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HABITS OF SEDUCTION: ACCOUNTS OF PORTUGUESE NUNS IN BRITISH OFFICERS' PENINSULAR WAR MEMOIRS*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 July 2015

JENNINE HURL-EAMON
JENNINE HURL-EAMON*
Affiliation:
Trent University
*
Trent University, 1600 West Bank Drive, Peterborough, Ontario, Canadak9j 7b8jenninehurleamon@trentu.ca
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Abstract

In their published memoirs of the Peninsular War, a surprising number of British officers mentioned visits to Portuguese convents and openly confessed to having flirted with the sisters – occasionally to the point of outright seduction – and abandoned them when the regiment moved on. This seems like a very negative self-fashioning to modern readers, but can best be understood in the context of the political and cultural climate in which these memoirs were produced. This article argues that officers' descriptions of convent visiting and their professions of sympathy for cloistered women revealed the influence of gothic, erotic, romantic, and travel literature on military life writing. Their depiction of nuns differed from nuns’ portrayal by common soldiers due to its infusion with masculine ideals of chivalry and sensibility. Elite memoirists saw no need to justify their abandonment of nuns because they viewed it in light of other literary accounts of soldiers who broke nuns’ hearts. At the same time, they contrasted themselves with the barbarism of the French, believing themselves to be far more compassionate and tolerant of Catholic strictures. Officers’ portrayals of Portuguese sisters can thus also be seen as an expression of Britons’ sense of their relationship with Portugal in the war.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 58 , Issue 3 , September 2015 , pp. 733 - 756
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

The author wishes gratefully to acknowledge the assistance of Jennifer Avis, Gemma Bagshaw, Joanne Bailey, Ivana Elbl, Sarah Goldsmith, and Andrew Monnickendam. Thanks also to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for funding the research for this project.

References

1 Diary of Lieutenant George Woodberry, 3 and 25 July 1813, Olite, National Army Museum, Chelsea (NAM), 1968–07–267, p. 189.

2 Thomas Perronet Thompson to his wife, n.d., Hull History Centre, Hull University Archives (HHC) U DTH/5/14/46 (transcription of letter for a draft biography by his granddaughter, Edith Thompson).

3 James Macdonald to Louisa Macdonald, 29 Dec. 1812, Vizen, HHC U DDBM/32/14. In Godfrey Macdonald to Louisa, 14 Jan. 1813, ‘Beveses near Vizen’, U DDBM/x2/2, Louisa's husband (and James's brother) told her that the talented singer was ‘a secular, not a nun, who dwelt in the convent’, but most officers do not make this distinction.

4 Lt. Colonel Joseph Anderson, Recollections of a Peninsular veteran (London, 1913), p. 31.

5 On womanizing as a key component of masculinity in Napoleon's army, see Michael J. Hughes, Forging Napoleon's Grand Armée: motivation, military culture and masculinity (New York, NY, 2013), pp. 123–35. For the British army, see J. Hurl-Eamon, Marriage and the British army in the long eighteenth century: ‘the girl I left behind me’ (Oxford, 2014), pp. 101–11.

6 Gavin Daly, The British soldier in the Peninsular War: encounters with Spain and Portugal, 1808–1814 (New York, NY, 2013), pp. 164–5, 184–5, and Catriona Kennedy, Narratives of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: military and civilian experience in Britain and Ireland (New York, NY, 2013), p. 99. Kennedy mistakenly assumes the encounters to be with ‘Spanish’ not Portuguese convents. Jo Ann McNamara, Sisters in arms: Catholic nuns through two millennia (Cambridge, MA, 1998), pp. 565–8, focuses on the devastation to Iberian convents caused by the French revolutionary army, but ignores any impact of the British on nuns.

7 Kennedy, Narratives, p. 8.

8 Maria Purves, The gothic and Catholicism: religion, cultural exchange and the popular novel, 1785–1829 (Cardiff, 2009), pp. 93–169.

9 Purves, The gothic and Catholicism, p. 46.

10 Susan P. Casteras, ‘Virgin vows: the early Victorian artists’ portrayal of nuns and novices’, in Gail Malmgreen, ed., Religion in the lives of English women, 1760–1930 (Bloomington, IN, 1986), p. 140.

