Paisanos

The Irish and the Liberation of Latin America

Tim Fanning

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780268104924
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de Latinoamérica y el Caribe

In the early nineteenth century, thousands of volunteers left Ireland behind to join the fight for South American independence. Lured by the promise of adventure, fortune, and the opportunity to take a stand against colonialism, they braved the treacherous Atlantic crossing to join the ranks of the Liberator, Simón Bolívar, and became instrumental in helping oust the Spanish from Colombia, Panama, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. Today, the names of streets, towns, schools, and football teams on the continent bear witness to their influence.

But it was not just during wars of independence that the Irish helped transform Spanish America. Irish soldiers, engineers, and politicians, who had fled Ireland to escape religious and political persecution in their homeland, were responsible for changing the face of the Spanish colonies in the Americas during the eighteenth century. They included a chief minister of Spain, Richard Wall; a chief inspector of the Spanish Army, Alexander O'Reilly; and the viceroy of Peru, Ambrose O'Higgins.

Whether telling the stories of armed revolutionaries like Bernardo O'Higgins and James Rooke or retracing the steps of trailblazing women like Eliza Lynch and Camila O'Gorman, Paisanos revisits a forgotten chapter of Irish history and, in so doing, reanimates the hopes, ambitions, ideals, and romanticism that helped fashion the New World and sowed the seeds of Ireland's revolutions to follow.

PART ONE

EXILE

Chapter 1

WILD GEESE

In 1754, to the surprise of courtiers and diplomats around Europe, the king of Spain appointed a 60-year-old Irishman as his new secretary of state, or prime minister. There was no doubting the Irishman’s talent and experience, nor his loyalty to his adopted homeland: he had, after all, served the Spanish crown ably as a soldier and diplomat for the best part of four decades. However, interested observers could have been forgiven for thinking that Richard Wall’s foreign birth and ancestry precluded him from the highest political office in the land. The fact that Wall, an Irishman born in France, could become Spain’s most powerful politician showed not only the new secretary of state’s well-disguised ambition and skill at political manoeuvring but also the unique position that Irish Catholics enjoyed in the eighteenth-century Spanish Empire.

Wall represented a generation of Irish Catholics who had been denied political and economic opportunities in their homeland because of their religion and who were now hungry for success abroad. While none of his compatriots matched Wall’s achievements in the realm of Spanish politics, many of the Irish soldiers with whom he served on the battlefields of Europe, and to whom he later extended patronage, forged equally impressive careers in commerce, the military and the administration of Spain’s far-reaching colonies.

Wall became prime minister of Spain at a time when the country’s Bourbon monarchs were introducing reforms across the board in a vain attempt to control more closely the governance of their American colonies. They turned to the new scientific, rational processes that were becoming popular in Enlightenment Europe and the expertise of talented, far-sighted men. Irish-born economists and scientists, administrators and soldiers, naturalists and lexicographers – men such as John Garland, Ambrose O’Higgins, Alexander O’Reilly, John Mackenna and Bernard Ward – were at the forefront of the Bourbons’ attempts to modernise the Spanish Empire.

Writing in the 1790s, the British politician Lord Holland noted that Spain had taken advantage of Britain’s loss:

Any one conversant with the modern military history of Spain, or with good society in that country, must be struck with the large proportion of their eminent officers who were either born or descended from those who were born in Ireland. The comment, which that circumstance furnishes upon our exclusive and intolerant laws, is obvious enough.¹

Throughout the eighteenth century these talented emigrants took advantage of an extensive network of patronage in Spain, which saw the Irish favour their families and friends. At the heart of this network was Richard Wall.

Born in the cosmopolitan Atlantic port of Nantes in 1694, Richard was the son of Matthew and Kathleen Wall. Like tens of thousands of other Irish Catholics, the Walls had fled to France after the Treaty of Limerick in 1691, which had brought an end to the war between the victorious William III and the deposed monarch James II. Most of the fighting had taken place on the sodden battlefields of Ireland. At stake had been not only the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland but also the future of the Irish Catholic nobility. The soldiers and their families who left Ireland for the European continent became known as the Wild Geese. More came in the next decades, realising that there was no future for them in Ireland when the Protestant-dominated Irish Parliament began passing punitive anti-Catholic laws.

