Chapter 5
In the months straddling the end of 1807 and the beginning of 1808, tens of thousands of battle-hardened French soldiers began flooding through the icy passes of the Pyrenees onto the plains of northern Spain. To enforce the continental blockade of British trade, the French emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte, had sent General Jean-Andoche Junot to invade Portugal, Britain’s oldest ally. The Spanish government had agreed to allow French troops cross its territory on their way to Portugal, having negotiated a treaty with Napoleon under which Spain would receive a third of Portuguese territory.
In the spring of 1808, however, as the frost receded on the Castilian plain and the snows melted on the ridges, the French troops who had been fanning out across northern Spain seized Pamplona, Figueras, Barcelona and San Sebastián. Napoleon had shown his hand; the French invasion of Spain had begun.
The Spanish court was in panic. Though Charles IV shared his late father’s passion for hunting, the comparisons stopped there. Charles III had been a reforming, energetic monarch; his son was an ineffectual leader, widely regarded as feeble-minded and more interested in leisurely pursuits than in the business of government. The real powers behind the throne were Queen María Luisa and her lover, Manuel Godoy, the former royal bodyguard who had risen to become the prime minister.
Lord Holland summed up the dysfunctional family dynamic of the Spanish Bourbons in his Foreign Reminiscences, recalling that Charles IV had often remarked to his father, the then king, Charles III, about how lucky princes were to be ‘exempt from the lot to which too many husbands were exposed; first, because their wives were more strictly educated than private women; and, secondly, because if viciously inclined, they could seldom find any royal personages with whom they could indulge such evil propensities.’ To which the old man would reproach his son for his stupidity: ‘Carlos, Carlos, what a fool you are!’ or employ one of his favourite maxims: ‘Yes, all of them are whores.’1
To make matters worse for the family, Charles IV and María Luisa’s son Ferdinand, the present heir to the throne, was an impetuous, cruel young man who was fiercely resentful of his mother’s lover, Godoy, whom he believed was scheming to seize the crown for himself.
In March 1808, with French troops occupying the northern part of the country, the royal household fled south from Madrid. On 17 March Ferdinand’s supporters organised an uprising against the king and queen and the unpopular Godoy, which became known as the motín, or mutiny, of Aranjuez, the site of the winter palace where the king and queen were staying. In a panic, Charles abdicated in favour of his son.
The arrival of Ferdinand VII on the throne was greeted with celebration. He was known to the people as el deseado, the desired one, because it was hoped that he would be able to tackle the problems that had afflicted Spain during the previous 20 years of misrule.
However, Charles immediately realised that he had made a mistake in abdicating and he desperately tried to reverse his decision. It was too late. In May 1808 Charles, María Luisa and Godoy were brought under French guard to the Château de Marracq in Bayonne. Napoleon also summoned Ferdinand to Bayonne. In a farcical encounter, the French emperor forced Ferdinand to return the Spanish crown to his father. He then ordered Charles to hand it over to himself. Now believing the Spanish crown to be in his gift, Napoleon bestowed it upon his own brother, Joseph Bonaparte.
Napoleon had taken advantage of the internecine conflict at the heart of the Madrid court to further his own dynastic ambitions in Europe, yet he had underestimated Spanish popular opposition to French rule. While there were those among the Spanish elite – the so-called afrancesados – who accepted their new masters, the wider population rose up against the French in the name of the dethroned Ferdinand VII. Throughout Spain, local councils, or juntas, operating independently of one another, organised resistance to the French. The people’s rebellion and the terrible French reprisals that followed are hauntingly depicted in Goya’s companion pieces The Second of May, 1808 and The Third of May, 1808 (see Plates 6 and 7), which are on display in the Prado in Madrid.
For most of the previous century Britain and Spain had been sworn enemies, but in July 1808, in the face of French aggression, they ceased hostilities and became allies. While the British landed an invasion force in Portugal under the command of the Dublin-born lieutenant-general Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, the regional juntas in Spain formed themselves into one council, which became known as the Supreme Central Junta, and succeeded in driving Joseph Bonaparte from Madrid.
