Sobre huesos de héroes cimentado,
Un rey ingrato, de memoria impura,
Con eterno baldón dejó manchado.
¡Ay! para herir la libertad sagrada,
El Príncipe, borrón de nuestra historia,
Llamó en su ayuda la francesa espada,
Que segase el laurel de vuestra gloria.
These verses were written in later life; but already in 1827 he dates a poem "fourth year after the sale of Spanish liberty."
It was an age of political conspiracy and secret societies. Many liberals were members of Masonic lodges, and in addition there were circles like the Friends of Liberty, the Friends of the Constitution, the Cross of Malta, the Spanish Patriot, and others. Nothing more natural than that boys whose age made them ineligible to join these organizations should form one of their own. The result was La Sociedad de los Numantinos. The prime movers were Miguel Ortiz Amor and Patricio de Escosura, who drew up its Draconic constitution. Other founders were Espronceda, Ventura de la Vega, and Núñez de Arenas. All told, the society had about a dozen members. Their first meetings were held in a sand-pit, until the curiosity of the police forced them to seek safer quarters. One of the members was an apothecary's apprentice, who, unknown to his master, installed the club in the shop cellar. There they built an altar bearing all the romantic paraphernalia of skull and cross-bones, swords, and pistols. The members stood wrapped in black garments, their faces muffled with their long Spanish capes, wearing Venetian masks, each one grasping a naked dagger. There they swore binding oaths and delivered fiery orations. Red paper lanterns cast a weird light over the scene. How tame the sessions of the Myrtle must have seemed by comparison! Yet the two organizations throve simultaneously.
With the return of Ferdinand in September the persecution of the liberals began. The boys witnessed the judicial murder of Riego, the hero of the constitutional movement, November 8, 1823. This made the impression upon them that might have been expected. That night an extraordinary session of the Numantinos was held at which Espronceda delivered an impassioned oration. Then all signed a document in which the king's death was decreed. Some of the members' parents seem to have learned what was happening. The father of Ortiz, the club's first president, prudently sent him away to Oñate. Escosura became the second president, and held office until September of 1824, when his father sent him to France. Espronceda then became the club's third president, but his term was brief. The boys had made the mistake of admitting one member of mature years whose name we do not know; for, in spite of his treachery, the Numantinos even in their old age chivalrously refrained from publishing it. This Judas betrayed the secrets of his fellow-members, and placed incriminating documents, among them the king's "death warrant," in the hands of the police. The latter, however, displayed less rigor and more common sense than usual. While all the youths implicated were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment in various monasteries scattered throughout Spain, nothing more was intended than to give the conspirators a salutary scare. They were all released after a few weeks of nominal servitude. Ortiz and Escosura, the ringleaders, were sentenced to six years of seclusion, and Espronceda received a term of five years to be served in the Monastery of San Francisco de Guadalajara in the city of Guadalajara. His term was pronounced completed after a very few weeks of confinement. That he had a father prominent in the government service stood him in good stead, and this probably accounts for the fact that his place of confinement was in the city where Don Juan was garrisoned. The latter, as an old soldier in the wars against Napoleon, sympathized in a general way with liberal ideas; yet, placed as he was in a very difficult position, he must have found his son's escapades compromising. His record shows that he was "purified," that is his loyalty to the crown was certified to, on August 8, 1824. He seems to have maintained a "correct" attitude toward his rulers to the end, with all the unquestioning obedience of a military man.