3-021-677 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The Spanish Revolution: entrance, from the cloister, to Burgos Cathedral, where the governor was murdered, 1869. 'The ferocious acts of some fanatics in assassinating the Civil Governor of Burgos, Don Isidore Gutierrez de Castro...on Saturday, the 23rd January, when he had gone there, by order of the Minister of Public Instruction, to make an inventory of the...art-treasures in the keeping of the Chapter, has excited a strong feeling of indignation among the Spanish people. It seems that the Governor...had found the public doors of the cathedral locked, and had then entered through the Archbishop's palace, which has a private passage into the cathedral. On reading to the Archbishop the Ministerial decree, under which the Governor acted, that Prelate exclaimed that the Ministers and the Governor were tyrants...a furious mob from the outside broke into the cloisters. Don Gutierrez went to...expostulate with them at the cloister door, but they crowded upon him and stabbed him to death, mangling his lifeless body in a horrible manner and dragging it by a rope into the street; the eyes were torn out, and the nose and ears were cut off...This cathedral church is one of the finest buildings in Spain...[It] was begun in the thirteenth century'. From "Illustrated London News", 1869.