Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826: Rewriting Conquest 9780748641611

Citation preview

Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826

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EDINBURGH STUDIES IN TRANSATLANTIC LITERATURES Series Editors: Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor Modern global culture makes it clear that literary study can no longer operate on nation-based or exceptionalist models. In practice, American literatures have always been understood and defined in relation to the literatures of Europe and Asia. The books in this series work within a broad comparative framework to question place-based identities and monocular visions, in historical contexts from the earliest European settlements to contemporary affairs, and across all literary genres. They explore the multiple ways in which ideas, texts, objects and bodies travel across spatial and temporal borders, generating powerful forms of contrast and affinity. The Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures series fosters new paradigms of exchange, circulation and transformation for transatlantic literary studies, expanding the critical and theoretical work of this rapidly developing field. Titles in the series include: Ethnicity and Cultural Authority: From Arnold to Du Bois Daniel G. Williams Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture Michèle Mendelssohn American Modernism’s Expatriate Scene: The Labour of Translation Daniel Katz The Dandy in Irish and American Southern Fiction: Aristocratic Drag Ellen Crowell Philanthropy in British and American Fiction: Dickens, Hawthorne, Eliot, and Howells Frank Christianson Transatlantic Women’s Literature Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman: A Transatlantic Perspective Günter Leypoldt Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826: Rewriting Conquest Rebecca Cole Heinowitz

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Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 Rewriting Conquest

◆ ◆ ◆

Rebecca Cole Heinowitz

EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS

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© Rebecca Cole Heinowitz, 2010 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 11/13 Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 3868 0 (hardback) The right of Rebecca Cole Heinowitz to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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CONTENTS

List of Figures

vii

Acknowledgements

viii

Introduction: ‘An Empire in Men’s Hearts:’ The Liberal Conquest of Spanish America 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

1

Naturalizing Empire: Helen Maria Williams’s Peru and the British Ascendancy in Spanish America

34

Creole Patriotism and the Discourse of Revolutionary Loyalism, 1792–9

70

The Allure of the Same: Robert Southey’s Welsh Indians and the Rhetoric of Good Colonialism

93

‘Thy World, Columbus, shall be free:’ Visions of Spanish America during the Peninsular War

132

Lord Byron’s ‘South American Project:’ Aristocratic Radicalism and the Question of Venezuelan Settlement

158

The Spanish American Bubble and Britain’s Crisis of Informal Empire, 1822–6

183

Bibliography

218

Index

237

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LIST OF FIGURES

Cover image: Agostino Aglio, interior of the exhibition of ‘Ancient Mexico.’ Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. Figure 1 Isidor Stanislas Helman, after Jean Michel Moreau le jeune. ‘Two Incas, man and woman, standing at an old man’s [Bartolomé de las Casas’s] bedside; Spanish man seated at left.’ Jean-François Marmontel, Les Incas, ou la destruction de l’Empire du Pérou (Paris: Lacombe, 1777). Courtesy of the British Museum.

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Figure 2 John Bell, The Poets of Great Britain complete from Chaucer to Churchill (London: Printed for the author, 1777). ‘Britannia seated on rocks, storm clouds behind, shield resting at left; in circular frame with lion’s head and garland above.’ Courtesy of the British Museum.

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Figure 3 ‘Pizzaro [sic] a New Play or the Drury-Lane Masquerade’ (1799). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

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Figure 4 Title page. Robert Southey, Madoc (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1805).

111

Figure 5 R. Cruickshank, ‘The Bubble Burst – or 203 the Ghost of an old Act of Parliament’ (1825). Courtesy of the British Museum.

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Acknowledgements

My first and deepest thanks are to Israeli Reichman, for his generosity, intelligence, creativity – and for his love. I am also immensely grateful to my parents, Judith and Mark Green, Jack Heinowitz, and Ellen Eichler. This book would have been impossible without their understanding and support. The insight and wisdom of Nancy Armstrong, Alan Bewell, Timothy Fulford, and William Keach were invaluable in the early stages of this book. During the later stages, the enlivening critical responses of Robert Aguirre, Nicole Caso, Deirdre d’Albertis, and Geoff Sanborn were indispensable. Thank you also to my research assistant, Nese Senol, for her curiosity and commitment. I am grateful to the organizers of and participants in several productive panels on Anglo-Hispanic Romanticism at the annual conferences of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism: Joselyn Almeida, Jessica Damián, Lisa Nevarez, Charles Rzepka, Juan Sánchez, and Maria Soledad Caballero. Thank you to Jeffrey Cox, Lance Newman, Joel Pace, Jeffrey Robinson, Ivy Schweitzer, Michael Scrivener, and Dan White for their engagement with this project, their warmth, and their professional advice. Thank you to Daniel O’Quinn, Gabriel Paquette, and Judith Thompson for generously sharing their research with me. I owe a debt of gratitude to the people who have provided moral and intellectual sustenance during the gestation of this book. I thank particularly Susanna Bohme, Pophana Brandes, Miles Champion, Jack Collom, Matthew Everett, Carla Harryman, Robert Kelly, Ann Lauterbach, Rachel Levitsky, Eva Marer, Michael McGregor, Shiba

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Acknowledgements

[ ix

Nemat-Nasser, Jeremy Prynne, José María Sanguino Gonzáles, Rachel Szekely, Éric Trudel, Erik Ulman, Marina van Zuylen, Nicholas Veroli, Lisa Voigt, Jacqueline Waters, Barrett Watten, and Eric Zimmerman. Portions of this work were presented before helpful audiences at the annual meetings of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism and the American Comparative Literature Society, the Atlantic Worlds Seminar at New York University, and the 2004 conference at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, Romanticism, History, Historicism. For funds to conduct research, reproduce images, and defray permission costs, I am grateful to have received a Bard Research Council Grant. For permission to reproduce the images in this book, I thank the John Carter Brown Library, the British Museum, the Library of Congress, and Union College. I am grateful to the staff of the libraries in which research for this project was carried out: the British Library, the Brown University Library, the Columbia University Library, the Huntington Library, the John Carter Brown Library, and the New York Public Library. I owe special thanks to the staff of the Bard College Library, particularly the Inter-Library Loan Office, for their tireless work. An earlier version of Chapter 3 appeared in ‘“Sullen Fires across the Atlantic:” Essays in British and American Romanticism,’ a special issue of the Romantic Circles Praxis Series edited by Lance Newman and Joel Pace (November 2006). Parts of Chapters 2 and 4 appeared in European Romantic Review 17:2 (April 2006). An earlier version of Chapter 6 is forthcoming in the collection, Romanticism and the Anglo-Hispanic Imaginary, edited by Joselyn Almeida (Rodopi). All are reprinted by permission of the publishers.

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introduction

‘AN EMPIRE IN MEN’S HEARTS:’ THE LIBERAL CONQUEST OF SPANISH AMERICA

I. Redefining Empire Robert Southey did not exaggerate when he described the England of his day as ‘South American mad.’1 From the loss of Britain’s North American colonies to the first Spanish American debt crisis and the ensuing London stock market crash of 1825–6, a deep fascination with Spanish America pervaded all aspects of British society. As Spain’s hold on its colonies weakened under the weight of domestic pressures and ultramarine revolts, British merchants, miners, scientists, and traders rushed to exploit the mineral wealth and raw materials of Spanish America. Thousands of British soldiers enlisted to aid the colonial independence movements. Travelers flooded the British press with vivid accounts of everything from the famed silver mines of Potosí to the medicinal ‘Jesuits Bark’ of Peru, the social customs of Chile, the fatal earthquakes of Caracas, and the cultivation of logwood on the Mosquito Coast and cochineal in New Spain. The figure of Spanish America displayed itself in poems, plays, operas, cabinets of curiosity, political tracts, news reportage, reviews, stock market quotations, and even in the fashionable ladies’ magazines that announced the arrival in London of the ‘Bolivar hat.’ Creole patriots gathered in England to solicit aid for their revolutions, and ministers debated tactics for liberating both the peoples and the untapped wealth of Spain’s colonies.2 The cause of Spanish American independence bridged political gaps, galvanizing ‘intellectual alliances between revolutionaries and reactionaries, mercantilists and proponents of free trade, and champions of colonial expansion

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together with their detractors.’3 Though rhetorically, demographically, and ideologically wide-ranging, however, one burning question ran through all contemporary attention to Spanish America, namely the question of empire.4 In recent decades it has become something of a commonplace that ‘Romanticism cannot be understood properly without reference to modern imperialism.’5 Eschewing the traditional portrait of the Romantic writer as a ‘bohemian intellectual opposing society,’ critics have attempted to resist ‘an uncritical absorption in Romanticism’s own self-representations’ by exploring the ways in which British Romantic ideology was shaped by its engagement with empire.6 To be sure, as Tim Fulford and Peter Kitson have pointed out, ‘the Romantic period is a watershed in colonial history.’7 The period was profoundly marked by the loss of Britain’s North American colonies, the impeachment of the Governor of Bengal, Warren Hastings, slave revolts in the West Indies, colonial expansion in Africa and the Mediterranean, the transportation of convicts to Australia, the aggressive development of Canada, and colonial turmoil in India and England’s Celtic periphery. These dramatic changes within the British Empire exerted an inescapable influence on metropolitan subjects. As Mary Louise Pratt reminds us, ‘Europe was constructed from the outside in as much as from the inside out,’ through a process of ‘transculturation from the colonies to the metropolis.’8 Frantz Fanon makes this claim yet more pointedly in his memorable comment that ‘Europe is literally the creation of the Third World.’9 It is in this light that Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh have so convincingly argued for a reading of British Romanticism ‘as a response to the collective experience, ideological requirements, and deforming effects of imperialism.’10 While this concentration on the formal British Empire has produced an invaluably rich body of scholarship,11 it has tended to neglect the important complex of exchanges taking place between Britain and what historians have called its burgeoning ‘informal empire’12 in Spanish America.13 Because – with the exception of Honduras and Guiana – Britain never successfully established a formal empire in Spanish America,14 and because the relationship between the discourses of direct and indirect rule remained unsettled with regard to Spanish America throughout the Romantic period, the texts examined in this book provide a window onto anxieties, ambivalences, and contradictions that both resist and help to redefine the imperial rhetoric associated with Britain’s established dominions in

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North America, India, the West Indies, and Africa.15 By revealing the untold story of Romantic-era Britain’s literary and political embroilment with Spanish America, we can begin to move beyond the critical impasse in which Romantic writers appear as either radical defenders of universal liberty or as Victorian imperialists avant la lettre. Britain’s most enduring policy with regard to Spanish America was based on investment and commerce. As such, Spanish America (and Latin America, more broadly) has become ‘the crucial regional test of theories of informal imperialism.’16 It must not be forgotten, however, that Britain repeatedly plotted and actually attempted (albeit unsuccessfully) to commandeer Spanish American territory in Mexico, Chile, Carthagena, the Mosquito Coast, La Plata, Venezuela, Montevideo, and other regions throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Such events complicate any clear-cut distinction between an ‘economic imperialism’ characterized by commercial expansionism and free trade, and the ‘formal’ hegemony exercised by territorial occupation.17 Indeed, Britain’s commercial ascendancy in Spanish America would have been unthinkable were it not for strategic colonial strongholds in the Caribbean islands. In 1800, Secretary of War Henry Dundas wrote to this effect that Britain’s ‘permanent interests’ were ‘the acquisition of markets in South America,’ that these interests ‘would be best secured not by domination . . . but by helping the Spanish colonies to independence,’ and that, in order to pursue this lofty goal, it would be necessary for Britain to ‘acquire a few bases for commercial penetration.’18 Lord Castlereagh agreed, urging Britain to save itself ‘from the hopeless task of conquering’ Spanish America by imposing ‘the military occupancy of an armed post’ that would safeguard its commercial interests (Lynch, ‘British,’ 22). As such statements make clear, Romantic-era Britain’s Spanish American policy heavily depended on what Gallagher and Robinson refer to as the ‘fundamental continuity’ and ‘underlying unity’ between formal and informal imperialism.19 The British government’s recognition of this ‘underlying unity’ derived theoretical support from the writings of economic thinkers such as Adam Smith and Henry Brougham. In The Wealth of Nations (1776), Smith had argued that while monopoly trade was ‘a dead weight’ that ‘cramps . . . the enjoyments and the industry’ of both colony and metropole, Europe had nevertheless derived significant industrial and commercial ‘advantages . . . from the discovery and colonization of America.’20 In other words, the problem was

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not with colonialism per se, but rather with ‘exclusive trade’ (Smith, Wealth, II. iv. 7. 108). In his Colonial Policy of European Nations (1803), Brougham went further, contending that colonies and their attendant monopoly trade were in fact a necessity if England were to establish itself as a ‘Free Trade Empire.’21 Despite the apparently contradictory nature of his terms, Brougham’s synthesis of mercantilism and free trade was to inform British debates on imperialism well into the nineteenth century. But if Romantic-era Britain’s position on Spanish America reflected the continuity between formal and informal imperial strategies, it also exposed the persistent tensions that the GallagherRobinson thesis elides.22 From 1805 to 1806, when the British government was flooded with Spanish American projects, William Windham at the War Office sought to ‘acquire colonial conquests’ while Lord Auckland at the Board of Trade approved of annexation only ‘as a means of satisfying merchant pressure for new markets’ (Lynch, ‘British,’ 19). When Sir Home Popham seized Buenos Aires in 1806, The Times announced in no uncertain terms, ‘Buenos Aires at this moment forms part of the British Empire.’23 After news of the mission’s ignominious failure reached England in early 1807, however, Lord Grenville denied having authorized the attack and Lord Castlereagh speedily drafted a memorandum definitively rejecting ‘any prospect of territorial acquisition, any dream of exclusive British political influence, or any intention to intervene further in the political condition of the Spanish Colonies’ (Platt, 312). In 1822, when George Canning replaced Castlereagh, he held firm to his predecessor’s policy of acting as ‘auxiliaries and protectors’ in Spanish America, yet on the eve of Britain’s formal recognition of the independent republics in 1824, he equivocally announced, ‘Spanish America is free, and if we do not mismanage our affairs sadly, she is English.’24 While ministers might debate the comparative merits of territorial occupation versus free trade, these three words (‘she is English’) reveal the consistent understanding that commercial preeminence in Spanish America was, in the last analysis, tantamount to possession. II. Historicizing Spanish America As eighteenth-century British readers increasingly sought out information about Spanish America, they turned primarily to two works, the Abbé Raynal’s multi-volume Histoire philosophique et politique