In response, Napoleon invaded Spain at the end of 1808 and quickly reestablished control of most of the country, including Madrid. The junta fled to Seville. Spain was now under French occupation, except for Andalusia. In January 1810, as the French drove into Andalusia, the Supreme Central Junta ordered the convocation of a cortes or representative assembly. The junta promptly dissolved itself, handing authority to a five-man regency council, which governed in the name of the imprisoned Ferdinand VII.
The convocation of the Cádiz Cortes, as it became known, was a revolutionary moment in the history of Spain and its empire, not least because it was the first time the metropolis had granted the right of representation to the colonies. The cortes were an institution that dated from the Middle Ages. Historically they had played an important role in safeguarding the rights of the citizens against arbitrary royal power, but by the eighteenth century they acted in a purely advisory capacity to the monarch and were rarely summoned. The assembly that met in Cádiz, which had become the last stronghold of opposition to the French, may be regarded as a forerunner of the modern representative institutions that are prevalent today in western democracies. Cádiz was the birthplace of Spanish liberal democracy.
On the morning of 24 September 1810 elected representatives from throughout the Spanish Empire met in the town hall – it had been turned into the Royal Palace of the Regency – on the Isla de León, the island connected to Cádiz by a sandbar and separated from the mainland by salt marshes. The deputies then walked down to the parish church for a special mass, celebrated by the Cardinal Archbishop of Toledo. After the reading of the gospel the Bishop of Ourense, Pedro de Quevedo y Quintano, who was also president of the five-man regency council, said a prayer exhorting God to look with favour on the efforts of the Cortes. He was followed by the secretary of state, Nicolás María de Sierra, who requested the deputies to swear a number of oaths.
Do you swear loyalty to the holy, catholic, apostolic, Roman religion, without acknowledging any other in this realm? Do you swear to maintain the integrity of the Spanish Nation, and do everything to free her from her wrongful oppressors? Do you swear to maintain our beloved Sovereign, Don Ferdinand VII, in his realms, and, failing this, his legitimate successors, and do all that is possible to rescue him from captivity and restore him to the throne? Do you swear to carry out faithfully and legitimately the responsibility that the Nation has placed on you, keeping the laws of Spain, except those that must be modified, altered or changed for the good of the nation?2
Having affirmed the oaths in unison, the representatives walked in pairs up the nave of the church to the altar, where they placed their hands on the gospel. Quevedo concluded the oath-taking ceremony by intoning: ‘If you do this, God will reward you; if not, he will demand it of you.’ The mass ended with the hymn Veni Sancti Spiritus and a Te Deum.
Far from being a revolutionary body, the regency council saw its role as preserving the status quo until the return of Ferdinand VII. The Cortes had other ideas.
The deputies then walked over to the Teatro Cómico, a recently built theatre that served as the Cortes’s first meeting-place. On the stage was an empty throne, which represented Ferdinand’s captivity, in front of which sat the members of the regency council. The diplomatic corps, senior army officers and ‘ladies of first distinction’ were placed around the sides of the auditorium. The higher floors were taken up by an ‘immense’, ‘distinguished throng’. On the entrance of the deputies the crowd proclaimed repeatedly, ‘Long live the Nation!’3
More than 70,000 French troops were besieging the Isla de León and Cádiz while the Cortes was deliberating. The big guns of the French artillery rained shells down upon the city for almost two years while the deputies wrestled with revolutionary legal and political concepts. The steady flow of British soldiers coursing through the city, both those awaiting deployment to the mainland or those recovering from their wounds, focused the deputies’ minds. Out at sea, Britain’s Royal Navy maintained a blockade of French-controlled ports along the adjacent coast. Almost all the deputies from the colonies had been unable to reach Spain in time for the opening session of the Cortes and were represented by substitutes. The only exception was the deputy representing Puerto Rico, a young man from an Irish family named Ramón Power y Giralt.
