Simon Bolivar

by John Lynch

  Realism prevailed when the aristocracy came to appreciate that they themselves were better guardians of the existing social structure than was the metropolis. The colonial elites were more worried by the hostile presence of pardos, blacks and slaves, the ‘volcano at our feet’, as Bolívar later described it, than about cacao prices and consumer shortages.4 There would be no cacao without slave labour, no leisure without a servile work force. Violence in Coro, conspiracy in La Guaira, banditry in the llanos, these movements had racial connotations, threatened security of life and property, and raised the spectre of black power. Social protest from below frightened the Venezuelan elites into the shelter of the colonial state. But if the colonial state itself was unstable, could they find security outside?

  1808, the Critical Year

  The balance between obedience and dissent was disturbed not by economic depression or colonial grievance but by the shock of events in the metropolis. When they saw the state collapse and interests struggle for power at the centre of the Spanish empire, the peoples of colonial Venezuela also went into action, as Spaniards and creoles interpreted events and decided their moves.

  In 1807–8 Napoleon decided to destroy the last shreds of Spanish independence and invaded the Iberian peninsula. Bourbon government was already divided against itself and the country was defenceless against attack. In March 1808 a palace revolution at Aranjuez, masking an aristocratic reaction against the Bourbon state, forced Charles IV to dismiss Godoy and to abdicate in favour of his son, Ferdinand. But the French were the winners. They occupied Madrid, and Napoleon induced Charles and Ferdinand to proceed to Bayonne for discussion. There, on 10 May 1808, he forced both of them to abdicate and in the following month proclaimed his brother, Joseph, king of Spain and the Indies. The predictions of Bolívar were coming true.

  In Spain the people began to fight for their independence and the liberals to plan for a constitution. Provincial juntas organized resistance to France. Deputies were sent to England to secure peace and alliance. In September 1808 a central junta was formed, invoking the name of the king and, from Seville in January 1809, issuing a decree that Spanish dominions in America were not colonies but an integral part of the Spanish monarchy with rights of representation. But as French forces penetrated Andalusia, the junta was driven into a corner and in January 1810 it dissolved, leaving in its place a regency of five instructed to summon a cortes that would represent both Spain and America. Spanish liberals were no less imperialist than Spanish conservatives. The cortes of Cadiz produced the constitution of 1812 which declared Spain and America a single nation. But while Americans were granted representation they were denied equal representation, and while they were promised reform they were refused freedom of trade.

  What did these events mean to Spanish America? The two years after 1808 were decisive. The French conquest of Spain, the collapse of the Spanish Bourbons, the implacable imperialism of Spanish liberals, all delivered a profound and irreparable shock to relations between Spain and America. The spectacle was unbelievable: a king deposed, local autonomies rising, foreign forces occupying the land. A crisis of political legitimacy confronted Americans. Could they too achieve the unimaginable? They could not have the Bourbons, they did not want Napoleon, they did not trust the liberals. Whom then should they obey? And how should power be distributed between imperial officials and local elites? Once autonomous decisions were taken on these issues, independence could hardly be avoided.

  News of the French conquest of Spain was first known to the authorities in Venezuela, a country without newspapers, at the beginning of July 1808 when two issues of The Times of London dated 31 May and 1 June reached Caracas, courtesy of the governor of Trinidad. The Times reports, specifying the abdication of the Bourbons and the takeover by Napoleon, were translated by Andrés Bello, then an official in the colonial service, for the benefit of Captain–General Juan de Casas, who promptly rejected them as ‘lies invented by the perfidious English’.5 He was soon disabused. On 15 July two ships arrived at La Guaira almost simultaneously. The first, a French brigantine, carried agents of Napoleon to demand submission to the French, as the monarch himself had submitted. The other was the British frigate Acasta, commanded by Captain Philip Beaver, who announced that the Spanish people had risen in resistance to the French and had the alliance of Britain. Captain Beaver was not impressed by his official reception, and he preferred to visit the streets of Caracas, fielding questions and testing public opinion. He was struck by the people’s sense of judgement and reported, ‘I venture to say that these people are extremely loyal and passionately devoted to the Spanish branch of the House of Bourbon; and that so long as there is some probability of the return of Ferdinand VII to Madrid, they will remain loyal to the present government. But if this does not happen soon, I believe I can affirm with equal certainty that they will declare independence for themselves and then they will look to England as the only means of assuring their freedom and expanding their trade.’6

