Paisanos E-Book

Tim Fanning

• Herausgeber: Gill Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Seitenzahl: 507

Beschreibung

The epic story of the forgotten Irish men and women who changed the face of Latin America forever.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, Símon 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.

Leseprobe

PAISANOS

The Forgotten Irish whoChanged the Faceof Latin America

TIM FANNING

Gill Books

For Mark and Caroline

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Foreword by President Michael D. Higgins

Introduction

Note

Part One: Exile

Chapter 1. Wild Geese

Chapter 2. Remaking the New World

Chapter 3. A New Model Army

Chapter 4. The King of Peru

Chapter 5. Spain Under Siege

Chapter 6. The Propagandist Priest

Chapter 7. Merchants, Sailors, Soldiers, Spies

Part Two: Revolution

Chapter 8. The Battle for the River Plate

Chapter 9. General O’Higgins

Chapter 10. Bolívar’s Irish Volunteers

Chapter 11. The Hibernian Regiment and the Irish Legion

Chapter 12. Death in the Andes

Chapter 13. The San Patricios

Chapter 14. The Kingdom of God

Part Three: Home

Chapter 15. After the Revolution

Chapter 16. The ‘New Erin’

Chapter 17. Making History

Chapter 18. The ‘Spiritual Empire’

Notes

Bibliographical Note

Abbreviations

Sources

Images

Maps

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Author

About Gill Books

FOREWORD

I was delighted to be asked to provide a foreword for Paisanos, this attractive, important and, I believe, necessary volume on the role played by Irish men and women in the emergence of the new, modern and independent republics of Latin America. The story of historic Irish migrations to Latin America – of Irish service, military and administrative – is known by most only in its broad lines. This valuable piece of scholarship will do much to help redress the balance by introducing to an Irish audience lives that are revered all over Latin America. It will help to bring out the texture, colour and personality of the Irish and those of Irish descent in Spanish-speaking America and the part they played in the establishment of republics throughout the continent.

I would like to pay tribute to the author of Paisanos, Tim Fanning, for the depth and breadth of his research, and to Conor McEnroy, who encouraged and assisted him in this endeavour. Conor, along with Michael Lillis and Justin Harman, the Irish ambassador in Buenos Aires, are Irishmen who today are seeking to bridge the Atlantic, bringing Ireland and Latin America closer together, by encouraging work such as this.

Latin America and the course of its political and economic development have occupied a special place in my own heart for over fifty years. During the course of my political and academic career, I have been privileged to witness the conflicts, struggles for human rights and, above all, the generous heart of this continent. It is a region I have journeyed to twice as president of Ireland, visiting, at their invitation, six countries, from Chile at its southern tip, through Argentina, Brazil, El Salvador and Costa Rica, up to Mexico at the northern frontier where English and Spanish-speaking America meet.

This book starts with exile and those exiled, the Wild Geese. In a year dedicated to recalling the founding moments of our Irish independence, when we are asked to fine-tune in an ethical and inclusive way our use of memory, to encounter complexity afresh, it is so appropriate that we pause to discover the contribution made to world history by those exiled Irish men and women, who, after the Treaty of Limerick in 1691 and the punitive laws of the eighteenth century against their religion, settled in Spain and France and moved to the centre of the international conflicts of the day. Their children would go on to deliver the ideas of the Enlightenment under royal patronage as engineers, administrators, cartographers and geographers in Spanish colonies across the world. And their children’s children in turn would see the prospects, sow the seeds and deliver the reality of independence from the Spanish Empire, engaging in all the essential conflicts and adjustments that resulted.

I had the great honour, during an official visit to Chile in 2012, of laying a wreath at the monument to Chile’s great liberator, Bernardo O’Higgins. Bernardo’s father, Ambrose O’Higgins, was born in County Sligo to a modest farming family and went on to become mayor of Concepción, governor of Chile and later viceroy of Peru, the highest office in South America in colonial times. Among the many interesting historical asides in the book, I was intrigued to learn that he introduced the prefix ‘O’ to his surname later in life in order to strengthen his claim to a Spanish noble title. Ambrose is remembered in Chile for his great achievement in abolishing the encomienda, the system of forced labour and dependency for indigenous people that was imposed by the Spanish crown during the colonial period.

However, as the book notes, Ambrose was, fundamentally, an unflinching royalist and an austere and conservative administrator for the Spanish Empire. How remarkable, then, that Bernardo O’Higgins, the son of this loyal servant of the Spanish crown, went on to become one of the greatest exponents of pan-American revolution and liberal republicanism.

