British Civilian Travellers during the Peninsular War
Online Seminar
Napoleonic & Revolutionary War Graves Charity
Starts on Thu, 25 Apr 2024 13:00 GMT-5
We generally assume that war is an impediment to travel and tourism but in this talk we reveal how the Peninsular War saw an upsurge in British civilian travellers to Spain and Portugal. Most but not all of these travellers were young men, who in peace-time might have travelled to Italy and Greece, but instead arrived in Spain and Portugal hoping to observe the dramatic political changes that were unfolding. Not only might Napoleon’s ambitions be halted, but the Spanish might also cast off hundreds of years of absolutist monarchy. Disillusion with Spain soon set in, however, yet travellers continued to be drawn by the prospect of witnessing the triumph of British arms under Wellington’s command.
Civilian travellers were able to take advantage of much more regular sailings between Falmouth and Plymouth and the Iberian Peninsula: many used army or admiralty contacts to secure a passage on a man of war. Once in Iberia, travellers were well-advised to don their militia uniform (if they had one), as a military appearance enabled them to commandeer transport and accommodation.
Travellers enjoyed mixing with the military and political elite in Lisbon, Seville and Cadiz but also undertook longer tours: their exploration of Southern Spain in particular provides valuable eyewitness accounts of the impact of the war on local communities to complement that of military observers and some vivid descriptions of the palace of the Alhambra before the damage inflicted by the French General Sebastiani and by nineteenth-century restorers.
Speakers: Professor Rosemary Sweet & Dr Richard Ansell
Professor Rosemary Sweet is professor of urban history at the University of Leicester. She is currently working on the Leverhulme Trust funded project ‘War, Travel and Cultural Exchange: William Gell and the British in Iberia, 1750-1830’ (RPG 2020 194). She has published widely on the history of travel, including Cities and the Grand Tour: The British in Italy, c. 1690-1820 (Cambridge, 2012), on the reception of the past in the long eighteenth century and on eighteenth-century urban culture and politics. She is a member of Council for the British School at Rome and chairs their Faculty of Archaeology, History and Letters.
Dr Richard Ansell is a Research Associate at the University of Leicester, interested in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century travel. He is the author of Complete Gentlemen: Educational Travel and Family Strategy, 1650-1750 (British Academy/OUP, 2022) and has also published journal articles and book chapters on travel and its relationship with wider social and cultural history. He is now working on Rosemary Sweet’s Leverhulme Trust Research Project, ‘War, Travel and Cultural Exchange’, alongside an ongoing interest in travelling servants.