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des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les Deux Indes (1770–80) and William Robertson’s History of America (1777). In addition to providing historically comprehensive treatments of the Spanish colonies, both works offered readers an appealingly integrative vision of traditional colonialism and enlightened commerce. Both histories proved an instant success. Raynal’s Histoire went through no fewer than eighteen English editions (the first of which sold out in three weeks) and appeared, like Robertson’s History, in numerous partial editions, abridgements, and excerpts.25 Together, these two works were to become seminal in shaping Romantic-era Britain’s understanding of its relationship with the Spanish colonies. And as we shall see, both the rhetorical power and the critical limitations of Raynal’s and Robertson’s claims were to lay the foundation for two generations of literary adaptations and contestations. As both Raynal’s and Robertson’s analyses of the decline of the Spanish empire demonstrate, the target of their censure was not colonialism itself, but rather Spain’s imperial economy. Spain’s ‘idea of monopolising the trade with America, and debarring her subjects there from any communication with foreigners’ prevented ‘that competition which preserves commodities at their natural price’ and multiplied ‘useless expenses’ and ‘formalities of every kind.’26 Worse yet, both authors argued, was Spain’s irrational obsession with the mining of precious metals and its corresponding neglect of more certain means of creating national prosperity, namely agriculture and industry.27 These flawed economic foundations, they continued, accounted directly for the abuses of the indigenous population that had blackened the career of the Spanish in America. Because, Robertson laments, ‘the avarice of the Spaniards was too rapacious and impatient to try any method of acquiring wealth but that of searching for gold . . . The Indians were driven in crowds to the mountains, and compelled to work in the mines by masters who imposed their tasks without mercy or discretion’ (W. Robertson, I. 2. 137). ‘If the Spanish had understood their true interest,’ Raynal maintains, ‘they would . . . have been content with establishing an equitable intercourse with the Indians, which would have a settled mutual dependence, and reciprocal profits between the two nations’ (Raynal, IV. 8. 309). The Spanish would not have enslaved the Native Americans because they would have recognized ‘the true spirit’ of commerce, namely that ‘all nations should consider themselves as one great society, whose members all have an equal right to partake of the conveniences of the rest’ (III. 5. 191). But Raynal’s claim that

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respect for equal rights would have brought about nothing less than a ‘[u]niversal society’ is somewhat misleading (III. 5. 189). While such assertions may seem to suggest that the ‘true interests’ of an empire are strictly egalitarian, they lead seamlessly to the conclusion that were such ‘equitable intercourse’ established, ‘Spain would equally have been mistress of Mexico and Peru; because any nation that cultivates the arts, and does not communicate the method by which it carries them on, will always have an evident superiority over those to whom it sells it’s [sic] manufactures’ (IV. 8. 309). In his conflation of ‘equitable commerce’ with uneven development, Raynal suggests that the end result of Spain’s ‘peaceable traffic’ and ‘lasting union’ with America would in fact have been one of imperial control (IV. 8. 309).28 It is thus through the domination of the unindustrious by the industrious that the world becomes ‘one single family’ (VIII. 19. 194).29 If illiberal economy is the source of Spain’s decadence, Raynal and Robertson explain, then enlightened commercial management is the means of reforming and revitalizing the empire. Both authors are eager to praise contemporary Bourbon Spain for having ‘discovered the destructive tendency of those narrow maxims, which, by cramping commerce in all its operations, have so long retarded its progress,’ and for beginning to implement ‘sentiments more liberal and enlarged’ (W. Robertson, II. 8. 251–2).30 Because Bourbon reforms were both influenced by the British commercial system and favorable to Britain’s trade with the Spanish colonies, their celebration by Robertson and Raynal was hardly grounds for dispute. Yet Robertson’s and Raynal’s vindications of Spanish imperialism went well beyond a comfortable approval of Bourbon reforms. ‘I am satisfied,’ Robertson writes, ‘that upon a more minute scrutiny into [Spain’s] early operations in the New World, however reprehensible the actions of individuals may appear, the conduct of the nation will be placed in a more favourable light’ (I. ix).31 Similarly, Raynal concedes that while Spain was indeed guilty of ‘a restless tyranny, and an insatiable avarice,’ its ‘cruelties were less than the nations have reason to suppose, from the accounts given by the historians of [its] ravages.’ As such, Raynal declares to the Spanish nation, ‘it is I, whom you look upon as the detractor of your character, who, while I accuse you of ignorance and imposture, become, as much as possible, your apologist’ (Raynal, III. 6. 314).32 It was one thing to commend the commercial improvements of a struggling empire, but such a wide-reaching exoneration of the

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Spanish nation flew in the face of two centuries of the Black Legend, that nearly ubiquitous notion that defined Spanish colonialism – by contrast with that of England or France – as fanatical, tyrannical, and grievously inhumane.33 Knowing that his exculpations of the Spanish might be construed as offensively fulsome, Raynal takes care to assure his readers, ‘It has not been my intention to be the panegyrist of the conquerors of the other hemisphere. I have not suffered my judgments to be so far misled by the brilliance of their successes, as to be blind to their crimes and acts of injustice’ (IV. 7. 1). Robertson would have done well to qualify his leniency toward Spain in a similar fashion. For although the History won the admiration of luminaries such as Edward Gibbon and Edmund Burke,34 its alleged ‘disposition to palliate or to veil the enormities of the Spaniards, in their American conquests’ met with considerable censure in the British press.35 By reinstating Spain among the lists of ‘good’ imperial powers, Robertson and Raynal challenged Britain’s time-honored strategy of ensuring its own venerability by casting Spain as the repository of all colonial evils. But if these works discomfited readers by accommodating a possible likeness between Britain and its ancient imperial rival, they also contained the germ of what would become Romantic-era Britain’s principle defense against the threat of Spanish resemblance – the counter-assertion of an identity between Britain and the American victims of Spanish oppression. Of course, neither Robertson nor Raynal go so far as to make this claim directly. Their interest lies merely in detecting similarities between Western Europe and pre-Columbian America. Yet Robertson’s and Raynal’s portrayals of the Aztecs and the Incas are of inestimable importance because they created the foundations upon which Romantic-era poets, playwrights, and propagandists would construct a vision of Britain’s kinship with the indigenous populations of Spanish America. And it was this putative kinship that would be marshaled to legitimate Britain’s imperial intervention in the Spanish colonies as a mission of rightful recovery rather than of violent conquest. Robertson and Raynal praise Aztec Mexico and Inca Peru, by contrast with their less developed neighbors, as ‘polished states,’ ruled over by ‘sovereigns,’ an ‘empire of laws,’ and ‘the authority of religion,’ and structured according to a system of social ranks roughly equivalent to those found in early modern Europe (W. Robertson, II. 7. 144). While both peoples stand out for their particular cultural achievements, however, Robertson and Raynal reserve

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their greatest admiration for the Incas, whose rituals were not stained by the ‘detestable’ custom of ‘human sacrifice’ (II. 7. 171). Raynal even suggests that the ancient Incas were ‘the descendents of certain navigators of Europe,’ adducing the claim that ‘the face of the Incas was whiter than that of the natives of the country, and that several of the royal family had beards’ (Raynal, IV. 7. 24). Continuing the traditions of their European antecedents, these royal ‘legislators’ established an advanced system of civic law that ‘maintained among the Peruvians concord, benevolence, patriotism, and . . . public spirit’ (IV. 7. 27). If these ‘sublime and amiable virtues’ had hitherto been concealed from Europe, Raynal avers, it was only because the ‘ferocious disposition’ of their Spanish conquerors had concealed ‘from them the image of an organisation similar to their own’ (IV. 7. 23; IV. 8. 310). It is in Robertson’s account, however, that one catches a glimpse of the role the Incas would play as British foils in the decades to come. ‘In Peru,’ he writes, ‘agriculture, the art of primary necessity in social life, was more extensive, and carried on with greater skill than in any part of America’ (W. Robertson, II. 7. 179). A network of ‘great roads’ connected the principle cities of Cuzco and Quito while light Peruvian vessels traversed the region’s waterways, sailing ‘nimbly before the wind’ (II. 7. 181, 183). Labor, territory, and provisions were shared equally, with the result that ‘[e]ach individual felt his connexion with those around him.’ ‘A state thus constituted,’ Robertson effused, ‘may be considered as one great family, in which the union of the members was so complete . . . as to . . . bind man to man in closer intercourse than subsisted under any form of society established in America’ (II. 7. 178). And if the Peruvians resembled Britain’s flattering self-representations as a united nation of navigational and agricultural advances, the Incas’ policy of benevolent conquest, namely ‘to reclaim and civilize the vanquished, and to diffuse the knowledge of their own institutions and arts,’ evoked for British readers an early example of their own claims to enlightened imperialism (II. 7. 177). Such statements of recognition and admiration, however, are only adumbrations of what was to come. For their purposes, neither Robertson nor Raynal found it useful to praise the Incas in unqualified terms. Robertson, for instance, roundly mocks his contemporaries’ desire to locate in America the progeny of European civilization. ‘There is hardly any nation,’ he complains, ‘to which some antiquary, in the extravagance of conjecture, has not ascribed

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the honour of peopling America’ (I. 4. 216). After disparaging these ‘frivolous’ claims, he goes on to state that, while the ‘improvement’ found in Peru is ‘conspicuous,’ this is only so in comparison with ‘the inferiority’ of the rest of America and, as such, the Incas are not rightly ‘entitled to rank with those nations which merit the name of civilized’ (I. 4. 217; II. 7. 144). Even while Raynal would seem to make greater allowances for the European derivation of the Incas, directly after elaborating these conjectures, he calls them ‘improbable’ and asserts that, even were they accurate, the passage of centuries would likely have abolished any trace of European knowledge, arts, and characteristics among the Peruvians (Raynal, IV. 7. 24). Moreover, while the seeds of Euro-American identification exist in Robertson’s and Raynal’s accounts of the Mexican and Peruvian civilizations, they impart no agency to contemporary American indigenes. Raynal assumes as a foregone conclusion that the golden age of the Inca Empire will never return to Peru and wishes only ‘that this beautiful aera may be renewed, sooner or later, in some [other] quarter of the globe’ (IV. 7. 34). Likewise, the legacy of the ancient Aztecs will only be brought to light ‘[w]hen some [English or French] philosophers shall have been allowed to penetrate into Mexico, to search for, and to decypher the ruins of their history’ (III. 6. 313). Robertson concurs that extant Aztec relics are of no use to presentday Mexicans and can only serve to afford the curious European with ‘interesting objects of attention’ (W. Robertson, II. 7. 159). For both writers, the Aztecs and Incas remain trapped in a historical past from which they cannot emerge to join in the ‘universal peace’ promised by European enlightenment (Raynal, VIII. 19. 216). In a striking gesture of what Johannes Fabian has called ‘the denial of coevalness,’ Raynal and Robertson insist that any similarities between early Europe and pre-conquest Mexico and Peru have now been overwritten by the inevitable march of progress.36 III. Romancing Spanish America While Robertson and Raynal were willing to dismiss the cultural parallels they uncovered between Europe and the natives of Spanish America, the British Romantic-era writers who relied on their histories were not. Fortunately, these authors had a more congenial source on which to draw, Jean-François Marmontel’s semi-historical romance Les Incas, ou la destruction de l’empire du Pérou (1777). In terms

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of historical information, Les Incas added little or nothing that was not already known. Its great advantage to British writers lay in the fact of its generic multiplicity. Because Les Incas was, as Marmontel claimed, at once a ‘Romance’ and a ‘History,’ a combination of both ‘truth’ and ‘fiction,’ it possessed much broader imaginative latitude than the histories of Robertson and Raynal.37 It was thus Marmontel who enabled later British writers to refashion the story of Spanish America’s pre-conquest peoples to suit their aesthetic purposes. And perhaps even more importantly, it was Marmontel who established the Spanish conquest as a narrative resource that could be used to infuse literature with a sense of moral and political urgency.38 Though now little-read, Les Incas took eighteenth-century England by storm, inspiring works such as Helen Maria William’s long poem, Peru (1784), John Thelwall’s unproduced drama, The Incas; or, The Peruvian Virgin (1792), and Samuel Morton’s popular play, Columbus; or, a World Discovered (1792). The Critical Review praised Marmontel for awakening ‘the most generous feelings of the heart’ and ‘the noblest sentiments of virtue, with the inviolable sanctity of moral obligation.’39 The Monthly Review remarked on the novel’s ‘evident marks of superior genius and original invention’ and its ‘variety of just and manly sentiments,’ proclaiming that Les Incas could not fail to obtain ‘the warmest applause from every true lover of liberty and friend of mankind.’40 After its initial success, Les Incas was adapted for the stage by the fashionable German dramatist August von Kotzebue as Die Sonnenjungfrau [The Virgin of the Sun] (1791) and Die Spanier in Peru, oder: Rolla’s Tod [The Spaniards in Peru, or: the Death of Rolla] (1796).41 These works, in turn, were widely translated by writers from Matthew Lewis to Richard Brinsley Sheridan, bringing about a resurgence of interest in Les Incas at the end of the century.42 In part, the sensational impact of Les Incas on British readers and writers was predetermined by eighteenth-century Britain’s passion for sentimental literature and by Marmontel’s famously critical attitude toward the French government. Even more instrumental in the novel’s popularity among English readers, however, was the timeliness of its glorified vision of Euro-American collaboration. Combining Raynal’s suggestion of the Incas’ European roots with his argument for the compatibility of colonialism and liberal trade, Marmontel re-imagined the conquest of Peru, not as a scene of exploitation and injustice, but rather as a consensual process that redounded to the benefit of both parties. The English translation of

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Les Incas was issued immediately after the novel’s initial publication, and its vision of harmonious colonial contact spoke eloquently to British anxieties. Only a year before, Britain’s North American colonies had issued their Declaration of Independence, rejecting British rule and threatening the mother country with the loss of an essential trading partner. In a desperate effort to ensure the continuance of a preferential transatlantic trade, Britain turned its eyes increasingly to Spanish America. Perhaps there, Les Incas suggested to its readers across the channel, Britain might establish a more humane and more lucrative empire, an empire legitimized by the Raynalian tenets of ‘equitable intercourse’ and naturalized by the mythical kinship of the European and the Inca (Raynal, IV. 8. 309).43 In this way, Les Incas captured Britain’s imperial imagination at a particularly vulnerable moment and provided a master-text that would become a touchstone for literary treatments of Spanish America in the decades to come. Marmontel begins his recuperation of conquest by rewriting the character of Pizarro. Rather than define the infamous conqueror, as Robertson does, as ‘a bastard’ gifted primarily with ‘the dissimulation of a politician,’ Marmontel presents Pizarro as a principled follower of Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, the ‘Guardian Angel of the New World’ (W. Robertson, II. 6. 60; Marmontel, II. 43. 176).44 Like las Casas, Pizarro aspires to conquer America ‘by the ascendancy of virtue’ rather than by force of arms (Marmontel, II. 43. 176). He impugns Columbus and Cortés as ‘illustrious plunderers’ and vows to ‘wash off the stain they have cast on our country’ by refusing to ‘disgrace’ himself ‘with the low concern of amassing [gold]’ (II. 45. 187–8). Anachronistically imbued with the enlightened doctrines of Raynal, Pizarro offers the Inca king Ataliba a ‘treaty of peace and mutual commerce,’ promising, in exchange for gold, to provide the Peruvians with ‘a thousand new discoveries to supply [their] wants, and augment [their] pleasures’ and to instruct them in the cultural advances of Europe (II. 49. 234). But although his intentions are apparently good, Marmontel’s Pizarro is weak. While he begins by expounding upon the excellence of conquest by ‘justice’ and ‘exertions of goodness,’ he ends by ingloriously succumbing to his men’s ‘wish for gold,’ promising that they will ‘return burdened with the object of [their] wish’ (I. 11. 106; II. 45. 187–9). Where Pizarro fails to erect ‘the empire of virtue’ that would prove the compatibility of colonialism and liberal commerce, his follower Alonzo succeeds (II. 45. 188). Embracing the ‘upright and benevolent manners’ by which the Incas ‘have won [his] heart,’ Alonzo resolves:

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Figure 1 Isidor Stanislas Helman, after Jean Michel Moreau le jeune. ‘Two Incas, man and woman, standing at an old man’s [Bartolomé de las Casas’s] bedside; Spanish man seated at left.’ Jean-François Marmontel, Les Incas, ou la destruction de l'Empire du Pérou (Paris: Lacombe, 1777). Courtesy of the British Museum.