11 O'Brien, Susan, ‘French nuns in nineteenth-century England’, Past and Present, 154 (1997), pp. 142–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at pp. 175–7.

12 Neil Ramsey, The military memoir and romantic literary culture, 1780–1835 (Farnham, 2011), pp. 33–41. See also Diana Chlebek, ‘Romanticism and the nineteenth century’, in Gabrielle Watling, ed., Cultural history of reading, ii:World literature (Westport, CT, 2009), p. 204.

13 Kate Flint, ‘Women and the reading of Vanity Fair’, in James Raven et al., eds., The practice and representation of reading in England (Cambridge, 1996), p. 252.

14 H. J. Jackson, Romantic readers: the evidence of marginalia (New Haven, CT, 2005), p. 300.

15 Sympathy – such as elicited by the notion of a heartbroken girl retreating to a convent – was a key component of the man of sensibility, and true manliness emerged in ‘patriarchal protectiveness’. Stafford, William, ‘Gentlemanly masculinities as represented by the late Georgian Gentleman's Magazine’, History, 93 (2008), pp. 47–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at pp. 57–8. At the time of these memoirs, chivalry had also emerged as a concurrent form of masculinity (connected with the rise of gothic culture) and would replace politeness by the end of the period. Cohen, Michèle, ‘“Manners” make the man: politeness, chivalry, and the construction of masculinity’, Journal of British Studies, 44 (2005), pp. 312–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also George Barker-Benfield, The culture of sensibility: sex and society in eighteenth-century Britain (London, 1992), pp. 247–50; Philip Carter, Men and the emergence of polite society in Britain, 1660–1800 (Harlow, 2001), pp. 102–5; Diane Long Hoeveler, Gothic feminism: the professionalization of gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontës (Philadelphia, PA, 1998), pp. 89–90; Simon Bainbridge, British poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars: visions of conflict (Oxford, 2003), pp. 67–80, 85, 112–20, 158–63; Abrams, Lynn, ‘The taming of highland masculinity: inter-personal violence and shifting codes of manhood, c. 1760–1840’, Scottish Historical Review, 92 (2013), pp. 100–22, at pp. 112–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Cohen, ‘“Manners”’, p. 321. Kennedy, Narratives, p. 174, found chivalry to ‘be a vital element in the “pleasure culture of war”’ for civilians.

17 Walter Henry, Trifles from my portfolio; or, Recollections of…adventures during twenty-nine years’ military service…by a staff surgeon, i (Quebec, 1839), p. 46.

18 George Bell, Rough notes by an old soldier… (London, 1867), p. 22.

19 Colonel J. M. Sherer, Recollections of the Peninsula (5th edn, London, 1827), p. 136.

20 Daly, The British soldier, p. 160.

21 E. W. Buckham, Personal narrative of adventures in the Peninsula during the war in 1812–1813 by an officer late in the staff corps regiment of cavalry (London, 1827), letter ii, dated Oporto, 10 May 1812, pp. 20–1.

22 Sherer, Recollections, pp. 2–33.

23 Bell, Rough notes, p. 41. On the treatment of women dictated by chivalric masculinity, see Cohen, ‘“Manners”’, pp. 319–20.

24 Adam Neale, Letters from Portugal and Spain: comprising an account of the operations of operations of the armies…by Adam Neale,…physician to his Majesty's forces (London, 1809), letter xxxviii, dated Salamanca, 30 Nov. 1808, p. 229.

25 Robert Ker Porter, Letters from Portugal and Spain, written during the march of the British troops under Sir John Moore… (London, 1809), p. 185.

26 Purves, The gothic and Catholicism, p. 65.

27 Catriona Kennedy, ‘John Bull into battle: military masculinity and the British army officer during the Napoleonic Wars’, in Karen Hagemann, Gisela Mettele, and Jane Rendall, eds., Gender, war and politics: transatlantic perspectives, 1775–1830 (New York, NY, 2010), p. 143.