  Beaver hit the mark. Casas was in a panic and dithered. Spanish officials feared for their jobs. The cabildo, the establishment and many people wanted recognition of Ferdinand VII as legitimate king and the establishment of a junta, comparable to the responses in Spain. And Bolívar? Events were proving the force of his position on absolute independence. The first reaction in Caracas envisaged a union of the local ruling class, officials and leading citizens, in support of Ferdinand VII and the Spanish resistance movement, almost in patriotic parallel to the junta movement in Spain itself. While the Spanish bureaucracy hesitated and drew back from the idea of a junta, leading creoles began to meet and talk. The authorities were alarmed by intelligence of a republican conspiracy, premature though it was, and arrested a number of people, including Captain Manuel Matos, a friend of Bolívar, who were alleged to have plotted in the country house of Bolívar near the River Guaire.7 The captain–general sent his son to give Bolívar an informal warning against associating with subversives. Bolívar, not yet ready to raise his profile, protested that he was ‘anxious to escape from unwelcome hangers on who came uninvited’, and that he was leaving for his hacienda the following day, innocent of any wrongdoing.8

  Nevertheless, leading creoles continued to meet in Bolívar’s house, some to socialize and talk politics, some to take the initiative and press for an independent junta, and some to listen and report to the authorities.9 Bolívar and his brother joined actively in these discussions, though their ideas were well in advance of the rest of the company, and Simón reserved his position. He had acquired his political convictions in Europe and was unwilling to compromise them amidst conflicting opinions in Caracas or moves towards appeasement with the monarchy. But the creole establishment, or as they said, ‘la mayor parte de los Caballeros de esta ciudad’, in effect forty–five signatories headed by the conde de Tovar, José Félix Ribas and Mariano Montilla, and mobilized by the Spaniard Antonio Fernández de León, a powerful landowner in Maracay and future marquis, presented a petition to the captain–general on 24 November 1808, rejecting the jurisdiction of the Seville junta in Venezuela, and requesting the establishment of an independent junta to exercise authority on behalf of Ferdinand VII.10 This was not a revolutionary move: rather it was a traditional form of response in defence of the legitimate monarch by ‘representantes del pueblo’, which meant leading planters, merchants, military, clerics and others from the colonial elite, and it included Spaniards as well as creoles. It did not, however, include Simón Bolívar. Along with others who would take a revolutionary position in 1810, he refused to sign the petition to the captain–general as it did not go as far as he wished, and he left Caracas for San Mateo.11 Bolívar thus distanced himself from the juntista movement; his goal was independence and anything less was a blind alley.

  The Caracas government proved his point; it arrested the marqués del Toro, the conde de San Javier, and Fernández de León, the future marqués de Casa León, the Tovar brothers, Mariano Montilla, Pedro Palacios, José
Félix Ribas, and others. The authorities clamped down hard on the movement with shock tactics and arrests in the night, actions which appalled the elderly conde de Tovar, a confirmed monarchist who was the first to sign the petition. In the event, sentences of imprisonment and exile proved to be fairly lenient, though other tactics were more insidious and played upon latent social tensions. Government propaganda sought to persuade European Spaniards that their lives were at risk, while warning the pardos and lower classes, already alerted to the implications of juntista power, that the creoles would enslave them. The idea that the revolution was exclusive to the white elite and held nothing for the lower orders was an argument favoured by the Spanish authorities to stir up black resistance and slave rebellions on creole estates.12

