Chapter 2
Charles III acceded to the throne in 1759. The new king was a man of simple tastes. He was pious, chaste and hard-working, most unlike the majority of his Bourbon ancestors. His main entertainment was hunting. In a famous portrait by Goya, dating from 1788 (see Plate 2), Charles is depicted in simple hunting costume, a blue sash the only symbol of his royal authority. With his bulbous nose, slightly hunched back and ruddy cheeks, he looks more like an English country parson than the sovereign of a global empire. There is something of Charles’s pragmatism in Goya’s portrait, a recognition that the concept of kingly authority is changing, albeit very slowly.
Charles was among the most capable of Spain’s monarchs, a diligent, thoughtful ruler who interested himself in the business of royal government and employed the talents of his ministers wisely. He had a unified vision for the Spanish Empire and, on acceding to the throne, reformed its government and economy. A new administrative system of intendancies, already in place in Bourbon France, was introduced in an attempt to strengthen royal control over the American colonies, which inevitably led to discontent among the criollo elite.
Though personally religious, Charles curbed the power of the Inquisition and attacked the privileges of the Church. Yet first and foremost he was anxious to bolster his own authority. Like his father and half-brother before him, Charles believed in his divine right to rule. In this respect he was very much in the mould of the ‘enlightened despot’ who believed that scientific progress and rational thought were not incompatible with a medieval, absolutist form of government.
During the seventeenth century the Spanish Habsburgs had been content to let Spain’s American possessions govern themselves, having neither the inclination nor the ability to do otherwise. The Bourbons reversed this policy. Charles wished to turn the old self-governing kingdoms into productive colonies. The quickening pace of Bourbon reform brought many positive changes to Spanish America. New roads and towns were built, and the Enlightenment spirit of inquiry brought scientific advances. The problem was that all this progress was designed for the benefit of peninsular Spain, not for the inhabitants of the colonies.
The reserved, deliberate Charles and the gregarious, buccaneering Wall were starkly contrasting characters. They had first met in Italy in the early 1730s, when Wall’s regiment had been sent to support Charles’s claim to the Duchy of Parma. Charles had been a callow 16-year-old, who had grown up at court in the shadow of his domineering mother, Elisabeth Farnese. Wall was then in his late thirties, a hardened teniente coronel (lieutenant colonel) in the Batavia Regiment of Dragoons. The Irish officer and the young Spanish heir to the throne had gone hunting together, and Wall had delivered messages between the duke and his parents, the king and queen of Spain. In 1734 Wall had served under Charles during the Spanish campaign to conquer Naples and Sicily. However, Charles’s accession to the Spanish throne had created problems for Wall. While Charles was personally well disposed to Wall, his favoured courtiers from Italy were less well inclined towards a man they regarded as little more than an interloper.
The new king needed a new way of running the vast empire that he had inherited from his half-brother. He wished to reform government and stimulate the economy to make it more productive; and to do this he required information. And so naturalists, economists, political scientists and geographers were encouraged to produce detailed descriptions of the Spanish Empire’s geography, economy, society and administration.
The great German geographer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt’s description of a five-year journey through Spanish America gave European readers a new understanding of a part of the world that had previously been obscure and the subject of wild conjecture. However, his multi-volume account did not begin to appear until 1807. Before Humboldt, however, several Irish writers helped give Charles an idea of how his empire worked and how it might be fixed.
William Bowles was a chemist and metallurgist from County Cork who settled in Spain in 1752 on accepting the position of intendant of the state mines. He travelled extensively throughout the Iberian Peninsula, surveying the country’s mineral deposits, inspecting mines and producing studies. In 1775 he published Introducción a la historia natural y á la geografía física de España, the first comprehensive account of its kind. In the book Bowles compared parts of Spain with Ireland, noting the similarities between the folk culture of Galicia, the Basque Country and Ireland.1
Another influential author was Pedro Alonso O’Crouley, a member of the Irish merchant community in Cádiz who was infused with the intellectual energy of the Enlightenment. O’Crouley was born in 1740, his Irish parents having arrived in the city in the 1720s. He was educated first by the Jesuits in Cádiz and then by the Augustinians in Senlis, north-east of Paris. While studying at Senlis the young O’Crouley developed a curiosity about how the world worked that was to stay with him for the rest of his life. Upon completing his education, he entered one of the city’s merchant houses. In 1765 he travelled for the first time to New Spain (present-day Mexico). Ten merchant ships sailed in the flotilla, carrying 8,000 tons of cargo and escorted by two men-of-war to protect against privateers.
