María Rosa de Gálvez: notes for a biography

Joseph R. Jones

University of Kentucky

Since Serrano y Sanz published a collection of documents about María Rosa de Gálvez ninety years ago, nothing has been added to her sketchy biography¹. Now, recently discovered data about Gálvez' husband Josef de Cabrera's diplomatic career in the United States suggest a new interpretation of some of Serrano's documents and of the unflattering anecdotes about Gálvez reported by Serrano and other historians since at least the early nineteenth century. What follows is an outline, based mostly on secondary sources, of the life of Gálvez, incorporating the hitherto unknown evidence.

María Rosa de Gálvez believed that she was the first Spanish woman ever to write plays: «[Soy] una muger, la primera entre las españolas que se ha dedicado a este ramo de Literatura...» (Serrano, 451). She was, of course, wrong². Yet even so, the rarity of women playwrights before the later nineteenth century should have given Gálvez a certain lonely prominence in literary histories, whatever the artistic value that critics may ultimately attribute to her works, which have recently been the object of study by American and European scholars³. She several times points out that not even in France was there a woman with such a collection of original dramas to her credit, and that persons of her sex rarely cultivated belles lettres⁴. At the peak of her career, an admirer of her poetry called her «the principal and most fertile female poet» in Spain⁵. Yet she is so completely forgotten that her name does not appear in Simón Díaz' or even Francisco Aguilar Piñal's bibliographical manuals⁶ or, until 1986, the MLA bibliography. The least that literary historians might have done, it would seem, is to remember her as one of the few European female dramatists of the Napoleonic era. They might also, had they looked at her career more carefully, have found her interesting because, aside from her unique status as what one might call a government-sponsored female dramatist, she was a minor actor in one of the most exciting periods of modern European and Spanish history. The French Revolution occurred when María Rosa was twenty-one years old; Napoleon's rise to eminence took place during her active years in Madrid, and she remained an admirer of «Buonaparte» until her early death at the age of thirty-eight in 1806⁷. The new republicart government in Washington, where her husband was stationed as an attaché, was beginning to meddle in European affairs and to irritate the advisers of Carlos IV, notably with the purchase from Napoleon of Spain's former colony, Louisiana. Romanticism was about to overwhelm Neoclassical culture, and Gálvez, as an imitator (however indirect) of Rousseau, was an intermediary in the transmission of early Romantic forms to Spain.

María Rosa de Gálvez⁸ was born in 1768*⁹ and was adopted -perhaps because she was a relative- by Col. don Antonio Gálvez of Málaga¹⁰. Her adoptive father was a member of a distinguished family whose most illustrious representatives in the later eighteenth century were don Bernardo de Gálvez, conde de Gálvez, who had once been governor of Louisiana and viceroy of Mexico, and don José de Gálvez, marqués de Sonora, secretary of the council of the Indies¹¹. Besides these powerful relatives with New World diplomatic connections, doña María Rosa had another American tie: her husband, Captain José Cabrera y Ramírez, was an «oficial agregado» of the first Spanish Legation in the United States from late 1803 to early 1806.

María Rosa married Cabrera while still living in Málaga* and at a very young age.* She was in Madrid by 1801¹², during which year she requested permission to print various works. As a married woman, she led an immoral life,* according to a hostile nineteenth-century source¹³, supported by Godoy¹⁴, to whom she read a naughty sonnet every day «a la hora de tomar el chocolate». As a result of this scandalous behavior, Captain Cabrera left his wife («se divorció»),* asked to be transferred to America¹⁵,* and later harassed María Rosa with lawsuits¹⁶.

Captain Cabrera was in America by early 1804. The best documentary evidence of a marital rift between the couple is María Rosa's will of 1806, in which she leaves nothing to Cabrera, although she names him as her husband and as a person under the influence of unsavory characters.

