Historical Fiction, Cultural Transfer and the Recycling of the Black Legend between the Low Countries and Britain: A Nineteenth-Century Case Study

Abstract

This chapter compares Henri Moke’s Le Gueux de Mer (1827) and Thomas Colley Grattan’s The Heiress of Bruges (1830), two historical novels set at the time of the Dutch Revolt and written in the final years of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. The comparison provides insights into the respective priorities of British and ‘Netherlandic’ writers who dealt in images of Spain in the early nineteenth century. Beyond some clear differences in the ideological urgency of their work, the authors’ liberal politics, their sympathy towards Catholicism and the influence of Romantic Orientalism create important nuances in their versions of the Black Legend, which are ultimately denunciations of bigotry and tyranny rather than expressions of wholesale Hispanophobia.