Statesman, Historian, and Friend to Huelva
Born Málaga, 8th February 1828 — Assassinated at the baths of Santa Águeda, Mondragón, 8th August 1897
Huelva is in mourning.
The son of a poor Málaga schoolmaster who by the sheer force of his talents rose to the first offices of the nation; the clerk in the offices of the Madrid–Aranjuez railway who was six times to govern Spain; the pen that drafted the Manifesto of Manzanares before its owner was seven-and-twenty; the statesman who conceived and sustained the Restoration of the Monarchy, and gave it institutions that have brought to our public life a stability long absent from it; the historian of the decline of the House of Austria, a model of criticism and of erudition; the orator of a vigour and energy never once belied; the politician better known and more praised, it may be, beyond Spain than within her; and — what touches us most nearly here — the constant friend of this province, to whose will Huelva owes the Columbian Centenary and La Rábida the beginning of its restoration: he is dead by the hand of a foreign fanatic, in a crime as cowardly as it is deplorable.
The distinguished statesman was taking the cure at the baths of Santa Águeda, in the Guipuzcoan district of Mondragón, when on the 8th, having heard mass and seated himself in the courtyard of the establishment with a newspaper in his hand, he received three pistol shots fired at little more than arm’s length. The assassin, seized upon the spot — a foreigner lodged there under the name and appearance of a newspaper correspondent — declared that he acted in reprisal for the executions at Montjuich. The news reached this city the same afternoon, and within a few hours nothing else was spoken of in Huelva.
He was born at Málaga in the year 1828, the son of a master of primary letters. He came young to Madrid to a clerkship in the offices of the Madrid–Aranjuez railway, then under construction, and there pursued the studies in law which he completed in 1851. He made his name in journalism, and though the tribune claimed him afterwards, he never laid down the pen. His was the drafting of the Manifesto of Manzanares in 1854, and in that same year he was returned as deputy for Málaga to the Constituent Cortes.
His advancement came by degrees and not at a bound: a post in the Ministry of State, the civil governorship of Cádiz, the Direction General of Local Administration, and the Under-Secretaryship of Gobernación, before he received that portfolio itself in the government of Don Alejandro Mon in 1864, and the Ministry of Ultramar in the year following. His conduct in the affair of the sergeants of San Gil, in 1866, cost him banishment to Palencia, and he remained apart from public business until the Revolution of September 1868, in which, far from quitting the field, he took up the leadership of the conservative minority in the Cortes. It was he who afterwards conceived and carried through the Restoration of the Monarchy in the person of His Majesty Alfonso XII, though matters fell out otherwise than he had disposed, the pronunciamiento of Sagunto in December 1874 anticipating by some weeks the civil settlement he had prepared. Six times thereafter he held the Presidency of the Council, and though he resigned often, whether by conscience or by conflict, he ever returned, summoned by duty and by royal confidence.
But it is not the high business of the State that moves us to write here. Few public men of Madrid knew this province as he knew it, and none did it greater good. He gave his countenance to the Zafra–Huelva line, opened from Valdelamusa to this city in July 1886 and completed to Zafra on the first day of 1889, which broke the isolation of the Andévalo and the Sierra and brought to our port what was formerly lost upon the roads. He maintained a long and cordial connection with the Rio Tinto Company and with its chairman, Mr. Hugh Matheson, who counted him a personal friend. And for the restoration of the monastery of La Rábida, now begun, and for the holding of the Columbian Centenary here and in no distant capital, to him is owing as much as the will of one man can accomplish in such matters.
For it is proper to recall, now that we mourn him, that the claim of Huelva had been pressed for years by the Sociedad Colombina Onubense and by good friends of this province, and that there was no want of those who held it a dream of onubenses. Cánovas, returning to the Presidency in July of 1890, set the commemoration upon the footing of congresses and exhibitions, with these shores at their centre, and carried it through. Named honorary president of the IX International Congress of Americanists, which assembled from the 7th to the 11th of October 1892 under the presidency of the Minister of Ultramar, Don Antonio María Fabié, it fell to him to deliver the inaugural discourse in the cloister of the Monastery. On the 12th of that month, and in the same house, upon his proposal Her Majesty the Queen Regent set her hand to the decree by which the Government was authorised to seek from the Cortes the perpetual declaration of the 12th of October as a national festival. Those who saw those days know what they were, and know to whom Huelva owes them.
He was likewise a historian of singular penetration. His writings on the decline of the Spanish monarchy from Felipe III to Carlos II, on the House of Austria, and upon the reign of Felipe IV retain their authority; nor is it to be forgotten that he began with the novel, in La Campana de Huesca. As Director of the Royal Academy of History and President of the Ateneo of Madrid, he sought always to unite the past with the present, holding history to be the very blood and life of political action.
In an age of shifting ideologies and fragile pacts, he stood for continuity, tradition, and order. Often accused of obstinacy, he was guided always by a profound sense of Spain’s historic mission. His death leaves a void in the councils of the nation and a shadow upon our shores; and here in Huelva we lay upon the mourning of Spaniards the mourning of a gratitude that is not to end with him.
Requiescat in pace.
[A Huelva Gazette article based on original documents and sources of the epoch]