Political journalism in Spain was born out of the decision by the members of the Cádiz Cortes to abolish restrictions on the press. Consequently the debates between liberals and conservatives in the Cortes were reported with great interest not only in Spain but also abroad.
One of the most perceptive and interested observers of the Cortes was the Irish-Spaniard José María Blanco White. The White family had adopted the surname Blanco (blanco means white in Spanish) when they settled in Spain; José María adopted the double surname Blanco White when he was in England. From his exile in London this rather severe, impassioned, intolerant young man became not only one of the foremost propagandists for Spanish liberalism but also a fierce critic of Spanish rule in the American colonies. His fiery polemics in favour of American independence were to earn him the opprobrium of both Spanish conservatives and liberals. His biographer, Manuel Moreno Alonso, goes so far as to describe him as ‘the “inventor” of Liberalism in Spain’ and says that ‘one can say that until the Generation of ’98, nobody raised in such a continual and obsessive manner what, afterwards, has been called “the subject of Spain”.’
Blanco White possessed the zeal of the convert. He was born in Seville on 11 July 1775 into an exaggeratedly pious Irish family in deeply Catholic southern Spain whose estates in Ireland had been expropriated in the Cromwellian era. His great-grandfather was living in County Waterford when he sent four of his five children abroad ‘to escape the oppression of the penal laws.’ Blanco White’s grandfather settled in Seville, where he inherited the substantial business of his merchant uncle, Philip Nangle. The connection with Ireland remained strong when Blanco White was growing up. His grandfather’s ‘love of his native land could not be impaired by his foreign residence,’ and English was spoken at home with ‘an Irish pronunciation.’ Blanco White’s own father had been sent back to Ireland as a child so that ‘he might also cling to that country by early feelings of kindness.’
When Blanco White was a child, the family business began to fail and the money that remained was ‘just enough to save the family from such poverty as might have entirely changed their condition in the world.’ Blanco White’s aunt married an Irishman named Thomas Cahill, who took over the running of the business. Their daughter, Blanco White’s cousin, married another Irishman, by the name of Beck, one of the many Irish clerks employed by the Whites, who then took over the business in partnership with Blanco White’s brother. The White family in Seville thus preserved their links to the ancestral homeland. Blanco White wrote that his family was ‘a small Irish colony, whose members preserve the language and many of the habits and affections which its founder brought to Spain.’
Blanco White was introduced to the family business at an early age, learning reading and writing from one of the Irish clerks. As a 12-year-old he was employed in the office copying correspondence, invoices, bills of exchange and bills of lading. When he declared to his parents that he wished to become a priest, they greeted the news with enthusiasm. Blanco White’s father was a devout man who would spend hours in church. His son attributed his religiosity to his having spent his childhood in Ireland and wrote of his father that he ‘combined in his person the two most powerful and genuine elements of a religionist – the unhesitating faith of persecuting Spain: the impassioned belief of persecuted Ireland.’ On his father’s death ‘multitudes of people thronged the house to indulge a last view of the body,’ such was his ‘purity’, ‘benevolence’, and ‘angelic piety’. Blanco White’s mother, a member of the impoverished Spanish gentry, was equally religious.
His parents sent Blanco White to the Dominican College in Seville at the age of 14, but he was soon in trouble. Demonstrating the type of intellectual independence that would later lead him to fall out with his superiors in the Catholic Church, he got into an argument about Aristotelian logic with one of the Dominican friars. His exasperated mother removed him from the college and sent him instead to the University of Seville. Though he had already begun to show doubts about his chosen path, he did not stop studying for the priesthood. After his ordination in 1800 he continued to question Catholic doctrine and struggled to reconcile his beliefs. He later wrote:
At length the moment arrived when, by the deliberate admission of the fact that the Church had erred, I came at once to the conclusion at which every sincere Roman Catholic, in similar circumstances, must arrive. I concluded that Christianity could not be true. This inference was not properly my own. The Church of Rome had most assiduously prepared me to draw it.
His conversion to liberalism – and English Protestantism – far from being Damascene, as he might have wished to paint it in later life, was gradual, founded upon a logical dismantling of the tenets that formed the basis of his education as a priest. Even before he was ordained, he had begun to think about how he might best escape the predicament of choosing to be a priest when he no longer believed in the Church.
(excerpted from chapter 6)
