A HISTORICAL LOOK: We are not the first

Valencians have traveled and settled in England since time immemorial for various reasons and economic, political or other circumstances. The historian Vicent Baydal informed us in a zoom conference for Valencians UK in the spring of 2020 about the presence of Valencians around the world.

The knight and writer Joanot Martorell (Valencia 1410-1465) spent two stays in London in the course of his life; the first in 1437 and the second in 1450. It is undoubtedly an exceptional testimony because it left a literary imprint on his visit to the court of the King of England. The excerpt from the book Tirant lo Blanch recounts the knight's stay in London. What better proof could you have?

The War of the Spanish Succession in Spain led to an exile of Austrianists, for whom the Valencians had bet, abroad. The ecclesiastic Manuel Mercader i Torà (1674-1737), rector of the University of Valencia from 1703 to 1706 left for Menorca after losing the war and on September 1, 1714 he arrived with the jurist Francesc Sancho in exile in England. Sancho was able to return the following year while Manuel Mercader made political flight into permanent exile. He died in poverty, and "in the Christian faith" in England.

In the 19th century, Valencians who came to British soil basically responded to two reasons: political exiles - each scattering of absolutism persecuted liberals who chose to leave - and economists who sought a better life beyond their borders.

The end of the Liberal Triennium (1820-1823) and the arrival of the Hundred Thousand Sons of St. Louis to restore absolutism with Ferdinand VII forced liberals declared into exile. The bookseller and publisher Vicente Salvá Pérez (Valencia 1786-Paris 1849) fled Valencia to Gibraltar and from there to London where he had contacts to resume his work. Most of the politically persecuted were modest people of humble origins, but there were also what would be called today by professionals and people well placed in society.

The bookseller opened a bookstore called the Spanish & Classical Library in 1825 at 124 Regent 'Street, in the center of the city, at that time an orb that dominated the world with the empire in which it was never placed. the sun because when it was put in one place it came out for another. The Valencian bookshop soon became a meeting place for Spanish liberal exiles in London, according to all the chronicles of the time. Some settled permanently in England, others took exile as a temporary stay waiting for a political change in Spain that would allow them to return. Others moved to France to be closer to Spain.

Vicent Salvá also had editorial contacts in Paris, where he left in 1830. For a time he alternated between London and Paris until in 1834 he closed his business in England and remained in Paris where he died. Its London bookshop ceased to be a center for social gatherings in 1830. The exile after the Liberal or Constitutional Triennium brought to London characters such as the poet José de Espronceda or a whole wave that settled in the district of Somers Town, in the north of the city, the writer Antonio Alcalá Galiano called the neighborhood an "abbreviated constitutional Spain" and political exile as "the fatal emigration." That was the poor community, the exiles without resources.