Communities of Irish Jacobite exiles formed throughout Europe. Once the Irish were established in a city, their relations followed, lured by the promise of a job and disillusioned by the diminishing opportunities available to them at home. Many of the merchants and artisans who thronged the narrow medieval streets outside the Church of Saint-Nicolas in Nantes on the day of Richard Wall’s baptism in 1694 were Irish exiles. Nantes was an attractive place for the Irish, offering rich commercial possibilities, being an important port on the triangular trade route that linked western Europe with Africa and the Americas. Textiles and weapons were loaded on ships at the docks for west Africa; in Africa these goods were bartered for slaves. After crossing the Atlantic the slaves were sold in the American markets and the empty ships were loaded with exotic commodities such as sugar and tobacco for sale in Europe. It was this booming trade in slaves that made Nantes’ elite rich.

It was not just economic considerations that drew the Irish to France. The Irish soldiers who had fought for James II at Athlone, Aughrim and Limerick believed that King Louis XIV of France, the powerful Sun King who had supported James II by sending French troops to Ireland, would support a new attempt to restore the exiled Stuart monarch to the throne. Ensconced in the luxurious atmosphere of the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, James was surrounded by conspiring Irish courtiers, dreaming up invasion plans.

Richard’s father, Matthew Wall, a native of Kilmallock, County Limerick, was in the service of Henry FitzJames, one of James II’s illegitimate children.

Matthew’s wife, Kathleen, was a Devereux from County Waterford.² And so their son was among those Irish men and women who passed through the gilded halls and courtyards of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Through the patronage that bound the fortunes of prominent Irish families to the exiled Stuart court and the French aristocracy, Wall became a page to the Duchess of Vendôme, Marie-Anne de Bourbon.³ It was the beginning of a long and fruitful association with the Bourbons. The young Irish boy not only received a superior education but also learnt how to negotiate his way through courtly intrigues.

In 1697 Louis XIV signed the Treaty of Ryswick, briefly putting an end to hostilities in Europe. It meant disappointment for Irish Catholics: the dream of a Jacobite invasion of Ireland was ever more distant. Four years later, however, war returned to the continent over the question of who would succeed to the throne of Spain.

For almost two centuries the Habsburgs had ruled Spain and its colonies. The Spanish Empire at its peak, under Charles V, the greatest of all the Habsburg monarchs, had rivalled any seen in history. It was the first truly global empire, encompassing territory comprising much of southern and western Europe, continent-sized swathes of the Americas, and archipelagos in the Pacific. During the sixteenth century, because of the ambition of the early Spanish Habsburgs and the limitless supply of precious metals arriving in Seville from the American colonies, the disjointed medieval feudal society of peninsular Spain – brought together in 1492 by the Catholic monarchs, Isabel and Ferdinand – was transformed into the glittering metropolis of the Counter-Reformation.

This was the siglo de oro, Spain’s Golden Age, when writers, poets and artists, such as Cervantes, Lope de Vega and Velásquez, revolutionised European culture and when the most powerful monarchs in the world proclaimed their earthly triumphs with the construction of vast palaces, such as the Escorial, built by Philip II outside Madrid, and gloried in their role as the foremost defenders of the Catholic faith by raising ornate cathedrals and churches, crammed full of American silver and gold. The mighty armadas that set sail twice yearly from Seville to retrieve the loot from the mines of Mexico and Peru were the symbol of Spanish power. Spain’s great European rivals, the English, the French and the Dutch, watched hungrily on the fringes of the Spanish Atlantic, waiting to carve for themselves a slice of its enormous markets and to plunder its colonies’ resources.

Yet, for all the pomp and majesty of Spanish churches, the splendour of Spanish palaces and the brilliance of Spanish artists, by the beginning of the seventeenth century Spanish power was already an illusion. The veins of gold and silver in Mexico and Peru, which had once seemed inexhaustible, were diminishing. Furthermore, Spain had failed to invest in domestic manufacturing; the gold and silver that did arrive in the port of Seville quickly found its way north, to England, France and the Netherlands, to pay for imported luxury goods. Spain’s aristocrats believed that wealth and honour were inextricably linked to landownership and the purity of one’s blood – limpieza de sangre – not trade and commerce. It was this obsession with a pure bloodline that led the Spanish Habsburgs to interbreed relentlessly, resulting in the last of their line, the enfeebled Charles II – unable to talk until he was four, barely able to eat and incapable of producing an heir because of his physical deformities, including a grotesquely exaggerated version of the famous Habsburg jaw – presiding over the decay of the Spanish Empire in the final years of the seventeenth century.