Beyond the great historical figures like Bernardo O’Higgins and Admiral William Brown, whose names are remembered in the streetscapes of the great cities of Buenos Aires and Santiago, Tim Fanning has succeeded in bringing to light the stories of lesser-known figures, such as Francis Burdett O’Connor and Daniel Florence O’Leary, both Corkmen, who served as senior officers in the armies of Simón Bolívar.

This book is valuable in bringing the story of Ricardo Wall to a wide audience. How a French-born man of Irish descent became, at the age of 60, chief minister of the Spanish government until he resigned in 1763 is one of the great stories of intrigue of the eighteenth century. How he employed other goslings of the Wild Geese in the administration of European relations with America is recalled today in South America while it gets insufficient attention perhaps in Ireland.

Paisanos also explores the famous Irish battalion, the San Patricios. On my official visit to Mexico in 2013, I had the opportunity to pay tribute to the Irish soldiers of the Batallón de San Patricio, who gave their lives for Mexican independence during the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848. These Irishmen were fleeing poverty and famine in their homeland for a better life in the New World but they had no hesitation in showing their solidarity with the Mexican people in their hour of need, creating what I described at the time as ‘an unbreakable link’ between the two countries, which happily still exists today.

The relationship between Ireland and Latin America draws on our shared history of struggle against colonialism. At the same time that Irish patriots were challenging the colonial relationship between Ireland and Britain in the late eighteenth century, an emerging sense of nationhood was taking shape in Spain’s American colonies. That the modern-day Latin American republics came into being in the early part of the nineteenth century was in no small part thanks to the contribution, in their different ways, of Irish men and women, many of whom were driven by their forefathers’ experience of oppression and dreams of liberty for their homeland. In a coincidence of timing, 2016 is not only the centenary of the 1916 Rising in Ireland but also the bicentenary of the Declaration of Independence in Argentina at the Congress of Tucumán. It is a fitting occasion to examine the role played by Irish men and women in the fight for independence at home and abroad.

In this well-researched volume, Tim Fanning highlights the many ways in which the Irish left their stamp on the history of the modern Latin American republics and, conversely, how Irish advocates of home rule such as Daniel O’Connell were inspired by the heroes of Latin American independence, such as Simón Bolívar, José de San Martín and Bernardo O’Higgins. And indeed it was an Irish-Argentine born in Buenos Aires, Éamon Bulfin, who raised the tricolour above the General Post Office during Easter Week 1916, which goes to show that history is no respecter of borders.

They are all here, those who allied themselves with, differed from, reconciled, shared love and dreams: the Paisanos.

In this year of commemorations, it is appropriate, finally, that the author has reminded us of how the Irish were, and continue to be, remembered in Latin America. It is vital that we cherish the ‘unbreakable link’ between the peoples of Ireland and Latin America, and what better way to do this than to further explore our common history. As the author points out, while a good literature serves this history in the Spanish language, there is not a comparable literature available in English. This fine book is a welcome contribution to that literature on the history of our exiles and their descendants to which, without hesitation, I suggest we need to pay so much more attention. Tim Fanning gives us a great help in that regard with an exciting and accessible book that is a pleasure to read.

MICHAEL D. HIGGINS

UACHTARÁN NA HÉIREANN

PRESIDENT OF IRELAND

26 APRIL 2016

INTRODUCTION

The contribution of the Irish to the development of the English-speaking part of the Americas has been well documented; less well known is the role Irish men and women played in the modern history of Spanish-speaking America. While the names of William Brown and Bernardo O’Higgins are not unknown in Ireland, and are indeed celebrated, these tend to be thought of as exceptions rather than as the most famous names in a long list of characters, both Irish-born and of Irish heritage, who were pivotal in the transformation of the Spanish colonies in the Americas into modern republics.

The principal reason why the Irish contribution to the achievement of independence in Latin America is not better known is the language barrier. Countless books in Spanish have been published in Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile, Caracas, Montevideo, Asunción and Bogotá about the Irish heroes of national independence. There are only a few notable exceptions in English.

The second reason is cultural. We know from the cinema and television about the Old West, the gold rushes, the American Civil War, tenement life in nineteenth-century New York and the Kennedys; our knowledge of modern Latin American history is hazier, often translated for us by the Anglo-American eyes of Hollywood.

