Malaga’s English Cemetery and Revolutionaries on the Rock; Part 1.

 

   It may seem strange in this day and age that two hundred years ago there was a need to provide an English Cemetery in Malaga. The reason harks back to the Spanish Inquisition, which was not finally dissolved in Spain until 1836, in the reign of Isabella II. To the Inquisitors, English Protestants, along with Muslims and Jews, were all heretics; and heretics could not be buried in consecrated ground. An English Catholic faced no such discrimination, but what was to be done when a Protestant breathed his last at Malaga and went to meet his maker?

Almost unbelievably, the local authorities allowed only that he be carried to the beach and buried by moonlight - upright - below the high water mark facing the sea and left to the mercy of the waves and scavenging animals. 

This is an epic story packed with facts but well worth pursuing to its final outcome. It is a tale of honour, commitment to liberty, betrayal and cruel usage; all of which would reach their conclusion at the cemetery.                   

 Let’s meet the participants:

William Mark came to live in Malaga in 1816 and in 1823 he took up the post of British Consul for the Kingdom of Granada. He was both astonished and horrified to learn that in Spain, burial in consecrated ground was reserved exclusively for Catholics. Protestants were buried without rites and Malaga’s beach burials were quite bizarre. After trying to organise a cemetery for a number of years, in 1828 Consul Mark finally approached the Governor of Malaga, General José Mansó, who immediately called the Board of Health and arranged for a suitable site to be provided. This site was a small plot outside the city on the road to Almeria. The grant of the land was ratified by Ferdinand VII by Royal Order of 11^th April 1830. To his great credit, the British Consul had finally achieved a suitable resting place for his Protestant countrymen; it was the first such in all of Spain.

       

                   Consul William Mark                                             original walled precinct.

 

So how did William Mark come to be in Malaga in the first place? Unsurprisingly, he came via Gibraltar. Born in Berwick on Tweed, William was apprenticed to a textile merchant in London, where he learned his trade. Aged 18, he lost his job and after some financial difficulty, joined the Royal Navy. His knowledge of accounting and writing secured William an appointment as secretary to the captain of the frigate HMS Hydra. Barely three years later, being highly regarded, he was invited to dine with Nelson on board HMS Victory. He was then appointed accountant to a variety of ships until 1808 when he was assigned as accountant to the base hulk HMS San Juan, in Gibraltar. Here, he met Emma Bedwell, daughter of a garrison officer, whom he married in 1810. They enjoyed a comfortable existence; by 1816, before the move to Malaga, the family occupied a ten room house above New Mole Parade on the road up to South Barracks.

Ships’ accountant was a polite term for a Prize Master; managing the money, cargos  and loot captured from the enemy during the (Peninsular) war, for sale to Gibraltar merchants, thus generating prize money for the officers. So it is little wonder that William was well thought of. Shortly after the war ended, his role became redundant, but his superiors stood by him, recommending his appointment as British Consul to the Kingdom of Granada, eventually to replace the aging incumbent.

Consul Mark’s English cemetery originally comprised just a small unfenced area and its first resident was buried there in 1831. The register informs us that this was George Stephens, owner of the brig Cicero, who accidentally drowned in Malaga harbour in January 1831. Later that year a wall was raised around what is now the inner precinct and the first person laid to rest there, in December, was one Robert Boyd of Derry. Robert’s tale is fascinating and is directly connected to the Rock.

                
 

                                        Robert Boyd                                      Gen. Jose Maria Torrijos y Uriarte

 

Robert Boyd was a scion of an Anglo-Irish family, whose fortunes were raised during the Protestant Ascendancy which followed the plantation of Ulster. Ulster had been the most Gaelic province of Ireland until the plantation dispossessed its native Catholic nobility of all lands and titles, which were then sold by the Crown to loyal, upstanding, Protestant families, mostly imported - as Boyd’s were - from Scotland. As well as a residence on Shipquay Street, a fashionable part of Derry, the family owned an estate at Ballymacool near Letterkenny. Robert had served as a Lieutenant in the Honourable East India Company’s Army of the Bengal Presidency and latterly fought in the final years of the Greek War of Independence against their Ottoman oppressors. It may have been this exposure to colonial rule or perhaps the history of Ulster which led him to espouse the liberal cause.