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‘No, I can never abandon you to destruction . . . never can it be said that I betray my country, by opposing the ruffians who dishonour her, and by endeavoring to establish her [sic] an empire in men’s hearts.’ But if Alonzo is ‘attached’ to the Peruvians, as he insists, ‘by an invincible charm,’ he is also committed to conquering them – albeit by means of their own ‘tender and unaffected marks of friendship’ (I. 19. 189–90). As the benevolent colonialist admonishes Pizarro, ‘the surest means of captivating these people, are justice and beneficence’ (I. 19. 191). The natives have ‘won’ his ‘heart,’ and Alonzo will reciprocate by establishing an ‘empire’ in theirs. Like Pizarro, Alonzo initiates his conquest of the Peruvians by ‘informing their reason’ and ‘giv[ing] them a notion of [European] customs and manners, of the progress made by [Europe] in knowledge, [and] of the wonders effected by [European] arts’ (I. 19. 190–1). And like Pizarro, Alonzo justifies his pretensions to rule according to the Inca precedent of bringing to the conquered ‘a system of . . . arts, and laws, which will render [them] better and more happy,’ winning their loyalty ‘not by arms, but by reason’ (II. 49. 233; II. 34. 76–7). More importantly, however, Alonzo’s gentle wisdom is inseparable from his economic liberalism. As he explains to the Peruvians, the Spaniards will pour into Europe the treasures of America, which will resemble pitch thrown into a burning furnace: lust, irritated by riches and luxury, will be amazed to behold indigence continually recurring on its increasing wants; gold, in accumulating, will soon sink in value; the price of labour increasing, will follow the progress of riches; hoarded by the avaricious they will become less a blessing than scarcity itself, and ye, unhappy people, and your posterity, will have perished in those mines, exhausted by your labours, without having augmented the riches of Europe. Alas! perhaps ye will have even encreased its misery with its wants. (II. 31. 58–9)

Throughout Les Incas, Marmontel equates monopoly trade with human degradation, and liberal commerce with civilization and moral virtue. Thus, when the Peruvians hail Alonzo as the continuator of Inca values and declare their willing submission to his rule, they demonstrate not only their appreciation of his kindness and his reason, but also their affinity with his commercial values. It is here that Marmontel deviates most significantly from his historical sources. Both Raynal and Robertson deny that the Incas

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possessed an understanding of commercial principles.45 Marmontel, by contrast, credits the Peruvians with an innate grasp of nature as a system of reciprocal exchange. According to their creation myth, the sun awoke the elements with [its] vivifying and genial warmth; the air became fluid and insinuating, the waters moist and yielding, the earth animated and fruitful . . . The elements . . . moved into alliance. The fire slid into the bosom of the waters: the waters parting into vapour, flew aloft, and spread themselves through the air: from the air, the earth received into her womb the precious rudiments of fertility: then began she to bring forth the unceasing fruits of that ever-renewing love, first kindled by thy rays. (I. 1. 6)

Replace the sun’s rays with the light of liberal trade and you have Raynal’s promise that ‘Clouds will be dispelled in all parts; a serene sky will shine over the face of the globe, and nature will resume the reins of the world’ (Raynal, VIII. 19. 215–16). Indeed, the cycle by which ‘waters [part] into vapour’ and the earth brings forth ‘unceasing fruits’ is precisely that of ‘[c]ommerce, which naturally arises from agriculture, returns to it’s [sic] bent, and by it’s [sic] circulation.’ ‘Thus it is,’ Raynal explains, ‘that the rivers return to the sea, which has produced them, by the exhalation of it’s [sic] waters into vapours, and by the fall of those vapours into waters’ (VIII. 19. 216). As these parallels suggest, the Incas’ reverence for the sun is more systematically elaborated than ‘primitive’ nature worship. For the Incas ‘imitate’ the sun when they cultivate the earth and ‘pay . . . tribute’ to the people with its ‘treasures,’ binding the natural world and society into ‘one single family,’ which is the empire (Marmontel, I. 3. 20; Raynal, VIII. 19. 194). By fusing natural economy with civic responsibility, Marmontel’s Incas provide an indigenous model of the paradise to be regained when Europe embraces, as Raynal insists it will, ‘an enlightened system of oeconomy’ and at last ‘restore[s] that happy fraternity which constituted the delight of the first ages’ (Raynal, VIII. 19. 213–14). As Raynal argues, the monopolistic ‘frenzy of impositions and prohibitions’ has caused Europe to attempt an unnatural self-sufficiency, cultivating products ‘which it’s [sic] soil and it’s [sic] climate rejected’ (VIII. 19. 213). Only when ‘the people, in whatever country fate may have placed them’ can ‘communicate as freely with each other, as the inhabitants of . . . the same empire . . . free from duties, formalities, or predilections,’ when ‘the earth can satisfy it’s [sic] wants in a more pleasant way, and at a cheaper rate,’

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then will the world ‘turn all it’s [sic] activity to the objects for which nature had destined it’ (VIII. 19. 213). Yet despite the ways in which the vision of commerce as natural exchange found in Les Incas mirrors that found in the Histoire, Marmontel’s insistence on the identity between the native Inca and the benevolent, liberal European marks a significant alteration to Raynal’s proposal of an ‘equitable intercourse’ with America based on the ‘evident superiority’ of Europe (IV. 8. 309). Marmontel suggests, rather, that the Incas’ affective, intellectual, and political propinquity with enlightened Europe offered a more legitimate and more ethical basis for imperialism. In so doing, he also directly challenges Robertson and Raynal’s ‘denial of coevalness’ by asserting that the modern principles of liberal commerce were in fact intrinsic to the Peruvians and were those on which they unavailingly wished to establish their relationship with Spain. Such historical revisionism provided subsequent writers with a language in which to imagine a British ascendancy in the Spanish colonies as justified by moral and cultural kinship with the indigenous population. In addition, it invited Britons to conceive of themselves as enlightened liberators, rescuing their rightful allies from the economic oppression of Spain. But while these claims added up to a powerful refutation of Spain’s imperial title to America, they were inextricable from a fundamentally proprietary reconstruction of the native Spanish Americans as British. As a result, the works examined in the following chapters shift uncomfortably between assertions of revolutionary solidarity and gestures of cultural appropriation, and between fantasies of intercultural intimacy and schemes of colonial domination. It is the purpose of this study to track the ways in which these rhetorical, imaginative, and ideological tensions collide and coalesce to produce Romantic-era Britain’s literary love affair with Spanish America. IV. The Chapters Chapter 1, ‘Naturalizing Empire: Helen Maria Williams’s Peru and the British Ascendancy in Spanish America,’ analyzes the epic romance, Peru (1784), in which Williams endorses the 1780–2 Peruvian revolt led by Túpac Amaru II, against the historical backdrop of Britain’s increasing economic and political involvement with Spanish America. This history reveals the persistence of a problematic slippage between Britain’s commercial and colonialist interests

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in the Spanish colonies and suggests that a proprietary remainder infuses even the most liberal schemes to foment colonial revolution through trade. Given the specter of entitlement that shadowed British endorsements of the liberating and improving effects of free trade, I examine the implications of Williams’s most singular departure from her sources in Raynal, Robertson, and Marmontel, namely the omission from her poem of any celebration of commerce. Chapter 1 proposes that Williams’s engagement with the patriotic and sentimental poetry of the eighteenth century fostered a mistrust of commerce as a humanizing means of exchange and disposed her to understand outright colonialism as at once more natural and more ethical than free trade. Considering Williams’s significant indebtedness to the poetry of James Thomson, which stressed the Briton’s natural sincerity and the justice of Britain’s ‘empire of the deep,’ I show how Williams meticulously transposes standard eighteenthcentury British patriotic rhetoric onto the Inca empire.46 Comparing Williams’s poem with William Wordsworth’s early sonnet, ‘On Seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams Weep at a Tale of Distress,’ this chapter explores the ways in which sentimental poetry of the 1780s stressed the affective unity of the suffering subject and the sympathetic, observing writer, yet ultimately instrumentalized that unity in order to foreground the author’s unique sensibility. Shaped as it was by these influences, I argue that Peru is just as invested in asserting Williams’s own sentimental, patriotic, and particularly British subjectivity as it is in advocating the liberation of Peru from Spain. Indeed, these two objectives mutually reinforce one another through Williams’s depiction of the Peruvians as emotionally, ideologically, and even physically British. Nor was Williams alone in this approach. Contemporary periodical literature and news coverage of the Túpac Amaru revolt also tended to privilege the authority of the feeling British observer while pointing out the purportedly British qualities of the Peruvians. In this context, what makes Peru so important as a literary and cultural document is that Williams’s assertion of intersubjective, intercultural identity does not stop with that between the Briton and the Peruvian. Harking back to the example of Marmontel’s good conquistador, Alonzo de Molina, Williams’s poem flies in the face of the Black Legend by extending the association between the British and the Peruvians to their putative adversaries, the Spanish. By constructing an elaborate allegory in which conquest appears as an intrinsic part of the Peruvian life cycle, Williams initiates a poetic

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naturalization of colonialism. The apparent contradiction between Williams’s support of Peru’s anti-colonial movement and her naturalization of the Spanish conquest, I posit, marks a turning point where patriotic and sentimental British literature examined anew the moral prospects of colonialism and initiated a tentative reconciliation between revolutionary sympathy and the pursuit of empire. Williams’s simultaneous accommodation of revolution and conquest had significant consequences for British writing about Spanish America during the French Revolution. Chapter 2, ‘Creole Patriotism and the Discourse of Revolutionary Loyalism, 1792–9,’ opens with an examination of two theatrical works treating the conquest of Spanish America, Samuel Morton’s Columbus; or, A World Discovered and John Thelwall’s The Incas; or, The Peruvian Virgin (both 1792). Both of these plays carefully adapt Marmontel’s Les Incas to suit the contemporary British atmosphere of conservative nationalism by replacing the Spanish protagonists of Les Incas with comfortingly familiar English stock characters. After considering the ways in which these dramas prefigure Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s blockbuster tragedy, Pizarro (1799), I turn to analyze the very different political context of the late 1790s that allowed Sheridan to remove Morton and Thelwall’s mollifying English characters. Following his sources in August von Kotzebue’s recent adaptations of Les Incas for the German stage, Sheridan modifies Marmontel’s original text by overshadowing the benevolent Spanish hero, Alonzo de Molina, with the Inca freedom fighter Rolla. By placing into Rolla’s mouth thinly veiled, conventional British harangues against Napoleon, Sheridan continues Williams’s strategy of identifying the British with the Incas, but adds to it a timely identification of Napoleonic France with colonial Spain. Figuring the British as loyal Peruvian patriots opposing Spanish tyranny, Sheridan’s play thus catered to his nation’s pride in its valiant resistance to the French. The same year that witnessed the premiere of Pizarro on the English stage and Napoleon’s coup d’état of the Eighteenth Brumaire saw the publication in London of the creole patriot Juan Pablo Viscardo y Guzmán’s Lettre aux Espagnols-Américains, a work that called for Britain’s aid in effecting Spanish American independence and catalyzed a flood of support in the British press. In his Lettre, Viscardo argued that Spain’s medieval constitution had been framed so as to ensure that unrepresentative government could be lawfully overthrown. According to Viscardo, the contemporary Spanish American revolutions drew legitimacy from this venerable European

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tradition in order to oppose the arbitrary power being exercised by modern Spain in its overseas colonies. He depicted Spanish America’s patriots, moreover, as lovers of British constitutional monarchy and partisans of aristocratic reform. As contemporary periodicals attest, Viscardo’s praise of the British monarchy and his defense of the right to resist tyranny were not lost on the British public. By examining the textual intersections between Sheridan’s and Viscardo’s patriotic rhetoric, as well as the responses to both works in the British press, this chapter tracks the ever-more intimate bond being forged between Spanish American and British nationalism. Viscardo and Sheridan’s patriotic linkage of Britain with Spanish America not only rendered revolutionary sympathy more acceptable during a time of anti-French reaction, it also created a literary formula that allowed for the expression of radical sentiments closer to home.47 While Pizarro’s anti-French rhetoric appealed directly to British patriotism, the play’s critique of irresponsible colonialism also recalled recent and bitter debates over the question of English rule in India and Ireland. The principle monologue in which Pizarro’s Alonzo condemns Spanish corruption, for example, is conspicuously reminiscent of Sheridan’s parliamentary speeches against Warren Hastings, and would have been uncomfortably familiar to all who had followed the Governor General’s impeachment trial. Although it was certainly a political liability to criticize the British empire during this period, the ingenious ways in which Viscardo and Sheridan framed the similarities between Britain and Spanish America made it possible not only to support the Spanish American revolutions, but also to openly question the actions of both the British Crown and the East India Company. Chapter 3, ‘The Allure of the Same: Robert Southey’s Welsh Indians and the Rhetoric of Good Colonialism,’ takes as its starting point this expanded scope for exposing England’s colonial iniquities by asserting a shared British-Spanish American patriotism. But while early nineteenth-century writers reaped the benefits of Williams and Sheridan’s political equation, the moment in which Robert Southey’s Madoc (1805) was published differed materially from that which saw the publication of Peru and the premiere of Pizarro. As Britain’s war with Spain and France accelerated, so too did the fear that Napoleon might bring the Spanish colonies under his sway and cripple British trade dominance in the region.48 Schemes for the outright annexation of Spanish American territory emerged as Britain braced for this eventuality.49 Madoc reflects these developments by transforming

