My dear Sir,—I received on the 19th your very acceptable letter without date, and am heartily rejoiced to find that you have received satisfaction for the insult, and that the Alcalde is likely to be punished for his unjustifiable conduct. If you come to Cadiz your baggage may be landed and deposited at the gates to be shipped with yourselves wherever the steamer may go, in which case the authorities would not examine it, if you bring it into Cadiz it would be examined at the gates—or, if you were to get it examined at the Custom House at Seville and there sealed with the seal of the Customs—it might then be transhipped into the steamer or into any other vessel without being subjected to any examination. If you take your horse, the agents of the steamer ought to be apprized of your intention, that they may be prepared, which I do not think they generally are, with a suitable box.
Consuls are not authorised to unite Protestant subjects in the bonds of Holy Matrimony in popish countries—which seems a peculiar hardship, because popish priests could not, if they would—hence in Spain no Protestants can be legally married. Marriages solemnised abroad according to the law of that land wheresoever the parties may at the time be inhabitants are valid—but the law of Spain excludes their priests from performing these ceremonies where both parties are Protestants—and where one is a Papist, except a dispensation be obtained from the Pope. So you must either go to Gibraltar—or wait till you arrive in England. I have represented the hardship of such a case more than once or twice to Government. In my report upon the Consular Act, 6 Geo. iv. cap. 87—eleven years ago—I suggested that provision should be made to legalise marriages solemnised by the Consul within the Consulate, and that such marriages should be registered in the Consular Office—and that duly certified copies thereof should be equivalent to certificates of marriages registered in any church in England. These suggestions not having been acted upon, I brought the matter under the consideration of Lord John Russell (I being then in England at the time of his altering the Marriage Act), and proposed that Consuls abroad should have the power of magistrates and civil authorities at home for receiving the declarations of British subjects who might wish to enter into the marriage state—but they feared lest the introduction of such a clause, simple and efficacious as it would have been, might have endangered the fate of the Bill; and so we are as Protestants deprived of all power of being legally married in Spain.
What sort of a horse is your hack?—What colour? What age? Would he carry me?—What his action? What his price? Because if in all these points he would suit me, perhaps you would give me the refusal of him. You will of course enquire whether your Arab may be legally exported.
All my family beg to be kindly remembered to you.—I am, my dear sir, most faithfully yours,
J. M. Brackenbury.
There is a young gentleman here, who is in Spain partly on account of his health—partly for literary purposes. I will give him, with your leave, a line of introduction to you whenever he may go to Seville. He is the Honourable R. Dundas Murray, brother of Lord Elibank, a Scottish nobleman.
FOOTNOTES:
[111] Norfolk Chronicle, 17th October 1835.
[112] Secretary Samuel Brandram, writing to Borrow from the office of the Bible Society in October 1835, gave clear indication that the Society was uncertain how next to utilise Borrow's linguistic and missionary talents. Should he go to Portugal or to China was the question. In November the committee had decided on Portugal, although they thought it probable that Borrow would 'eventually go to China,' 'With Portugal he is already acquainted,' said Mr. Brandram in a letter of introduction to the Rev. E. Whitely, the British chaplain in Oporto. So that Borrow must really have wandered into Portugal in that earlier and more melancholy apprenticeship to vagabondage concerning which there is so much surmise and so little knowledge. Had he lied about his acquaintance with Portugal he would certainly have been 'found out' by this Portuguese acquaintance, with whom he had much social intercourse.
[113] The reader who finds Borrow's Bible in Spain insufficient for his account of that period, and I am not of the number, may turn to the Letters of George Borrow to the Bible Society, from which we have already quoted, or to Mr. Herbert Jenkins's Life of George Borrow. In the former book the greater part of 500 closely-printed pages is taken up with repetitions of the story as told in The Bible in Spain, or with additions which Borrow deliberately cancelled in the work in question. In Mr. Jenkins's Life he will find that out of a solid volume of 496 pages exactly 212 are occupied with Borrow's association with the Peninsula and his work therein. To the enthusiast who desires to supplement The Bible in Spain with valuable annotation I cordially commend both these volumes.