However, the story of those Irish who came to Latin America in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is no less interesting than that of their cousins in the United States and Canada. Many of them did not go directly to Spanish America from Ireland or England but through Spain. By the middle of the eighteenth century, Irishmen occupied key positions in the Spanish military and political administration. They were emigrants who had escaped political and religious persecution in Ireland for a new life on the continent. Most of them began their careers as soldiers or merchants, using their talents to secure enviable and lucrative jobs in Spain and its American colonies. Born in France to Irish Jacobite exiles, Richard Wall became Spain’s prime minister in 1754. Ambrose O’Higgins was the son of small farmers from County Sligo who emigrated to Cádiz in southern Spain and rose to become the viceroy of Peru, the highest-ranking colonial official in the whole of the Spanish Empire. Wall and O’Higgins were among the Irishmen (for they were nearly all men, women then being excluded from high office by legal and social barriers) who helped govern the enormous Spanish Empire.

The children and grandchildren of Irish emigrants to Spain in the eighteenth century also feature on the list of illustrious names in the history of Latin American independence. The most famous is Ambrose O’Higgins’s son, Bernardo O’Higgins, who led the fight against the Spanish in Chile and became one of the first leaders of the independent republic.

Though not born in Ireland, these soldiers, merchants and diplomats of Irish ancestry, born in Spain or Latin America, retained a strong feeling for the homeland of their ancestors. The title of this book, Paisanos, is a Spanish word that roughly translates as ‘fellow-countrymen’ or ‘compatriots’. Members of the Irish community in Spain and Latin America used this word to describe themselves and their Irish-born family and friends. It encapsulates that feeling of Irishness that was shared by those of common ancestry in Spain and its American colonies before, during and after the wars of independence.

Ramón Power y Giralt is a good example of how Irish communities could retain a sense of shared ancestry while adopting new identities. Power was the son of a Basque of Irish ancestry who emigrated to Puerto Rico in the eighteenth century. The Powers were part of an Irish community of rich planters. Like the children of many rich criollos – those of Spanish descent born in the Americas – Ramón was sent to Spain to be educated. He served as an officer in the Spanish navy before returning to Puerto Rico. In 1810 he was elected Puerto Rico’s delegate to the Cádiz Cortes, the national assembly that sprang up in response to Napoleon’s invasion of Spain. Not only did he win important economic concessions for Puerto Rico, he played a central role in redefining the wider relationship between Spain and its American colonies. In the process he helped forge a Puerto Rican national identity and is today regarded as one of the nation’s founding fathers.

The story of the Irish in the eighteenth-century Spanish Atlantic world – the first part of this book – provides the context for the revolutionary period – the second part – during which Irish-born volunteers travelled to Latin America from Irish and English ports to fight in the patriot armies under the command of Simón Bolívar. Irishmen such as William Brown, Peter Campbell, John Thomond O’Brien, Francis Burdett O’Connor, Daniel Florence O’Leary, James Rooke, Arthur Sandes and Thomas Charles Wright are still remembered in South America for the part they played in the liberation of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela from Spanish rule. All of them served as senior officers, and two of them, O’Connor and O’Leary, wrote memoirs that became important sources for historians researching the revolutionary period. While they are justly celebrated, there were thousands of other Irishmen who fought for independence in Spanish America who are all but forgotten, not least because some of them have gone down in the annals of history as English. Not only were there a self-styled Hibernian Regiment and Irish Legion but also the majority of the officers and enlisted men who fought in what became known as the British Legions were Irish.

The Irish were present at all the major battles that were fought by Simón Bolívar, the leader of the independence movement in the northern part of South America, during the campaigns that transformed Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia from Spanish colonies into independent republics. But because the whole island of Ireland was then part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and neither the sources nor the histories discriminated between the nationalities of that state, the Irishmen who fought for the independence of the South American republics were often referred to as ingleses.

They fought for different reasons. Some had no money and needed to make a living; others felt the call of adventure. And then there were those, such as Francis Burdett O’Connor, who travelled to Venezuela as a member of the ill-fated Irish Legion and later played a prominent role as a senior staff officer in Bolívar’s campaigns in Peru and Bolivia, who drew parallels between the colonial experience of Latin America and Ireland.

The great hero of Catholic Emancipation and advocate of Irish home rule, Daniel O’Connell, drew inspiration from Bolívar. He raised money for the Irish Legion and sent his 14-year-old son, Morgan, to Venezuela to serve as an aide-de-camp to its commanding officer, the roguish County Wexford man John Devereux. Bolívar had already become known as the Liberator before O’Connell was honoured with that title in Ireland.