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a critique of the current state of the English empire and the assertion of British-Spanish American propinquity to mount a defense of reformed British colonialism. Although significantly different from its literary antecedents, this transformation was not sui generis. In his impeachment proceedings against Warren Hastings, Edmund Burke had employed this same strategy, exposing Hastings’s imperial iniquities in order to assert a vision of improved, beneficent colonialism based on sympathy between the British and the Indians. Although Burke tirelessly defended his vision of humane rule in India, his ultimate failure to expiate Britain’s colonial guilt by indicting Hastings left an indelible mark on Romantic-era England. It was under the influence of this Burkean amalgam of ‘good’ colonial rhetoric and uncontainable colonial guilt that Robert Southey produced his American epic. Madoc relates how the eponymous twelfthcentury Welsh prince fled the English conquerors of Wales, discovered America (over 300 years before Columbus), and peacefully founded a thriving Welsh Indian colony. Yet while Madoc develops a legend that conferred British rights to America that predated the arrival of the Spanish and that implied the American natives had been effectively British since the twelfth century, Southey’s anxiety of empire is manifest in his dependence on a medieval Welsh prince to establish a properly British claim to America. As Southey was well aware, the Madoc legend had been recently reclaimed by radical Welsh nationalists in order to rejuvenate Welsh pride and even to argue for the liberation of Wales from England. As such, his use of Prince Madoc as the vehicle for asserting a unified British entitlement to America threatens to undercut the ostensible humanity of Madoc’s conquest by conscripting it in the service of English colonialism in the Celtic periphery. Southey attempts to defuse this tension by associating the English persecutors of the Welsh with the Aztec persecutors of the innocent Hoamen, and by identifying Prince Madoc and his followers with the beleaguered tribe. But while this assertion of kinship between the Welsh and the Hoamen aims to establish an ethical version of conquest, when the Hoamen beseech their Welsh allies to protect them from the Aztecs, Madoc is involuntarily drawn into a war that ends – like the infamous campaign of Cortés – in the destruction of the Aztecs. On the one hand, the defeat of the Aztecs, combined with Southey’s uneasy adoption of the Madoc legend, seriously destabilizes any defense of righteous colonialism. On the other hand, Madoc does not end with the Welsh reduction of the Aztecs, but rather with the projected devastation of both the Aztecs and the Welsh Indians

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by the ‘Spaniard’s unrelenting sword.’50 Even as it seems to rupture the continuity of Britain’s claim to America, the Spanish destruction of the Welsh Indians works to ensure the goodness of Madoc’s conquest by concealing the operations of British imperial power behind a veil of collective suffering. Furthermore, according to the logic of what David Quint calls the ‘epic of the defeated,’ defeat confers upon the imperial losers the right to vanquish in their turn.51 As such, the imagined demise of the Welsh Indians works not only to neutralize the violence of Madoc’s conquest by insisting on the ultimate triumph of Welsh-Indian identity in death, it also repositions Britain’s nineteenth-century intervention in Spanish America as a war of legitimate reconquest. With the failure of Britain’s 1806–7 attempts to commandeer La Plata and Montevideo, the courts martial of the expeditions’ commanding officers, John Whitelocke and Sir Home Popham, Napoleon’s 1808 invasion of the Iberian Peninsula, and the establishment of Britain’s wartime peace with Spain, Britain officially rejected a policy of Spanish American conquest. This transformative moment sets the stage for Chapter 4, ‘“Thy World, Columbus, shall be free:” Visions of Spanish America during the Peninsular War.’ In the face of the looming threat of a Napoleonic ascendancy in the Spanish colonies, a program of protecting the Spanish empire effectively replaced Britain’s previous annexation schemes. Accordingly, during the years of the Peninsular War (1808–14), British writing about Spanish America seemed to turn away from earlier works that had identified sympathy for the Spanish American natives with British imperialism. Poems that overtly linked British and Spanish patriotism, such as Felicia Hemans’s England and Spain (1808) and Sir Walter Scott’s The Vision of Don Roderick (1811), were the order of the day. These works tended to conceal Britain’s unabated interest in establishing commercial dominance in Spanish America. Despite Britain’s nominal refusal to countenance further revolutionary schemes, creole patriots and their British supporters continued to petition the government and mounted numerous publicity campaigns to popularize their cause in the British press. The question now confronting proponents of Spanish American independence was not how to interest Britain in emancipation efforts, but rather how to present such efforts as consistent with Britain’s promise to protect the Spanish empire. Propagandists, poets, and playwrights rose to the challenge. Creole writers and their English supporters stressed Spanish Americans’ continued loyalty to Spain, defending revolt on the grounds of

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Napoleon’s unjust usurpation. Poets such as Samuel Rogers circumvented Britain’s contradictory allegiances by presenting the Spanish American struggle for liberty as a natural extension of Spanish imperialism. To do this, poets fastened on the Romantic era’s fascination with Columbus, a figure that was most frequently portrayed as an enlightened scientific visionary rather than a conqueror. The figure of Columbus was particularly useful insofar as it could be invoked to glorify the achievements of the Spanish empire as well as to symbolize America itself, as in Anna Letitia Barbauld’s famous prophecy of 1812, ‘Thy World, Columbus, shall be free!’52 Works such as Rogers’s Voyage of Columbus and Frederick Reynolds’s Virgin of the Sun (both 1812) employed other means for eliding the causes of Spain and Spanish America, creolizing Columbus by identifying him with the Spanish empire as well as with contemporary creole patriots and pre-Columbian Americans. In the years immediately following the defeat of Napoleon, writers spoke out more openly than ever before in support of Spanish American independence. Yet the figure of the creole persisted, no longer charged with the work of uniting Spain and America, but rather with the task of revolution. In The Missionary (1815), William Lisle Bowles thematizes this shift by recounting the story of Lautaro, a native Araucan serving as page to the Spanish governor of Chile, Pedro de Valdivia. Like wartime creoles, Lautaro is torn between his loyalty to his nation and his Spanish master. When he ultimately decides to betray Valdivia and defend his people, Lautaro reflects the fact that for contemporary creoles, the time of accommodation was at an end. James Scott Walker made this point even more directly when he cast none other than Simón Bolívar himself as the Columbus-styled hero of The South American (1816). But as much as this new Columbus – now embodied by the nation of Colombia – is Americanized, so too is it Anglicized, as when the spirit of ‘Columbia’s land’ enjoins Bolívar to ‘Court’ the ‘alliance’ of ‘Britannia’s land:’ ‘To her, above the rest, be commerce given; / From her example learn to model laws.’53 And this is precisely what Bolívar did when, the year after Napoleon’s defeat, he spelled out his intentions to establish a constitutional monarchy in the new nations and entreated none other than Richard Wellesley ‘to be the savior of America.’54 As Spain’s transatlantic empire continued to deteriorate during the late 1810s and early 1820s, the ranks of Britons working to aid (and to benefit from) the Spanish American revolutions swelled. British

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soldiers rushed to enlist in the revolutionary armies of Simón Bolívar and José de San Martín. Joint stock companies bought up abandoned mines and imported English scientists and workers to increase their productivity. Spanish American emissaries issued solicitations inviting Britons to emigrate to their new republics. And prominent banking firms such as Herring, Graham, and Powles contracted enormous loans to support the nascent American governments. It was in the midst of this ferment that Lord Byron began laying the groundwork for his plan to emigrate to Venezuela. Chapter 5, ‘Lord Byron’s “South American Project:” Aristocratic Radicalism and the Question of Venezuelan Settlement,’ examines Byron’s letters of 1819–23, his anti-imperialist poems The Island and The Age of Bronze (both 1823), and the later sections of Don Juan in light of what he liked to call his ‘South American project.’55 By reconstructing Byron’s knowledge of the emerging republics of Spanish America, this chapter explores his motivations for relocating to Venezuela as well as the significance of his decision to sail, instead, for military service in Greece. Byron, the parliamentary advocate of frame-breaking, the invited leader of the Italian Carbonari, and the devoted partisan of Greek revolution, maintained an enduring interest in the independence movements that tore through Spanish America during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Given his support for these radical causes, what is so intriguing about the letters Byron wrote proclaiming his plans to settle in ‘Bolivar’s country’ is that they indicate absolutely no desire to participate in the revolutionary struggle (Byron, LJ, IX. 173). Emphasis falls in these letters, instead, on Byron’s longing for domestic stability and a sense of national belonging. But why, this chapter asks, did Byron seek to move to a land in the throes of revolution in order to shun political engagement, and why, if he was intent on avoiding armed conflict, did he ultimately devote himself to active service in the Greek revolution? Many scholars have written on Byron’s devotion to the struggle for Greek independence. None, however, has considered his decision to go to Greece as a reaction against the British commercial explosion then taking place in Spanish America. While Byron wrote passionately against imperialism and sacrificed his life to the cause of Greek independence, this chapter suggests, the cause of Spanish America was ideologically too close to home. Virtually overrun by British mercenary soldiers, merchants, and speculators, the Spanish America of the late 1810s and early 1820s was, in many ways, a

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mirror of the England Byron had fled, a market in which investors lined up to stake their fortunes on overseas companies and governments. Byron correctly foresaw that a stock market crash was imminent and his correspondence from this time reveals his frantic attempts to extricate his capital from government bonds and the London exchange. While the radical insurgents in Spanish America certainly engaged his republican sympathies, I contend that Byron the nobleman could not countenance the increasingly intimate link between Spanish American revolution and liberal Britain’s speculation in the region. These facts help explain Byron’s alternating attraction to and repulsion by Venezuela. They also highlight the significant class basis of Britain’s financial involvement in Spanish America. Given that Byron’s early political speeches in Parliament had laid him open to insinuations of bourgeois liberalism, and given the precariousness of his finances during the years in which he contemplated relocating to Venezuela, his decision not to go to Spanish America illustrates, more than anything, a deep personal anxiety to avoid association with aspiring middle-class Britons who sought to profit by the revolutions in Spain’s colonies. A consideration of Byron’s correspondence in the months before his death, however, reveals that the situation in Greece was, in fact, all too similar to that which Byron abhorred in Spanish America. Although Byron maintained his aristocratic pretensions by fighting on the side of ‘Prince’ Mavrocordato, he was increasingly aware of the liberal Benthamite orientation of the London Greek Committee on whose behalf he acted. This correspondence has broad implications for Britain’s economic involvement with Spanish America in general, and for Byron’s late writing in particular, as it elucidates both the tension and the complicity between aristocratic antiimperialism and liberal economic interests during the early 1820s. The unstable admixture of aristocratic prerogative, republicanism, and economic liberalism expressed in Byron’s letters unsettles any easy opposition between Romantic-era radicalism and conservatism and foreshadows the wholesale ideological breakdown that ensued in Britain when the Spanish American ‘bubble’ finally burst. Chapter 6, ‘The Spanish American Bubble and Britain’s Crisis of Informal Empire, 1822–6,’ examines the conflicting ways in which British literature, periodicals, and popular entertainments fomented, critiqued, and ultimately repudiated the nation’s Spanish American mania. Between 1822 and 1825, an entire cultural industry was carved out to exploit Britain’s infatuation with Spanish America.

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James Robinson Planché’s musical drama Cortez; or, The Conquest of Mexico (1823) delighted audiences at Covent Garden, William Bullock’s Mexican Exhibition (1824–5) offered spectators enticing specimens of everything from contemporary Mexico’s gold and silver to its ancient Aztec relics, and entrepreneurs flooded the press with tantalizing Spanish American stock and bond prospectuses. Against a prospect of such dazzling allurements, Robert Southey’s A Tale of Paraguay and Felicia Hemans’s The Forest Sanctuary (both 1825) stand out for their striking lack of exoticism, their erasure of native and colonial history, their avoidance of the subject of commerce, and their overarching morbidity. By situating these poems in the context of the boom and cataclysmic bust of the British economy, I argue that their lack of natural, cultural, and economic description and their association of Spanish America with fatality metaphorize both the dangerously little that investors knew about Spanish America and the devastating results of their ignorance. By troping the death of a Spanish conquistador in America and the decimation of the native Guaraní in Paraguay as properly British calamities, The Forest Sanctuary and A Tale of Paraguay (respectively) continue the proprietary strategies of earlier British treatments of Spanish America. But whereas works such as Williams’s Peru, Sheridan’s Pizarro, or Southey’s Madoc identified the Briton with the Spanish American through the nationalist rhetoric of sincerity and vulnerability, The Forest Sanctuary and A Tale of Paraguay present the destruction of America as irremediable by British moral and political authority. Gone are the glorious hopes of Britain’s total commercial penetration of an independent Spanish America. By 1825, these hopes had indeed been realized and, rather than stimulating the British economy, seemed to have precipitated its collapse. As a result, the narrative by which American victimization stands for and tacitly authorizes British imperial dominance could no longer be employed to support Spanish American revolution or to trumpet the great improvements sure to follow from a completely open trade with the new republics. One consequence of this disappointment was a growing disenchantment with Spanish America, as evinced by the numerous travel narratives of authors such as Maria Graham, Captain Basil Hall, and Sir Francis Bond Head, works that variously criticized the Spanish American people and revealed the horrific degree to which Britons had been misled by overzealous stock and bond prospectuses. The other consequence of these events was an increasing disillusionment

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with Britain’s vaunted policy of informal empire in Spanish America. Whereas writers from William Robertson to Francisco de Miranda and James Mill had supported British commercial dominance in Spanish America for almost half a century, commentators now suggested that Spain’s long berated colonial monopoly had in fact been less deleterious than Britain’s free trade with the new republics. Defeated by its own ostensibly liberal commercial improvement, Britain now transferred to its Spanish American allies the stigma of economic backwardness it had once applied to their Spanish rulers and depicted the Spanish, by extension, as the victims of American prejudice. Popular entertainments portrayed the parallels, not between patriotic Britons and revolutionary Spanish Americans, but rather between British and Spanish imperialists. As loan payments were suspended, associations dissolved, investors ruined, and banks closed, Britain rapidly came to understand that the concomitant destruction of Spain and Britain’s dominance in Spanish America had effectively dissolved the opposition between informal and formal imperialism. Although Britain’s fascination with Spanish America would arise, phoenix-like, from the ashes of the London crash during the Victorian era, for observers in the second half of the 1820s, that long-standing transatlantic romance now seemed officially dead. NOTES

1. Southey, LC, 212. 2. In this context, the term ‘creole’ refers to American-born citizens of Spanish descent. 3. Paquette, ‘Intellectual,’ 75. 4. I have restricted the scope of this study to British writing about the areas of Latin America colonized by the Spanish. Although Romanticera writers devoted considerable attention to Portuguese America, Brazil’s relationship with Britain was significantly different from that of Spanish America. Since the 1703 Treaty of Methuen, Portugal had served as an essential part of the British mercantile system and functioned throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a British client state. Britain possessed extensive legal trading rights with Brazil both before and after the Portuguese Court of Braganza removed there (with British assistance) in 1807. In 1820–1, the royal family split and Pedro I proclaimed Brazilian independence. Because this independence was the result of peaceful monarchical transition, aided by continuous British diplomacy, naval protection, and commerce, Brazil enjoyed a political stability uncharacteristic of its Spanish American neighbors.