  The regime survived attempts on 14 December 1809 and 2 April 1810 to depose the new captain–general of Venezuela and governor of Caracas, Vicente Emparan. Emparan was a mass of contradictions. A Spaniard of the Enlightenment, formerly an efficient governor of Cumaná, a partisan of France and Napoleon, yet on friendly terms with many of the creole juntistas, he was well enough liked by local interests for his liberal interpretation of the colonial trading laws. He arrived from Spain in May 1809 in the company of Fernando Toro, Bolívar’s close friend, and was soon at odds with opponents of the juntistas led by Miguel Joseph Sanz and his son–in–law Captain Francisco Antonio Rodríguez, who denounced him to the government of Spain for disloyalty. Toro was aware of the opposition towards his brother Francisco and friends, and recruited Bolívar to back him up. Armed with sabres, they marched across Caracas to Sanz’s house to confront Rodríguez and berate him.13 Emparan intervened to arrest Rodríguez and expel Sanz, and the matter subsided. But no one showed up well. Emparan appeared weak and partisan. Toro overreacted. And Bolívar behaved with an extravagant sense of solidarity, his judgement not yet fully mature. He disagreed with the politics of the Toros, but felt obliged to stand at the side of Fernando out of friendship, displaying in the process a certain public swagger. A curious incident that underlines the crossing of political and social lines in Caracas in a time of confusion.

  Events in Spain sharpened the crisis. The transfer of the central junta to Seville, its announced intention to enfranchise some deputies from America, and the treaty of alliance with Britain were all reported in April–May 1809 in the recently established Gaceta de Caracas, Venezuela’s first newspaper and government mouthpiece.14 But creoles soon found that no government in Spain was willing to grant equality of representation to Americans. And that was not the end of the Spanish nightmare. The central junta dissolved itself at Cadiz in February 1810 in favour of a regency. Why should Americans accept these manoeuvres and obey a so–called regency? The question was asked in all the Spanish colonies, and the answer led to revolutionary movements throughout the subcontinent. But Venezuela heard the news first and took action on 19 April 1810. The captain–general still refused to collaborate in the creation of an autonomous junta, so the radicals took matters into their own hands, orchestrated by a maverick canon of the cathedral, José Joaquín Cortés Madariaga, one of the many minor characters with walk–on parts in the story of Bolívar. While young activists mobilized a crowd in the main plaza of Caracas, the cabildo met independently of the Spanish authorities and was joined by creole revolutionaries representing various interests. On the balcony of the cabildo, Emparan was shouted down by the crowd and decided to concede the day. The cabildo became the nucleus of a new government of Venezuela, the Junta Conservadora de los Derechos de Fernando VII, which refused to recognize the regency in Spain.15 They deposed and deported the captain–general, the intendant, half the judges of the audiencia, and senior army officers, while their place in the tasks of government was assumed by the local ruling class, not by officers of the crown to which they were supposedly loyal. While the pace of revolutionary change quickened in Caracas, other provinces were joining the movement, and throughout Spanish America independent juntas made their appearance. Bolívar, however, remained aloof in his hacienda of Yare, absent from the events of 19 April, their preliminaries and their conclusion. Not for him adhesion to an absent king and spurious institutions in Spain, or to those in Venezuela who took these things seriously. Full independence was the only serious choice.

