Abstract
Among the ten items labelled “Peninsular War ballads” in the website Broadside Ballads Online of the Bodleian Libraries two evidently date from the First Carlist War, and show a different mood. The remaining eight items related to the 1807-1815 period are actually only five, as two of them are different editions of the same songs, and another is merely about the setting in the Horse Guards Parade, London, of a memorial to the lifting of the siege of Cádiz in 1812. While the five true Peninsular War ballads represent it as a patriotic enterprise on behalf of brave Spaniards fighting tyrannical invaders, the two set in the Carlist War portray a more individualized adventure of soldiers of fortune. This new approach after 1815 suggests a more limited popular understanding of Spanish politics. Spain is no longer a scenario for the defence of universal principles, but for the reckless adventure of particular men.
Highlights
In this article I examine a small corpus of Peninsular War ballads in the Bodleian libraries, which interestingly turns out to contain two ballads from a different Spanish war, the First Carlist War (1833-1839)
A comparison between the former, which are based on the 1807-1814 war, and the latter, reveals the change of attitude towards intervention in Spanish wars that took place after 1815, from an internationalist fight for political freedom to an adventure for individual glory, followed by a complete waning of interest in writing ballads about British interventionism in Spain
In order to explain the sort of approach to events in the ballads I will discuss the characteristics of broadside balladry as an expression of popular sentiment, and as a traditional form of poetry which calls for comparison between ballads about different wars and political causes, such as the Jacobite and the Carlist ones
Summary
In this article I examine a small corpus of Peninsular War ballads in the Bodleian libraries, which interestingly turns out to contain two ballads from a different Spanish war, the First Carlist War (1833-1839). A comparison between the former, which are based on the 1807-1814 war, and the latter, reveals the change of attitude towards intervention in Spanish wars that took place after 1815, from an internationalist fight for political freedom to an adventure for individual glory, followed by a complete waning of interest in writing ballads about British interventionism in Spain. A comparison between the former, which are based on the 1807-1814 war, and the latter, reveals the change of attitude towards intervention in Spanish wars that took place after 1815, from an internationalist fight for political freedom to an adventure for individual glory, followed by a complete waning of interest in writing ballads about British interventionism in Spain. In order to explain the sort of approach to events in the ballads I will discuss the characteristics of broadside balladry as an expression of popular sentiment, and as a traditional form of poetry which calls for comparison between ballads about different wars and political causes, such as the Jacobite and the Carlist ones.. The essay concludes by establishing an analogy between Lord Alfred Tennyson’s silence after his own brief Spanish intervention, and the absence of English ballad-making about Spain during Spanish king Ferdinand VII’s reign, pointing, beyond that, to future English writing about the Spanish. The theoretical frame adopted responds in general terms to Iris Zavala’s semiology of silence (1987), which she initially defines as “desentrañar lo que dice y lo que no dice un texto, en tanto en cuanto todo discurso es ideológico” (Zavala 147), but it is extended to include what ballad texts did not say about King Ferdinand’s Spain
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