Irishmen fought on both sides during the wars of independence; so that, while many Irish volunteers were recruited by Bolívar in Irish and English cities or, for economic reasons, joined the patriot armies after emigrating to South American cities, there were also Irish officers serving in the royalist forces who believed they owed everything to the Spanish king, such as Diego O’Reilly, who committed suicide after being captured by the patriot forces in Peru. There were also those who changed sides, like John Mackenna of County Monaghan, a soldier in the Spanish army, who was appointed governor of Osorno by Ambrose O’Higgins in Chile before he joined the independence struggle alongside Ambrose’s son, Bernardo.

The Irish contribution to independence is recalled in Latin American public memory by the names of streets, towns and schools. There are four football teams in the Argentine league named after William Brown, the mariner from County Mayo who is credited with founding the country’s navy. The Pedro Campbell is a frigate in the Uruguayan navy named after the guerrilla-cum-gaucho from County Tipperary who helped win that country’s independence.

The role played in the achievement of South American independence by a coterie of Irishmen working for the British government is less well known. In the eighteenth century, Britain was desperate for a share of Spain’s colonial markets. The two countries were at each other’s throats throughout the period over the Atlantic trade; yet, just at the moment when the first calls for independence were heard on the streets of Buenos Aires, Caracas and Quito, Britain and Spain ceased hostilities and became allies against a common foe, Napoleon Bonaparte. The British now found themselves in the position of having to remain openly neutral regarding independence for the colonies, so as to placate their Spanish allies, while secretly negotiating with the revolutionary juntas that were forming throughout the South American continent. A couple of Anglo-Irish politicians, George Canning and Lord Castlereagh, were central to the formulation of British policy in South America, while the Anglo-Irish diplomat Lord Strangford played a crucial role in implementing it. They were aided in their efforts by an Irish-born Buenos Aires merchant, Thomas O’Gorman, and a colourful French-born Irish spy, James Florence Bourke.

The final part of the book examines the later careers of some of the most notable Irish volunteers to serve in the war who settled in Latin America, many of whom suffered in the civil wars and political intrigues that followed independence. The volunteers for Bolívar’s army who braved the Atlantic on overcrowded ships sailing from Irish ports were soldiers – and emigrants. They included William Owens Ferguson, who was shot dead in a dark alley in Bogotá, a victim of a failed assassination attempt on Simón Bolívar. He was buried with full honours in Bogotá’s cathedral and was among those Irish soldiers who were accorded a place in the patriotic pantheon of the new, independent Latin American republics.

In the wake of independence, many foreigners began flooding into Latin America to take advantage of the new economic opportunities afforded by the introduction of free trade. Bernardo O’Higgins, John Thomond O’Brien and Francis Burdett O’Connor were among the revolutionary leaders who sought to introduce Irish settlers to work the depopulated lands of the continent’s interior. Some of these schemes proved unsuccessful, but one in particular endured and saw tens of thousands of Irish families emigrate en masse from towns and villages in counties Offaly, Longford and Westmeath in the middle of the nineteenth century. The children of these Irish families who struck out from Irish and English ports for a new life in Argentina and Uruguay were to make substantial contributions to the economic, cultural and social life of their new countries. While these Irish families integrated into their new communities within a few generations, many of their progeny remained proud of their link to their distant homeland across the Atlantic Ocean, exemplifying the ability of Irish communities throughout the world to retain a sense of identity while fully integrating into the host culture.

The Spanish-speaking Irish community has been less visible in Ireland than Irish emigrants in the English-speaking world. It is the purpose of this book to redress that imbalance and recall the Irish soldiers and sailors, entrepreneurs and merchants, diplomats and politicians, priests and pamphleteers, who, just like their cousins who played such a significant role in the creation of the United States, helped forge modern Latin America.

NOTE

Irish and English forenames and surnames tended to be hispanicised in the Spanish Empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Richard became Ricardo, John became Juan, Fitzgerald became Geraldino and O’Donoghue became O’Donojú. Throughout the text I have used the English spelling of the name for those born in Ireland, but for those who were born in Spain or Latin America I prefer the Spanish version, so that the Chilean patriot Juan Mackenna, who was born in County Monaghan, is referred to throughout the text as John Mackenna, while his friend and ally, who was born in Chile, remains Bernardo O’Higgins. Where the birthplace is not clear, I have chosen the Spanish version.

