From a North American point of view, the most important member of the clan was Bernardo (de) Gálvez, the son of Matías Gálvez, a soldier and diplomat who had served briefly as viceroy of Mexico in 1781. Bernardo was governor of Louisiana during the American Revolution (1776-9); he was the Spanish representative who officially recognized American independence and materially assisted it by capturing British forts on the Mississippi; and he was the spectacularly reckless attacker of the English at the battle of Pensacola in 1781. The British Hispanist and historian Sir Charles Petrie says that Gálvez' conquest of Pensacola «may well have been one of the decisive battles of history», because, had the British retained what is now Florida and the northern Gulf coast, the outcome of the American Civil War would doubtless have been far different. King Charles III of Spain: An Enlightened Despot (Constable: London, 1971), 208. Don Bernardo died in 1794.

Spanish historians tend to consider as more important don Bernardo's uncle, José Gálvez, who ruled the council of the Indies, reformed administrative, judicial, and mercantile practices in the New World, and was ennobled with the title of marqués de Sonora. Don José died in 1787. His daughter, María Josefa Gálvez y Valenzuela, condesa de Castroterreño (and marquesa de Sonora in her own right), a member of the Queen's circle of cultured women, was to be María Rosa's principal heir. With such important connections at court, it seems likely that doña María Rosa could exert pressure on the government, whatever the character of her acquaintance with Godoy (discussed below) may have been.

Lewis, Feminine Discourse, 147, n. 2, says that Jovellanos' diaries record that he visited a woman named Gálvez in Madrid in 1790; but the only references in the diaries that I have found mention two visits to a Gálvez family, without further explanation.

Serrano, 445, note 1. The original source this anecdote is José Carvajal y Hue.

For the purposes of chronology, it is useful to recall that in 1784, Manuel de Godoy, then seventeen years old (and one year older than María Rosa), became a member of the royal guards, from which position he rose to the rank of Field Marshall by the time he was twenty-three, when he became Secretary of State (1792-8). After a brief period of eclipse, he regained the confidence of the monarchs and in effect ruled Spain until the Motín de Aranjuez in March of 1808.

The Espasa encyclopedia's imprecisely worded entry on Gálvez implies, wrongly, that María Rosa accompanied Cabrera to his post in North America.

This datum seems to be Serrano's interpretation of a passage in María Rosa's will about three of her husband's cronies who she believed had hoodwinked him and who had persecuted her: how, she does not say. Espasa follows this account, with some restraint.

In the unpaginated «Advertencia» at the beginning of volume II of her Obras, she claims that her status as a woman and unspecified troubles have prevented her from polishing her tragedies («el sexo, y las continuas ocupaciones, y no vulgares penas que acompañan mi situación»).

In the «Advertencia» of vol. II she speaks bitterly of the vicious criticism awaiting any Spaniard who attempts to publish original tragedies: «no hay la menor indulgencia, lloviendo críticas, y aun sátiras indecentes sobre qualquiera que se atreve a emprender esta dificultosísima carrera... [Un] drama original no puede tener una situación, un verso, un descuido que se tolere: todo ha de ser perfecto...»

Le Délire was one of the most admired operas of Henri Montan Berton (1767-1844), on a libretto by Jacques Révroni St. Cyr. Manuel García de Villanueva, in his curious Origen, épocas y progresos del teatro español (Sancha: Madrid, 1802), p. 225, includes El delirio as one of the most popular operettas in Madrid theaters at the turn of the century.

Lewis also suspeets autobiographical elements in the play. Feminine Discourse, 231.