28 Sherer, Recollections, pp. 32–3.

29 Diary of Lieutenant George Woodberry, 15 Aug. 1813, Olite, NAM 1968–07–267, p. 212.

30 Diary of Lieutenant George Woodberry, 18 Aug. 1813, Olite, NAM 1968–07–267, p. 216.

31 Kennedy, Narratives, p. 99. See also Daly, The British soldier, pp. 160 and 184.

32 Voyage across the Atlantic, 1807, a journal kept by Mrs Courtenay Ilbert, wife of 2nd Captain Courtenay Ilbert, Royal Artillery, 24 Sept. 1807, NAM 1996–06–136–1, p. 56 (photocopy of a transcript).

33 Ibid., emphasis in original.

34 Ibid., 20 Oct. 1807, p. 65.

35 Helen Maria Williams, Letters written in France in the summer 1790, to a friend in England; containing various anecdotes relative to the French Revolution, ed. Neil Fraistat and Susan S. Lanser (Peterborough, ON, 2011), p. 111.

36 Ibid.

37 Ramsey, The military memoir, pp. 114–15, 132–5. See also Kennedy, Narratives, pp. 79–81.

38 [Joseph Donaldson], Recollections of an eventful life, chiefly passed in the army (Glasgow, 1824), p. 115, emphasis in original.

39 Johan Christian Maempel, Adventures of a young rifleman, in the French and English armies. translation by author, ed. and preface by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (2nd edn, London, 1827), pp. 291–2.

40 Robert Blakeney, A boy in the Peninsular War (1899; repr. London, 1989), pp. 273–7.

41 Sir James McGrigor, The scalpel and the sword: the autobiography of the father of army medicine, ed. Mary McGrigor (Dalkeith, 2000), p. 184.

42 Sarah Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC, 2009), pp. 153–94; p. 166, notes, however, that ‘such fierce and entitled claims to sensibility were not shared by rank-and-file soldiers’.

43 Jacqueline Howard, Reading gothic fiction: a Bakhtinian approach (Oxford, 1994), p. 18.

44 Bainbridge, British poetry, p. 75.

45 Ramsey, The military memoir, p. 176.

46 Anderson, Recollections, p. 31. While the use of the term ‘made love’ does not quite have the sexual connotations it does in modern parlance, it is nonetheless transgressive as a characterization of men's interaction with nuns.

47 John Kincaid, Random shots from a rifleman (2nd edn, London, 1847), p. 224.

48 Jonathan Leach, Rough sketches of the life of an old soldier… (London, 1831), p. 73.

49 George Gleig, A narrative of the campaigns of the British army at Washington and New Orleans…in the years 1814 and 1815 (London, 1821), p. 58.

50 Porter, Letters, pp. 184–5.

51 R. H. Gronow, The reminiscences and recollections of Captain Gronow, being anecdotes of the camp, court, clubs and society, 1810–1860, i (London, 1900), pp. 61–2.

52 Kincaid, Random shots, p. 225.

53 See Hurl-Eamon, Marriage and the British army, pp. 101–11.

54 Leach, Rough sketches, p. 78.

55 Kincaid, Random shots, pp. 224–5.

56 William Graham, Travels through Portugal and Spain during the Peninsular War (London, 1820), p. 23. On p. 33, Graham was permitted inside the cloistered space of a Portuguese convent, but still ‘all the young nuns were invisible’.

57 Ibid., p. 44.

58 Neale, Letters, letter xxxviii, dated Salamanca, 30 Nov. 1808, pp. 230–1.

59 Charles Boutflower, Journal of an army surgeon during the Peninsular War (Manchester, 1912), p. 39.

60 Kincaid, Random shots, p. 225.

61 Sherer, Recollections, p. 136.

62 Kincaid, Random shots, pp. 224–5.

63 Leach, Rough sketches, p. 73.

64 Gleig, Narrative, pp. 58–9.

65 Carter, Men and the emergence of polite society, p. 8. Carter went on to suggest generational competition as one example, a point also made by Michael Roper and John Tosh, ‘Historians and the politics of masculinity’, in Michael Roper and John Tosh, eds., Manful assertions: masculinities in Britain since 1800 (London, 1991), p. 17. For more on the contested nature of male sensibility and politeness, see Carter, Men and the emergence of polite society, 88–123; Henry French and Mark Rothery, Man's estate: landed gentry masculinities, 1660–1900 (Oxford, 2012), pp. 149–50.

