George Washington Montgomery

George Washington Montgomery, or Jorge Montgomery (Alicante, Spain, 1804 - Washington D.C., June 5, 1841) was an American Spanish-born writer, translator and diplomat.[1]

His father was an Irishman businessman, John Montgomery; his mother was perhaps a Spaniard. His father had lived in Boston and had settled in Alicante, where he was a U.S. consul. George spent his childhood in England, and studied Humanities in Exeter. Then he had some minor function in U.S. embassy at Madrid; afterwards he was secretary of Carlos Martinez de Irujo y Tacón, former Spanish minister to the United States from 1796 to 1807, married with an American lady, Sarah Maria Theresa McKean,[2] with whom George held a long friendship. Thanks to U.S. minister Alexander Hill Everett, Washington Irving met his namesake in the Madrid tertulia of Mrs. Sarah McKean, a widow by then (1826), and the friendship between the two was never interrupted. Montgomery held various diplomatic positions: U.S. consul in San Juan de Puerto Rico, 1835–38; Tampico, 1840–41. He is entombed at Oak Hill Cemetery, Washington, D.C.[3]

As a writer and translator, he wrote adaptations of some minor works of Washington Irving in Tareas de un solitario,[4] and the first Spanish translation of The Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada by this author.[5] In 1832, published El bastardo de Castilla, «historical novel, chivalrous, original» about the romantic medieval hero Bernardo del Carpio.[6] In 1839, Narrative of a journey to Guatemala, in Central America, in 1838, an interesting travelogue about these regions, was published in New York.[7]