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By Conxa Rodriguez
Communications in the world of 1833 had little in common with the 21st century both in the methods of transport and the way information flowed. Nevertheless the news of the death of King Fernando VII on 29 September 1833 spread quickly. The bells announced it to the people of Madrid and a hundred King's messengers were sent on horseback to the whole of Spain. The news arrived in Morella a few days later. At that time Morella had a population of between 5.000 and 6.000 people living in 531 houses whilst in the surrounding countryside there were 120,000 sheep. The town had two circles where politics were discussed. The first group was called dels pantalons or ‘trousers' and this group met at the house of Ramon Cardona. They numbered amongst others, the lawyer Bernardino Piquer, Cristobal Feliu and Joaquim Lopez. These were the people of higher social class. The others were called de l'espardenya or ‘slippers' and were the ‘realist', or ‘absolutist' tendency. It was based in the house of the popular Josep Mestre, a dyer, and included the brothers Pere Sarseral and Manuel Llisterri, Josep Jovani –known as Revoltetes and the brothers Julian Monsó, Andreu and Agustí Trafec Ripollés. These were from the lower social classes. The historian Segura Barrera explains in a very detailed way the conspiracies of both groups -from Sant Miquel area to the Plaça dels Estudis (the Students' Square) and from Sant Francesc (at the top of the village) to the Sol de Vila (bottom of the village). The political divisions were exacerbated by the dispute around the Bourbon feud and escalated to civil war.
On 13 October 1833, Manuel Gonzalez the administrator in charge of the post office of Talavera de la Reina, a town in Castilla, and leader of the realists was the first to declare himself in favour of King Carlos V, the brother of the dead king. Carlos was only in fact a king pretender. In the Basque country, Navarra, Castilla and Catalonia; the Carlists, the supporters of Carlos V, and their programme of absolutist government, rose against the liberal government of young Isabel II, daughter of Fernando VII. The Carlists claimed that under the Salica law women were prevented from becoming head of state.
The Carlists of Aragon and Valencia also rebelled but the communications between them and Carlists elsewhere were neither quick nor reliable. The military officer, Manuel Carnicer from Alcañiz, declared in la Codonyera, South Aragon, that he was in favour of Carlos V. This was on 28 October and still within a month of the death of the King. He waited for the support from Morella where the absolutists had been prominent in previous conflicts. A decree had already obliged the realist volunteers to put their arms in the town depot – The site on which a few years later, in 1845, today's theatre was built. The absolutists of Morella were therefore at that time excited by the political revolt but unarmed. On 6 November the absolutists, led by Carnicer, arrived at the hostel of La Pedrera from where he sent a message to the dyer Josep Mestre. Mestre was to meet him in Santa Llucia to discuss whether Morella was ready to rise against the liberals and Isabel II. Josep said for the moment no, but the meeting between Carnicer and the dyer in Santa Llucia provoked excitement. Revoltetes returning to Morella from the fields shouted slogans in favour of Carlos V. In the evening of the same day, 6 November 1833, Rafael Ramdeviu Pueyo, the baron of Herbes, arrived in Morella from Valencia, and joined the circle dels pantalons. He reported to them the news he had seen on his journey of the uprising against the widow queen regent, Maria Cristina and the liberals.
On the 11 November Morellans celebrated the festival of Sant Marti leaving the town for a day in the countryside. As night fell 25 men with a drum shouted in favour of Carlos V in front of the houses of well known liberals. The mayor Vicent Garrigues, regardless of his personal views, acted against the subversive shouts made by Revoltetes and those using the Sant Marti festival for political purposes. On the night of the twelfth the ‘realists' called for a meeting at the foot of the castle's east side. The plotters were on the move; a few meetings at the governor's house, (the Comte de Creixell, which today is the Dada pub in the Virgin of Vallivana Street) advanced the uprising. The night of the 12 November in Morella was busy with gent de manta (‘blanket people') -because they were wearing blankets to protect them from the cold and also to stop them being recognised. At dawn the town crier allowed the ‘realists' to collect their arms from the town depot and the volunteers assembled at the entrance to the town. Monsó and a dozen others were at the door of Sant Mateu. On arriving there from chasing Carnicer, the military asked "Who lives there?" "Isabel II" was the answer. A rifle or pistol shot was the signal that Morella was declaring itself Carlist. The troops retreated along on the road to Valencia. On 13 November 1833 the military governor Carlos Victoria, on a horse and in uniform, and the baron of Herbes proclaimed in la Costereta de Roman, in the market square, that Carlos V was the King. This site is today the junction of three roads; Marquesa Street, Colomer Street and Blasc d'Alagó. Many Morellans joined up to fight but others were afraid. On 14th - a military committee was formed with members of dels pantalons and l'espardenya-. The support of Morella given to Carlos V attracted many volunteers and on 20 November, 3,000 men coming from the surrounding areas assembled armed and ready to defend Carlism.
