’I don’t know about him,’ she replies haughtily.
’How old is the hotel?’
’It was built in 1764 and became Lawrence’s in 1780. It is the second oldest hotel in the world, after Brown’s in London.’
’And why Lawrence’s?’
’Nobody knows, but some people say there was a Mrs. Lawrence, a British army widow.’
I’ve no idea what the hotel was like two hundred years ago but now it is an absolute delight. Instead of the usual large ‘coffee shop’ seating area there are four small rooms, snugs, set off the main staircase, itself rich dark wide wood. Off one of these snugs there is a library, a small wood panelled room with buttoned armchairs and the smell of old reading. The rooms and meals are unashamedly expensive, yet the usual glitzy trappings of an expensive hotel are missing and not missed. The atmosphere is restrained, discreet, and courteously welcoming; the starter ‘Gratinated Goat Cheese Crepe with Tomato Compote and Lime’ and main course ‘Braised Sword Fish with Sautey Spinaches and Lemon and Caper Sauce’ are delicious even at €60 with a carafe of white wine, all served on a pressed white table cloth with full silver service.
They left the fairy tale of Cintra then, as we leave the fairy tale of Sintra now, with the promise to return, albeit the kind of promise one knows one is unlikely to keep.
After two weeks in Portugal Byron had exhausted its diversions and decided it was time for the entourage to set off on the Grand Tour proper. He found a schooner to take Joe Murray, William Fletcher, Friese and most of the baggage to Gibraltar; Hobhouse,Robert Rushton, his Portuguese guide Sanguinetti and he himself would meet them there in a week or so having ridden overland through the Portuguese plains, and skirting the Peninsular War, down to Sevilla and Cadiz in Spain and then on to Gibraltar.
At sparrowfart on Friday 21 July 1809 five horses, three men and a boy left Lisbon and set off east at a good pace across the width of Portugal. Against the intense mid-summer heat they had parasols and weak ale. The staging system was the same as all across Europe: paddocks every ten to fifteen miles provided fresh horses and refreshments for the travellers. Some were towns, most were hamlets. Rushton would inevitably get the smallest horse, the largest would take Byron’s luggage and Sanguinetti would take the most rascally of the remainder. They rode long and hard; up every morning just before dawn to travel all day in the saddle and take pot luck with whatever inn they could find wherever dusk found them.
Hobhouse recorded that their first adventure came in Venta Nova, now called Vendas Novas, where they arrived in mid-afternoon on the first day. ‘At Venta an old Palace - a thief, supposed a boy, whipped one of Lord Byron’s pistols from the holster here - we found it after search under some dung.’ The palace at Vendas Novas is now home to the Portuguese Army’s 14th Artillery Brigade. In front of the main gates various pieces of rather ancient and scruffy looking artillery are on static display. One hopes NATO does not require too much assistance from the 14th Brigade. Outside the main gate is a red and white striped sentry hut and standing slackly within a gawky looking girl in an oversize, man’s, uniform. One can imagine a regimental sergeant major at Aldershot going berserk as he bellows to her, his feet well clear of the ground. Inside all is quiet, as though there is nothing worth guarding anyway.
The next town east was Montemor, Hobhouse’s favourite town on the journey and the traveller today could only agree. ‘This stage four leagues - to Montemor, very romantic and beautiful scenery, good hard road - dark before we came in through a forest to Montemor. The sides of the road in general very green with aromatic shrubs not hilly nor level - a vast number of crosses, signs of murders, on the side of the way.’ The road today is as romantic and green and shrubby - cork and olive trees in the main - and hillocky as he described it then, except for the crosses which may have been for directions rather than the murder markers he perceived. The road is actually part of the main trunk route, the N4, from Lisbon to the old court’s summer capital of Évora, and like all roads in the Portuguese countryside wonderfully wide and empty so that even my rented old 125 c.c. Honda felt it could stretch its legs.
Montemor itself is a lovely old, very old, fortified wall town topped by a magnificent Moorish castle from the ninth century. It is so out of the way that this town which deserves to be dripping with tourists has none at all. But there is a token Tourist Office in one of the old squares, which central casting has placed between a leather shop selling saddles and horse accessories on one side and a very old dusty rusty ironmonger on the other.
