"Elvis was a hero to most / But he never meant shit to me"

Heroes! We all have them. Personal and national heroes, men who mirror to us the qualities we most envy, the ones we fervently wish we had ourselves.  But heroism is like taffeta, it is not the same in all lights. A man devoutly admired by one group can be an object of passionate scorn, or even downright hate, to another.  Through Nathaniel's eyes we are about to meet the greatest hero of Christian Spain - El Cid.

"The hero is represented in the most extraordinary of attitudes: the head is thrown back, and the face turned towards one side; the legs in a sort of studied posture; a drawn sword is in the right hand, the point somewhat raised. The general expression is that of a comic actor attempting an attitude of mock-heroic impertinence; and is probably the result of an unattained object in the mind of the artist, of producing that of fearless independence."

This is Nathaniel's damning verdict on an oil painting of El Cid that once hung in the Ayuntamiento - not a very good one it seems.  It was presumably put there by those who genuinely wished to honour the great man whose bones rested amongst them.   But Nathaniel has no time for this picture.  To him it's an artistic failure, rubbish.

Only, is it just the picture he has no time for?  Really he is not just dissing whatever poor provincial artist attempted the likeness of Spain's great preserver: inevitably, by association, he is ridiculing the hero himself. 

El Cid statue in the centre of modern Burgos

This is an unpopular viewpoint, at least in the west.  The statue above was put up only sixty years ago, a mere six years before Hollywood canonised El Cid in the person of Charlton Heston. Like the film, it aims to show El Cid as the magnificent champion of Christian Spain against the Moors, and that is still very much how he is seen by many in Spain today.  But we soon learn that, for Nathaniel, El Cid's hero status is overblown, ambiguous,  untrustworthy - undeserved.

"For those who are satisfied with the orthodox histories of the monks, he is without defects—a simple unsophisticated demi-god. But there have been Mahometan historians of Spain. These are universally acknowledged to have treated of all that concerned themselves with complete accuracy and impartiality; and, when this happens, it should seem to be the best criterion, in the absence of other proof, of their faithful delineation of others' portraits."

The icon of one group will often be the hate figure of another.  I am sensing something significant about Nathaniel, which is that he loves Spain so much not for its triumphant Christian past, but for its lost Moorish civilization. His derogatory attitude to El Cid is the litmus test which proves something profound about him.

Deep, deep  down,  Nathaniel Armstrong Wells Esq. of Piercefield, Monmouthshire, wishes the Africans had won.

In my end is my beginning.

So, starting from the end.  This is a copy of Nathaniel's burial record, taken from the net.  And there's something mightily depressing about seeing it in black and white.  Obviously, since he was born in 1806, I was never going to contact him on facebook, but... this is sad.  And why is this much-travelled man being buried in Edgbaston of all places?  And why do they appear to have his age wrong in the burial record - oh but that's minor, clerical errors happen all the time. But why in Edgbaston?

A mystery put aside for another day.  Let's go back gratefully to Nathaniel still alive and receiving impressions and transferring them onto paper, for long-term storage and the ultimate pleasure of people not alive when he was breathing that Pyrenean air.

He's travelling through Basque country to Burgos, ancient capital of Castile. And it's quite...small.

"The extent of Burgos bears a very inadequate proportion to the idea formed of it by strangers, derived from its former importance and renown. It is composed of five or six narrow streets, winding round the back of an irregularly shaped colonnaded plaza. The whole occupies a narrow space, comprised between the river Arlançon, and the almost circular hill of scarcely a mile in circumference, (on which stands the citadel) and covers altogether about double the extent of Windsor Castle."

 He adds that the medieval town has "received a sort of modern facing, consisting of a row of regularly built white houses, which turn their backs to the Plaza, and front the river"

Perhaps those "regularly built" modern houses of his are now bijou holiday lets, renting on the strength of their cute antiquity?  Maybe they've vanished under concrete.  A quick visit via the net to modern Burgos (...aaargh my god it's huge!! No, no it's not: but bigger, yes, obviously bigger.  Has an airport and everything.  Still looks a great place for a tourist though, and still possesses all those creamy white historic buildings and some narrow medievally streets.)

He gets a little prickly about the small size of his Burgos.  We must not patronise it, we Brits, despite its surprising, ah, compactness to our Victorian eyes, which are more used to the great suburban sprawl of London or Brum, or Edgbaston.  But you couldn't build cities as neatly as this in Britain though because of all the rain...:

"The dimensions of this, and many other Spanish towns, must not be adopted as a base for estimating their amount of population. Irun, at the frontier of France, stands on a little hill, the surface of which would scarcely suffice for a country-house, with its surrounding offices and gardens: it contains, nevertheless, four or five thousand inhabitants, and comprises a good-sized market-place and handsome town-hall, besides several streets. Nor does this close packing render the Spanish towns less healthy than our straggling cities, planned with a view to circulation and purity of atmosphere...The humidity of the atmosphere in England would be the principal obstacle to cleanliness and salubrity, had the towns a more compact mode of construction; whilst in Spain, on the contrary, this system is advantageous as a protection against the excessive power of the summer sun, which would render our wide streets—bordered by houses too low to afford complete shade—not only almost impassable, but uninhabitable."


Okay.  Small is not only beautiful in Spain, but also populous, dry, well-planned, hygienic and shady.  Because it's Spain, and we love Spain.

Which brings us to Nathaniel's first attempt to render a picturesque antiquity visually, the Arco de Santa Maria.  What do you think of him as an artist?