O’Higgins promoted free trade and abolished slave labour, which had been in force since 1544. Through a strategy of road and town building, he opened up the country. He introduced new taxes and started a fishing industry. When he invited four Indian chiefs to celebrate the accession of Charles VI to the throne of Spain, he outraged the local colonial landed gentry. They really did hate him. However, the ordinary people regarded him as a reformer and a hero. In 1795 the Prime Minister of Spain, Manuel de Godoy, appointed him to the most important post in the Spanish Empire: viceroy of Peru.
O’Higgins was concerned with his countrymen’s comforts. In his imagination he was hospitable to visitors to his palace but in reality he wasn’t. In 1795, when the explorer George Vancouver visited, he was appalled by the filth and dirt in the palace. It must have been bad if an eighteenth-century explorer noticed it. Vancouver observed that the dust was so thick in his apartment that it needed a shovel rather than a broom to remove it.
O’Higgins was progressive politically for the time and place; emotionally he wasn’t. He had an overly developed parental attitude to all those under his care, with the exception of his actual son. Though psychology had not yet been invented, I think we can safely conclude he over-compensated in the care of his subjects because of his well-disguised guilt over his neglect of his own son. As with many men in Irish history, O’Higgins was extremely emotional but went to extraordinary lengths to disguise the fact that he had any feelings. The effort resulted in his developing a red complexion that, combined with his small stature, resulted in the Indians giving him the nickname El Camarón (The Shrimp).
In 1772, when O’Higgins met the young Isabel Riquelme, who was a colonial with some Indian blood, the fifty-two-year-old lieutenant colonel of dragoons fell madly in love. She was fourteen and beautiful. He wasn’t. He was short, red-faced, fat and severe looking, with no sense of humour. He also had a long pointed nose and large bushy eyebrows. He promised to seek permission from the Spanish King to marry her because any official needed royal permission to marry a colonial. He never actually married her. Five years later he succeeded in persuading her to have sex with him. I cannot imagine what he said. She conceived a child, Bernardo, who was born on the feast of Saint Bernard. O’Higgins then promptly left her when he realised that his usually stony heart was getting in the way of his ambition.
Bernardo O’Higgins was born when his old man was fifty-seven. There is an inevitable set of desperate acts of idiocy that the young children of old men must perform in order to try to gain the attention of someone who just wants to sleep in front of the fire with the newspaper over his head. Bernardo did all these before he would go on to serve with distinction in the wars of independence from Spain, earning him the title “Liberator of Chile”.
However, first he was given to foster parents. When he had just learned to recognise them as his parents, he was taken away as a four-year-old by a detachment of dragoons sent by his father, Don Ambrosio. They galloped into town, kidnapped Bernardo and took him to an estate, where he would be looked after by a friend of Don Ambrosio, Don Albano. He would try to keep Bernardo from the attention of the authorities, since the child was the illegitimate result of a relationship with a Creole woman that had not been given royal permission.
In 1788, when Don Ambrosio was the ruler of the whole country as the captain general of the King of Spain in Chile, he visited the young Bernardo. Soon after this, Bernardo was sent to a special school for the education of the sons of Indian chiefs. After two years he was sent to the Royal College of San Carlos in Lima, in Peru. When he was sixteen, when Don Ambrosio became viceroy of Peru, Bernardo was sent to Spain to get him even further out of the way.
As viceroy, Don Ambrosio ruled over a population of one million. He ruled from a throne-like seat with a red velvet canopy in his audience chamber. But Lima itself was a cesspit. He issued laws of good government and started a road-building plan. Though dour and outwardly and inwardly humourless, he enjoyed the title “The Great Viceroy”. The colonial Creole landed gentry continued to hate him. He hated Lima. The eighty-year-old pined for the fresh air of Chile.