66 Carter, Men and the emergence of polite society, pp. 195–6.

67 See, for example, Robert B. Shoemaker, Gender in English society, 1650–1850: the emergence of separate spheres? (London, 1998), pp. 68, 75.

68 Cohen, ‘“Manners”’, p. 320.

69 Julie Peakman, Mighty lewd books: the development of pornography in eighteenth-century England (New York, NY, 2003), esp. pp. 148–52, and Margaret Miles, A complex delight: the secularization of the breast, 1650–1750 (Berkeley, CA, 2008), pp. 123–4. Gamer, Michael, ‘Genres for the prosecution: pornography and the gothic’, PMLA, 114 (1999), pp. 1043–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar, argues that, in the minds of some readers, gothic and pornographic genres blended together in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

70 Lady Mary Wortley Montague, The complete letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montague, ii, ed. Robert Halsband (Oxford, 1966), p. 420, to Lady Bute, Feb. 1749.

71 Chernaik, Warren, ‘Unguarded hearts: transgression and epistolary form in Aphra Behn's “Love-Letters” and the “Portuguese Letters”’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 97 (1998), pp. 13–33, at p. 14Google Scholar.

72 Ebenezer Elliott, Night, a descriptive poem in four books (London, 1818), p. 90.

73 Ibid., p. 112.

74 Ibid., p. 115.

75 Porter, Letters, p. 185.

76 Diary of Lieutenant George Woodberry, 25 July 1813, Olite, NAM 1968–07–267, p. 189.

77 Ibid., 5 Sept. 1813, Olite, NAM 1968–07–267, pp. 228–9.

78 Bowers, Toni, ‘Seduction narratives and tory experience in Augustan England’, Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 40 (1999), pp. 128–54, at pp. 135–6Google Scholar.

79 Maria Clara Paulino, ‘The “alien” European: British accounts of Portugal and the Portuguese, 1780–1850’, in Martin Farr and Xavier Guégan, eds., The British abroad since the eighteenth century, i:Travelers and tourists (Houndmills, 2013), p. 106, has observed a similar British blindness in travel accounts at the time, calling it ‘startling’ that almost no authors noted ‘a problem with the British attitude toward their oldest ally’.

80 Anna Klobucka, The Portuguese nun: formation of a national myth (Lewisburg, PA, 2000).

81 Bainbridge, British poetry, p. 158. Cohen, ‘“Manners”’, pp. 322–5, connected the chivalric code with an inherent Britishness that contrasted sharply with the effeminacy of a Frenchified education that fostered polite models of masculinity.

82 Silvia Evangelisti, Nuns: a history of convent life, 1450–1700 (Oxford, 2007), p. 43.

83 Ibid., p. 49.

84 A. H. De Oliveira Marques, History of Portugal, i (New York, NY, 1972), p. 420.

85 Diary of Lieutenant George Woodberry, 17 July 1813, Olite, NAM 1968–07–267, p. 183.

86 Ibid., 23 July 1813, Olite, NAM 1968–07–267, p. 187.

87 Henry, Trifles, p. 46.

88 Leach, Rough sketches, pp. 78, 79.

89 Ronald Fraser, Napoleon's cursed war: Spanish popular resistance in the Peninsular War, 1808–1814 (London, 2008), pp. 320, 331.

90 Neale, Letters, p. 230.

91 Graham, Travels, p. 44.

92 ‘We undoubtedly had to thank the lady-abbess for their non-appearance at their prison gates’, wrote Lieutenant-Colonel Jonathan Leach, Rough sketches, p. 79.

93 L. M. E. Shaw, The Anglo-Portuguese alliance and the English merchants in Portugal, 1654–1810 (Aldershot, 1998), p. 181.