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Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 As P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins observe, ‘It is scarcely surprising that Brazil has been referred to, during its first phase of independence, as being a virtual British protectorate’ (Cain and Hopkins, 298). On Britain’s relationship with Brazil, see Richard Graham, Patronage and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990), and Alan K. Manchester, British Preëminence in Brazil, its Rise and Decline; a Study in European Expansion (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1933). This study also confines itself to the Spanish American mainland. Like Brazil, the Caribbean islands functioned during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as vital depots for the slave trade as well as for British commercial and military penetration of Spain’s mainland colonies. Despite the fact that the Spanish monopoly had not been legally broken in the eighteenth century, England had openly encouraged ‘trade between the British West Indian free ports and foreign plantations, a trade that was contraband in the eyes of every conscientious Spanish official’ (Goebel, 290). With the British capture of Trinidad in 1797, that island became a key ‘entrepôt for British trade with Venezuela and a base for the subversion of Spanish rule there’ (Lynch, ‘British,’ 12). Caribbean sites such as Saint Domingue, whose violent uprising of 1797 shook Europe to its foundations, were also particularly important in shaping British attitudes toward Spanish American emancipation in the late 1790s and early 1800s. On British commerce and racial politics in the Caribbean, see Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993); Philip Gould, Barbaric Traffic: Commerce and Antislavery in the EighteenthCentury Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2003); Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Methuen, 1992); Debbie Lee, Slavery and the Romantic Imagination (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2002); and Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2000). On the use of the British West Indies as an entrepôt for contraband trade during this period, see Frances Armytage, The Free Port System in the British West Indies: A Study in Commercial Policy, 1766–1822 (London: Longmans, 1953). On other regions in the circum-Atlantic (especially Florida and Louisiana) that served as strategic points in Britain’s penetration of Spanish America, see John Rydjord, Foreign Interest in the Independence of New Spain (Durham: Duke UP, 1935). On the role of British Honduras and British Guiana in Britain’s relationship with Spanish America, see G. E. Carl, First Among Equals: Great Britain and Venezuela, 1810–1910 (Syracuse: Dept of Geography, Syracuse U, 1980).

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‘An Empire in Men’s Hearts’ 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

[ 27

Makdisi, xi. Butler, 3; McGann, Romantic, 1. Fulford and Kitson, 3. M. Pratt, 6. Fanon, 58. For a provocative discussion of how ‘Europe was made by its imperial projects,’ see Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,’ in Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: U of California P, 1997): 1–56, p. 1. For other contestations of the traditional ‘center-periphery’ model of Atlantic empire, see Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans; C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Random House, 1963); and Jeremy Smith, Europe and the Americas: State Formation, Capitalism and Civilizations in Atlantic Modernity (Leiden: Brill, 2006). Richardson and Hofkosh, 5. In addition to the works cited in this study, see John Barrell, The Infection of Thomas de Quincey: A Psychopathology of Imperialism (New Haven: Yale UP, 1991); Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999); and Tim Fulford, Peter Kitson, and Debbie Lee, Literature, Science, and Exploration in the Romantic Era: Bodies of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004). In 1953, historians John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson registered a complaint that remains relevant for contemporary British literary studies: ‘It ought to be a commonplace that Great Britain during the nineteenth century expanded overseas by means of “informal empire” as much as by acquiring dominion in the strict constitutional sense . . . Nevertheless, almost all imperial history has been written on the assumption that the empire of formal dominion is historically comprehensible in itself and can be cut out of its context in British expansion and world politics. The conventional interpretation of the nineteenthcentury empire continues to rest upon study of the formal empire alone, which is rather like judging the size and character of icebergs solely from the parts above the water-line’ (Gallagher and Robinson, 1). Notable exceptions include Robert D. Aguirre, Informal Empire; Joselyn Almeida, ‘Locating Romanticism’s Transatlantic Song,’ European Romantic Review 10:4 (1999): 401–23; Nigel Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–1840: ‘From an Antique Land’ (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002), ch. 6; Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes; Luz Elena Ramírez, British Representations of Latin America (Gainseville: UP Florida, 2007); Eugenia Vera Roldán, The British Book Trade and South America (London: Ashgate, 2003); Charles Rzepka, ‘“Cortez – or Balboa, or Somebody Like That”: Form, Fact,

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14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 and Forgetting in Keats’s “Chapman’s Homer” Sonnet,’ Keats-Shelley Journal 51 (2002): 35–75; and Nanora Sweet, ‘“Hitherto Closed to British Enterprise”: Trading and Writing the Hispanic World Circa 1815,’ European Romantic Review 8:2 (1997): 139–47. British Honduras served as a naval and commercial hub in Britain’s dealings with Central America. British Guiana, a seventeenth-century settlement, also aided British expansion in Spanish America, particularly in Venezuela. This is not to deny the important role of informal imperialism in Britain’s established colonies during the Romantic era. As Fulford and Kitson rightly explain, the Romantic period witnessed a general move ‘from a protectionist colonial system, based upon mercantilist economic principles, to a free-trade empire with a political and moral agenda’ (Fulford and Kitson, 3). As Saree Makdisi argues, the Romantic era is distinguished by the convergence of two kinds of hegemonic practice, those of capitalism and imperialism, and thus marks ‘the beginning of a process that has only in recent years come to be recognized as “globalization”’ (Makdisi, xii). Cain and Hopkins, 276. Platt, 308. Lynch, ‘British,’ 14. Gallagher and Robinson, 6–7. Smith, Wealth, II. iv. 7. 104–5. Citations refer to volume, book, chapter, and page number(s). Semmel, 45. While historians such as Oliver MacDonagh, D. C. M. Platt, and David McLean have questioned several of Gallagher and Robinson’s claims (particularly that trade dominance constitutes imperialism per se), there is a general consensus regarding the complementary nature of formal and informal imperial strategies. See Alan Knight, ‘Britain and Latin America,’ in Andrew Porter (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999), pp. 122–45; David McLean, War, Diplomacy and Informal Empire: Britain and the Republics of La Plata 1836–1853 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1995); Oliver MacDonagh, ‘The Anti-Imperialism of Free Trade,’ Economic History Review (1962): 489–501; and D. C. M. Platt, Finance, Trade, and Politics in British Foreign Policy, 1815–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1968). On the various contestations of the Gallagher-Robinson thesis, see William Roger Louis (ed.), Imperialism: The Gallagher and Robinson Controversy (New York: New Viewpoints, 1976) and Christopher Abel and Colin M. Lewis (eds), Latin America, Economic Imperialism and the State: the Political Economy of the External Connection from Independence to the Present (London: Athlone P, 1985), pp. 5–8.

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[ 29

23. Quoted in J. Brown, 48. 24. Quoted in Ferns, 48; quoted in Kaufmann, 178; italics in original. 25. Many British readers, including Adam Smith and Horace Walpole, read Raynal’s work in the original French before an English translation was available. The original text of the Histoire was already so well known that when the Critical Review announced the first English translation in 1776, it began with the disclaimer: ‘This valuable work, having already come under our notice in the original, and being by this time generally known and admired thro’ Europe, it would now be superfluous to enter into a particular discussion of its merits’ (CR 1776, 402). 26. W. Robertson, II. 8. 241, 243; Raynal, IV. 8. 293. Citations for both works refer to volume, book, and page number(s). 27. ‘Ever since the discovery of America,’ Raynal explains, ‘the Spaniards had attended only to this species of wealth. In vain did some men of more enlightened understanding exclaim against this infatuation. Let the gold remain where it is, said they, provided the surface of the earth that covers it produce an ear of corn that will make bread, or a blade of grass to feed your sheep.’ In their myopic quest for mineral wealth, ‘[t]he Spaniards [had] acted like the dog in the fable, that dropped the meat out of his mouth in order to bite at the image of it in the water, and was drowned in attempting to get it’ (Raynal, IV. 8. 311–12). Like Raynal, Robertson criticizes the Spanish for neglecting to develop their colonies ‘with that sober persevering spirit which gradually converts whatever is in its possession to a proper use, and derives thence the greatest advantage’ (W. Robertson, II. 8. 231–2). Misguidedly spurning ‘the humbler paths of industry, which lead more slowly, but with greater certainty, to wealth and increase of national strength,’ the Spanish devoted themselves only to the quest for ‘sudden and exorbitant gain’ (II. 8. 232). 28. See also Raynal’s claim, ‘If in our transactions with the Indians . . . we had shew’n them, that mutual advantage is the basis of commerce . . . we should insensibly have gained their affections . . . Every one of our establishments would have been to each nation of Europe as their native country, where they would have found a sure protection’ (Raynal, III. 5. 218). While Raynal begins by asserting the mutual advantages of commerce, the affective language to which these reflections give rise (‘we should insensibly have gained their affections’) brings him squarely within the bounds of colonial discourse (‘Every one of our establishments would have been to each nation of Europe as their native country’). 29. Scholars have traditionally understood Raynal’s opposition to extractive economy and monopoly trade as proof of an anti-imperialism that stands in direct opposition to his endorsement of colonialism. Srinivas Aravamudan, for example, refers to the Histoire as ‘a collocation of the

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antagonistic agendas of imperialism and anticolonialism,’ while J. G. A. Pocock describes the text as ‘a product of Europe’s quarrel with its own history’ (Aravamudan, ‘Progress,’ 259; Pocock, ‘Commerce,’ 21). Such apparently conflicting impulses, Lynn Festa adds, ‘make it difficult to assign a consistent position to the narrator’ (Festa, 209–10). Many commentators have ascribed this positional multiplicity to the political differences of the Histoire’s multiple (and frequently unacknowledged) contributors. According to this argument, Diderot’s contributions to the Histoire (amounting to approximately one fifth of the 1780 revised edition) put forth an ‘outspoken condemnation of European colonization’ that undercuts the sections authored by Raynal, whose purpose was to ‘advance colonialism, rendering it more humane and efficient’ (Pagden, Lords, 164; Furbank, 417). Eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury readers, however, would have read the Histoire as the work of a single writer with a coherent political message. In France, it was Raynal alone who was condemned by Parliament and driven into exile. It was Raynal who was lionized in England and whose authorial bust was prominently displayed on the frontispieces of British editions of the Histoire, thereby educating Britons to read the work as the meditations of one identifiable individual. Such evidence suggests that a historical consideration of the Histoire must acknowledge the ways in which its espousals of liberal anti-imperialism and formal colonialism can be read as mutually supportive. 30. Reforms that elicit particular praise from both authors include the replacement of the annual galleons sent to America with smaller and more frequent packet boats, the liberalization of the Spanish port system, the opening of free trade between the provinces of Spanish America, and the removal of excessive duties on expensive trade items. 31. In addition to offending the national prejudices of his British readers, Robertson’s extenuation of Spain’s early colonial activity undercuts the very criteria on which he bases his praise of modern Spain. Robertson excuses, for example, the ‘jealousy and exclusion’ with which Spain once guarded its monopoly trade, suggesting that such practices were ‘natural, and perhaps necessary’ (W. Robertson, II. 8. 213). He even goes so far as to identify the monopoly system that maintained the Spanish colonies in a state of ‘perpetual pupilage’ to ‘the parent state . . . during two centuries and a half’ as ‘a refinement in policy of which Spain set the first example to European nations’ (II. 8. 214). 32. See also Raynal’s comparative palliation of Cortés’s devastation of Mexico: ‘Let us put him at the head of the fleet that advanced against Xerxes; or reckon him among the Spartans at Thermopylae . . . and Cortez will appear a great man . . . Had Caesar been born in the fifteenth century, and commanded at Mexico, he would have been a worse man than Cortez’ (Raynal, III. 6. 317–18).

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[ 31

33. The foundational text for British Black Legend rhetoric was Fray Bartolomé de las Casas’s scathing indictment of Spanish colonial iniquity, Brevíssima relación de la destruición de las Indias [Brief account of the destruction of the Indies] (1552). The Brevíssima relación was translated into English as The Tears of the Indians in 1565. 34. Gibbon observed ‘that the dangers, the achievements, and the views of the Spanish adventurers, are related with a temperate spirit; and that the most original, perhaps the most curious portion of human manners, is at length rescued from the hands of sophists and declaimers’ (quoted in Frost, xxi). Burke wrote to Robertson, ‘I believe few books have done more than this, towards clearing up dark points, correcting errors, and removing prejudices . . . You have, besides, thrown quite a new light on the present state of the Spanish provinces, and furnished both materials and hints for a rational theory of what may be expected from them in future’ (xxi). 35. Frost, xxii. Commentators objected that Robertson ‘had shed an illusive lustre round the daring and intelligent but sanguinary and unprincipled Cortes’ (xxii). Even Dugald Stewart, one of Robertson’s chief supporters, complained that Robertson’s treatment of the conquest was ‘a blemish of a . . . serious nature’ (Stewart, 242). Examining reviews of the History in the Annual Register, the Critical Review, or Annals of Literature, the Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Chronicle, the Monthly Review, or Literary Journal, and the Scots Magazine, Gabriel Paquette shows that ‘even laudatory reviews negotiated Robertson’s “elogiums” of Bourbon imperial reforms with unconcealed skepticism’ (Paquette, ‘Intellectual,’ 92n). 36. Fabian, 31. 37. Marmontel, ‘Preface,’ xxiii. This is not to suggest that the histories of Robertson and Raynal were received as entirely factual. Both authors were accused of an overly credulous reliance upon the theories of American inferiority put forth by the eighteenth-century philosophers Cornelius de Pauw and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon. See de Pauw, Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains, ou Mémoires intéressants pour servir à l’Histoire de l’Espèce Humaine. Avec une Dissertation sur l’Amérique & les Américains (1770) and Buffon, Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière (1749–78). For a comprehensive discussion of the eighteenth-century theory of American inferiority, see Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750–1900, trans. Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1973). 38. In Marmontel’s ‘Epistle Dedicatory’ to the King of Sweden, he places particular emphasis on the contemporary relevance of his narrative: ‘Half the globe oppressed, laid waste by Fanaticism, is the picture I

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39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

44. 45.

46. 47.

48.

49. 50. 51.

Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 have to offer to your Majesty . . . ’Tis Humanity herself I am endeavoring to put under the protection of a just and good King, or rather of all good Kings . . . You are born, Sire, to set a great example to your Fellow Monarchs’ (Marmontel, ‘Epistle Dedicatory,’ unpaginated). CR 1777, 211. MR 1778, 336–7. On Kotzebue’s immense influence on the British stage, see Nicoll, 64. In 1799, Die Sonnenjungfrau was translated as The Virgin of the Sun by three different British authors: Anne Plumptre, Benjamin Thompson, and James Lawrence. That same year, Die Spanier in Peru saw five translations: Plumptre’s The Spaniards in Peru, or: the Death of Rolla, Matthew Lewis’s Rolla; or, The Peruvian Hero, Thomas Dutton’s Pizarro in Peru; or, The Death of Rolla, Richard Heron’s Pizarro, or The Death of Rolla, and Matthew West’s Pizarro: A Tragedy, followed in 1800 by Thompson’s Pizarro or, The Death of Rolla. The most influential adaptation of the play was Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s Pizarro (1799). Marmontel’s novel lends itself to what Mary Louise Pratt calls the representational strategy of ‘anti-conquest’ whereby European subjects ‘seek to secure their innocence in the same moment as they assert European hegemony’ (M. Pratt, 7). Unless otherwise noted, citations refer to volume, chapter, and page number(s). Raynal contends that the Peruvians ‘had not, properly speaking, any kind of commerce’ (Raynal, IV. 7. 32). Robertson confirms this view, stating that despite their superior agriculture and highly developed system of roads, the Peruvians were almost entirely unacquainted ‘with that active intercourse, which is at once a bond of union and an incentive to improvement’ (W. Robertson, II. 7. 186). Thomson, Britannia, 167. Aravamudan’s observations regarding Raynal’s Histoire are particularly applicable in this context. ‘One function of anticolonial rhetoric,’ he notes, ‘was to metaphorize wrongs abroad in order to radicalize democratic aspirations in France even while escaping censorship’ (Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans, 298). James Mill commented in 1809, ‘Nothing, if Bonaparte becomes master of Old Spain, seems capable of preventing his becoming, at the same time, master of [Spanish] America’ (Mill, ‘Molina’s Account,’ 350). See J. Budd, Considerations for and Against a South-American Expedition (London, 1805). Southey, Madoc, II. xxvii. 395. Citation refers to book, canto, and line number. Quint, 157.