It is of course dangerous to confuse poetic expression with biographical fact; but it is hard to resist the conviction that Gálvez is venting personal anguish in the poetry submitted to the Imprenta Real in late 1803. She speaks several times of her «inmensos» and «infinitos males» (I, 25, 37)¹⁷. And in an ode on the subject of envy, dedicated to an elderly friend whom she calls «Licio», she urges him to ignore the «poisonous tongue of malicious envy» whose words have even «penetrated the poor dwelling where I live» and where they have met only «compassion and scorn». (Obras I, 52-3) Perhaps this scorn was simply her reaction to unfavorable criticism of her plays¹⁸. In an ode on taking leave of the palace at Aranjuez, she says that Nature's beauties have allowed her to forget her «suerte cruel », «tristeza», and «suerte impía», and that at Aranjuez, she has rejected love («Desprecié altiva el amoroso fuego»): clearly no reference to her husband. At Aranjuez «cesó la causa de mi llanto; / De mi persecución calmó la ira; / Y ... del hado aquí logré victoria...» (I, 55-6)

There are also several emotional references to gambling that, read together with a section of her testament and the account of her husband's financial troubles (discussed below), suggest that the «infinitos males» were perhaps a result of Captain Cabrera's compulsión to gamble. In her ode on ephemeral pleasures, she describes the voluptuary who needs ever stronger stimuli for his jaded taste: «al juego vuela, / Al juego destructor; en él consume / Su tiempo y su riqueza: En sus falaces suertes pierde el oro, / Que socorrer pudiera cien familias, / Y dexa entre las manos de un malvado, / Lo que aliviar debiera al desdichado». (I, 33) Equally curious is her description of her reaction to a moving performance of El delirio, subtitled in one translation Las consecuencias del juego, an opera in which a virtuous man is «degraded» by the «black vice» of gambling and goes mad. (Obras I, 41)¹⁹

If Cabrera did in fact gamble to excess, then there are interesting parallels between Gálvez' situation and the plot of her serious comedy El egoísta, in which the weakness that brings down the wicked husband, a duelist and womanizer, is gambling²⁰. «Una baraja, fatal / Vicio, vicio que ha causado mi ruina!» says Nancy, the heroine of El egoísta, who is bereft of both parents and married to a husband, Sidney, who no longer loves her and who is rapidly depleting her dowry with an extravagant life-style that «sumergió en la indigencia a su esposa» (the very words that Gálvez uses to describe her own condition, in a petition to the king). In order to solve his financial problems, Sidney forces his wife to use her influence and money with «the Minister» to obtain a post for him in India. After suffering Sidney's contempt and abuse, Nancy resolves to leave him, «Que el cielo, / Aunque bendice los santos / Vínculos del matrimonio, / También manda separarlos, / Si la salud o la vida / En él están arriesgados». Meanwhile, Sidney and an equally shady friend are cheating an Irishman in a card game when the Governor of Windsor appears and confiscates the winnings. The next morning, the king orders Sidney to prison for fraud and attempted murder.

A hypothesis that seems to account for the family's documented money problems, the rumors about Godoy, and these oblique poetical allusions to hardships, love, and gambling, is that María Rosa and Captain Cabrera were estranged because of his gambling and that the Captain had received from Godoy, through the influence of the Gálvez family and its friends, an appointment to the legation in America, as far away from his wife as possible. The unhappy matron may have been the object of another man's -possibly Godoy's- attentions or even have had an embarrassing flirtation with Godoy at Aranjuez. There also, perhaps, she obtained royal encouragement (through her mentor Quintana?) to publish the works for which she had with great difficulty obtained permission and for which she herself had no funds to defray printing.