Returning to the communications; at the outset; the rebellion of Morella of 13 November was heard in Tortosa only a while later. The governor of Tortosa had exiled for other reasons, some citizens that could light the flame of war. Among these was Ramon Cabrera, 26 years old. Buenaventura de Cordoba, in his excellent biography up to 1844, wrote that Cabrera and two friends collected two mules from Mas de Barberans farm at dawn of the 15th and entered Morella at six in the afternoon of the same day. Other sources say that he arrived on the 16th. The three arrived from Tortosa and stayed in a house in Calçades Street owned by Josep Giner who, according to Segura Barreda writing in the 19th century, said it was "number 14". Today is Hotel Rey Don Jaime. There they were offered sacks of straw on which to sleep. Cabrera had met in the seminary in Tortosa, a Morellan, Miquel Villuendas, whose house was near to Josep Giner's. He introduced himself at Villuendes' house, where Miquel's mother and sisters, Antonia and Joana, looked after his clothes and money that had been given him by his mother Maria Grinyó. There was Cabrera among 3,000 volunteers committed to the downfall of the liberal government. Although the volunteers were numerous, they had little discipline or means of making war. Cosme Corvasi asked the volunteers if there were some who were able to read so that the orders of the junta could be spread. And here for the first time Ramon Cabrera Grinyó (1806-1877) stood out as one of a few able to read and write. They made their battalions and went to Aragon, Valencia and Catalonia. On the 10th December Cristine's troops entered Morella and the repression began. A shout in favour of Carlos V was answered by an execution. The rebellion was not to last a month. The repression was strong but the opposition lasted. On 10th April 1834 a group of young Morellans in a column of Carlists died violently at Mayals. The Carlist Bernardino Piquer in 1833 to 1840, went to France and returned, settling in Canet and marrying in Tirig in September 1843.
Cabrera stood out as an audacious soldier in different parts of the country and journeyed to Navarra to speak with Carlos V. In Morella the authorities continued their control over the population. On the evening of Sant Julià of 1836 there was a round up of priests and suspects of having helped the uprising of November 1833, completely filling the prisons. In Tortosa, Cabrera's mother, Maria Grinyó was executed in revenge on the leadership of her son while Cabrera, known by then as the Tiger of Maestrazgo, ordered the execution of four prisoners from the families of Liberals and in Cantavieja the execution of the mayor and secretary of Cinctorres. The governor, Fernando Alcocer, thinking a conspiracy of Carlists had taken Morella from the liberals, ordered the shooting of 21 people in November 1836. This took place at the side of the old cemetery wall next to today's town swimming pool. The governor was then substituted by Bruno Portillo de Velasco for the excesses made by a legitimate government. The main tax payers of the area had to witness the deaths. Sad, they entered the town through the entrance by the Students Square and a priest of the Sant Joan parish, Miquel Uguet, gave a sermon or political speech from the balcony of Piquer's house, justifying or explaining the executions. According to the writer Segura Barreda, two years later after Morella returned to Carlism, the same priest from the same place gave another political speech with the opposite sentiment.
Communications in the 19th century were not like today's, but information and facts were subject to the same manipulation. There was an episode in Morella in 1836, which is a good example. On this occasion we give again the credibility for the testimony of Segura Berruda over those of Ortí Miralles and Calbo y Rochina because Segura Barreda had direct access to the events and the people involved, whilst Ortí, Calbo and other authors perpetuated the version -based on the official reports. These official reports were falsified to justify the actions taken. Segura Barreda was not implicated in this case; those that had written the reports, were. The governor Alcocer had controlled the town but the Morellan Carlists knew the area better than the Queen's troops. Josep Miralles organised the men from Morella and the surrounding areas who had returned looking for help and food into groups of 10 or 12. The groups benefiting from the dark of the night, would go to the wall to the far right in Sant Miquel's Square to shout slogans against the well known liberals of the town. The provocations challenged the authority of the governor. On the nights of the 25,28,29,and 30 of July the groups of Carlists dared to fire shots before running away.