In London, Robert made the acquaintance of the exiled Spanish General Jose Maria de Torrijos y Uriarte, a cultivated, well educated, multi lingual and politically determined liberal. Torrijos had been a hero of Spain during the Peninsular War, distinguishing himself whilst serving under the Duke of Wellington. He had been Captain General of Valencia and for a short time Minister of War during the Trienio Liberal of 1820-23, when Spain was ruled by a liberal government after the military uprising of January 1820 which unseated King Ferdinand VII. One of the numerous Spanish liberals living in London after Ferdinand’s subsequent restoration, Torrijos was highly charismatic, becoming a magnet for liberal intellectuals, such as the Cambridge Apostles.

The radical Apostles formed around John Sterling (Boyd’s cousin) and included poets Alfred Tennyson and Arthur Hallam, John Kemble, Richard Trench and others, established when they were all at university together.  Torrijos was welcomed into the group, as was Robert Boyd; who instantly empathised with the General’s cause, which involved the overthrow of the despotic King Ferdinand VII and a return to a liberal democracy. Boyd was described as an ‘ardent, brave man and a lover of liberty devotedly attached to the cause of the Spanish patriots’

                           

                     

Ferdinand VII, corrupt, cruel and arch-conservative, had been displaced when Napoleon  put his brother Joseph on the throne of Spain. But when the French were driven from Iberia, Ferdinand was restored to the throne by the British in 1814 on condition that he ruled under the liberal Constitution of Cadiz (La Pepa). However, Ferdinand wasted no time in dissolving the Cortes, repealing the constitution, re-establishing absolute monarchy and reverting to his former ways.

He was next ousted by a revolt in 1820 but was restored once again in 1823, showing no change in his despotic rule and earning the soubriquet Fernando el Felon from his subjects.

 

The Revolutionaries:

Boyd used an inheritance of £4000 to fund the revolutionaries, first chartering a schooner, the Mary, (from the firm Gerrard & Hutt) in which he, Torrijos and a body of men intended to set sail for Gibraltar. The vessel, moored in the Thames, was provisioned, equipped with arms and ammunition and was ready to go when the Spanish Ambassador got wind of the plot and tipped off the British authorities; asking them to intervene. On a dark night in July 1830, when the vessel carrying Sterling, Trench and seventy-odd conspirators, a stack of printed proclamations and a consignment of arms, set sail from Blackwall Reach, the Thames Police surged out of the darkness, clambered aboard and seized everyone and everything in the King’s name. Richard Trench and John Sterling escaped by dropping overboard into a wherry and rushed off to warn Torrijos and Boyd, waiting to be picked up at Deal. They and most of the other conspirators now crossed individually to France where they regrouped before continuing overland to Gibraltar.

               

                                        Tennyson                                                    Hallam

The poet Alfred Tennyson and his friend Arthur Henry Hallam travelled as couriers with letters and money to revolutionaries in the Pyrenees. Poet Richard Trench, (a future Anglican Archbishop of Dublin) and John Mitchell Kemble (the Anglo-Saxon scholar) both sailed to Gibraltar to meet Torrijos before entering Spain. Their task was to prepare the ground; delivering despatches, convening the local rebel groups and managing the budget. It was to prove a difficult task:

“I set out from Falmouth on the 9th by Steam Packet and on that very day one week later arrived at Gibraltar - viz: Friday 16th July, 1830. The pretext under which I journeyed was pleasure, and I consequently presented a letter I had, to a young officer of the 12th first; this was the most fortunate thing possible.

 All my other letters were addressed to gentlemen living in the place under fictitious names, and of these fictitious names I had not been informed, owing to the hurry in which I was obliged to leave London. I should therefore have had the greatest difficulty in finding them; but Lieutenant Bell being on guard, or otherwise engaged committed me accidentally to the care of a friend M. de Pardio, to whom one of the letters was addressed and who hence opened a communication between me and the other gentlemen.” Lieutenant Bell, it now appears, was probably in on the secret.