  The junta represented the creole ruling class, but this class did not speak with one voice. It was divided between conservatives who saw themselves as holding the fort for a captive king and the traditional order, autonomists who wanted home rule within the Spanish monarchy, and supporters of independence who demanded an absolute break with Spain.16 At first the conservatives were in the ascendancy, and it was they who forbade the entry of the veteran revolutionary Miranda, whom they saw as an invader, deist and anticlerical. Where did Bolívar stand now? The patriot government was at last in place and giving orders. It was not what he wanted, but he could not remain aloof indefinitely, without a voice and without influence. So he offered his services to the new government in a diplomatic capacity, which would enable him to express his patriotism without identifying closely with the new regime in Venezuela. The junta promoted him from captain to lieutenant colonel in the infantry militia, and in June 1810 appointed him on a mission to London to make contact with the British government and seek its support, a proposal previously canvassed by Miranda. Some disapproved of the appointment, for they resented Bolívar’s obvious aloofness from their movement and suspected his judgement, but as he undertook to pay the expenses of the mission and the treasury was empty, they could hardly refuse his offer. So they added Luis López Méndez, a graduate with administrative experience, as second commissioner and a restraining influence, and Andrés Bello as secretary to the mission; it was a group that mirrored the revolution, an aristocrat supported by middle–class professionals. Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane, commander of the British Windward Fleet, sent the naval vessel Wellington to transport the trio, who left La Guaira on 9 June and arrived in Portsmouth on 10 July. Waiting for them in London was Francisco de Miranda, a man with a prolific past, soldier, politician, intellectual, revolutionary, anglophile, an exile anxious to return to his embattled country.

  The London Mission

  The three great causes for which Miranda stood throughout his public life were independence, liberty and unity. In 1810 in a circular letter to Spanish Americans he wrote: ‘My house in this city is the fixed point for the independence and liberties of the Colombian continent, and it always will be.’17 From 1802 that house was 27 Grafton Street (now 58 Grafton Way) and it served not only as a home for Miranda, his companion Sarah Andrews, his two sons, Leander and Francisco, and his secretary Tomás Molini and his wife, but also as a resource centre for Latin American affairs. As such it housed his library, meeting rooms and the editorial offices of El Colombiano. And now, in the summer of 1810, it became the effective headquarters of the delegates from Venezuela. They had been warned by the Caracas junta to beware of Miranda who was suspect to some creoles as a French revolutionary extremist, but in the event they would have been nothing without Miranda. According to López Méndez, the delegation arrived in London lost and disorientated, and it was Miranda who rescued them from oblivion:

  The only person we could consult with confidence and who could give us the preliminary briefings we needed was our compatriot; he more than anyone else, with his extensive experience and travels, his long contacts with this government, and his well–known exertions for America, was in a position to give us wide and reliable advice. Even his enemies have never dared to deny his extraordinary knowledge, experience, and talents. He was extremely helpful to us and placed his knowledge, his books, his influence and his contacts completely at our disposal.18

  Andrés Bello was equally impressed: ‘That great exile personified in himself the Spanish American revolution. He was already sixty years old. But in spite of his age he seemed to be at the height of his youth and ideals, and he persisted in all the plans for promoting the independence of Spanish America, neve
r losing hope of seeing this desire fulfilled.’19 Bolívar, according to o’Leary, eager no doubt to put the best gloss on his hero’s relations with Miranda, ‘had long recognized in Miranda not only great military genius but also the veteran who had been the first to try and rescue Venezuela from oppression. He believed that … he had discovered in Miranda the man whose happy destiny reserved for him the glory of realizing the splendid project of emancipating South America.’ Bolívar urged Miranda to return to Venezuela to serve the cause ‘for which he had suffered so much’.20

  More immediately Miranda spent hours arranging meetings and interviews for the delegates and briefing them in appropriate arguments, introducing them to his friends and contacts, including Nicholas Vansittart, the duke of Cumberland, the duke of Gloucester and the recently arrived Blanco White, and taking them to the houses of Samuel Enderby, John Turnbull and William Wilberforce, where on one occasion they arrived when the family was at prayer and were kept waiting for some time.21 Miranda put Bolívar in touch with significant institutions such as Joseph Lancaster’s school in Borough Road, as well as taking the group to the tourist sights of London: Greenwich, Richmond, Kew Gardens and Hampton Court. On other occasions, from his rooms in Duke Street, Bolívar made his own way around London. He was thrown out of a brothel when one of the girls mistook him for a homosexual demanding services that were not on offer. When he tried to calm her with banknotes she threw them into the fire and raised the rest of the house: ‘Imagine the scene, I spoke no English and the prostitute no Spanish. She seemed to think that I was some Greek pederast and created a scandal that made me leave faster than I had entered.’22