I duck my way in and ask the rather scraggy young henna haired young lady if she speaks English.
’That’s why I’m here,’ she smiles as I try to detect the accent.
’Go on, where’s it from?’
’Where’s what from?’
’Your accent.’
’Oh me accent, Stoke-on-Trent. You been there, have you?’
’No, unfortunately not. One day I hope to do so. What took you there, and brings you here?’
It turns out that she - Terésa - was from Lisbon and went to Stokeas an au pair; she was there on New Year’s Eve as the millennium changed. She met a local lad there and they pooled resources. Then they broke up, she had long since fallen out with her parents, mostly about the shenanigans in Stoke, her grandmother was alone and poorly in Montemor and she came here to look after her and to get over the Stoke episode. As she spoke fluent English she got this job here. She asked me what brought me to Montemor.
’Lord Byron came through here two hundred years ago. Are there many hotels or inns over two hundred years old here?’
’A few, not many. Have you any clues?’
I looked at Hobhouse’s notes. ‘Two rooms, rather bad to sleep in.’
’Oh that’ll be the Recidencial Boas.’
’It’s that bad?’
’It’s a shitehouse, pardon me French. Been like that for years.’
I invite her along. She doesn’t bother to lock up, just leaves the door ajar. We wander through Montemor’s medieval mazes and alleys with cobbles below, peeling walls and the smell of small livestock around us, walking from bright hot sunlight to deep dark shadows and back again. In a particularly attractive old square is a run down three-storey shallow light green - hospital green - building at the end. Recidencial Boas, except the ‘s’ has fallen off Boas. Even two hundred years ago the square would have looked two hundred years old.
Terésa orders coffees and cakes. The coffee is only so-so warm and the cake nondescript. UK Health & Safety would have a fit, not least at the state of the crone who serves us. I try to imagine our party off our in their two rooms upstairs. I cannot, I don’t know why, it just didn’t seem like the place, although it was clearly like the place. I pay, it is at least cheap. Hobhouse noticed that he ‘could not judge of the price because everything paid by Sanguinetti and profusely, but not so very cheap as expected.’ No doubt Sanguinetti was taking advantage of his master’s total lack of interest in anything to do with money. I thank Téresa, we kiss each other’s cheeks goodbye. I offer to give my regards to Stoke-on-Trent, she advises me not to bother. ‘The bastard (bass-ted)’.
Byron’s entourage set off early again the following morning and stopped at Arraiolos. ‘A good English kind of road, part very pretty,with some signs of cultivation - good horses - got a good breakfast of eggs, wine, and a little bad fruit at Arryolos, where the inn is a very neat cottage indeed. Waited upon by two neat women - (wrote this at Arryolos Castle Moorish, eleven o’clock a.m.).’ Arraiolos is quite delightful, Montemor in miniature. There is just one small and very ancient square in the centre. And there, right there, on one side of the small and very ancient square is an inn which is ‘a very neat cottage indeed’. This is undoubtedly the place they took their breakfast, the description is perfect, there can be no other. Outside are a few tables with people enjoying their coff
ee and chatting under the parasols. Head bowed I enter the cottage /inn, now a café, half expecting to be waited upon by Hobhouse’s two neat women. A charming elderly man, the owner it seems, waits on me instead. He doesn’t speak English, nor I Portuguese, but there’s nothing much to say anyway; the enjoyment comes from soaking up the moment and not even bothering with the ‘eggs, wine, and a little bad fruit’.
Breakfasted and back in their saddles the entourage set off on the last leg of the journey to Spain. They rode through Venta de Duque, now called Vimieiro, site of the battle that led to the Convention of Cintra, and after several more hours across barren scrubland in the intense summer heat of the Portuguese plains they arrived in Estremoz.
Hobhouse recorded that ‘Estremoz is a fortified walled town but not much attended to now,’ and the description still holds well today. It’s hard to see why it isn’t better attended to; the Moors laid it out around a large open square and fortified a substantial area around and beyond, and the Portuguese then surrounded the square with attractive churches and monasteries. Hobhouse reported that there were two convents - an Iberian convent can equally well be a monastery - as well. One is now the town’s museum and the other the church of St. Affonso. There is still a monastery, the Igreja dos Congregados.