Ramón was the son of Joaquín Ramón Power, a Bilbao-born member of a wealthy Irish merchant family originally from County Waterford based in Cádiz. An agent for a slave-trading company, Joaquín Power had emigrated to Puerto Rico in his mid-forties, marrying a Puerto Rican woman, María Josefa Giralt. He had established a plantation on land granted to him by the Spanish crown – taking advantage of the crown’s efforts to modernise agriculture in Puerto Rico – on which he grew cacao, sugar, tobacco, cotton, peppers and indigo, among other crops.4
There was a strong Irish planter community in Puerto Rico. With their contacts in Europe, their commercial and technological expertise, and the fact that new immigrants to Puerto Rico had to be white and Catholic, men like Joaquín Power and Thomas O’Daly – a military engineer from County Galway who had served in the Ultonia Regiment and later under the command of Alexander O’Reilly – had become extremely wealthy. But an attempted invasion of Puerto Rico by the British in 1797 had brought the Irish community to its knees. The invasion force had numbered 10,000 troops, carried on board a convoy of more than 60 ships, yet they had been unable to penetrate the island’s superb defensive fortifications, which had been designed and built by the Irishmen Alexander O’Reilly and Thomas O’Daly, and had been repelled by the efforts of the Puerto Rican defenders.5
The successful defence of the island had given the criollo elite a new sense of themselves as Puerto Ricans. However, in the aftermath of the attempted invasion the Spanish governor, Ramón de Castro, had ordered the surveillance of foreigners and issued expulsion orders, directed for the most part against the Irish planter community, accusing them of treachery and being in communication with the British. Among those who were given eight days to leave the island were Jaime Quinlan, Jaime O’Daly, Miguel Conway, Juan Nagle, Miguel Kirwan, Patricio Kirwan, Felipe Doran, Patricio Fitzpatrick and Antonio Skerret. The Irish had eventually proved their innocence, but not before suffering losses and significant hardship in prison.6
Ramón Power was the second of six children. Like many boys born into Irish merchant families in the Spanish Atlantic world, he was destined from an early age for service in the armed forces, entering the naval school in El Ferrol in 1792. He served as a naval officer for the next two decades, rising to the rank of captain. On his return to Puerto Rico in 1801 to attend to family business after his father’s death, he was given command of a ship carrying post between the island and the Venezuelan mainland. Upon the convocation of the Cádiz Cortes, the island’s pre-eminent families elected him as their representative.
On 25 September 1810, the second day of the opening session, Power was elected first vice-president of the Cortes. Along with the fact that he was the only elected representative from the colonies who had reached Spain for the opening session (the other colonies were represented by substitutes), his position meant that he was the unofficial spokesman of the American deputies. He used his role not only to advance the interests of his native island, and especially the Puerto Rican merchant class, but also to redefine the relationship between Spain and its colonies.
The deputies who attended the Cádiz Cortes were split between liberals, influenced by Enlightenment ideas, who wished to introduce reforms abolishing privilege and despotism, and conservatives, who regarded the assembly as an interim solution until Ferdinand could be restored to the throne. The Catholic priests Santiago Key Muñoz,7 representing Tenerife, and Juan Bernardo O’Gavan, representing Cuba, were among the notable conservative deputies who attended the Cortes. Both were of Irish ancestry. Key’s paternal grandfather, Diego Key, or James Key, was from County Kilkenny. The surname Key may have derived from Kelly or Keogh.
