On this date in 1823, Rafael Riego was hanged in Madrid.
Riego was a leading exponent of the supine cause of Spanish liberalism during the 1810s reign of the feckless Ferdinand VII, who had reversed Spain’s extraordinarily progressive 1812 constitution.
On the first day of the 1820s, he led an army mutiny that forced the king to restore that constitution.
Feckless Ferdinand went along with the new sheriff, and the result was a three-year interregnum of constitutional government — the Trienio Liberal.
But the Bourbon king was only too pleased to solicit the aid of Europe’s counterrevolutionary monarchs.
In 1823, a French expedition — the “hundred thousand sons of St. Louis — invaded Spain at Ferdinand’s invitation and swiftly crushed Riego’s liberals. Then Ferdinand crushed Riego himself.
Induced like Cranmer to sully his reputation by recanting in the vain hope of a pardon (and by starvation and other coercions), Riego was instead stripped of military honors, given a summary trial, and ignominiously drug to the gallows in a basket.
Post-Riego, Spain’s liberal and absolutist factions still had years of bloody fighting and martyr-making yet to go.
And we’re not just talking 19th century. There’s a Himno de Riego, which was also the anthem of the 1930s Spanish Republic that Franco laid low.
On this day..
- 1888: Pedro, the pirate Ñancúpel
- 1810: Metta Fock, embroiderer
- 1707: Bartellemy Pichon dit La Roze, the first executed in Fort Detroit
- 1873: Captain Joseph Fry and 36 crew of the Virginius
- 1941: Francisc Panet
- 1765: Alexander Provan, half-handed
- 1898: Sokong, Lavari, and Kruba of the Imperri
- 1918: Louis Harris and Ernest Jackson, the last British soldiers shot at dawn
- 1864: Retaliatory executions by John Mosby
- 1817: The Pentrich Rebellion leaders
- 1550: Jon Arason, the last Catholic bishop of Iceland
- 1944: Hannah Szenes, who gambled on what mattered most
- 1944: Richard Sorge and Hotsumi Ozaki