 John Kemble did not find it by any means smooth sailing. There were jealousies among the conspirators themselves, and the rebel Junta was annoyed at an Ingles being placed over their heads, but as he held the purse they could do nothing against him. To the Spaniards he was an arrogant intruder; Kemble saw a squabbling, corrupt rabble, less interested in liberation than serving their own ends. He said:

          “Damn their cowardly souls to hell… all but Torrijos are mere eunuchs.” 

“I found that the different parties were so divided, as hardly to be on speaking terms, and that the Junta had long discontinued their meetings. They decided that I was to be received into their body as a Commissioner appointed to instruct them on the state of affairs at home; assist their deliberations and furnish them with money.”  Having decided on that, they failed to summon him to any of their meetings.

“On August 24th Trench arrived from England with the news that it was our expedition that had been seized; that himself and Sterling had only saved themselves by jumping over the side of the vessel into a boat, and so getting ashore, and that all the arms as well as the men on board had been detained. In return however, he states that Torrijos is gone to Paris, and he and Boyd might be expected from Marseilles daily. The (Spanish) Government however are entirely on the alert, troops are drawing down to Algeciras under pretext of a general review, and it is reported that a Cordon is about to be drawn along the coast.”

This would prove fatal to their cause as many became fainthearted and deserted. It was not till September that Torrijos, along with Flores Calderón landed in Gibraltar, where among others were General Salvador Manzanares as well as the aristocratic Francisco Fernández Golfín, a Colonel of Infantry during the Peninsular War (also one of the members who signed the liberal Constitution of 1812). He had been sentenced to ten years in prison when Ferdinand was restored but then released during the Liberal Triennium. On Ferdinand’s return to power, he went into exile in Lisbon and Gibraltar.

Kemble, September 5th: “This very day I was delighted to receive a note from Boyd that he and General Torrijos were waiting for us in the Bay. I joined them immediately.”  The next day Kemble writes; “Tried to get the permission for the General to go on shore in exchange for his passport. It was refused, so we went to work to devise a means of getting him ashore. During the time which intervened between this time and the 9th I had several conversations with the General on the state of affairs, and remained always astonished at his profoundly philosophical insight into the nature and necessities of his countrymen; an insight so rare in military men; and at the same time delighted with the kindliness of feeling and affectionate regard which he maintained towards Trench and myself.”

 The manner in which the General was brought on shore as described on September 9th. At seven in the morning, having arranged our plans, Boyd and I went on board at the Waterport Gate. Trench meanwhile, walked down to Rosia, where we had determined to make our attempt. First there is no regular entrance into the Garrison at that point, nor any indeed except by a ladder put up to one of the embrasures, and guarded by a single sentry, and no 'Inspector of Strangers.' Secondly because though no one is allowed to go up this ladder, officers at times do so, as a short cut to their quarters in the 'South' and 'Europa'. At twenty minutes to nine we left the boat with the General, whom we had disguised in a white jacket, trousers and hat, such as we ourselves wore, and such as is the common boating dress of the officers; and after a pull of half an hour, reached the ladder and drew up under the wall. Trench now came down to us crying, 'you’re very late, come along' and I shouted to a soldier who was idling by the sentry to go and tell Captain B: that he might get breakfast ready, for we were coming immediately. We then coolly mounted the ladder past the sentry, who looked on with great unconcern the whole while, and in ten minutes were safely lodged and breakfasting in B's quarters.

In the afternoon Boyd completed a still bolder stratagem to bring in Colonel Gutierrez. Putting off to the boat he came back with that gentleman, having his coat, waistcoat and handkerchief stripped off, and I believe un-stockinged, and loaded with a carpet bag and valise. Followed by Gutierrez, Boyd entered the Waterport Gate and stopped to beg a light for his cigar from the 'Inspector of Strangers' and conversed for a minute or two with him on the necessity of having a fresh permit for the entry of the rest of his luggage, and so passed on with Gutierrez unobserved and unquestioned, to the very heart of the town where the supposed bearer laid down his load. These two instances are enough to show how easily a bold face and a bold act will deceive practised inquisitors who are even at the moment in search of those whom you are passing through their hands.”

        

                                                              Rosia embrasures today.