Like Power, Key was a vociferous defender of the interests of the people who had elected him, the islanders of Tenerife, who showered him with honours in thanks for his efforts.8 He demanded an episcopal see for Tenerife, clashed with his fellow-deputies from the Canary Islands over the fruits of government largesse and was a vigorous defender of Church privilege in the face of state encroachment. In November 1812 he reminded the Cortes that the new constitution was based on the ‘profession, defence and conservation of the Catholic religion; anyone who offended the religion, its rites, its priests or its practices … was in violation of the Constitution and its enemy, and was a bad citizen and a bad Spaniard … did not deserve public confidence nor a public position.’9 In January 1813 he voted against the abolition of the Inquisition. He was less inflexible when it came to pardoning those accused of having collaborated with the French.10 O’Gavan represented the province of Santiago in Cuba and argued for greater investment in the island and freedom of trade.
The Cortes was further divided between the peninsular and American deputies. The American deputies themselves were split between liberals and conservatives, with individual regions and socio-economic groups having different interests. Power represented the wealthy plantation owners in Puerto Rico, many of them Irish or of Irish extraction, who wished to see Spain’s monopolistic practices in the colonies reformed. He demanded investment for the island, including the foundation of universities and hospitals, the right to free trade, the appointment of criollos to government posts, freedom of the press, and the abolition of sales taxes, customs duties, tithes and state monopolies. All these demands were contained in specific instructions given to Power by the five Puerto Rico cabildos, or municipal councils, that he was representing in Cádiz.
The Cortes granted Power’s proposal to separate the posts of military governor and intendente, or chief tax collector, in Puerto Rico. Previously the governor, Salvador Meléndez, exercised both functions. The Cortes also approved measures for improving port facilities on the island, an important concession for Puerto Rico’s commercial interests, and gave permission for the creation of an economic society of friends, similar to those that had been proposed by Bernard Ward and that had emerged in peninsular Spain in the eighteenth century. These reforms became known as the ley Power (Power’s law).
Power not only won economic reforms for his region but in his speeches to the Cortes, he also articulated a growing sense of nationhood among the American criollos. He envisaged a Puerto Rico free to develop and expand commercially but within the Two Spains (as Peninsular and American Spain were then known). He and his fellow-American deputies, as Marie-Laure Rieu-Millan has written, ‘represented the white criollo society from which they came, eager for reform, but also anxious about immediate political independence.’11
These anxieties arose from the emergence in 1810 of independence movements in Caracas, Buenos Aires and Mexico. Unlike the more radical criollos who were to challenge the very authority of the crown, Power and the other liberal deputies from America wished to achieve economic and political freedoms for their regions while professing loyalty to the Spanish crown. ‘The inhabitants of Puerto Rico are also Spanish,’ Power wrote in August 1810, ‘they have the same rights as the rest, and finding themselves separated from Caracas by a sea of 200 leagues [700 miles], they are equal to anyone in terms of their loyalty and patriotism.’12 In February 1811, in a speech to the Cortes, he attacked a crackdown on political undesirables in Puerto Rico, which had been authorised by the regency council in response to the growing unrest in Caracas, where a recently formed junta had proclaimed its independence.
The Regency Council, in issuing this order, degrades the majesty of sovereignty, confusing it with the most oppressive despotism; and the circumstances in which it has taken this measure are the least opportune in respect of Puerto Rico, and the least politic to calm the troubled emotions of the American peoples, which must have been the end desired … The island of Puerto Rico has sworn to adhere herself eternally to our cause; she has sworn subordination and respect to the authorities; but she does not wish nor should she wish to be a slave.13
Power’s dogged efforts at Cádiz on behalf of his homeland and the American colonies in general ensured his legacy. However, he was not able to enjoy the approbation of the Puerto Ricans in his lifetime, dying in Cádiz, aged 37, during an outbreak of yellow fever in June 1813.
The culmination of the Cortes’s work was the 1812 constitution, which influenced political thought throughout Latin America. While never fully enacted in Spain, it contained many of the liberal precepts that were to inform the political ideas and future written constitutions in the Americas, including the 1824 constitution of Mexico. The 1812 constitution established national sovereignty, universal male suffrage and freedom of the press. These new ideas were disseminated in the pages of a thriving newspaper industry in Spain and beyond, including one published in London by a Spaniard of Irish extraction.