Gálvez' reputation as a writer has been tarnished by her dealings with the spectacularly successful favorite of Queen María Luisa and King Carlos IV. Historians are still trying to make a balanced assessment of the reign and the personality of this monarch by placing Spain's troubles in a larger context of international power struggles, world-wide inflation, and unsettling new intellectual currents; and they have put Godoy under the historical microscope. If most historians no longer consider «the Prince of Peace» to be the ignorant lout whose meteoric career is attributable to the queen's insatiable lust and the king's truly incredible naïveté (or, as some have suggested, the king's own ambiguous attachment to the handsome young man), neither do they find Godoy to be a slandered martyr to the cause of reform. Chastenet calls him immature, vain, greedy, and lustful²¹. As proof of this last trait, Chastenet cites Alcalá Galiano, who says that Godoy's antechamber was always full of women, including courtesans, and that even wellborn women offered sex in exchange for his influence. A Frenen ambassador claimed that it was common to see two or three hundred women in the corridors near his apartments in the palace, and that Godoy liked to accept their offers and then describe his performance. In addition to his notorious liaison with the queen, Godoy had a mistress by whom he had two children and whom he married after his first wife, the king's illegitimate niece, died. Godoy's irregular sex life made suspect his contact with any woman, especially one who had dedicated flattering poems to him²² and for whom he exercised his influence. His conservative enemies, including churchmen, took every opportunity to vilify both him and his acquaintances among the educated and independent women of the Enlightenment -like Gálvez- who rejected the traditional role of upper-class females as invisible helpmeets²³. One must therefore regard the stories of Godoy's conquest with some caution. Serrano solemnly assures us that the rumors about Gálvez' intimacy with Godoy and her «extremely naughty, off-color sonnets» are the exaggerations of malicious gossip. But it is clear that Godoy did in fact intervene personally more than once to help Gálvez's publishing projeets.

Furthermore, years after her death, he still remembered her well. In his Memoirs, he recalls María Rosa de Gálvez by name and clearly views her as the most important woman writer of his time. As well as I can calculate, among the hundreds of writers and artists that Godoy names, he singles out eight women for artistic creativity. These are two musicians²⁴, five translators²⁵, and Gálvez, of whom he says that she was «aplaudida largamente en los teatros y estimada otro tanto y alentada por nuestros literatos de aquel tiempo [por las] composiciones líricas y dramáticas con que aumentó nuestro Parnaso»²⁶. He may also be praising her without recalling her name if it is her «Oda a la beneficencia» whose author he cannot remember²⁷.

Gálvez was on terms of familiarity with another eminent man of the period, Manuel José Quintana (1772-1857), and about their relationship there is likewise little direct evidence. After Gálvez' death, Quintana went on to become an important political figure, lionized or persecuted depending on the regime, who would outlive his enemies and be crowned poet lauréate by Isabel II. Quintana was four years younger than María Rosa, and both writers began their theater careers in Madrid in the same year. María Rosa dedicated to Quintana two odes, one of which implies that they have been intimate friends²⁸, and she clearly admired him to the point of imitating him in her poetry on patriotic and didactic subjeets (such as her odes on Trafalgar and on medical discoveries). Quintana was the editor (1803-5) of a journal called Variedades de ciencias, literatura y artes in which he wrote (vol. V, pp. 159-164) a cautiously-worded review of Gálvez's works that sounds like a sincere effort to find something good to say about an author whose energy, cultivation, and ideas he respeets («una aplicación singular, unos conocimientos nada comunes y un modo de pensar noble y elevado»)²⁹, but whose opus he cannot quite bring himself to praise without qualification. He finds in her best non-dramatic work, like the ode on Godoy's victories in Portugal, clarity and skill in versifying united with pleasing images and ideas. As a dramatist, in her tragedies she has overcome, with unusual daring, inventiveness, and craftsmanship, the formidable problems that face the playwright. But as an impartial critic he must add that some of her plays are colorless, facile, and based on illchosen subjeets. Even with such defeets, however, no critic can judge plays fairly until he has seen them in performance: to paraphrase Quintana's words, a criticism that seems conclusive in the library vanishes in the theater. It seems unlikely that Quintana would have given even lukewarm publicity in his periodical to a woman who was known to have earned Godoy's generosity with sex and obscene verses.

The printing history of Gálvez' works and the documents regarding censorship reveal a few more facts about her life from 1801 to her death³⁰. Her first staged dramatic work is a zarzuela called El califa de Bagdad, for which she obtained a license for performance on April 18, 1801³¹. Ten days after approving her zarzuela (28 April 1801), authorities granted her a license to perform and publish a five-act tragedy, Ali Bek.

