John Kemble's Gibraltar Journal ― The Spanish Expedition of the Cambridge Apostles, 1830-1831

The summer of 1830 stirred revolutionary desires in young hearts across Europe. More than a generation of war and political instability had failed to dampen the fervor still felt from the French Revolution. In England the Cambridge Apostles took up the cause of the Spanish emigres so movingly visible in London where they had sought refuge from the tyranny of Ferdinand VII and his suppression of constitutional rights. The Spanish Expedition of the Cambridge Apostles has always captured our imaginations. Its blend of idealism and daring, of theory and practice, of thought and energy, seems perfectly to fulfill the principles the Apostles steadfastly espoused, a combination of faith and works. The episodes comprised in most accounts of the expedition are symbolic and filled with intrigue: secret meetings, assumed names, hidden messages, contraband, narrow escapes from the authorities, treachery, and finally a bloody execution on the beach at Malaga. A host of newly-discovered documents now enable us to re-examine one of the most intriguing events in British intellectual history.

Eric W. Nye teaches at the University of Wyoming, USA and has held visiting positions at Cambridge and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Edinburgh, UK. For much of his career Nye has been tracking the legacy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, especially in the transitional decades between the Romantics and Victorians. His concern for the Cambridge Apostles arose from a project to renew interest in John Sterling, whose life was told so convincingly yet so inadequately by Thomas Carlyle.