O’Crouley travelled back and forth across the Atlantic, immersing himself in the exotic natural surroundings of the New World, constantly taking notes and making sketches. In 1784 his precarious financial situation was eased by his marriage to María Power y Gil, the daughter of one of the wealthiest Irish merchants in Cádiz, which left him free to concentrate on his scientific interests. The fruit of his studies was published in 1774 as Idea compendiosa del reyno de Nueva España (edited and translated into English in 1972 by Seán Galvin as A Description of the Kingdom of New Spain). O’Crouley crammed information about the geography, natural history, religious organisation and urban development of Mexico into the book, conforming to the Enlightenment idea that every piece of useful knowledge could and should be compiled and stored away for future use. The book included illustrations and tables relating to the landscape and cities of different regions of New Spain, information about their populations, and pictures of indigenous animals and plants.2
Antonio O’Brien was the son of an Irish merchant who had settled in Seville. Antonio had served in the Ultonia Regiment before travelling to Peru in 1762, where he worked as an agent for various Cádiz merchants. He also taught in a military school in Lima, which brought him to the attention of the viceroy. In the mid-1760s, at the viceroy’s behest, O’Brien drew up detailed plans and maps of the port and fort at Callao. His most notable achievement, however, was the Explicación de los metales de Huantajaya, the report he compiled about the silver mines in the north of present-day Chile and the maps he drew to complement his findings. They are not only important sources for the history of this part of colonial Chile, and beautiful examples of eighteenth-century cartography – the viceroy of Peru ordered O’Brien to report on every aspect of the geography, politics, economy and society of this remote region – but may also be seen as the beginning of modern mineralogy and metallurgy in that country.
In a similar vein, King Charles IV – Charles III’s son and successor – gave two Irish priests the responsibility for compiling the first Spanish-English dictionary to be printed in Spain. The four-volume Diccionario nuevo y completo de las lenguas española é inglesa, published in 1797, was a ground-breaking work in the history of Spanish lexicography. It was compiled by the Dominican friar Thomas Connelly, who was also confessor to the royal family, and the Carmelite Thomas Higgins. Connelly worked on the project for 14 years, borrowing heavily from Samuel Johnson’s English dictionary and the Spanish Academy’s authoritative Spanish dictionary.
The Bourbons were determined to strengthen their political control of the Americas for the benefit of the peninsular economy. One of Charles III’s principal economic advisers was an Irishman named Bernard Ward, a native of the townland of Lisirril in the lake district of County Monaghan, who wrote an influential treatise about all aspects of royal policy in the Spanish Empire.
The Spanish monarchy had been good to the Ward family. Bernard was a director of the royal mint; his wife, Maria O’More, from Ballina, County Kildare, was a lady-in-waiting to the strong-willed Elisabeth Farnese, the Italian-born queen dowager of Spain. The Wards lived in a comfortable house in the Calle de Hortaleza in the centre of Madrid. Their son Felipe was born in May 1758.