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[ 33

Barbauld, Eighteen, l. 334. Walker, IV. xix. Bolívar, ‘Wellesley,’ 154. Byron, LJ, VI. 225.

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CHAPTER ONE

NATURALIZING EMPIRE: HELEN MARIA WILLIAMS’S PERU AND THE BRITISH ASCENDANCY IN SPANISH AMERICA

When Helen Maria Williams embarked on the composition of her ‘epic romance’ Peru (1784), she drew on a formidable tradition of Enlightenment-era writing about Spanish America.1 Works such as the Abbé Raynal’s Histoire philosophique et politique des Deux Indes and William Robertson’s History of America had done much to shift eighteenth-century discourse about Spanish America from one that emphasized the moral depravity and greed of the Spanish conquerors to one that defined Spanish America as a site of commercial promise. While both historians sharply criticized the bullionist economy of the Spanish empire, they lauded Bourbon reforms aimed at the opening of trade and the reduction of taxes. Thanks to Spain’s recent adoption of more liberal imperial practices, Spanish America was destined to become a principle hub in the spread of universal improvement, thereby proving the moral and political compatibility of free trade and colonialism. This conjunction of liberal economy and rational empire, Raynal and Robertson projected, would not only extend ‘universal benevolence’ to the Spanish colonies, it would also bring a corrupted Europe closer to the social unity and natural sensibility of earlier times, thereby compensating, on both sides of the Atlantic, for the ravages of conquest.2 In addition to her acknowledged debt to Raynal and Robertson, Williams’s Peru was deeply influenced by Jean-François Marmontel’s Les Incas.3 One sees Marmontel’s influence in the names of Williams’s characters, in the poem’s elevated sentimental tone, and in its attention to the intimate inter-relationships linking each aspect of the Inca empire, from its religion to its laws, and from the emotions of its

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subjects to Peru’s flora and fauna. Equally conspicuous is Williams’s adoption of Marmontel’s argument for the ethical identity of the benevolent European conqueror and the conquered Spanish American native. But while much may be said of Williams’s indebtedness to the writings of her Enlightenment-era antecedents, she pointedly deviates from Raynal and Robertson’s assertion of the compatibility of colonialism and free trade as well as from Marmontel’s identification of liberal commercial imperialism as the natural extension of Inca sensibility. The present chapter aims to show that the specific national and literary milieu in which Williams wrote caused her to depart from these models in ways that reveal hitherto unrecognized aspects of Britain’s relationship with Spanish America. I. The Political Foundations of Peru As early as the War of Spanish Succession (1701–14), British statesmen began to conceive of free trade as a preferable substitute for colonial competition with Spain. As Daniel Defoe tellingly wrote in 1707, ‘We want not the domination of more countries than we have; we sufficiently possess a nation when we have an open and free trade to it.’4 In the Treaty of Utrecht six years later, France ceded to Britain the Spanish asiento, the right to supply Spanish America with African slaves and the ‘privilege of sending annually to the fair of Portobello a ship of five hundred tons, laden with European commodities.’5 Under cover of the importation stipulated by the treaty, however, Britain ‘usually employed [a ship] which exceeded nine hundred tons in burden . . . accompanied by two or three smaller vessels, which mooring in some neighbouring creek, supplied her clandestinely with fresh bales of goods, to replace such as were sold’ (W. Robertson, I. 8. 174). Since the decline of Spanish sea power in the late seventeenth century, Britain and other European nations (principally France and the Netherlands) had traded illegally with the Spanish colonies. By gaining legal trading rights, however, Britain at last secured dominance in the region. Commerce, not conquest, was the watchword by which Britain established what the poet James Thomson called its ‘empire of the deep.’6 In Britannia, written after the Spanish attempted to regain Gibraltar in 1727, Thomson underscored the principles that distinguished Britain from her Spanish rival. Britain was an ‘empire o’er the conquered seas,’ and happily, unlike Spain, was ‘unencumbered with the bulk immense / Of conquest’ (Thomson, Britannia, ll. 103,

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208–9). Thirteen years later, in the closing ode of Alfred: A Masque (1740), Thomson returned to the linkage between Britain’s imperial power and its overseas trade, but his treatment of commerce had shifted in revealing ways. ‘I see thy commerce, Britain, grasp the world,’ he wrote, See, where beyond the vast Atlantic surge, By boldest keels untouch’d, a dreadful space! Shores, yet unfound, arise! in youthful prime, With towering forests, mighty rivers crown’d: These stoop to Britain’s thunder. This new world, Shook to its centre, trembles at her name: And there her sons, with aim exalted, sow The seeds of rising empire, arts, and arms.7

Here, Thomson no longer distinguishes between Britain’s commercial empire and the work of conquest. Erasing Spain’s earlier Atlantic ‘discoveries,’ Thomson’s Britain encounters ‘Shores, yet unfound,’ a ‘new world’ that ‘stoop[s] to Britain’s thunder’ rather than to conquistadors’ firepower. Nevertheless, if commerce ‘sows the seeds of empire’ by extending its ‘empire o’er the conquered seas,’ it does so with an ‘aim exalted’ that seems to exonerate it from any exploitative intent. Despite persistent avowals that Britain’s interests in Spanish America lay in trade, not territory, British poetry and policy of this period reveal an increasingly troublesome slippage between what was properly considered commerce and what colonialism. In many cases, Britain’s strategy of admitting colonies for the improvement of commerce was scarcely distinct from outright colonialism. In 1739, Britain had gone to war with Spain with the ostensible aim of obtaining more direct access to Spanish American markets. But as rumors of creole and indigenous dissension began to spread, British pamphleteers proposed the outright annexation of Mexico. The British navy ordered proclamations distributed to Spanish dependencies, informing them that their rights and privileges included direct commerce with Britain and urging them to separate from Spain. Spanish Americans were to be promised tax and tribute relief, respect for property, and treatment as British subjects if they did so. In short, the war was to include a campaign for annexation by consent and for purposes of trade.8

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In 1740, the English Governor of Jamaica, Edward Trelawny, suggested fomenting revolt in Panama in order to ‘lay a foundation for a most extensive and beneficial trade with the inhabitants,’ adding that he was also motivated by the desire ‘to see a new colony annexed to the British Crown.’9 Even if, as historian Peggy Liss asserts, ‘[c]ommerce, rather than territorial expansion, would become the official desideratum, in regard to Spain’s colonies,’ statesmen agreed that conquest was by no means incompatible with the pursuit of free trade (Liss, 5). This pattern of denying territorial ambitions while sanctioning conquest in the name of trade continued throughout the next three decades. To be sure, the 1760s and 1770s saw the emergence of powerfully persuasive arguments against colonialism. Economic thinkers such as Josiah Tucker and Adam Smith contended that colonies imposed unnecessary financial burdens on the mother country and could be traded with to greater advantage were they outside the formal British empire.10 The geographer and writer Alexander Dalrymple applied these principles to Britain’s commerce with Spanish America, encouraging his nation to pursue ‘discoveries . . . not with a view of colonizing; not with the view of conquest; but of an amicable intercourse for mutual benefit.’11 In theory, free trade offered a level playing field for all countries capable of supporting overseas commerce to apply their ambition for the greater advantage of their nation and of those nations with which they traded. In practice, it meant that Britain, with its superior commercial banking system, navy, and merchant fleet, would dominate that field. As the War Council tellingly declared, the British government should ‘compell the King of Spain to . . . give a free trade to all nations’ since Britain would never ‘be out traded to Spanish America by any nation whatsoever.’12 It was in this spirit that, at the 1763 Peace of Paris, Britain returned Havana to Spain, despite the strategic access it granted to the silver of Mexico, in exchange for increased control of American seaways and rivers. Five years later, however, Secretary of State Lord Shelburne authorized the seizure of Vera Cruz and San Juan de Ulloa in order to support a Mexican revolution and encourage similar revolts in Peru and Chile. Following the pattern established earlier in the century, Britain’s campaigns for freer and more direct commerce with Spanish America always flirted suggestively with the trappings of conquest. In 1776, spurred in large part by the North American colonies’ Declaration of Independence, British designs on Spanish America took

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on a more frankly colonialist character. In December, a plan to ‘annihilate universally the Spanish dominions in America’ was submitted to the British government.13 Britain was to be compensated for its efforts not only by ‘the revenues of Spanish America’ and ‘the confiscation of certain properties,’ but also by ‘free and exclusive trade and commerce’ and ‘the possession of all the seacoasts of Spanish America.’14 In 1779, Captain William Dalrymple commanded an attack by a brigade of ‘Loyal Irish Volunteers’ on the Mosquito Coast.15 That same year, Captain Gustavus Hippisley, in concert with several expelled Spanish Jesuits, suggested ‘that Mexico could easily be conquered by an expedition from the West Indies aimed against Lower California and by an attack on Acapulco and Veracruz,’ a proposal that attracted the attention of Warren Hastings and was approved by Lord North, though never executed (W. S. Robertson, Miranda, 200). At the same time, though, such plans were increasingly cast in terms of liberation rather than conquest. Thus, when Governor Pownall suggested in 1781 that Britain ‘counteract her own losses’ in North America ‘by creating a new commercial field’ to the south, he did not propose territorial annexation per se, but merely ‘that England encourage the independence of the Spanish colonies.’16 Schemes regarding British intervention in Spanish America multiplied after the loss of the North American colonies, such that by 1783, dissident Spanish Americans ‘had become accustomed to look to Britain for support in their plans for the achievement of independence’ (Rippy, 26). The scale of British ambition in Spanish America seemed unbounded. In its review of a speech on economic reform made by Edmund Burke in February of 1780, for example, the London Magazine noted that, while Burke’s ‘excellent’ plan was impracticable in the immediate present, one might look forward to its implementation ‘when we get possession of the mines of Peru and Mexico.’17 In a similar mood, the London’s ‘Account of Rio de la Plata’ bluntly stated that while invasions had been tried in discrete regions of Spanish America, further attempts ‘could be of little or [no use] to us, unless we also possessed the sovereignty of the whole adjacent country.’18 Although none of these schemes took immediate effect, the Peace Treaty of 1783 explicitly legitimized the presence of British settlements in Spanish America: The intention of the two contracting parties being to prevent, as much as possible, all the causes of complaint and misunderstanding heretofore

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occasioned . . . and several British settlements having been formed and extended, under that premise, upon the Spanish [American] continent, it is expressly agreed, that his Britannick Majesty’s subjects shall have the right of . . . build[ing] therein houses and magazines necessary for themselves, their families, and their effects.19

The agreement further established that the governors of Spanish America ‘shall be ordered to grant the English dispersed, every convenience possible for their removing to the settlement agreed upon by the present article, or for their retiring wherever they shall think proper’ (quoted in LM, October 1783, 361). As with the granting of the asiento in 1713 and its reinstatement in 1748, this agreement established a legitimate British foothold in Spanish America that could be amply exploited beyond the tenets of the Treaty. Partly as a result of this concession, Britain was able to severely cripple Spain’s commerce with its colonies and take over the majority of that trade after 1783. The early 1780s also marked a period of intense turmoil in the Spanish colonies themselves. As Spain struggled to keep pace with Britain’s commercial ascendancy, its subsequent policy changes often meant increasing restrictions on the creole and indigenous populations. In 1779, popular demonstrations protested the creation of new taxes, the more efficient collection of existing taxes, and the continuing preference given to Spanish-born over American-born citizens in the granting of high-ranking positions. The dissidence spread and grew in strength, culminating in the ‘Great Rebellion’ of 1780–2, led by Túpac Amaru II, a descendent of the eponymous ancient Inca King.20 The events of the Túpac Amaru rebellion ‘were exceptional for their brutality on both the Spanish and the Indian sides,’ with estimates suggesting that the Indian death toll was between 100,000 and 140,000, the Spanish death toll in the tens of thousands.21 The effects of these events were wide-ranging. In New Granada, the socalled comuneros rose up in 1781 to protest extortionate taxes and similar social restrictions to those experienced in Peru. McFarlane comments, ‘At its height, the rebellion saw the mobilisation of a rebel force that was said to have been 20,000 strong, and, after threatening the viceregal capital, the rebels forced the colonial authorities to capitulate to their demands’ (McFarlane, 314). Soon the central port of Buenos Aires was closed, all trade being thus interrupted with the provinces of the interior. Never before had the Spanish empire seen something this close to a full-scale revolution.

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Meanwhile, dissident creoles began flocking to London in search of aid for their revolutionary plans. According to Liss, ‘From the 1780s . . . men sympathetic to or involved in the revolts of Túpac Amaru and the comuneros had received British pensions’ (Liss, 166). In 1781, the expelled Argentine Jesuit Juan José de Godoy arrived in London. He was soon followed by Antonio Nariño, Francisco de Miranda, Francisco de Mendiola, Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, and Juan Pablo Viscardo y Guzmán. A mysterious figure calling himself Don Juan also appeared before the English government in late 1783, claiming to be the deputy of a secret organization of creoles and Spanish American natives. In exchange for Britain’s support, Don Juan ‘proposed to unite Chile, Tucuman, Peru, and Patagonia under one government, which was to be modeled somewhat on the government of England’ and ‘made tributary to Great Britain’ (W. S. Robertson, Miranda, 203, 206). That same year, Don Luis Vidall, an emissary from New Granada, put forth a plan similar to Don Juan’s. In addition to offering gold in exchange for munitions, [i]t was further recommended that some English officers and engineers should learn the Spanish language so that if they got “the fire lit well” in the Kingdom of Santa Fé they might send for some of these officers in order that they might “thro’ their Good Counsels . . . enjoy in a few Years being Subjects of Great Britain.” (207)

If the attempt were successful, in return for Britain’s aid, Vidall also promised that ‘the kingdom of Sta. Fee [sic], The Provinces of Maracaybo, Sta. Marta, and Carthagena, shall be deliver’d to His Britanick Majesty without reserving to Ourselves but our Religion, and the same Privilidges [sic] that an English Subject is entitled to’ (quoted in W. S. Robertson, Miranda, 207).22 Although Don Juan and Don Vidall’s plans were cut short by the 1783 Paris Peace Treaty, their presence drew additional attention to the commercial and colonial possibilities of a revolutionary Spanish America. Nor were their solicitations in vain. As we will discuss in the following chapter, the actions of their countrymen in England during the 1790s and early 1800s were to have a significant effect on British activities in Spanish America. Spurred by Spanish American rebellions and by the information provided by revolutionary creole ambassadors in London, Britain’s interest in Spanish America burgeoned during the 1780s.