Alcocer increased the repression in the town, and required Morellans to declare themselves in favour of the Queen, also ordering a search of all the houses that were next to the wall. At that moment the line of the houses went from the door at Sant Miquel's Square, where today finishes En Timoneda street. In one of their searches, the guards found some metal rings in a house in En Timoneda street lived in by the Carlist, Francisco Guarch Gargull. The metal rings were from an old disused drum from the time when he was the drummer of the ‘realists'. They were not tools to dig the wall to help Carlists get into Morella. The reports of the governor to the captain general informed him that arms and excavations in the walls had been made to allow the Carlists to enter through the houses. The official reports invented a conspiracy between Cabrera and Gargull in that Gargull made the holes giving access to the Carlists into Morella. The Governor made an order evicting 47 poor people –(not 47 houses) from the houses that were to be demolished, with the ban that they could not be rebuilt. Because of that, Sant Miquel square today has a line of parking places between the place where there was a weighbridge between 1950-70 and En Timoneda Street. If Segura Barreda had not left this testimony, the official version of history would say that Cabrera and Gargull had conspired to let the Carlists enter by the hole made by Gargull with the metal rings. Gargull had been imprisioned in the castle in July 1836. In November, 21 presumed conspirators were shot. Gargull still in prison was accused of conspiracy and paid with his life being executed by the army on 1st December 1836. If it had been a real plot, adds Segura Barreda, the governor Alcocer would have had the solid evidence for the executions as a warning to the living rather than as punishment for the dead. Neither was there a political conspiracy, although the metal rings of an old drum were used to justify the execution. A passage had been constructed with forced labour between the wall and the houses in En Timoneda Street that had been left standing.
The year 1837 repression continued inside the town with the same hard hand as in 1836, but the Carlists continued to look at Morella as a place to conquer. Cabrera went from triumph to triumph and defeat to defeat, organising the Carlist army all around the country. The night of 26 January 1838 the Carlists, stationed at the mill of Adell and those at the Capellans, after being helped by deserters or spies entered Morella castle and took the town. In a straight line from the mills they scaled the walls with wooden ladders, in the place that today is covered by trees near to the public nursery. On 31 January coming from Benicarlo, Cabrera entered Morella in triumph described by his biographers for posterity. "Announced by the shot of a cannon when he was close ….). Everybody went out to wait for him at the gate of the Students square ….). This entry at 3 o'clock in the afternoon came amidst genuine acclamation, bells, music and artillery fire. Three or four days later he marched to expand the war and fight the armies of the Queen. In July and August he returned to Morella to prepare for the defence against the attack of the Liberal Marcelino Oráa. The Liberal armies, superior to the Carlists, broke through the wall at Saint Miquel Square – one can still see today the difference in the stone. Despite days of attack, Oráa had to retreat and Cabrera became a hero and on 31 August 1838 was named by the pretender King Carlos V as the Count of Morella and lieutenant general, head of the Carlist army of Aragon, Valencia and Murcia.
In the years 1838-40 the Count of Morella went in and out of the town many times. The Carlists organised a state within a state with services from Mirambel to Cantavieja – hospitals, courts and new parishes – a special kind of Carlist state. Meanwhile the Queen's armies rallied targeting Cabrera and Morella. This is the period of the 19th century for which the names of Morella and Cabrera are remembered. On 9th January 1840, coming from Herbes and la Fresneda Cabrera entered Morella sick with typhoid fever. By the 30th he had improved and went to the cathedral for mass before leaving on the 31st for Sant Mateu. However he fell ill at Ulldecona and on a hill of Roquetes saw his native Tortosa for the last time of his life when he was still only 34 years old.
Flavio, one of the biographers and admirers of Cabrera wrote "Morella had a magnificent hospital situated in two spacious houses in the Etudio street with fifty comfortable beds, organised in wide and ventilated rooms designed for the wounded and sick of the army". The house where Cabrera lived in Morella is a mystery. By logic, the den of the Tiger should have been the castle. At that time, sited in the castle were a few houses, a barracks, the palace of the governor, and full prisons. The Carlist biographer Roman Oyarzum, the first writer to begin the study of Cabrera with objectivity, visited Morella in 1950. He described a few places in the castle where the home of the general could be, because he found the coat of arms of the Count and the year 1838 encrusted - something that can still be seen today. Alternatively the German engineer, the Baron Von Radhen, identified in his map of the town, the house of Cabrera as being situated in today's Marquesa Street to Colomer Street sited on the Bancaixa office, the second from the corner of the Roman slope according to the map. In this house there used to be a hospital that may have been for military officers and people of pantalons. It is possible that Cabrera could have been there for one of his states of convalescence although living officially in the castle. Cordoba claimed that the Carlists created 29 hospitals in the area in which they dominated.
At the end of January 1840 Cabrera continued to expand the war. "At the exit of Morella he gave some orders to reassure the inhabitants that his army would keep them safe, and were to distribute wheat to the farmers and skilled workers until the day of Sant Joan in June. In May 1840 General Baldomero Espartero took Morella, looted the town and carried out extensive killings. This time the superiority of the Liberal army against the ‘realist' volunteers was overwhelming. Some incidents were truly tragic and after weeks of the attack Morella was facing its own rebuilding. Espartero was named Duke of Morella and lieutenant general, in clear answer to the titles and military status of his rival Cabrera. Cabrera marched towards Carlist Berga and into exile through Catalonia. His title of Count of Morella was legitimised by Alfons XII in March 1875, linking for posterity the name of Cabrera to the town where, in fact he did not live for very long, but long enough to make history.
Translation: John Ball
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