3 Review(s)

Edward Blaquiere (1779-1832), an Irishman of Huguenot descent, joined the Royal Navy in 1794 and served, chiefly in the Mediterranean, throughout the Napoleonic wars. In 1820, influenced by Jeremy Bentham, he went on his behalf to Spain to observe the revolution there, and published this account in 1822. (Blaquiere was later involved in the Greek war of independence, and his accounts of two visits to Greece are also reissued in this series.) He arrived to find the country (still not recovered from the Napoleonic wars) in turmoil, with an ongoing struggle between the recently restored absolutist King Ferdinand VII and a liberal faction in the army. He combines his epistolary account of the beginning of the so-called 'liberal triennium' (three years of liberal rule from 1820) with a general view of the land, people and culture of Spain, in a series of sixteen letters and an extended postscript.