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Intelligence on Spanish America was gathered more vigorously by the state, ‘plans for British attacks flowed from official and private sources; and a section of merchant opinion increased its agitation for military intervention in the area.’23 The newly formed United States now presented the only real threat to England’s dominance in the region. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1786, ‘Our Confederacy must be viewed as the nest from which all America, North and South is to be peopled,’ and he eagerly anticipated the time when the United States would be able to get possession of Spanish America ‘piece by piece’ (quoted in Rydjord, 98–9). As was the case with the French and the Dutch earlier in the century, however, competition would prove a goad to British endeavor in the Spanish colonies. With the opening of the Spanish American ports under the Bourbons, and with England’s rise to unparalleled naval dominance, the Britain of the early 1780s was now poised – for conquest or for commerce – in a uniquely privileged position vis-à-vis Spanish America. II. Peru and the Turn from Commerce Helen Maria Williams’s Peru, which treats the prelapsarian bounties of the Inca empire, that empire’s destruction by Pizarro, and the rise of the Túpac Amaru revolt, appeared two years after the ‘Great Rebellion’ that seemed likely to create the economic freedom that Robertson, Raynal, and so many others had anticipated. In a note to Peru, Williams sanguinely reports, ‘An Indian descended from the Incas’ [sic], has lately obtained several victories over the Spaniards, the gold mines have been for some time shut up; and there is much reason to hope, that these injured nations may recover the liberty of which they have been so cruelly deprived.’24 After recounting the triumphs of Túpac Amaru over the Spaniards in Peru and Chile, Williams urges both the Peruvian rebels and her British readers: Still may that strain the patriot’s soul inspire, And still this injur’d race her spirit fire. O Freedom, may thy genius still ascend, Beneath thy crest may proud Iberia bend. (H. Williams, Peru, VI. 337–40)

It is here that we notice Williams’s first break with her Enlightenmentera antecedents. Unlike Marmontel’s Les Incas, on which Williams

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based so much of her poem, Peru does not end with the conquest, but rather with the hopefulness of the present day. And, as discussed above, Williams had good reason to be optimistic about the imminent advent of Spanish American independence. Williams continues Robertson, Raynal, and Marmontel’s sentimental descriptions of the perfect harmony between the private, public, and natural spheres found within the Inca empire. Unlike her sources, though, she makes no explicit connection between this inter-related indigenous network and the harmonious world community ostensibly offered by free trade. The first canto of Peru presents a vibrant web of interconnected life forces. The exotic flora of Peru stands out for its ability to heal human bodies and spirits: as the health-diffusing plant aspires, Disease, and pain, and hov’ring death retires; Affection sees new lustre light the eye, And feels her vanish’d joys again are nigh. (I. 19–22)

Peru’s native fauna then models the harmony between nature and the domestic affections. The humming bird seeks with fond delight the social nest Parental care has rear’d, and love has blest: The drops that on the blossom’s light leaf hung, He bears exulting to his tender young; The grateful joy his happy accents prove, Is nature, smiling on her works of love. (I. 35–40)

Zamor, the bard of Peru, derives his art from nature and, in turn, nourishes mankind and nature with his song: Nature, in terror rob’d, or beauty drest, Could thrill with dear enchantment Zamor’s breast: ... Oft his wild warblings charm’d the festal hour, Rose in the vale, and languished in the bower; The heart’s responsive tones he well could move, Whose song was nature, and whose theme was love. (V. 9–10, 21–4)

And Ataliba, the King of the Incas, receives his strength from the sun and transmits its celestial power to society:

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And as o’er nature’s form, the solar light Diffuses beauty, and inspires delight; So, o’er Peruvia flow’d the lib’ral ray Of mercy, lovelier than the smile of day! (I. 59–62)

One sees from these descriptions the imbrication of all aspects of Peru. Plants, animals, families, poets, citizens, celestial bodies, and kings all share and delight in one another’s bounty, and together constitute an unbroken cycle of life. In sorrow as well as in joy, the feeling individual is bound together with society and with nature. Underscoring the continuity between ruler and ruled, the emotions of King Ataliba’s people affect him as his own, and as he sits a captive of the Spanish ‘the pains of thousands,’ rather than his own sorrows, ‘throb’d . . . at his breast’ (II. 48). When the Spanish kill Ataliba’s wife, Alzira, ‘the wounds that pierce her bleeding heart’ are not Alzira’s own, but rather ‘Nature’s expiring pang, and death’s keen dart’ (I. 107–8). Similarly, while Manco Capac, Ataliba’s successor, fights the Spanish on the oncefruitful terrain that has been desiccated by war, the ‘famish’d bosom’ of his wife, Cora, registers the lifelessness of the soil. Cora’s agonies are echoed by nature itself (VI. 69): As thus the dying Cora’s plaints arose, O’er the fair valley sudden darkness throws A hideous horror; thro’ the wounded air Howl’d the shrill voice of nature in despair; The birds dart screaming thro’ the fluid sky, And, dash’d upon the cliff’s hard surface die. (VI. 81–6)25

This suffering is then transmuted to Manco when the couple is briefly reunited. Through the sharing of emotions, the identities of the couple merge: ‘he hears his Cora’s sigh – / He meets her look – their melting souls unite, / O’erwhelm’d, and agoniz’d with wild delight’ (VI. 98–100). After Cora’s death, Manco continues the exchange of identities and, assuming the role of the soldier’s widow, promises to ‘shed a tear upon [his] Cora’s grave’ (VI. 106). Manco’s tears complete the circle of nature and humanity by watering the earth and bringing forth new life: Oh nature! sure thy sympathetic ties Shall o’er the ruins of the grave arise;

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Undying spirit from the relentless tomb, And shed, in scenes of love, a lasting bloom. (VI. 145–8)

Williams thus substantially modifies the liberal doctrines of her predecessors by asserting that nature itself, or what one might call ‘organic commerce,’ and not commercial freedom, harmoniously unites the earth, the affective individual, and society. But why, on the eve of Britain’s open enjoyment of Spanish America’s markets, in a climate that celebrated the liberating and humanizing effects of that trade, did Williams omit any mention of economic commerce in her paean to Peruvian sensibility? Contemporary British periodicals following the revolutionary tumult in Peru envisioned Spanish America as a locus of enlightened commercial exchange. The London Magazine’s ‘Authentic Account of the Origin and Progress of the Revolt in the Spanish Colonies of South America,’ for instance, reveals a familiar admixture of respect for ‘liberty’ and – recalling the claims of Marmontel – respect for the Peruvians’ native commercial sensibility and discretion. Against the Spanish claim that Túpac Amaru had been defeated, the author contends, ‘the public will be able to judge of the probability of this defeat of Tupac, when it is considered that he had an army nearly equal to that of the Spaniards . . . and, to say all in a word, that they were fighting for liberty.’ The close of the article outlines the reasons for the revolt (chiefly the imposition of ‘immoderate taxes’), and approvingly notes that while the rebels destroyed Spanish customhouses and ransacked their warehouses, ‘the Indians respected the merchant goods, and did not touch them.’26 Given the ideological bent of her sources and of contemporary treatments of the Túpac Amaru uprising, it is striking that Williams neither makes an explicit connection between free trade and her own vision of organic commerce, nor exalts enlightened trade as the way for Peru to move forward as an independent nation. Perhaps one may argue that the bountiful and diversified climate of Williams’s Peru obviated Raynal’s vision of global intercourse. One can easily see how the natural plenitude portrayed in Peru could have appeared the embodiment, in one nation, of Raynal’s vision of the universal community of trade. Raynal explains that ‘[t]he frenzy of impositions and prohibitions’ had caused European nations to attempt self-sufficiency against the dictates of nature, cultivating commodities ‘which [their] soil and [their] climate rejected, and which were never either of good quality, or plentiful’ (Raynal, VIII. 19. 213).

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By the boon of free trade, however, these labors ‘will be directed to another channel,’ bringing man back to a world of plenty and natural luxury. ‘When the earth can satisfy it’s [sic] wants in a more pleasant way, and at a cheaper rate,’ Raynal contends, ‘it will turn all it’s [sic] activity to objects for which nature had destined it’ (VIII. 19. 213). It is particularly interesting to note that, according to Raynal’s formulation, a system of free trade will satisfy, not merely men, but ‘the earth’ itself, such that the call for liberal commerce proceeds not merely from human exigencies but also from natural demand. If we continue Raynal’s logic, then the enlightened goals of free trade may be said to be immanent (though not explicit) in Williams’s Peruvian ‘world of plenty and natural luxury.’ In order to understand Williams’s omission of commerce more fully, however, it is necessary to go back, once again, to the Enlightenment tradition, but to what we may call a counter-tradition that questioned the power of commerce to bring about the ‘[u]niversal society’ of ‘mutual satisfaction’ that Raynal had prophesied (III. 5. 189, 191). J. G. A. Pocock has pointed out that while Enlightenment-era thinkers understood commerce as a socializing agent, they also drew attention to the resistance of ‘natural society’ to commerce: enlightenment was also held to lead back to the discovery of natural sociability, and this could very easily mean the return to natural society, the charmed and limited sphere within which one formed one’s natural attachments and constructed a self as happy as the socialized self could hope to be. Hence the myth of the paternal family, the idyllic village, the virtuous republic, beyond which one should never stray; hence the mirage of the bons sauvages.27

It is to this Rousseauvian state of natural society ‘without encounter’ that Williams turns, while retaining the sentimental idiom so well developed by the commercial discourse of the Enlightenment (Pocock, ‘Commerce,’ 35). Williams’s omission of free trade also indicates that she read Raynal’s Histoire, somewhat against the grain, as a cautionary tale about the moral dangers of commerce. According to Lynn Festa’s analysis of the Histoire, commerce ‘depends upon and promotes universal and benevolent sentiments through complementary relations of supply and demand.’28 But despite Raynal’s depiction of commerce as sociable and benevolent, he is also sensitive to the deceptions it entails. Of retail traders, in particular, Raynal remarks,

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‘nothing truly laudable can be either recommended to, or expected from, a species of men who have arrived to such a pitch of degradation’ (Raynal, VIII. 19. 194).29 Regarding the lasting effects of global commerce, Raynal is equally pessimistic: in ages previous to civilization, to commerce, and to the invention of signs to represent riches, before interest had prepared a habitation for the traveller, hospitality supplied it’s [sic] place . . . These affecting instances of humanity have decreased, in proportion as the intercourse between nations hath been facilitated. Industrious, rapacious, and interested men, have formed, in all parts, settlements, where the traveller alights, where he commands, and where he disposes of all the conveniences of life as if he were at home . . . Hospitality, that sacred virtue . . . is extinguished amongst all nations, where civilization and social institutions have made any progress. (IV. 9. 376–7)

Festa is astute in parsing out this seamier side of commerce in the Histoire, explaining that Raynal’s celebration of increased freedoms and pleasures foreshadows a freedom unchecked by acknowledgment of other’s [sic] rights. Raynal’s initial jubilance at the potential benefits to all nations of a “general intercourse” [échange mutuel] of opinions, laws and customs, diseases and remedies, virtues and vices . . . opens up onto a darker prospect. Commerce may unite the globe, but it also drives peoples apart; it is, for Raynal, simultaneously the herald of civilization and the purveyor of European diseases, weapons, and vices. (Festa, 211)

At the same time that freer commerce forges connections between distant people, then, it also inspires individuals with the desire for personal gain at others’ expense and works to isolate them, through competition and jealousy, from their fellow men. Even Adam Smith had conceded that it was not genuine sympathy, but rather self-interest, that defined the enlightened affect of the ‘man of humanity.’ In The Theory of Moral Sentiments he notes that on hearing that ‘China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake . . . a man of humanity in Europe . . . would . . . express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people’ but that ‘[t]he most frivolous disaster which could befal [sic] himself would occasion a more real disturbance.’30 More materially, Raynal lamented, ‘an unavoidable inconvenience

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attending a commercial nation’ is that ‘[w]hether free or not, they ultimately love or value nothing but wealth’ (Raynal, VI. 14. 406). It was precisely Williams’s perception of this incommensurability between commercial humanization and genuine sympathy that led her to exclude the theme of free trade from Peru. In addition to a critical reading of the Histoire, Williams looked back to earlier eighteenth-century protests against the ravages of commerce, such as Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s story of Inkle and Yarico in The Spectator (1711). The tale of Inkle and Yarico, and the many literary and theatrical adaptations to which it gave rise throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, constitute one of the most widely diffused texts of European-American contact.31 The plot of the narrative is simple. Inkle, a young English merchant, raised to prize wealth above all else, is shipwrecked on the American mainland, probably in Spanish Florida. His companions are killed by natives, but Inkle is saved by an Indian princess, Yarico, who tends and shelters him. The couple falls in love and Inkle vows to marry Yarico and take her away to England. When an English ship headed for Barbados is sighted off the coast, however, Inkle returns to his mercenary ways and decides to sell Yarico as a slave, capping his cruelty by raising his asking price when he learns of her pregnancy with his child. In Addison and Steele’s account, this story is told by the salon hostess Arietta. The narrative closes with Mr Spectator’s departure from the room with tears in his eyes, tears ‘which a woman of Arietta’s good sense did . . . take for greater applause, than any compliments [he] could make her.’32 According to Martin Wechselblatt, Mr Spectator’s lachrymose sensibility puts forth a standard, acceptable English reaction to Inkle’s moral turpitude. Inkle is portrayed, not as a normative example of British greed and heartlessness, but as an aberration, the kind of trader who gives the good office a bad name, thereby suggesting that commerce and sensibility need not be opposed. After all, Wechselblatt recalls, in the early eighteenth century commerce had a positive reputation ‘as a civilizing agent of progressive “refinement.”’33 Furthermore, Mr Spectator’s sentimental reaction ‘teaches the reassuring lesson that commercial society is capable of regulating itself through its production of an ever more highly refined sensibility’.34 But if Mr Spectator’s ability to feel sympathetic emotional pain is the guarantor of commercial benevolence, what of Yarico’s agonies, or what of Arietta, who disappears after her rendering of Yarico’s story? Their unheeded expressions of