A month later, in a letter to the Junta de Dirección de Teatros (28 May 1801), María Rosa petitions the committee -an organ of the new program for the reform of theatrical affairs- for a one-time payment of 25 doubloons instead of the usual author's royalties, because a plague in Cadiz³² has sharply decreased her income, and she has unusual expenses (which «no se le ocurrirán otra vez en su vida»). It is noteworthy that she does not mention her husband (calling herself simply doña María de Gálvez) and describes herself as «a woman without heirs». The Junta acceded to her unusual petition on June 4, 1801.

On the same day that she wrote to the Junta regarding the royalties of Ali Bek, Gálvez penned an indignant letter to the Gobernador del Consejo regarding the denial of ecclesiastical approval of her one-act farce, Un loco hace ciento. The Vicaría had refused to give her a reason for its rejection, and she suspected that the censor was prejudiced against her³³. The censor's opinión has survived, and his apparent excuse for denying permission is that the farce «ridicules French things» and that Madrid is full of French officers whom it would be unwise to offend³⁴. The authorities overruled the censor's disapproval, and the farce was performed and printed in the same year.

Perhaps around the same date as Ali Bek, doña María Rosa wrote but never published a one-act play or libretto called La opera cómica, which survives in manuscript in the Biblioteca Nacional. Also during the fertile year 1801 Gálvez published Catalina, o la bella labradora, a translation from French³⁵, which a critic for the Memorial literario excoriated: it had nothing dramatic about it, and its style offended him with its «mestizo» language full of gallicisms «so fashionable among the throng of bad translators»³⁶.

During the summer of 1803, she asks permission to print a collection of plays. Three of them had already been examined by the ecclesiastical censor (Safo, La negra Zinda, La delirante), and she receives approval on November 5, paying the required fees on November 8.

On November 21, Gálvez begs the king to command the Imprenta Real to publish her works without the normal author's contribution, because she is too poor to pay the costs herself; she requests an arrangement in which the royal printery will recuperate its money from the sale of the work. Within four days, the petition is granted (25 November). Ten months later, on September 19, 1804, doña María Rosa sends presentation copies of her three-volume Obras poéticas to Godoy, asking him to keep one and give the others to the monarchs, and she endoses yet another petition (dated September 18) to the king, asking him to allow her to have all copies and any proceeds of sales, since she is «submerged in indigence». Gálvez' allusions to her poverty cast doubt on the tradition that she was being supported by Godoy.

Gálvez' literary activity after 1804 seems to have slowed considerably, perhaps because she was already ill. In early 1805 she had sold a comedy, La familia de la moda, to the Coliseo de los Caños de Peral (Petition dated 26 Feb 1805). After the director had chosen a cast and begun rehearsals, the ecclesiastical censor denied permission to perform the play because, as the rejection notice said, it was «immoral and a school for corruption and libertine behavior». Gálvez complains that the same prejudiced censors had denied permission to her play Un loco hace ciento, and she asks for a reader who is impartial and intelligent, promising to make any reasonable corrections. The authorities once again overruled the censor, granted permission, and sent the play to the secretary of theaters on March 17. But the text was never printed³⁷.

On November 4, 1805 (according to a receipt for payment), the actors of Los Caños de Peral premiered Las esclavas amazonas, which the critic of the Memorial literario found a tedious rehash of recognition scenes, lost children, separated families, etc. Gálvez rebutted the critic in a letter to Quintana's Variedad de ciencias, literatura y artes. Las esclavas amazonas is another of Gálvez' unpublished plays and is her last dramatic work³⁸.

She continued, however, to publish verse. In 1805 she has an ode on a voyage to see an eruption of Mount Teide (on Tenerife) in Variedad de ciencias, literatura y artes³⁹; and in her last year, she sent odes on the Battle of Trafalgar, grudgingly admired by the irascible Mor de Fuentes, and on the singularly unpoetic subject of anti-pestilential fumigations, to Minerva o el revisor general.

By September of 1806, María Rosa was bedridden and dying of an unspecified ailment. In her will, she describes herself as married to Captain Cabrera, a member of the legation in the United States. A puzzling section of the will deals with three men, named, and other unnamed «cronies» who have cruelly persecuted her and «afflicted her greatly in her person, honor, and interests», who may attempt to present forged claims for payment to her executors, and who have in their possession documents (gambling IOU's?) signed by María Rosa against her will, out of obedience to her husband, whom these persons had deceived. Among other bequests, she leaves her books and papers to the conde de Castroterreño, and one wonders whether they may not still exist in some family archive.