I have used the authentic version of place-names in Spain and Latin America except where there is a well-known alternative English spelling: for example, Seville is preferred to Sevilla.

I have taken the decision to concentrate on the independence struggle in Spain’s former colonies on the South American continent during the first decades of the nineteenth century, as well as examining the historical context in Spain and its American colonies. This is because the Irish played a significant role in the independence movement in the southern part of the continent – through the actions of individuals such as James Florence Bourke, William Brown, Peter Campbell, Bernardo O’Higgins and John Thomond O’Brien – and in the northern part through the Irish volunteers in Bolívar’s armies. This approach precludes looking at Cuba, which remained a Spanish possession until 1898.

The independence struggle in the Viceroyalty of New Spain – the Spanish administrative territory that covered Mexico, much of the modern United States of America and most of Central America – followed a different course from that of South America. It was at first a popular rising, as opposed to the middle-class-led revolutions. I have included a chapter on Mexico, in addition to those about South America, for two reasons. The first is that the Spanish general who signed the treaty that brought about Mexican independence in an extraordinary act of pragmatism was an Irish-Spaniard by the name of Juan O’Donojú. The second reason is that Mexico honours to this day a battalion of Irishmen known as the San Patricios who fought to preserve Mexican independence from the aggressive designs of the United States.

Brazil is a vast country, which covers almost half the South American continent. It requires its own separate study. However, that is not to say that the course of events in Brazil, especially the machinations of the Portuguese royal family during their exile in Rio de Janeiro and their decision to invade what is now Uruguay, remains completely outside the scope of this book.

The story of the Irish in Latin America is a huge subject. I have tried to give an idea of their broader involvement in the independence struggle while interspersing the narrative with the histories of the most important leaders.

Finally, this is a history not only of the Irish soldiers who helped achieve independence for the republics that came into existence at the beginning of the nineteenth century by force of arms but also of their compatriots in the service of Spain who created the conditions in which independence became possible.

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, innkeepers, prostitutes and thieves robbed the drunken sailors and bored soldiers awaiting embarkation. Periodic epidemics of yellow fever, transmitted by the mosquitoes that bred in the marshes surrounding the Bay of Cádiz, frequently devastated the population.

This bustling mass of humanity was home to merchants from all over Europe, including a thriving Irish community who got fat from trade with the Americas and northern Europe. Irish merchants had been trading beef, fish and butter for Spanish wine and wool for hundreds of years. Daniel O’Connell’s uncle Maurice ‘Hunting Cap’ O’Connell had made a fortune from smuggling goods between the secluded beaches of the Iveragh peninsula in County Kerry and the ports of northern Spain. In the aftermath of the Williamite wars, Irish families had settled permanently in the south of Spain. The Aylwards, Butlers, O’Dwyers, Lynches, Whites, Powers, Terrys and Walshes were among the Irish families that made a living from commerce in eighteenth-century Cádiz.6

The Irish enjoyed a privileged position relative to other nationalities. Since the sixteenth century, when the Spanish monarchs had first assumed the mantle of leaders of the Counter-Reformation and had extended protection to Catholics fleeing religious persecution from other parts of Europe, the Irish had sought shelter in Spain. The Spanish court had given refuge to Irish nobles and had subsidised the Irish Colleges that were founded in Spain in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries for training Irish priests.

The authorities treated the newcomers sympathetically, welcoming the military experience and skill that the Irish soldiers could bring to the Spanish army. By the late seventeenth century Irish Catholics were allowed to apply for royal jobs. In 1701 Philip v decreed that Irish and English Catholics who had been living in Spain for more than 10 years were to be treated as naturalised Spaniards. In 1718 another royal decree gave protection to Irish merchants from embargo in the event of a war with Britain. This favoured status meant it was much easier for the Irish to trade with the Americas than their competitors from such countries as Britain, France and the Dutch Republic. Those sons who did not follow their father and uncles into commerce found a career in the Spanish army, navy or royal administration.

Richard Wall was not in Cádiz for long, because his career in the Spanish navy ended rather abruptly. At the age of 23 he was taken prisoner by the British during the Spanish fleet’s attempt to regain Sicily. On his release, and with the Spanish navy routed, he realised that his career would be better served on land, and he petitioned Patiño for a transfer to the army, citing poor health.