He learned from spies that the Venezuelan revolutionary Francisco de Miranda was plotting revolution in London against the Spanish Crown. He also learned that Bernardo was one of Miranda’s followers. In fact, this was Don Ambrosio’s own fault because Bernardo had wanted to join the British Navy but was barred because he was illegitimate. Bernardo had written to his father begging him for help so he could join the navy, but he got no response. What choice had he but to fall in with the charismatic revolutionaries? He was extraordinarily charismatic himself.
Bernardo’s annual allowance of £300 from his father was normally stolen each year by those assigned to look after him. They forwarded about £1 to Bernardo from the fund. Thus, Bernardo was reduced to poverty. He did write frequently to his father to let him know how he was. Since Bernardo had enormous affection for his father, he only complained when his circumstances were unusually dire. Otherwise, he was of a cheerful and optimistic disposition, unlike his old man.
At one point Bernardo was so poor that he wrote to tell his father that he couldn’t leave his room because he had no proper clothes to wear outside. He couldn’t attend classes because he had no coat to wear. He even sold his piano. But, still, his father did nothing. Bernardo wrote that he was actually so poor that he had resorted to cutting his own hair, did his own sewing and mending, and wore the same suit for four years straight. He also wrote to tell his father that he didn’t want to beg from his few Irish friends because this would embarrass his father, obviously not realising that being a revolutionary against his father’s own government was slightly more embarrassing.
Naturally, Don Ambrosio’s bitter Creole enemies informed the authorities in Madrid about Bernardo’s revolutionary leanings. Don Ambrosio was forced into retirement when he was eighty-one because of the scandal. He was replaced by his archrival, the Margués de Avilés.
Don Ambrosio was so enraged with Bernardo over his forced early retirement that he became even redder, gave himself a brain hemorrhage and was carried to his deathbed. He asked his old friend Tomás Delfin to help him make his last will and testament. He wanted to cut Bernardo off completely but Delfin begged him to reconsider. Don Ambrosio refused. After days of pleading, he finally relented. On 14 March 1801 he drew up his will, officially recognising Bernardo as his son for the first time. He also left Bernardo, who was still in the same unwashed suit, an estate in Chile. He died four days later.
Because he was illegitimate, Bernardo could never get recognition for his father’s aristocratic titles. Throughout his life he maintained an obsessive regard for his old man. In his turn, Bernardo went on to become an accidental soldier, and the liberator of Chile from Spanish rule. I suspect his father would have been proud but would never have admitted it.
An Army Marches on Butter
War is fantastic if you are a butter merchant in Cork because you can sell your butter to an entire army of customers. War is bad when it ends suddenly and you are left with a butter mountain. This is what happened to Jeremiah O’Leary in 1815 after Napoleon’s dramatic defeat at the Battle of Waterloo. The British forces needed a lot of butter for their wars with France.
When the war ended, Jeremiah’s son, the young, naive and inexperienced Daniel Florence O’Leary (c.1802–1854), joined the crowd of penniless, de-mobbed, battle-hardened soldiers who were thronging Dublin. This mix of unemployed veterans and newly impoverished youths like O’Leary desperately needed a new conflict. Fortunately, a cause presented itself in the form of Generalissimo Simon Bolivar’s liberation of South America from Spanish colonial rule. This war promised lavish pay, rapid promotion and the distinctively attractive uniforms usually favoured by South American revolutionary forces.
O’Leary would have been told that he needed to act quickly because the war in Venezuela was practically won, and hi
s biggest danger would be to miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, or annual opportunity at least. Most of the Irish recruits were badly provisioned and had little food. In one instance, within a month of arriving at Margarita Island off the coast of Venezuela, 250 died of typhus. The rest were eventually placed under the command of General Rafael José Urdaneta y Faría, who was described by his contemporaries as being a slave to women and cigars. He was not a competent general, even by the standards that pertained amongst the rebels. He was in the habit of going into battle with two of his mistresses. When not actually fighting, he lay all day in a hammock with his other mistresses.