Felipe studied at the Seminario de Nobles de Madrid, the elite military school for the sons of the Spanish nobility.3 To gain entry to the school, candidates had to provide evidence of their unblemished Catholicism, their noble birth, and the identity of their parents and grandparents. In his statement the chaplain of the Flemish company of the Royal Guards, Edmundo O’Ryan, testified that there was ‘no more illustrious house in Ireland’ than that of the Wards, who, ‘as princes of that land, defended and maintained with their houses, lives and goods the Catholic Religion against the English, which turned them into their greatest enemies, and therefore they suffered for more than a century infinite persecution.’4 Alexander O’Reilly, a kinsman of Ward, and Patrick O’Shea, a lieutenant in the Royal Guards, also testified to the depredations suffered by the Ward family at the hands of the English.5
This type of testimony produced by Irish witnesses to prove the noble birth of candidates for admittance to institutions, military orders or higher office in the armed forces and government demonstrated loyalty to the Spanish state. Of course the Irish were tempted to offer glowing references and to wax lyrical about the noble ancestry of the candidate, in case they needed the favour returned, and they did not always have the documentary evidence to support their claims.
Felipe Ward served as a cadet in the Asturias Regiment before transferring to the Irlanda Regiment as a subteniente (roughly equivalent to second lieutenant). Later he was transferred to the military academy in Puerto de Santa María, near Cádiz, where he taught mathematics and military strategy to officers and cadets. He also served in New Spain in the Regimiento de Nueva España.6
His father, Bernard Ward, was an enthusiastic proponent of state intervention in the economy. In 1750 he recommended a welfare system, alongside the development of agriculture, industry and commerce, to alleviate Spain’s chronic poverty. During the next four years he travelled through Europe compiling information for what became the Proyecto económico,7 a comprehensive study of Spain’s economic problems and recommendations on how to solve them. On Ward’s return to Spain, the king appointed him to the royal economic council and made him a director of the royal glass factory at San Ildefonso, one of the enterprises that Charles III had founded to develop the domestic economy. Two years later Ward was named a member of the royal tax authority.8
Ward finished the Proyecto económico in 1762, though it was not until 1779 that his widow posthumously published it.9 The book was in two parts. The first part dealt with peninsular Spain. It recommended the construction of six arterial highways connecting Madrid with the provinces. Other recommendations included a comprehensive geographical survey; the development of canals, such as those Ward had seen during his travels through the Netherlands; a publicly financed credit system; the introduction of modern agricultural methods; and the development of the textile industry. Ward also proposed the setting up of a council devoted to improvements in every sphere of economic activity in Spain and the Americas, comprising ‘first-class subjects in terms of intelligence, talent, erudition, zeal and experience.’10 As his model for this council he cited the Dublin Society (later the Royal Dublin Society), which, ‘basing itself on the infallible rule of experience,’ had ‘managed to shine a light on matters relating to agriculture, industry and other matters under its inspection.’11 According to Ward,
… as the members of that Society are the principal people in the Kingdom [of Ireland], the care of which they all embrace, and their measures have produced such admirable results, a spirit of improvement has diffused throughout the entire body of the Nation; in such a way that what was before the work of a single Society has now become the general concern of almost all the individuals of the Kingdom …12
In the Proyecto económico Ward proposed Ireland as a blueprint for how a body of enlightened men, working with the king’s ministers, might contribute to the development of agriculture and industry in the Spanish Empire.
The [Irish] Parliament complies with all that the Society proposes; and the Scientists, the Scholars and other Sages contribute with their observations; and so it is revealed how to discover the quality of the soil, the influence of the weather on its fertility, the best time to sow every seed, while, on the other hand the experts occupy themselves with finding inventions to make work easier, developing knowledge, and perfecting the most common skills …13
In 1775, three years after Ward proposed what he called a council of improvements modelled on the Dublin Society, the first of the ‘Sociedades económicas de amigos del país’ was founded in the Basque Country. The societies soon spread throughout Spain and its American colonies. These private associations of gentlemen were committed to stimulating the economic and intellectual development of the Spanish Empire, promoted scientific and technological advances, and had the support of Enlightenment thinkers such as Pedro Rodríguez de Campomanes, a future Spanish prime minister.