María Rosa de Gálvez died on October 2, 1806, and on the 14th, the Diario de Madrid published a poem on her passing, in which the poet describes her as an «insigne y sola española poetisa del tiempo presente».

Captain Cabrera's career as agregado oficial in the Spanish legation deserves closer scrutiny for the light it casts on the true character of a man indirectly portrayed by Serrano as a victim of Godoy's womanizing and María Rosa's loose morals. Captain Cabrera presented his credentials in Washington on January 12, 1804⁴⁰. A little more than a year later, he was once again sending documents to Washington, this time to the House of Representatives: the Annals of Congress, vol. 14 (1804-1805), record that on Thursday, January 17, 1805, «The Speaker laid before the House a letter, together with a memorial and sundry accompanying documents, in the Spanish language, from Don Joseph de Cabrera, attached to the Legation of Spain, near the United States, now confined in the debtor's apartment of the jail in the city of Philadelphia, under a warrant from the Governor of the State of Pennsylvania, charging him with sundry criminal offences; which were ordered to lie on the table»⁴¹. Seven months later, the authorities of Philadelphia arraigned Cabrera on charges of forgery. On July 3, Cabrera appeared before the Mayor's court and pled not guilty. On July 5, a jury tried his case and, on July 11, found him guilty. The judge sentenced him to prison in Philadelphia (where the legation and most other diplomats lived while Washington City was under construction) for two years at hard labor and a fine of two thousand dollars, the sum that he had attempted to steal by forgery⁴². In May of 1805, between the dates of Cabrera's appeal to the House of Representatives and his trial, the ambassador had acknowledged letters from Spain with regard to «the fate of don José Cabrera" (Documentos, p. 63, no. 174). By some means now difficult to trace, the legation persuaded the governor of Pennsylvania to pardon Cabrera⁴³. The minutes of Governor Thomas McKean for July 23,1805, show that he relieved Cabrera from the sentence of hard labor but not from imprisonment or the fine⁴⁴. Four months later, on November 26, the governor granted a full pardon, on the condition that Cabrera leave the state and the country within twenty days, not to return for the space of three years (p. 2183).

In January of 1806, the secretary of the Spanish legation, José Bruno Magdalena, writes to Pedro Cevallos, the secretary of state (and Godoy's cousin), that on the last day of 1805 he had delivered the pardon of the Governor of Pennsylvania to Cabrera in jail (Documentos, p. 109, no. 288). Perhaps Magdalena waited more than a month to obtain Cabrera's release because there were no ships leaving within the twenty day period of grace. Cabrera presumably left the United States in January, 1806. It is impossible to believe that María Rosa, with her government contacts, knew nothing of this shameful affair, yet her will, dated Sept 30, 1806, still describes Cabrera as an official of the legation. This new information about the dubious character of Cabrera does not clarify the relationship between him and his wife or even the reference to her persecution by his acquaintances, who may be honest creditors, for all we know. Yet it suggests that Cabrera was in no position to offer financial support to his wife, that he was not an honorable man, and that her reticence about him was not necessarily motivated by some attachment to Godoy but because her husband was a source of embarrassment.

The bare, public facts of María Roa de Gálvez's life suggest that she had enjoyed all the advantages of high social status, a well-connected family, interesting friendships, marriage to an officer in the glamorous diplomatic service, the blessing of a regime willing to publish her writings at its own expense, and at least modest success as a playwright. This picture of security and accomplishment is marred only slightly by the hostility of critics. Yet the private facts of her biography, like her unknown parentage (and illegitimacy?), difficulties with censors, vicious gosip about her relations with Godoy, her husband's criminal activities, her poor health and penury, suggest an existence of struggle, frustrated ambition, and emotional poverty. One might say of Gálvez's short, sad life what a French musicologist once said of the career of Julie Candeille, whose saccharine domestic drama Gálvez had adapted for the Spanish stage: considering her talents, she might have expected better.