Legend refers to a biased set of historical representations of Catholic Spain including stereotypes of religious bigotry, fanaticism and cruelty that contributed to propaganda disseminating Hispanophobic ideas. The Spanish Inquisition, or the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, as it was known, was founded in the 15th century to stem the tide of heresy by enforcing orthodoxy. Long associated with torture and forced conversion, it persisted into the early 19th century and became a powerful symbol of the fanaticism assumed in the Black Legend. Revisionist historiography on the Inquisition suggests that it was negatively influenced by the Black Legend.

49 Pere Gifra-Adroher, “Witness to the Peninsular War…”, p. 164.

50 Gavin Daly, “A Dirty, Indolent, Priest-Ridden City: British Soldiers in Lisbon during the Peninsular War, 1808-1813”, History. The Journal of the Historical Association, vol. 94, no. 316, 2009, p. 476.

51 John Robert Holsman, Changing Perceptions of Spain…, p. 3.

52 Kevin Linch, Matthew McCormack, “Introduction”, in Britain’s Soldiers: Rethinking War and Society, 1715-1815, Kevin Linch, Matthew McCormack (eds.), Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2014, p. 1-2.

53 Moore v. Adam…, p. 1-2, see also p. 331.

54 Letters between General Caamano and Lieut-General Maitland (ibid., appendix, p. 8-9). There had been a rapid change of generals in command in Alicante between 1812 and 1813. Thomas Maitland was succeeded by John McKenzie and then William Clinton; Sir John Murray, who led the Battle at Castalla, was replaced by Major-General Campbell (John William Fortescue, A History of the British Army, vol. IX, 1813-1814, London, Macmillan, 1920).

55 Letter from General Caamano to Lieut-General Maitland, 19 September 1812 (ibid., appendix, p. 9).

56 Graciela Iglesias Rogers, “Soldiering Abroad: The Experience of Living and Fighting among Aliens during the Napoleonic Wars”, in Britain’s Soldiers…, p. 51-52.

57 Moore v. Adam…, p. 1.

58 The term liberales represented the radical reforming party in Spanish politics, while the serviles represented their opposition, the absolutist conservative traditionalists.

59 Moore v. Adam…, p. 12. Lord Frederick Bentinck was the brother of Lord William Bentinck, who became renowned for his meddling in Sicilian affairs in 1814.

60 Ibid., appendix, p. 10.

61 Ibid., note 95, p. 223.

62 Ibid., p. 295.

63 Ibid., p. 76.

64 Ibid., p. 73.

65 Ibid., p. 38.

66 Ibid.

67 Ibid., p. 42.

68 The Inquisition Unmasked by Antonio Puigblanch, an attack on the Inquisition, was published in England in 1816 (Nigel Glendinning, “Spanish Books in England: 1800-1850”, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, vol. 3, no. 1, 1959, p. 73). I assume that Moore had an earlier translation or made one himself.

69 Sir Charles Vaughan (1774-1849), the British diplomat assigned to the embassy in Cádiz, was the author of the hugely popular Narrative of the Siege of Zaragoza, London, J. Ridgeway, 1809.

70 Moore v. Adam… p. 42.

71 Ibid., p. 18.

72 Ibid., p. 39.

73 Ibid., p. 129.

74 Ibid., p. 144.

75 Ibid., p. 295.

76 The material in these final paragraphs on the trial in London is derived from notes taken by Mr. Gurney – this is probably a reference to Joseph Gurney (1744-1815), a shorthand writer in law courts and Parliament –, along with Moore’s own footnoted observations and final appendices.

77 Christopher Alan Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914, Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, 2004, p. 39.

78 Philip Harling, “The Law of Libel and the Limits of Repression, 1790-1832”, The Historical Journal, vol. 44, no. 1, March 2001, p. 107-134.

79 Moore v. Adam…, p. 274.

80 Ibid., p. 239-240.

81 Ibid., p. 143.

82 Ibid., p. 222.

83 Ibid., p. 223.

84 Ibid., p. 232-233.

85 Ibid., p. 171.

86 Ibid., note 106, p. 233.

87 Ibid., p. 220.

88 Ibid., p. 242.

89 Ibid., p. 110.

90 Ibid., p. 282.

91 Sönke Bauck, Thomas Maier, “Entangled History”, InterAmerican Wiki: Terms-Concepts-Critical Perspectives, 2015, online: https://www.uni-bielefeld.de/einrichtungen/cias/publikationen/wiki/e/entangled-history.xml.

92 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837, p. 333.

93 Ibid.

94 Moore v. Adam…, p. 221.

95 Ibid., p. 39.

96 Ibid., p. 51.

97 Leandro Prados de la Escosura, Carlos Santiago-Caballero, “The Napoleonic Wars: A Watershed in Spanish History?”, European Historical Economics Society, working paper no. 130, April 2018.

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Madeline O’Neill, « Moore v Adam. An Irish Merchant in 1812 Alicante: War, Politics and Business »Études irlandaises, 48-2 | 2023, 55-74.

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Madeline O’Neill, « Moore v Adam. An Irish Merchant in 1812 Alicante: War, Politics and Business »Études irlandaises [En ligne], 48-2 | 2023, mis en ligne le 06 novembre 2023, consulté le 09 novembre 2024. URL : http://0-journals-openedition-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/etudesirlandaises/17419 ; DOI : https://0-doi-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/10.4000/etudesirlandaises.17419

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Madeline O’Neill

University of Galway

Madeline O’Neill a obtenu son doctorat en histoire de l’université de Galway en 2018. Il s’agit d’une étude biographique du sénateur colonel Maurice Moore, figure importante de l’histoire nationaliste et impériale et descendant de Thomas Moore d’Alicante. O’Neill a contribué à des projets d’histoire locale de Mayo, ainsi qu’à un documentaire sur le premier Sénat irlandais. En 2021, son article « A Disquieting Presence or an Entangled History ? My Parents and the Museum » a été publié dans Museum Ireland (vol. 28, 2021, p. 28-34). Un autre article, intitulé « The Boer Colonel », est à paraître dans la revue History Ireland fin 2023.

Madeline O’Neill was conferred with a PhD in history by the University of Galway in 2018. She completed a biographical study of Senator Colonel Maurice Moore, a significant figure in nationalist and imperial history and a descendent of Thomas Moore of Alicante. She has contributed to local Mayo history projects, as well as a documentary on the first Irish Senate. In 2021, she had an article published in Museum Ireland (vol. 28, 2021, p. 28-34), entitled “A Disquieting Presence or an Entangled History? My Parents and the Museum”. Another article entitled “The Boer Colonel” is due to be published in History Ireland at the end of 2023.

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