They rode the next three hours to Elvas, and Hobhouse’s recommendation for future travellers was to stay at Estremoz instead ‘as Elvas is so bad.’ They arrived in moonlight to find the town gates shutting and then had a big brouhaha getting them opened. Even worse there was ‘nothing to eat at the inn - wine not allowed to be sold at inns - beds on the floor - accommodation very bad - ten at night went to bed after eating fowls just killed and boiled - which we should not have had but for Sanguinetti. N.B. it is perfectly necessary to have a man with you who can cook a little, as when there is anything to eat the people always spoil it with stinking oil and salt butter. Six dollars paid at this wretched inn next morning - very dear.’ No doubt another side deal done by the guide /cook Sanguinetti.
Elvas today is remarkable only for its originality, on the way to nowhere except the border with Spain, and its significance as a staging post in the past has now been overtaken by faster means of travel. One can imagine it being abandoned altogether soon and in two thousand years time of interest only to archaeologists.
On the road again they saw Spain for the first time in the early afternoon of 24 July, and then bathed in the River Caia, which was and is the frontier. Byron was expecting the border to be separated by a proper river which he could swim across but had to make do with paddling across what is little more than a stream. They arrived at Badajoz at five and showed their passports ‘to a fellow who could not read.’ For the evening they ‘got some boiled chickens, tolerable room and beds, and had some tunes from Sanguinetti’s flute - saw a great many eating out of one bowl (as usual).’ The Grand Tour had left behind Portugal and was now headed for Cadiz, Seville and Gibraltar, where they were eventually to be reunited with Murray, Fletcher, Friese, and the endless luggages.
Chapter Three
SPAIN, HEADING SOUTH
24 JULY - 3 AUGUST 1809 | 7-13 JANUARY 2009
Now that he was in Spain Byron immediately noticed the increased military activity. The Battle of Talavera, on the road connecting Madrid and Lisbon and one of the bloodiest in the Peninsular Wars, was being fought barely one hundred miles to their north-east. It would be claimed as an allied victory, but one won at a terrible cost of lives. Within a few miles an officer from the Junta in Seville demanded their horses, which Hobhouse noted firmly ‘he did not get.’
Yet by and large the entourage felt safe enough. They were skirting around the southern edges of the war and heading south, away from it. Their papers were in order; they were Spain’s allies; the roads were good and progress was fast. Byron wrote that ‘I had orders from the government, and every possible accommodation on the road, as an English nobleman, in an English uniform, is a very respectable personage in Spain at present. The horses are remarkably good, and the roads very far superior to the best English roads, without the smallest toll or turnpike. You will suppose this when I rode post to Seville, in four days, through this parching country in the midst of summer, without fatigue or annoyance.’
Their first stop was at Monesterio, half way between the border and Seville. Hobhouse saw the town held ‘2,000 patriot troops, of a decent appearance’ and saw ‘two French prisoners and a Spanish spy going to be hanged at Seville.’ He entered ‘through a barren plain, except the entrance into the town, where are hills covered with trees and a spot looking like a park.’ The approach to Monesterio is exactly as described two hundred years ago, and the contrast between the flat open plains and the sudden hilly parkland reminds one of Lyallpur in northern Punjab.
Today there is no part of the town that is obviously two hundred years old. There is one old pension, the Pension Fenoh. Maybe they stayed there, nobody knows. Anyway it is closed, maybe for the winter, maybe forever. Even the token Tourist Office is closed when it should be open, as if it too has given up the struggle. Out and about old men sit and natter, about what new one cannot imagine. Young men loiter and chew, jeans around hips, underpants around waist. Old women wear black and stoop and nod. Young women must have fled or joined a purdah cult. Dogs lie across the pavement. Cars and buses going anywhere take the bypass. Nothing seems to smell of anything very much.