The Irish recruits dwindled through sickness and death. Some joined the rebels in Colombia. O’Leary was lucky to survive the initial hazards. Auspiciously for him, O’Leary avoided Urdaneta and was posted to the Dragoons of the Guard of General José Antonio Anzoáteguí. He was subsequently involved in all of the campaigns that led to the freeing from Spanish rule of Colombia in 1819, Venezuela in 1821, Ecuador in 1822, Peru in 1824 and Upper Peru, afterwards known as Bolivia in honour of Bolivar, in 1825.
Like Don Ambrosio O’Higgins before him, O’Leary discovered that he was a naturally dashing cavalry officer. At the Battle of Pontano de Vargos he received a stylish saber wound to the face, and was reported killed. His death was even published in the Cork newspapers. Promotion came as fast as the recruiting agents had promised. Unfortunately, the war ended in 1826 when the Spanish admitted that they were beaten and withdrew from South America. If it had only kept going for just one more year, O’Leary may even have become a generalissimo like Bolivar.
Count Your Enemies
Fighting wasn’t the only route to the top of the South American social order for Irish men and women. You could copulate your way to the summit of society. This is what Eliza Lynch (1834–1886) from Cork did. When she met Fransisco Solano Lopez in Paris in 1854, they became lovers. Lopez was the son of the dictator of Paraguay and was leading an extravagant diplomatic mission to Europe. Lynch followed Lopez to Asunción, Paraguay. The elegant house he gave her became the centre of a cosmopolitan scene and the focus of gossip. They had six children together.
When Lopez succeeded his father as dictator in 1862, Lynch became the driving force behind the introduction of European culture and fashion. At that time in polite Paraguayan society it was a fashion essential to have dedicated enemies, and Lynch was extremely au courant: she had fifty society lady enemies. But these ladies now found that they had to suck up to her for both political success and well-being.
A definitive diagnosis of insanity amongst despots remains notoriously evasive for psychiatric medicine, even now. Lopez may have been actually insane, though it is hard to distinguish the subtle differences between your common or garden sane dictator and an actual insane one.
Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay allied against Lopez in the War of the Triple Alliance, 1864–1870, in which 90 per cent of the men and 50 per cent of the women of Paraguay died. Lynch has been blamed for the war, but, as with the insanity issue, opinion remains divided. Insane or not, Lopez, along with Eliza, their children and a few die-hard loyalists, had to flee into the surrounding jungle, as you do, when Brazilian troops occupied Asunción. When the family was eventually hunted down, Lopez and his oldest son, Fransisco, were killed in front of Lynch. At the time she was wearing a ballgown that had become ragged from the journey through the foliage, and a pair of silk slippers unsuited to the terrain. She had to dig their graves with her bare hands.
By 1870 she had managed to acquire about one-third of the land of Paraguay in her own name. But the new government declared her an outlaw, and confiscated her property. It was rumoured that Lopez had hidden a vast treasure siphoned from the people with Lynch’s help. She was deported back to Europe but not before the fifty outraged society ladies demanded that she be put on trial and shot for her crimes against propriety, as she was not married to Lopez. Shooting your defeated enemy with a firing squad was positively avant-garde in the best South American social circles. When the Government invited her back, Lynch became suspicious that they only wanted to force her to reveal the location of the treasure. It remains lost to this day.
Lynch did eventually return in October 1875. The peasants greeted her warmly. You can rely on peasants to have fickle memories. But the fifty outraged ladies were still fuming. She left for Buenos Aires where she wrote a passionate defence of her career as Lopez’s mistress. When she died in Paris in 1886 she was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery. Her body was exhumed in 1961 and returned to Asunción by the then Paraguayan dictator General Alfredo Stroessner, who may also have been insane. Who knows? He declared her a national hero. She is either an evil genius or a national icon, or maybe they are the same thing. Nevertheless, she was yet another shining example of the opportunities enjoyed by the Irish in the historical development of South America.
War: The Last Resort of a Ham Actor
When all else fails, you can become a soldier and then fail at that. This is what Richard Barry (1769–1793), 7th Earl of Barrymore, did. When he was young he was interested in racehorses, gambling and practical jokes. But these professional interests were nothing compared to his obsession with amateur dramatics. We all know someone whose life has been destroyed by part-time thespians. They start by dabbling in Ibsen before moving on to overdose on hardcore late Beckett material, like Breath, and expect to see family and friends in the audience at every performance.