94 On the difficulties faced by English Protestants in Portugal, see Shaw, The Anglo-Portuguese alliance, pp. 170–84.

95 For descriptions of Portugal's unease at its long alliance with Britain, see David Birmingham, A concise history of Portugal (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 64, 96; Shaw, The Anglo-Portuguese alliance, especially pp. 187–98; A. H. De Oliveira Marques, History of Portugal, ii (New York, NY, 1972), p. 1; and Paddy Griffith, ‘Oman's Peninsular War today’, in Paddy Griffith, ed., A history of the Peninsular War, ix:Modern studies of the war in Spain and Portugal, 1808–1814 (Mechanicsburg, PA, 1999), p. 37.

96 Shaw, The Anglo-Portuguese alliance, pp. 187–9.

97 See also Daly, The British soldier, pp. 19, 103–8.

98 John Aitchison, An ensign in the Peninsular War: the letters of John Aitchison, ed. W. F. K. Thompson (London, 1981), p. 44, letter dated 13 June 1809.

99 Sherer, Recollections, p. 135.

100 Buckham, Personal narrative, p. 130.

101 Kincaid, Random shots, p. 224.

102 Anderson, Recollections, p. 31.

103 Ibid., pp. 31–2.

104 Sherer, Recollections, p. 135.

105 Leach, Rough sketches, p. 73.

106 Sherer, Recollections, p. 137.

107 Assistant-Surgeon Good, quoted in Anthony Goodinge, The Scots Guards (The 3rd Guards) (London, 1969), p. 30.

108 Graham, Travels, p. 45, entry dated 7 June 1813.

109 He expected her to keep it as her pet and was delighted when she ‘kissed it a Thousand Times’ but appalled when she ‘produced it dead [emphasis in original] at the Grate in about 5 Minutes’. William Bragge, The letters of Captain William Bragge, Third (King's Own) Dragoons, ed. S. A. C. Cassels (London, 1963), p. 46, letter to ‘Capt. Adney, South Devon Regiment, Nottingham, England’, dated ‘Alpalhão, a dirty village one League distant from Niza, 21 April 1812’.

110 Godfrey Macdonald to wife Louisa, 14 Jan. 1813, Beveses near Vizen, HHC U DDBM/x2/2.

111 Diary of Lieutenant George Woodberry, 5 Sept. 1813, Olite, NAM 1968–07–267, p. 229. See also 15 Aug. 1813, ibid., p. 212, for an account where the officers are presented as having front-row seats ‘near the Altar’ to witness the ‘grand’ ceremony whereby a novice was invested in the order.

112 See, for example, Evangelisti, Nuns, pp. 33, 38; McNamara, Sisters in arms, pp. 420–2; and Stephen Ozment, Protestants: birth of a revolution (New York, NY, 1993), pp. 154–5.

113 T. Penson, Penson's short progress into Holland, Flanders and France, 1687, quoted in Corens, Liesbeth, ‘Catholic nuns and English identities. [sic] English Protestant travellers on the English convents in the Low Countries, 1660–1730’, Recusant History, 30 (2011), pp. 441–59, at p. 447CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Corens found Englishmen's overall attitude to their cloistered countrywomen to be respectful and positive.

114 McNamara, Sisters in arms, p. 547.

115 Thomas Marriott, Female conduct: being an essay on the art of pleasing: to be practiced by the fair sex, before, and after marriage… (London, 1759), p. 204.

116 Rosemary Sweet, Cities and the grand tour: the British in Italy, c. 1690–1820 (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 41–2, and Chloe Chard, Pleasure and guilt on the grand tour: travel writing and imaginative geography, 1600–1830 (Manchester, 1999), pp. 91–2.

117 Alexander Drummond, Travels through different cities of Germany, Italy, Greece, and several parts of Asia… (London, 1754), p. 75.

