ar, Madame Riego, the widow of the unfortunate patriot
General Riego, "the restorer and martyr of Spanish freedom." Her short
and eventful history possesses more than ordinary melancholy. While yet
a child she had to endure all the hardships and privations consequent
upon a state of warfare, and under the protection of her maternal
grandfather, had to seek refuge from place to place on the mountains of
Asturias from the French army. At the close of 1821 she was married to
General Riego, to whom she had been known and attached almost from
infancy, and, in the spring of the following year, became, with her
distinguished husband, a resident in Madrid. But the political confusion
and continued alarm of the period having appeared to affect her health,
the general proceeded with her in the autumn to Granada, where he parted
from his young and beloved wife, never again to meet her in this world,
the convocation of the extraordinary Cortes for October 1822 obliging him
to return to the capital.

Accompanied by the canon Riego, brother to her husband, and her attached
sister, Donna Lucie, she removed in March to Malaga, from whence the
advance of the French army into the south of Spain obliged them to seek
protection at Gibraltar, which, under the advice of General Riego, they
left for England on the 4th of July, but, owing to an unfavourable
passage, did not reach London until the 17th of August. Here the
visitation which impended over her was still more calamitous than all
that had preceded it. Within little more than two months after her
arrival in London, the account arrived of General Riego's execution. {97}

Gerald Griffin, the Irish novelist, in a letter dated 22nd of November,
1823, says,--

"I have been lately negotiating with my host (of 76 Regent Street)
for lodgings for the widow and brother of poor General Riego. They
are splendid apartments, but the affair has been broken off by the
account of his death. It has been concealed from her. She is a
young woman, and is following him fast, being far advanced in a
consumption. His brother is in deep grief. He says he will go and
bury himself for the remainder of his days in the woods of America."

The house,

No. 1, SEYMOUR PLACE,

[Picture: No. 1 Seymour Place] as it was then, Seymour Terrace, Little
Chelsea, as it is now called, became, about this period, the residence of
the unhappy fugitives. Grif