Barry was a friend of the Prince of Wales, the future George IV, who nicknamed him “Hellgate” on account of his recklessness. He squandered his family fortune building and running a private theatre for his own shows. To avoid his debts he became a member of Parliament. He was so clueless that he didn’t even marry money. Instead he married the daughter of a sedan chairman, an eighteenth-century taxi driver.
Having exhausted all possible ways to support his dramas, he became a soldier. Just as his new career began, he was killed instantly when a musket exploded while he was undertaking what seemed the safest job in the army of the Napoleonic Wars – escorting French prisoners of war in the peaceful scenic countryside of Kent, England.
His brother, Henry, succeeded him as Earl of Barrymore. Henry must have wished an exploding gun blew his brother’s head off years before he became involved in amateur dramatics. King George IV called Henry “Cripplegate” because he was lame. Another brother, Augustus, who was a gambling clergyman, he called “Newgate” after the debtors’ prison. Their sister, Carolina, he called “Billingsgate” because of her foul language. Billingsgate was a fish market that was established in London at the end of the seventeenth century. The women who sold fish had a notorious reputation for foul language. That king was extraordinarily witty and clearly had a lot on his mind during those difficult times.
Our Waterloo
It took an Irish soldier, Arthur Wellesley (1769–1852), also known as the Duke of Wellington, to finally defeat Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, and bring the Napoleonic Wars – which had been fought on and off since 1803, and were themselves a continuation of the French Revolutionary Wars from 1789 – to a definite end. Win or lose, we have to like Napoleon better than Wellesley, even if the latter was Irish. But Wellesley always denied being Irish. He was born in Dublin, but famously argued that being born in a stable doesn’t make you a horse. But being born in a stable doesn’t necessarily make you a horse – you might be an ass. His contemporaries regarded the fact that he could compose such a bon mot, or have it composed for him, as proof of his Irishness. Typically, once he defeated Napoleon, the English laid claim to him.
Wellesley was thick in school, which was no handicap for a young Irish gentleman wishing to enter the army. He also became a member of Parliament, again no burden, before embarking with the Duke of York on an allied campaign that planned but ultimately failed to invade Revolutionary France from the Netherlands. The campaign was an internationally recognised fiasco
at a time when the standards for such things were extremely low. Not just any debacle would qualify; incompetence above and beyond normal duty was required. His brother was governor general of Bengal in India, so Wellesley took himself out there. Surviving contact with the enemy guaranteed him promotion, though his critics attributed his success to nepotism. But he did have a dramatic success in 180466 that earned him a knighthood, and a lot of prize money to boot.
Wellesley competently ground out results without flair. Napoleon and his marshals were brilliant and entertaining to watch but perhaps ultimately fragile. What Wellesley lacked in brainpower he made up for in organisation. During his command of the Peninsular67 campaign he paid particular attention to logistics, military intelligence and harsh, rather than effective or thoughtful, discipline. Most of his soldiers were Irish but he didn’t think much of them. Wellesley won in Spain because the French had to withdraw to other theatres of the war: Napoleon’s army was freezing in Russia. Wellesley emerged from the Peninsular campaign as a duke, and with a grant of £400,00068 from Parliament.
By 1814, the now 1st Duke of Wellington had reached France in time for the French surrender. But Napoleon escaped from where he was in exile on the island of Elba, and was soon back in power for a new 100-day reign. Wellington was put in command of the Anglo-Dutch forces and, along with Marshal Blücher, was to defend Brussels from a French invasion. Wellington’s army met Napoleon’s forces at Waterloo on 18 June 1815. Wellington held them up until the arrival of Blücher’s Prussians, which forced the French to flee. Paris fell within three weeks, and Napoleon was forced back into exile, this time on the island of St Helena.
Poet, Madman, Scoundrel Page 10