The Bourbons had replaced the old Spanish military formations of the seventeenth century, known as the tercios, with modern infantry regiments, including the Irlanda, Hibernia and Ultonia, so named in recognition of the fact that they were officered predominantly by Irishmen. Wall was commissioned with the junior rank of alférez, approximating to second lieutenant (the lowest commissioned rank), in the Hibernia Regiment, taking part in two more expeditions to Sicily and Ceuta. In 1721 he transferred from the infantry to the dragoons and the Regiment of Batavia. He was a brave, capable officer, but promotion for any officer without funds with which to buy a commission was largely dependent on the vagaries of politics and length of service, and his career stalled.

Wall was not a man to forgo pleasure for the humdrum life of the parade ground; his service record shows that he was prone to spending a lot of time outside camp. But these absences also had a practical purpose. An ambitious young officer in the eighteenth-century Spanish army without powerful relatives or wealth had to be assiduous in cultivating connections at court. Wall’s Jacobite friends, most notably James FitzJames Stuart, Duke of Liria, helped him build relations with powerful members of the Spanish court. Liria was a son of the Duke of Berwick, one of James II’s illegitimate sons, and Honora Burke, the widow of the Irish Jacobite commander Patrick Sarsfield. Wall’s father, Matthew, had served Liria’s uncle, Henry FitzJames, in France.

In March 1727 Wall accompanied Liria on an arduous journey across Europe with the aim of convincing the Russian tsar to support Spain and Austria against the alliance of Britain, France and Prussia. Wall was well acquainted with life at court; but it was during this mission to Russia that he learnt the essence of statecraft. Noting that the Irish officer had impressed the king of Prussia, Frederick William I, Liria wrote: ‘Wall is a young man of great judgement, ability and skill.’7 However, Wall evidently found the journey exhausting and suffered from homesickness. In Moscow he refused to leave his room. Liria took pity on the Irishman and in December 1728 granted him permission to return to Spain. In this respect Wall was not unique: many of the Irish felt a visceral attachment to their adopted country, given the sense of dislocation they felt in exile and the warm reception and plentiful opportunities afforded them in Spain.8

Wall spent much of the next decade campaigning in Italy. In 1733 he acted as a messenger between the Duke of Parma, the future Charles III, and his parents, the king and queen of Spain. In 1737, in recognition of his services, Wall was admitted to the Order of Santiago.

The Spanish military-religious orders of Alcántara, Calatrava and Santiago date from the twelfth century and the Christian reconquest of Moorish Spain. The Order of Santiago was founded to protect pilgrims on their way to the holy shrine at Santiago de Compostela in Galicia. By the seventeenth century, when the court painter Diego Velázquez was admitted – the red Cross of St James is displayed on his breast in his masterpiece, Las Meninas – the order had ceased to have a military function.

In the eighteenth century, however, membership of the military orders conferred significant social status and was important for those seeking advancement. Only those of noble birth were admitted, and Irishmen had to prove their noble ancestry to the royal authorities with detailed submissions containing witness statements from their fellow-countrymen.

In 1746, at the age of 52, Richard Wall took a bullet wound to one of his kidneys at Plaisance in south-west France and was moved to a hospital in Montpellier to recuperate. His military career was over, though he was promoted to field-marshal the following year. A month later Philip v died and was succeeded by Ferdinand VI, Philip’s fourth son from his first marriage. The new king was keen to weaken the influence of his late father’s second wife, the Italian-born Elisabeth Farnese. As queen of Spain she had exercised a powerful influence over her husband, governed as she was by her ambitions for her own children. To this end she had insisted that Philip reclaim for her children the Italian territories lost by Spain at the end of the War of the Spanish Succession. However, on his accession to the throne Ferdinand instigated a relatively temperate foreign policy. The Marquis of Ensenada, the Duke of Huéscar and José Carvajal y Lancáster were the three men given the responsibility of implementing this policy, which depended on a rapprochement with Spain’s old enemy, Britain.

The powerful Ensenada was one of Ferdinand’s most industrious and able ministers. He had worked his way up from humble beginnings in La Rioja to exercise the levers of government in his early forties. Ferdinand was so impressed by the energy and zeal with which Ensenada had reformed the Spanish navy that he gave him responsibility for the ministries of war, the navy, finance and the Indies.

