Francisco Javier Negrete

Francisco Xavier de Negrete y Adorno, 1st Duke of Cotadilla (1763–1827), was a Captain General of New Castile and, briefly, Viceroy of Navarre.

After having seen much active duty in the last two decades of the 18th century and at the beginning of the 19th, no records exist of Negrete having taken part in any actual combat during the Peninsular War. the Duke of Campo de Alange, who were declared traitors and outlawed by the Supreme Central Junta in May 1809,

Peninsular War

Following the Tumult, or Mutiny of Aranjuez, Negrete was responsible for arresting, on Godoy's orders, and under whose very orders they were acting in requesting Napoleon's assistance in Ferdinand's struggles against his own father and against Godoy, thereby earning their political animosity, although they, like the future King, were all acquitted. during which Negrete gave the order, in full accordance with the Junta and the minister of War, O'Farrill's instructions, for Spain's troops to be confined to barracks, an order which, according to Juan Pérez de Guzmán y Gallo, Secretary of the Real Academia de la Historia from 1913 to 1921, and author of what is considered the most important study of the events around that uprising,

In May 1811, Negrete led the escort of a convoy from Bayonne to Madrid, which included General Hugo's wife, Sophie Trébuchet, and their three children, one of whom was the nine-year-old Victor Hugo.

Exile Following the Allied Anglo-Portuguese victory at the Battle of Salamanca, at Arapiles (July 1812), over twenty thousand afrancesados, including Negrete and his family, left Madrid for Valencia. Although he returned in December, his family went to Paris, where Negrete's father was, having been Spain's ambassador there until 1811.

When Joseph's reign finally collapsed, Negrete left Madrid in May 1813 for exile in France. Although the 1813 peace treaty between Napoleon and Ferdinand VII pardoned those "Spaniards who had supported King Joseph", a new decree in 1814 established the opposite. Although, with the amnesty declared by the liberals of the Trienio Liberal, Negrete made plans in 1823 to return to Madrid, the restoration of Ferdinand's absolutism in the Ominous Decade, he was unable to. He died in exile in Paris in 1827.