Alberto Rubio
11 December 1831. On the beach of San Andrés, in Málaga, 49 men face an execution squad that puts an end to their lives straight away, without trial or concessions. Among them was Robert Boyd, an Irish soldier who had supported General José María Torrijos’s revolt, who was also shot at that moment, against the absolutism of King Ferdinand VII. The uprising ended there. Their story did not.
All began when General Torrijos arrived in London in exile in 1824, after the defeat of the Spanish liberals at the hands of the famed ‘Hundred Thousand Sons of Saint Louis’. He lived in the British capital until 1829 thanks to a pension granted to him by the Duke of Wellington, his former leader during the Spanish War of Independence. But it was one thing to help a friend and quite another for the then British Prime Minister to risk war with Spain, and above all with the powers of the Holy Alliance, by supporting the Spanish liberals.
Torrijos had never stopped plotting, along with other exiles, to overthrow Ferdinand VII. In 1827, the most radical liberals set up the Junta Directiva del Alzamiento, chaired by the general himself, who in 1830 had already prepared his plan for the uprising, which consisted of entering the peninsula at various points.
Robert Boyd joined the expedition without hesitation. A native of Londonderry, he was 25 years old. A soldier with experience in the British army, he belonged to a group of young intellectuals – ‘The Cambridge Apostles’ – who collaborated with Torrijos. When the Spanish general told him of his plans, the Irishman replied that “his existence and his assets were the patrimony of freedom”. The heir to a considerable fortune, he placed all his money at the disposal of Spanish liberalism, with which he chartered a ship in Marseilles, from where the conspirators arrived in Gibraltar.
To explain the impulse that launched them both on an adventure with so little chance of success, the psychiatrist Joaquín Sama, in his article “The idealism of General Torrijos and Robert Boyd”, resorts to an old adage of the Roman playwright Publius Terentius – “I am human, nothing human is alien to me” – and adds that “character will place some people in places more or less distant from reprehensible behaviour”. So he concludes that “character will place some people in places more or less distant from reprehensible behaviour”: “It was undoubtedly character that led General José María Torrijos Uriarte and the Irishman Robert Boyd to the highest heights of romantic idealism, with the sacrifice of their lives in defence of an altruistic project for the benefit of their compatriots”.
Sama identifies as the common thread running through the lives of both men “a lofty altruism which, intellectualised in the form of a revolutionary ideal, was to restore freedom and progress to the Spanish people, whose rights were being curtailed by the despotism – dictatorship – of Ferdinand VII”.
The attempt, however, ended badly. Among other things, because Torrijos’ former comrades-in-arms and presumed allies, such as General Salvador González Moreno and Colonel Antonio Oro, who was an adjutant of King Ferdinand VII himself, “behaved in the most despicable manner in those circumstances”, writes Joaquín Sama. The soldiers, he explains, “were immediately promoted, while the King, with the death of those heroes, strengthened his despotic reign a little more”.
Colonel Oro, from the French border, was supposed to deal with the uprising in Aragon, but he warned the Spanish consul in Bordeaux of Torrijos’ plans. General González Moreno, governor of Malaga and a friend of Torrijos, persuaded him by letter to sail from Gibraltar, where he had arrived the previous year, and land on the beaches of Malaga. There, he lied to him, two thousand soldiers would be waiting for him to join the liberal uprising.
However, near Fuengirola, it was the warship Neptuno that was waiting, which “opened fire on the barges carrying Torrijos, Boyd, an English carpenter who had not been able to get off at Gibraltar, 52 men and an underage cabin boy to the coast”, Sama recounts.
Although they managed to escape by walking to Mijas and then to Alhaurín de la Torre, they had to surrender after being surrounded on 4 December. González Moreno immediately informed Ferdinand VII of their capture, to which the monarch replied in his own handwriting: “Let them all be shot. I, the King“.
On 11 December 1831, at 11.30 in the morning, without trial, the royal order was carried out on the beach of San Andrés. “They were shot in two groups, and those in the second group had to wait for the firing squad to reload their weapons, an operation that took some time”, laments Joaquín Sama, who adds another detail: “General Torrijos was denied his wish that he himself should give the order to open fire, and that he should not be blindfolded; Robert Boyd, after receiving the first shot, got up again to be shot again, and fell to the ground for good”.
Their bodies were taken to the cemetery in rubbish carts, although Torrijos’ was later collected by his sister, a resident of Málaga, and Boyd’s by the British consul, William Mark. He was buried in the ‘English cemetery’, where he is now. The other members of the expedition rest in three boxes – one of lead, another of mahogany and the third of cedar – in the funerary monument erected by popular subscription in the Plaza de la Merced in Malaga.
“The death of those heroes”, says Joaquín Sama, “had international repercussions, especially in England, which had seen two of its citizens die without trial”.
Currently, the Aula María Zambrano de Estudios Transatlánticos of the University of Málaga awards the Robert Boyd Prize for research work on cultural and historical relations between Spain and Ireland, created on the initiative of José Antonio Sierra, founder of the Spanish Cultural Institute, now the Cervantes Institute in Dublin.
Tomorrow 11 December, as every year, at the initiative of the Torrijos 1831 Historical and Cultural Association, a tribute to Robert Boyd will be held at the English Cemetery in Malaga. Afterwards, the procession, led by the Mayor of the city, will move to the Plaza de La Merced to pay tribute to the rest of those Romantics who fell in a utopian and admirable uprising that could have radically changed the history of Spain.