In contrast to the self-made Ensenada, Huéscar was from one of Spain’s oldest and most storied aristocratic families: among his other titles was the great Dukedom of Alba. Huéscar was the Spanish ambassador in Paris and a friend of Enlightenment thinkers such as d’Alembert and Rousseau.

Carvajal y Lancáster was Ferdinand’s first prime minister, who worked closely with Ensenada to carry out the king’s wishes regarding the new foreign policy.

It was through his friendship with influential members of the exiled Jacobite aristocracy that Richard Wall came to the notice of this privileged and powerful group. Huéscar was a brother-in-law of the third Duke of Berwick, son of the aristocrat with whom Wall had travelled to Russia in the 1720s. Wall knew the 27-year-old Berwick from the army.

Skilled in the arts of courtly politics and with a reputation of having been a brave officer on the battlefield, Wall was a good-humoured and gregarious man who was apt to indulge in the sensual pleasures of the eighteenth-century libertine. He felt equally at home in the company of queens and prostitutes. Huéscar, Berwick and Wall were confidants. When Berwick contracted syphilis in 1746, it was Wall, a consummate womaniser who had himself contracted the disease in his mid-forties, who ministered to him, possessing as he did the old soldier’s remedy, which in the eighteenth century was mercury.9

This was an era in which it was impossible to rise through the ranks without the help of powerful patrons. These wealthy aristocrats were attracted to Wall’s easy-going, amiable manner. The English traveller Henry Swinburne, who met Wall shortly before the latter’s death, when he was in his eighties, wrote that he was ‘fond of talking, but acquits himself so well of the talk, that the most loquacious must listen with patience and pleasure to his discourse, always heightened with mirth and good-humour.’10 These were the traits that Wall brought to his new career as a diplomat.

The cabal headed by the king’s prime minister, Carvajal, came to realise that Wall could be useful to them in pursuing their placatory policy with Britain. It was with this aim in mind that Huéscar sent Wall to London on a secret diplomatic mission. Spain’s fears of British commercial encroachment in its American colonies, and British resentment at Spain’s interference with its merchant fleet, had resulted in periodic hostilities between the two countries throughout the quarter of a century after the ending of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1715. Under the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht, which ended the war, Britain had been awarded the asiento or contract to supply Spain’s colonies with African slaves. Britain was also allowed to send a ship of 500 tons once a year to sell manufactured goods into the American markets. It was a concession that undermined Spain’s commercial monopoly with its colonies, not least because it enabled the British – already engaged in illegal trading with Spain’s American colonies through Jamaica – more easily to smuggle contraband.

Agents of the company established offices in ports throughout Spanish America. Under the terms of the asiento a proportion of the profits accrued to the Spanish crown. To ensure that the crown was getting its fair share, and to prevent illegal trading by the British, the Spanish king appointed his own representatives to the company as monitors. Two members of the Irish merchant community in Cádiz, Tomás Geraldino (Fitzgerald) and Pedro Tyrry (Terry), were among the king’s representatives in the 1730s. According to Ernest G. Hildner Jr,

… while the selection of Geraldino was agreeable to the English, that of Tyrry to the company, signed the same day, was far from being so. Tyrry was of Irish parentage and was suspected of ill will toward the British government and of having spied on the fleet at Portsmouth several years before.11

In 1739, two years after Tyrry arrived in England, following a breakdown in negotiations over the asiento between the two countries, both Tyrry and Geraldino, now the ambassador in London, were recalled to Spain. The same year the War of Jenkins’ Ear – known in Spanish as the War of the Asiento – broke out between Britain and Spain after continuing hostilities between the countries’ vessels on the Atlantic.

Wall was sent to London to mend fences at the end of the war. With the excuse that he was still suffering the effects of the wound he had received the previous year, he was withdrawn from Geneva, his first posting. In September 1747 he arrived in London, having travelled undercover as a horse-dealer by the name of Lemán to avert the suspicions of the French authorities. Wall’s mission was to bring about a peace agreement between Spain and Britain, without marginalising the French. His task was complicated by the fact that he was from a Jacobite family, which, barely a year after Prince Charles Edward Stuart’s rebellion had ended in failure at the Battle of Culloden, raised suspicions about his loyalties. The Marquis of Tabuérniga, a duplicitous Spanish aristocrat who was operating as a spy for Britain’s powerful Duke of Newcastle and who resented Wall’s privileged position at the Spanish court, encouraged these doubts in London.