118 Major Richard Davenport left several hints of nuns’ attractions in his letters to his brother during the War of Austrian Succession and the Seven Years War, but his interest was purely sexual. See W. O. II C. W. Frearson, ed., ‘“To Mr Davenport” being letters of Major Richard Davenport (1719–1760) to his brother during service in the 4th Troop of Horse Guards and 10th Dragoons, 1742–1760’ (London, 1968), pp. 16, 76–7, letters dated Ghent, 3 Jan. 1743, and Bramsche, 8 Feb. 1760. Rivington's New York Gazetteer, 5 May 1774, contains the lyrics to Hot Stuff, a popular ballad reputed to have been written by a sergeant while battling the French in North America during the Seven Years War. The final verse promises that ‘each soldier shall enter the convent in buff’ and give the nuns ‘hot stuff’.

119 John Stevenson, A soldier in time of war; or, the military life of Mr. John Stevenson: of the executive committee of the new British & foreign temperance society…twenty-one years in the British Foot Guards… (London, 1841), pp. 132–3.

120 Henry, Trifles, p. 117.

121 Aitchison, An ensign in the Peninsular War, p. 44, letter dated 13 June 1809.

122 Kennedy, ‘John Bull into battle’, pp. 140–1. See also Kennedy, Narratives, pp. 103–4. Hughes, Forging Napoleon's Grand Armée, pp. 127–9, 134, suggests that the French army encouraged rape in this period, but he also notes (pp. 182–3) that Napoleon's officers stopped their own troops from ravaging women during the capture of Löbeck, conduct similar to that of the British officers at Bajadoz described above. Hughes's strongest example of the rapist culture of Napoleon's army comes from a rape account in a French ballad, but there are British examples that sound like rape as well. See, for example, ‘The Soldier's Cloak’ (Nottingham: Burbage and Stretton, 1797–1807), Bodleian Library, Harding B 12(162).

123 Andrew Leith Hay, A narrative of the Peninsular War (4th edn, London, 1850), pp. 236–7.

124 See, for example, Purves, The gothic and Catholicism; Jane Stabler, ‘Devotion and diversion: early nineteenth-century British women travelers in Italy and the Catholic church’, in Alison Chapman and Jane Stabler, eds., Unfolding the south: nineteenth-century British women writers and artists in Italy (Manchester, 2003), pp. 15–34; and the introduction by Andrew Monnickendam in Christian Isobel Johnstone, Clan-Albin: a national tale, ed. Andrew Monnickendam (Glasgow, 2003), pp. xviii–ix, xiv–xv. Emma Major, Madam Britannia: women, church and nation, 1712–1812 (Oxford, 2012), p. 125, argues that there was some admiration for nuns, and ‘the idea of the Church of England as a via media between Roman Catholicism and dissenting Protestantism gained particular strength during the eighteenth century’.

125 Michael Snape, The redcoat and religion: the forgotten history of the British soldier from the age of Marlborough to the eve of the First World War (London, 2005), pp. 10–11, 123. Snape also argued (pp. 9–12, 159–64) that Catholicism was widely tolerated in the British army in this period; pp. 165–7 note the bond shared faith wrought between Catholic soldiers and the Portuguese and Spanish allies.

126 See, for example, Snape, The redcoat and religion, pp. 80–1, and Hurl-Eamon, Marriage and the British army, p. 149.

127 Sherer, Recollections, p. 31. For more anti-papist comments, see Graham, Travels, pp. 54, 87, and Boutflower, Journal, pp. 38–9.

128 Kincaid, Random shots, p. 225. Another volume of his memoirs relates a story where some refugee nuns generously shared their cornbread with Kincaid when he was suffering from hunger. He gave them a dollar to share and a kiss apiece, remarking upon the fact that they were more reluctant to receive the money than the kiss, which each permitted ‘as an unusual favour’. Captain John Kincaid, Adventures in the rifle brigade in the Peninsula, France, and the Netherlands, from 1809–1815 (London, 1830), p. 63.

129 Sherer, Recollections, p. 33.

130 See, for example, Howard, Reading gothic fiction, p. 26; Jerrold E. Hogle, ‘Introduction: the gothic in western culture’, in Jerrold E. Hogle, ed., The Cambridge companion to gothic fiction (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 14–16; Hoeveler, Gothic feminism, pp. 64–5.

131 Porter, Letters, p. 232.