Joseph White - Letters from Spain

But alas! what has been said of laws—and I believe it true in most countries, ancient and modern, except England—that they are like cobwebs, which entrap the weak, and yield to the strong and bold, is equally, and perhaps more generally applicable to public opinion. It is a fact, that many of the grandees, and the titled noblesse of this country, derive a large portion of their blood from Jews and Moriscoes. Their pedigree has been traced up to those cankered branches, in a manuscript book, which neither the threats of Government, nor the terrors of the Inquisition, have been able to suppress completely. It is called Tizon de España —“the Brand of Spain.” But wealth and power have set opinion at defiance; and while a poor industrious man, humbled by feelings not unlike those of an Indian Paria , will hardly venture to salute his neighbour, because, forsooth, his fourth or fifth ancestor fell into the hands of the Inquisition for declining to eat pork—the proud grandee, perhaps a nearer descendant of the Patriarchs, will think himself degraded by marrying the first gentlewoman in the kingdom, unless she brings him a hat , in addition to the six or eight which he may be already entitled to wear before the king. But this requires some explanation.

The highest privilege of a grandee is that of covering his head before the king. Hence, by two or more hats in a family, it is meant that it has a right, by inheritance, to as many titles of grandeeship. Pride having confined the grandees to intermarriages in their own caste, and the estates and titles being inheritable by females, an enormous accumulation of property and honours has been made in a few hands. The chief aim of every family is constantly to increase this preposterous accumulation. Their children are married, by dispensation, in their infancy, to some great heir or heiress; and such is the multitude of family names and titles which every grandee claims and uses, that if you should look into a simple passport given by the Spanish Ambassador in London, when he happens to be a member of the ancient Spanish families, you will find the whole first page of a large foolscap sheet, employed merely to tell you who the great man is whose signature is to close the whole. As far as vanity alone is concerned, this ambitious display of rank and parentage, might, at this time of day, be dismissed with a smile. But there lurks a more serious evil in the absurd and invidious system so studiously preserved by our first nobility. Surrounded by their own dependents, and avoided by the gentry, who are seldom disposed for an intercourse in which a sense of inferiority prevails, few of the grandees are exempt from the natural consequences of such a life—gross ignorance, intolerable conceit, and sometimes, though seldom, a strong dose of vulgarity. I would, however, be just, and by no means tax individuals with every vice of the class. But I believe I speak the prevalent sense of the country upon this point. The grandees have degraded themselves by their slavish behaviour at Court, and incurred great odium by their intolerable airs abroad. They have ruined their estates by mismanagement and extravagance, and impoverished the country by the neglect of their immense possessions. Should there be a revolution in Spain, wounded pride, and party spirit, would deny them the proper share of power in the constitution, to which their lands, their ancient rights, and their remaining influence entitle them. Thus excluded from their chief and peculiar duty of keeping the balance of power between the throne and the people, the Spanish grandees will remain a heavy burthen on the nation; while, either fearing for their overgrown privileges, or impatient under reforms which must fall chiefly on them and the clergy, they will always be inclined to join the crown in restoring the abuses of arbitrary government.

Would to Heaven that an opportunity presented itself for re-modelling our constitution after the only political system which has been sanctioned by the experience of ages—I mean your own. We have nearly the same elements in existence; and low and degraded as we are by the baneful influence of despotism, we might yet by a proper combination of our political forces, lay down the basis of a permanent and improvable free constitution. But I greatly fear that we have been too long in chains, to make the best use of the first moments of liberty. Perhaps the crown, as well as the classes of grandees and bishops, will be suffered to exist, from want of power in the popular party; but they will be made worse than useless through neglect and jealousy. I am neither what you call a tory nor a bigot; nor am I inditing a prophetic elegy on the diminished glories of crowns, coronets and mitres. A levelling spirit I detest indeed, and from my heart do I abhor every sort of spoliation. Many years, however, must pass, and strange events take place, before any such evils can threaten this country. Spanish despotism is not of that insulting and irritating nature which drives a whole people to madness. It is not the despotism of the taskmaster whose lash sows vengeance in the hearts of his slaves. It is the cautious forecast of the husbandman who mutilates the cattle whose strength he fears. The degraded animal grows up, unconscious of the injury, and after a short training, one might think he comes at last to love the yoke. Such, I believe, is our state. Taxes, among us, are rather ill-contrived than grinding; and millions of the lower classes are not aware of the share they contribute. They all love their king, however they may dislike the exciseman. Seigneurial rights are hardly in existence: and both gentry and peasantry find little to remind them of the exorbitant power which the improvident and slothful life of the grandees, at court, allows to lie dormant and wasting in their hands. The majority of the nation are more inclined to despise than to hate them; and though few men would lift up a finger to support their rights, fewer still would imitate the French in carrying fire and sword to their mansions.

For bishops and their spiritual power Juan Español 5 5 A name denoting the plain unsophisticated Spaniard. has as greedy and capacious a stomach, as John Bull for roast beef and ale. One single class of people feels galled and restless, and that unfortunately neither is, nor can be, numerous in this country. The class I mean consists of such as are able to perceive the encroachments of tyranny on their intellectual rights—whose pride of mind, and consciousness of mental strength, cause them to groan and fret, daily and hourly, under the necessity of keeping within the miry and crooked paths to which ignorance and superstition have confined the active souls of the Spaniards. But these, compared with the bulk of the nation, are but a mere handful. Yet, they may, under favourable circumstances, recruit and augment their forces with the ambitious of all classes. They will have, at first, to disguise their views, to conceal their favourite doctrines, and even to cherish those national prejudices, which, were their real views known, would crush them to atoms. The mass of the people may acquiesce for a time in the new order of things, partly from a vague desire of change and improvement, partly from the passive political habits which a dull and deadening despotism has bred and rooted in the course of ages. The army may cast the decisive weight of the sword on the popular side of the balance, as long as it suits its views. But if the church and the great nobility are neglected in the distribution of legislative power—if, instead of alluring them into the path of liberty with the sweet bait of constitutional influence, they are only alarmed for their rights and privileges, without a hope of compensation, they may be shovelled and heaped aside, like a mountain of dead and inert sand; but they will stand, in their massive and ponderous indolence, ready to slide down at every moment, and bury the small active party below, upon the least division of their strength. A house, or chamber of peers, composed of grandees in their own right—that is, not, as is done at present, by the transfer of one of the titles accumulated in the same family—of the bishops, and of a certain number of law lords regularly chosen from the supreme court of judicature (a measure of the greatest importance to discourage the distinction of blood , which is, perhaps, the worst evil in the present state of the great Spanish nobility), might, indeed, check the work of reformation to a slower pace than accords with the natural eagerness of a popular party. But the legislative body would possess a regulator within itself, which would faithfully mark the gradual capacity for improvement in the nation. The members of the privileged chamber would themselves be improved and enlightened by the exercise of constitutional power, and the pervading influence of public discussion: while, should they be overlooked in any future attempt at a free constitution, they will, like a diseased and neglected limb, spread infection over the whole body, or, at last, expose it to the hazard of a bloody and dangerous amputation. But it is time to return to our Hidalgos .