The second part of Ward’s Proyecto económico dealt with the Americas. In the opening chapter he levelled some harsh criticisms, questioning why it was that two great civilisations – those of the Aztecs and the Incas – had become, under the Spanish, ‘uncivilised, depopulated and almost destroyed.’ According to Ward, Spain’s American colonies could have become ‘the richest in the world’ but had remained chronically underdeveloped, because of the corrupt form of government in Spanish America.14
Given that his patron was the Spanish monarch, Ward had to make this point delicately, insisting that all those who had gone before had done their best with the primitive scientific and economic tools at their disposal. He balanced his criticisms with laudatory imperial rhetoric, praising the first Spanish explorers and governors for the ‘prodigious courage and perseverance of their voyages; the bravery of their conquests; the wisdom of the laws and constitutions for the government of the Indies; and the prodigious prudence and judiciousness of their other institutions.’15 But now, he insisted, the king could take advantage of scientific and technological innovation, as well as modern economic theory, to introduce a series of reforms in the Americas that would contribute to the development of the economy.
The problem for the Spanish crown was that, despite the inflow of wealth in the form of primary goods and precious metals from the Americas, the peninsular economy was stagnant. Much of the wealth accumulated during the early phase of colonisation had been spent by the Habsburg monarchs on wars, and the flow of silver into Spain had pushed up prices, making Spanish goods more expensive than those of competing powers. In the 1620s the silver that had flowed from the mines of Mexico and Peru began to dry up. By the eighteenth century most of the primary goods that entered Spain through Cádiz were immediately re-exported to northern Europe. What was worse, only a small fraction of the goods consumed in the American colonies were manufactured on the peninsula.
Ward believed that the American question had to be looked at from two points of view: as a market for Spanish goods and as an integral part of the empire which needed to be restructured politically and economically. Just as he had recommended for the peninsula in the first part of the book, Ward proposed an extensive royal survey of Spain’s American possessions.
The seeds of a modern state may be seen in the proposals included in Proyecto económico, based as they were on the rule of law and the introduction of a modern police force:
It will be said that I speak of America as if it was a well-populated country in all parts, in which a regular police force can operate, and the institutions that I propose can be easily set up, and as if the Indians were similar to the European Nations.
I realise that half the country is made up of desert, full of plateaux and mountains, without roads through the Provinces, or any comforts: the rivers without bridges, and the inhabitants in many parts little more than irrational; but that does not mean that one should not start with some form of police: so that the defects of the country may be corrected, improvements may be carried out in a determined and willing fashion, and, in order to achieve all this, there will be fixed rules.16
As in Spain, for a new centralised police force to be effective a modern communications network was required. Under the Incas the present-day countries of Peru, Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador and Colombia had been linked by an extensive communication system. Couriers, called chasquis, ran in relays along paths, trails and roads carrying messages from one part of the empire to another. They were stationed in posts called tambos, where they could avail of shelter and supplies. In Proyecto económico Ward proposed something similar to the tambos to facilitate communication and commerce in the Americas.
Ward was also a strong advocate of ecclesiastical reform in the Americas, calling for tighter royal control of clerical appointments and for scrutiny of financial abuses, and questioning why it was that the American missions, ‘despite the fact that the Spanish church is the richest in the world,’17 were being financed by the monarch. He thought the Catholic Church in America should found seminaries to educate the ‘sons of Indians’ who ‘would in time become good parish priests and missionaries to their compatriots.’18 Indeed Ward wrote that the indigenous people of the Spanish colonies were ‘the true treasure of Spain,’ who ‘carried the heaviest burden on the earth.’19
Many of the ideas in the Proyecto económico impressed Ward’s patrons in government. But there were significant obstacles to be overcome, in the form of financial resources, corruption, and opposition from the criollo elite and the indigenous tribes that still held sway in parts of Spanish America. If Charles III and his prime minister were to bring into effect Ward’s ideas, they would have to find men capable of introducing efficient methods for taxing, rebuilding and policing the American colonies. Because Wall was at the centre of government, at least in the first years of Charles’s reign, and because of their military experience, Irish administrators, engineers and soldiers were centrally involved in this project of remaking Spanish America.