Editing Washington Irving (section)

===Minister to Spain===
President [[John Tyler]] appointed Irving as Minister to Spain in February 1842, after an endorsement from Secretary of State [[Daniel Webster]].<ref>Hellman, 257.</ref> Irving wrote, "It will be a severe trial to absent myself for a time from my dear little Sunnyside, but I shall return to it better enabled to carry it on comfortably".<ref>Washington Irving to Ebenezer Irving, New York, February 10, 1842, ''Works'', 25:180.</ref> He hoped that his position as Minister would allow him plenty of time to write, but Spain was in a state of political upheaval during most of his tenure, with a number of warring factions vying for control of the 12-year-old [[Isabella II of Spain|Queen Isabella II]].<ref>Bowers, 127–275.</ref> Irving maintained good relations with the various generals and politicians, as control of Spain rotated through [[Baldomero Espartero|Espartero]], Bravo, then [[Ramón María Narváez y Campos, 1st Duke of Valencia|Narváez]]. Espartero was then locked in a power struggle with the Spanish Cortes. Irving's official reports on the ensuing civil war and revolution expressed his romantic fascination with the regent as young Queen Isabella's knight protector. He wrote with an anti-republican, undiplomatic bias. Though Espartero, ousted in July 1843, remained a fallen hero in his eyes, Irving began to view Spanish affairs more realistically.<ref>Mary  Duarte, and Ronald E. Coons, "Washington Irving, American Ambassador to Spain, 1842-1846". ''Consortium on Revolutionary Europe 1750-1850: Proceedings'' (1992), Vol. 21, pp, 350-360.</ref> However, the politics and warfare were exhausting, and Irving was both homesick and suffering from a crippling skin condition.

{{blockquote|I am wearied and at times heartsick of the wretched politics of this country…. The last ten or twelve years of my life, passed among sordid speculators in the United States, and political adventurers in Spain, has shewn me so much of the dark side of human nature, that I begin to have painful doubts of my fellow man; and look back with regret to the confiding period of my literary career, when, poor as a rat, but rich in dreams, I beheld the world through the medium of my imagination and was apt to believe men as good as I wished them to be.<ref>Irving to Thomas Wentworth Storrow, Madrid, 18 May 1844, ''Works'', 25:751</ref>}}

With the political situation relatively settled in Spain, Irving continued to closely monitor the development of the new government and the fate of Isabella. His official duties as Spanish Minister also involved negotiating American trade interests with Cuba and following the Spanish parliament's debates over the slave trade. He was also pressed into service by Louis McLane, the American Minister to the [[Court of St. James's]] in London, to assist in negotiating the [[Oregon boundary dispute|Anglo-American disagreement over the Oregon border]] that newly elected president [[James K. Polk]] had vowed to resolve.<ref>Jones, 415-56.</ref>