They rose early the next morning and headed south through Santa Olalla, ‘a few houses’ then, a few more today, not much else. The old road they would have taken now starts to rise with the Sierra Morena, and you can still see peasants being as beastly to donkeys now as they were then. On the higher ground were some artillery batteries ready to repel the French. Childe Harold saw:
At every turn Morena’s dusky height
Sustains aloft the battery’s iron load;
And, far as mortal eye can compass sight,
The mountain-howitzer, the broken road,
The bristling palisade, the fosse o’erflowed,
The stationed bands, the never-vacant watch,
The magazine in rocky durance stowed,
The holstered steed beneath the shed of thatch,
The ball-piled pyramid, the ever-blazing match.
Portend the deeds to come:
We are now in the area ‘in the road between Monesterio and Seville’, as Byron put it nine years later, which made such an impression on him that he used it as the prose preface for Don Juan.
The Reader is requested to suppose, by a like exertion of Imagination, that the following epic Narrative is told by a Spanish Gentleman in a village in the Sierra Morena in the road between Monesterio and Seville, sitting at the door of a Posada, and with the Curate of the hamlet on his right hand, a Segar in his mouth, a Jug of Malaga, or perhaps ‘right Sherris,’ before him on a small table containing the relics of an Olla Podrida: the time, Sunset: at some distance, a group of black-eyed peasantry are dancing to the sound of flute of a Portuguese servant belonging to two foreign travellers, who have, an hour ago, dismounted from their horses to spend the night on their way to the Capital of Andalusia. Of these, one is attending to the story; and the other, having sauntered further, is watching the beautiful movements of a tall peasant Girl, whose whole Soul is in her eyes and her heart in the dance, of which she is the Magnet to ten thousand feelings that vibrate with her own. Not far off a knot of French prisoners are contending with each other, at the grated lattice of their temporary confinement, for a view of the twilight festival. The two foremost are a couple of hussars, one of whom has a bandage on his forehead yet stained with the blood of a Sabre cut, received in the recent skirmish which deprived him of his lawless freedom: his eyes sparkle in unison, and his fingers beat time against the bars of his prison to the sound of a Fandango which is fleeting before him.
The ‘village’ is El Ronquillo, and this is surely where
he and Hobhouse (the ‘two foreign travellers’) ‘dismounted from their horses to spend the night on their way to the Capital of Andalusia.’ There is ‘a Posada’, or inn, at the head of a cobblestone plaza. A capilla lies next door to the inn, convenient for ‘the Curate’. The inn serves fino, ‘right Sherris’, if no longer ‘jugs of Malaga’ but then nobody does these days. For tapas they serve guisado or stew, descended from ‘Olla Podrida’. Hobhouse is the one ‘attending to the story’; and Byron ‘the other, having sauntered further, is watching the beautiful movements of a tall peasant Girl.’ (Funny that, wouldn’t have thought it of him.) The French prisoners could easily have been nearby, and we know from Hobhouse that the night before, in Monesterio, ‘Sanguinetti played his flute to a Fandango tune.’
Later that day they passed through Guillena, which they mentioned only in passing. It is now half a nondescript and dusty industrial overflow of Seville and half a dormitory town, except it is hard to imagine anyone actually wanting to work or sleep there. Even the (civil) war memorial shows little enthusiasm for its surroundings. But then there is the promise of Seville; if only we English speakers said Sevilla as it should be said. In fact, if you don’t mind, from now on I will.
Byron called Sevilla ‘a fine city’ and ‘a city of women and oranges’ and neither of these has changed in the interim. I imagine he meant the quantity of women rather than the quality; not, to add immediately, that there is anything wrong with the quality, but in an age where women elsewhere were largely confined to the house one cannot imagine the feisty Sevillanas putting up with that sort of thing. As for the oranges: yes, the avenidas are indeed lined by the orangest oranges, as abundant as the women, somehow supported by the spindliest spindles masquerading as trunks.
After Lisbon the clean streets and summer awnings of this most civilised of cities pleased Byron enormously. His delight increased when he met Augustina, the ‘Maid of Saragossa’, the heroine of the Peninsular War who had single-handedly loaded and fired the guns at Saragossa (Zaragoza) after all her comrades had been killed. For Byron she epitomised all that was best in Spanish women: soft and alluring yet proud and steely. He elevated her to define all Spanish women:
Joy Unconfined Page 4