It was Charles II’s death that prompted a new crisis in Europe. The late Spanish monarch had named as his heir Philip, Duke of Anjou, a grandson of France’s Louis XIV. The rest of the European powers were fearful that Philip’s ascension to the throne of Spain and the possible unification of the Spanish and French thrones under the Bourbons threatened the continent’s balance of power. Britain, the Dutch Republic, Austria and the Holy Roman Emperor supported the Habsburg candidate, Leopold, to counter French hegemony. Four years after the Treaty of Ryswick the European powers – and the Irishmen serving in their armies – were once again at war. The War of the Spanish Succession lasted for 13 years. At its end, Philip was confirmed as king of Spain, the Spanish Empire was stripped of most of its European possessions, and Louis XIV agreed to the removal of Philip from the line of succession to the French throne.

The conclusion of the war and the death of Louis XIV in 1715 brought a new era for the Irish soldiers in the employ of the continental armies. France was becalmed under its new monarch, Louis XV. In contrast, the Bourbon dynasty in Spain was anxious to prevent the further decline of the Spanish Empire and set about modernising the army and navy. The new Spanish king, Philip V, introduced a series of administrative and military reforms in an effort to reinvigorate the government of Spain and its American colonies, and he was hungry for talented and experienced officials and soldiers.

José Patiño was a Bourbon loyalist who had demonstrated his abilities during the war. In 1717 Philip gave him the responsibility of reorganising the navy. One of Patiño’s earliest measures was to found a naval school in Cádiz. Richard Wall was among the first cadets. Given the fact that he had to prove he was of noble blood to become a cadet, Wall’s admittance may be seen as the ‘first step on the long road to assimilation’ in Spain.⁴ It was also recognition on the part of Wall and, presumably, his benefactors that on the death of the Duchess of Vendôme in 1718, his best career prospects lay in Spain, not France.

The young Irishman entered an exhilarating phase of his life. Cádiz was founded by the Phoenicians about 1100 bc and is one of the oldest settlements on the Iberian Peninsula. Its inhabitants, known as gaditanos, have traditionally looked outwards, towards the sea, first the Mediterranean and then, with Columbus’s discovery of the Americas, the Atlantic. By the time Wall arrived in the city, Cádiz was the most important port trading with the Americas. Historically Seville had monopolised the Atlantic trade, but by the middle of the eighteenth century, with the River Guadalquivir silting up and with ships of greater draft incapable of forcing their way upriver, it had ceded its position to Cádiz. Into the narrow spit of land upon which Cádiz was built were packed the merchant houses that financed the ships that sailed across the Atlantic. It was from Cádiz that troops, royal administrators, merchants and priests set sail for the New World, and often a new life. It was also in Cádiz that bullion and exotic luxuries, such as tobacco, dyes, cacao and sugar, were unloaded from the ships returning from America before being moved on to northern Europe. To travel legally to Spain’s American colonies, one had first to make one’s way to Cádiz. In the eighteenth century this was the crossroads of the Spanish Atlantic.

Travellers found the city captivating. After a visit in 1809 Lord Byron wrote that ‘sweet Cadiz’ was ‘the first spot in the creation’ and added:

The beauty of its streets and mansions is only excelled by the loveliness of its inhabitants. For, with all national prejudice, I must confess the women of Cadiz are as far superior to the English women in beauty as the Spaniards are inferior to the English in every quality that dignifies the name of man … Certainly they are fascinating; but their minds have only one idea, and the business of their lives is intrigue.⁵

It is no wonder that intrigue was in the air. Commercial rivalries flourished between the city’s merchants, and Cádiz was an important military garrison and embarkation point for soldiers going to the colonies. With sailors, soldiers and traders constantly passing through the city on their way to and from Spanish America, government spies from rival European powers were everywhere. Foreign agents could learn more about Spain’s commercial and military strength by spending a few days in Cádiz than several weeks at court. The gaditanos moved in unison with the tides of the sea, which lapped against the foundations of the city’s whitewashed houses. Those families that had made a fortune from trade with the Indies lived in grand mansions furnished with lofty towers from which the tense merchants, awaiting the arrival of their precious goods, peered out to sea. In the poorer quarters of the city,...