The diplomat Jaime Masones de Lima was a member of Carvajal’s party and a good friend of Wall’s. He wrote to Huéscar in 1747 from London warning him that Wall ‘was not the most agreeable to that nation because, as well as the fact that being Irish is no recommendation to the English, he has the quality of being in his heart truly French and so any negotiation embarked upon is suspicious.’12 Wall himself recognised that ‘the fact that I am Irish in itself creates suspicion’;13 and after eight fruitless months in London he suggested that he be replaced. ‘Whoever it is will be accepted with the greatest satisfaction as long as he is not Irish because it is natural for these people [the English] always to distrust us,’ he wrote in a letter to Huéscar.14 However, Wall’s political masters, Carvajal and Huéscar, were not disposed to replace him, despite his increasing entreaties to be allowed return to Spain. They were not impressed by Tabuérniga’s intrigues, realising that he wished to sully Wall’s reputation at court, and remained convinced of Wall’s worth as a diplomat. Wall was to reward their confidence.

In 1748 the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle put an end to the war. Though again suffering from homesickness during his prolonged absence from Spain and writing a petition to be allowed home, Wall began to make headway with the British, helped in no small part by his ally, Benjamin Keene, the ambassador to Spain. In 1749 Wall was named ambassador to London, and Tabuérniga was recalled to Spain. Wall now began to earn the trust of the British prime minister, Henry Pelham, and his elder brother, the Duke of Newcastle. In December of that year Wall wrote to Carvajal, informing him of this change in attitude:

Such is the confidence the two brothers show in me that they have spoken about points of the greatest delicacy for them, and the Duke confessed to me a few days ago that my origins caused their suspicions and distrust. For a long period of time they had me spied upon, during all my conversations and wherever I went, and they even wished to discover if, during dinner, a little more wine than customary would reveal my thinking.15

Wall’s own awareness of his importance in the diplomatic firmament was reflected in his choice of residence, a grand mansion in fashionable Soho Square with space for an oratory, and in the commissioning of a portrait by the French painter Louis Michel van Loo, in which the subject is depicted regally with ceremonial sword and billowing red sash (see Plate 1).16

Wall was now in his late fifties. He was a well-built man with just the beginnings of a paunch. His eyes and his slightly ruddy complexion betrayed a humorous streak and a well-enjoyed life, though one that did not descend into dissipation. He had become more religious as old age approached. However, he continued to indulge in occasional debauches – his growing celebrity presented lots of opportunities for dalliances with London’s most attractive women – which would lead to periodic bouts of self-reproach. Though his time in London had brought a turnaround in his fortunes, he remained anxious to return to Spain.

The death of Carvajal in 1754 presented the opportunity. The group that had formed around the late prime minister had fractured in the intervening years, and a struggle developed to replace him as secretary of state. On one side was the faction led by the increasingly powerful Ensenada and the king’s confessor, Father Francisco Rábago y Noriega; on the other, the faction led by Huéscar, who, having been promoted to the position of mayordomo mayor, or head of the king’s household, now had the ear of the credulous Spanish monarch.

Huéscar played on the king’s and queen’s fears that Carvajal’s sudden death would lead to an unravelling of their policy, and he proposed Wall as a suitable replacement. Ferdinand had first wanted the Count of Valdeparaíso to become the new prime minister, but the count, who was a close ally of Huéscar’s and Wall’s, refused, citing his inexperience, and suggested Wall in his stead. Keene was also eager that Wall, whom he regarded as sympathetic to British interests, should be the next secretary of state.

At the age of 60, the French-born son of Irish Jacobite refugees had become the head of King Ferdinand VI’s government. Wall served as prime minister of the Spanish government until his resignation in 1763. Having himself benefited from the patronage of powerful benefactors, he was now in a position to help the careers of his compatriots. Some of them were the children of Jacobite exiles like himself who had arrived in Spain in the early part of the century; others were more recent arrivals who took advantage of the Irish networks that now existed in commerce and the military.

Wall’s period of office was contemporaneous with the Seven Years’ War and the accession of Ferdinand’s more capable half-brother, Charles III, to the throne. It was an era of crisis and change in which Spain and Britain came to blows over the latter’s persistent attempts to open up Spanish America to British trade. In response to these threats to its colonies, Charles was determined to increase the pace of reform in the Spanish Empire, with a view to centralising authority in Madrid. Over the next four years Charles and his Irish prime minister were responsible for introducing profound change to Spain and its colonies in the Americas.

Chapter 2

REMAKING THE NEW WORLD

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