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female suffering significantly complicate Mr Spectator’s ‘reassuring lesson’ about the humanity of English commerce. Williams’s own poetry from the 1780s attests to her understanding of transatlantic commerce as inhumane. In her reformist Poem on the Bill Lately Passed for Regulating the Slave Trade (1788), Williams uses the slave trade as a metonym for ‘Man’s insatiate power,’ commercial avarice.35 To do this, she cannily marshals the supposedly neutral vocabulary of the marketplace to expose the depravity of human exploitation. Commerce calculates the price of pain; Weighs Agony in sordid scales, ... And speculates with skill refin’d, How deep a wound will stab the mind; How far the spirit can endure Calamity, that hopes no cure. (H. Williams, Slave Trade, ll. 154–5, 163–6)

After completing its merciless transactions, ‘barb’rous commerce’ pauses ‘with exact precision . . . / At that nice point which Int’rest draws’ (ll. 228, 293–4). To this portrait of cold cunning, Williams opposes ‘noble’ Britain, ‘first of Europe’s polish’d lands, / To ease the Captive’s iron bands!’ (ll. 31, 37–8). Continuing Addison and Steele’s opposition between mercenary turpitude and sentimental virtue, the honest British soldier-hero, who ‘would spurn / The wealth, Oppression can bestow, / And scorn to wound a fetter’d foe,’ yields instead to ‘Compassion’s mild controul,’ and ardently acts to end the slave trade (ll. 242–4, 246). But while the feeling Briton’s ‘bosom for the Captive bleeds,’ Williams casts the traders of slaves as sanguinary savages, not unlike the Aztecs detailed by Robertson and Raynal (l. 73): Does Avarice, your god, delight With agony to feast his sight? Does he require that victims slain, And human blood, his altars stain? (ll. 307–10)

By the time Williams has done with these traders, they have not only ceased to act as feeling subjects; they have degenerated beyond the reach of European civilization. And Williams extends her censure of

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the slave trade to commerce in general when she writes that ‘despair’ is ‘But deem[ed] . . . a part of trade’ (l. 226). We are very far now indeed from Raynal’s and Marmontel’s portraits of humane commerce as redeeming the devastation wrought by the Spanish conquest. III. The Patriotic Poetics of Sensibility In rejecting the Enlightenment belief in free trade as an agent of human benevolence and improvement, Williams also turns away from the universalizing rhetoric used to support it. In place of Raynal’s celebration of a ‘[u]niversal society’ that exercises its ‘liberty’ through global ‘[c]ommerce,’ Peru foregrounds the importance of national independence (Raynal, III. 5. 189). In place of Marmontel’s praise for the Incas’ European commercial values, Williams exalts the Peruvians’ patriotism and moral sensibility. But as much as she deviates from the globalizing liberalism of her antecedents, Williams does not question the proprietary impulse behind their admiration of the Spanish American natives. If anything, she makes that impulse more explicit – more explicitly personal, and more explicitly British. Williams’s overt political aim in Peru was to encourage the ongoing struggle for Spanish American independence. The terms in which she advocates Peruvian revolution, however, are often difficult to distinguish from those intended to showcase her own exquisite sensibility and poetic authority. In the closing lines of the poem, Williams writes: Peru, the muse that vainly mourn’d thy woes, Whom pity robb’d so long of dear repose; The muse, whose pensive soul with anguish wrung Her early lyre for thee has trembling strung; Shed the weak tear, and breath’d the powerless sigh, Which soon in cold oblivion’s shade must die; Pants with the wish thy deeds may rise to fame, Bright on some living harp’s immortal frame! While on the string of extasy, it pours Thy future triumphs o’er unnumber’d shores. (H. Williams, Peru, VI. 347–56)

At once an apostrophe to Peru and a tribute to Williams’s authorial subjectivity, these lines leave the reader with an ambiguous message. When the poet (here identified as ‘the muse’) hopes that Peru’s ‘deeds

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may rise to fame, / Bright on some living harp’s immortal frame,’ is this a rallying cry to the Peruvian patriots or an articulation of her own literary ambitions? Is her prophecy that Peru itself will triumph ‘o’er unnumber’d shores’ or, rather, that her ‘harp’ will disseminate the news of those victories ‘o’er unnumber’d shores?’ The co-presence of these possibilities indicates that Williams envisions Peruvian independence as a corollary to her anticipated poetic success. Yet one is left to wonder why these triumphs – if they are indeed Peru’s – should be over ‘unnumber’d shores’ rather than over the nation’s Spanish tyrants. Does Williams imply that Peru will take its place next to imperial Britain, not merely defeating Spain, but also sending forth its legions over the seas? It is here that Williams’s poem suggests, not only the power of her sentimental identification with the Peruvians, but also the possibility that her defense of Peru is founded on its imagined resemblance to Britain. Williams would employ this same self-referential strategy in her Poem on the Bill Lately Passed for Regulating the Slave Trade. After detailing the horrors of slavery and the inhumanity of the slave trade, she validates the ability of her own poetic utterance to bring about enlightened change: Oh Eloquence, prevailing art! Whose force can chain the list’ning heart; The throb of Sympathy inspire, And kindle every great desire; With magic energy controul And reign the sov’reign of the soul! (H. Williams, Slave Trade, ll. 321–6)

The eloquent persuasion that Williams models finds its counterpart in Britain’s benevolent paternal rule over the globe: Lov’d Britain! whose protecting hand Stretch’d o’er the Globe, on Afric’s strand The honour’d base of Freedom lays, Soon, soon the finish’d fabric raise! (ll. 351–4)

But Britain’s role is not only to protect Africa; it is also to inspire the spread of British-style liberty throughout the world: And when surrounding realms would frame, Touch’d with a spark of gen’rous flame,

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Some pure, ennobling, great design, Some lofty act, almost divine; Which Earth may hail with rapture high, And Heav’n may view with fav’ring eye; Teach them to make all Nature free, And shine by emulating Thee! (ll. 355–62)

The message here is clear. Britain’s beneficent conquest of the globe will be achieved, not by commerce or by force of arms, but by universal emulation of the freedom and justice its poetry and policy inspire. By contrast with Williams, when Marmontel admits to the dedicatee of his novel, the King of Sweden, ‘my own fame is the object I am providing for, in beseeching of you to permit this work to make its appearance under your auspices,’ he immediately checks this articulation of personal ambition in favor of a more enlarged humanitarianism: ‘But whither am I running? Is it my own concerns, is it my own trifling reputation, that should occupy me on an occasion like the present? Half the globe oppressed, laid waste by Fanaticism, is the picture I have to offer your Majesty.’36 One sees by this comparison the advance of British authorial primacy into the discourse of humanitarian sympathy. Like Marmontel, Williams took care to point out the European characteristics of the Incas. But Williams went well beyond her source when she boldly modified certain characteristics of the Incas to fit a British model. Despite her knowledge that the Incas practiced mass weddings, for example, she depicts Alzira’s marriage to King Ataliba according to Christian custom:37 The virgin train, with rosy chaplets bind; The scented flowers that form her bridal wreathe ... The gentle tribe now sought the hallow’d fane, Where warbling vestals pour’d the choral strain: There aged Zorai, his Alzira prest With love parental, to his anxious breast. (H. Williams, Peru, I. 112– 13, 115–18)

Williams augments this cultural transposition by altering the physical aspect of the Peruvians, a gesture not even Marmontel had ventured. The noble Aciloe thus throws her ‘snowy arms’ around her father when he is rescued from the Spanish, and Alzira’s ‘auburn

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hair, spread[s] loosely to the wind’ as she stands before the altar (V. 98; I. 111). Williams was not alone in her Anglocentric approach to depicting the Spanish Americans. During the years of the Túpac Amaru revolt, sympathetic British attention to Peru frequently turned back upon itself in this manner. Not the ‘Foreign Intelligence’ column but rather the domestic ‘Society and Letters’ column of the Morning Post and Daily Advertiser contained accounts of the Túpac Amaru uprising. Displaying the British experience of gathering Peruvian intelligence as much as the intelligence itself, the Post bracketed its news of the revolt within the personal narrative and political reflections of its foreign correspondent: I have been engaged in examining a parcel of Spanish papers lately taken from a packet from Havanna to Cadiz . . . The papers . . . are advices from Lima, containing accounts from the beginning of January to the 20th of March, 1780, giving an alarming picture of insurrections and popular commotions at Arequipa, in the kingdom of Peru, occasioned by the late introduction of new imposts and duties, which seem to threaten a very general revolt in all the provinces of that extensive country . . . This appears from the following . . . which I have faithfully translated; viz. “We are here (at Lima) making every military preparation, and this city seems to be defended against any insult . . . In short, five provinces are this day in open and avowed insurrection, and the rest of the Viceroyalty disposed to do the same, &c.” Thus the standard of rebellion seems to be spreading over every part of the continent, and our Spanish politicians will have enough to do in their own extensive dominions, which may possibly be a means of hastening the return of peace, and a happy termination of our distraction.38

One reads the news of Peru in this passage, but one also learns of the British correspondent’s activities in obtaining, examining, and translating that news, followed by his observations and prognostications. In this way, events in Peru became inextricably bound up with the experience and thoughts of the writing British subject. Tellingly, the topic that received more attention than the Túpac Amaru revolt itself was the ensuing print war between the Post and another (unnamed) British daily, in which both papers provided evidence that they were the sole interceptor of the authentic story and the only source to be believed. The Post went so far as to provide the exact itinerary of the above-quoted letter as it meandered from

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Cuba, through Scotland, and finally to London, and to assure its readers that its contents had been inspected by a doctor ‘intimately acquainted with the Spanish language’ (MP, 17 November 1780, 66). The Post’s sally was met with an accusation of forgery, followed by more evidence of research, and the eventual withdrawal of the accusation. This emphasis on the British newspaper industry all but overshadowed events in Peru, such that the frequency of Peru’s appearances in the newspaper seemed to confirm, not the country’s intrinsic significance, but rather its significance to Britain’s representation of itself. If, as Benedict Anderson suggests, print culture is one of the primary means by which a nation constitutes and presents itself for its own consumption, then England’s news coverage of Peru offers a presciently globalized case in point.39 By extension, Williams’s use of patriotic rhetoric to describe the Peruvians implies both a proprietary claiming of Peru by Britain and a complementary use of Peru to consolidate a British national identity. Gerard Newman explains: The English quest for National Identity began around 1750 and was substantially complete by 1830. What evidently happened was that the eighteenth-century literary concept of the “Noble Savage,” originally used as a stalking-horse in the man-in-general social criticism of the early Enlightenment, was gradually nationalized and parochialized by the literati and hence made the noble bearer of values supposedly distinctively English. “Sincerity” was the name given to this manufactured national ideal.40

Applying this notion of British sincerity, which Newman defines as ‘artlessness, or innocence,’ Williams describes the King of the Incas (Newman, 129): In Ataliba’s pure and gen’rous heart The virtues bloom’d without the aid of art ... How dear the joys love’s early wishes sought, How mild his spirit, and how pure his thought. (H. Williams, Peru, I. 63–4, 71–2)

Observing ‘the Indian princess who figured so often in London cartoons as a symbol of the colonies,’ Linda Colley argues that this figure ‘summoned up the idea of a noble savage and was therefore well suited

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to those Britons who wanted to idealise America as a second Eden, a haven untouched by the corruption and luxury of the Old World.’41 Williams’s Aciloe, who ‘loves to breathe her hallow’d flame, where art / Has never veil’d the soul, or warp’d the heart,’ offered British readers much the same fantasy (V. 5–6). But Williams does something more than this. By endowing her Peruvians with ‘the wonderful primitive sincerity [and] honesty . . . of the ancient Britons,’ she invites her readers to sympathize with the Incas precisely because they resemble Britain’s own sentimental self-image (Newman, 133). In contending that Williams attempted to render her Peruvians effectively British by exhibiting their innocence, sincerity, and sensibility, I am extending the arguments offered by Newman and Leon Guilhamet that ‘[s]incerity was increasingly treated in the latter half of the [eighteenth] century as a distinctively English possession’ (128) and that in English poetry of this period, it was ‘worn as the badge of a superior culture.’42 It should be noted, though, that Newman’s designation of this ‘emergent national ideal’ as identified by ‘qualities of innocent simplicity and deep emotional responsiveness’ can be applied to Peru in a different way than I do here (127). Alan Richardson argues that the conventionally feminine “relational” virtues which set the Incas above the conquistadors in moral terms – charity, nurturing, “melting” love, self-abnegation – stand in an uncomfortably close relation to the “primitive” virtues – simplicity, purity, innocence, artlessness – that set them below the Spaniards in the hierarchy of races and civilizations. (Richardson, 273)

Yet it is exactly this ‘simplicity, purity, innocence, and artlessness’ – at once feminine and patriotic – that came to define eighteenthcentury Britain’s emerging national identity. James Thomson’s poem Liberty (1736), for instance, celebrates ‘Britannia’ in precisely such feminized, patriotic terms: Courage, of soft deportment, aspect calm, Unboastful, suffering long, and, till provoked, As mild and harmless as the sporting child; ... That Virtue known By the relenting look, whose equal heart For others feels as for another self –

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Of various name, as various objects wake, Warm into action, the kind sense within.43

Britain, ‘the Goddess,’ ‘the fair guardian,’ ‘The mother of the state,’ is thus simultaneously courageous, self-abnegating, infantilized, sympathetic, and charitable to those in need (Thomson, Liberty, IV. 464, 473, 507). Recent scholars have usefully analyzed the relationship between eighteenth-century femininity and nationalism.44 My focus here, however, is on Williams’s inheritance of a poetic language that grafted sincerity to a patriotic British self-image. Further on in Liberty, Thomson writes: O happy land! Where reigns alone this justice of the free! Mid the bright group, Sincerity his front, Diffusive, reared; his pure untroubled eye The fount of truth. (IV. 515–19)

In these few lines, one observes the outline of Newman’s five-part breakdown of British sincerity: ‘innocence,’ ‘honesty,’ ‘originality,’ ‘frankness,’ and ‘moral independence’ (Newman, 129–33). Though more florid in her language, Williams lauds Peruvian sincerity in remarkably similar terms: Nor less, Peruvia, for thy favour’d clime The virtues rose, unsullied, and sublime: There melting charity, with ardor warm, Spread her wide mantle o’er th’ unshelter’d form; ... Simplicity in every vale was found, ... And innocence in light, transparent vest (H. Williams, Peru, I. 41–4, 47, 49)

Drawing, as she so often did, on her beloved Thomson, Williams transposes the ‘happy land’ of Britain onto the ‘favour’d clime’ of Peru, that the latter too might bring forth a people distinguished by ‘Sincerity’ and ‘Simplicity.’45 But while Williams grounds her poem in the discourse of simplicity and sincerity, she also positions Peru, like mythic Albion, in

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what Timothy Brennan calls ‘an “immemorial past” where it’s [sic] arbitrariness cannot be questioned.’46 She imagines ‘Peruvia,’ like Thomson’s Britannia, called into being ‘at Heaven’s command:’47 There nature ever in luxuriant showers Pours from her treasures, the perennial flowers; In its dark foliage plum’d, the tow’ring pine Ascends the mountain, at her call divine. (I. 5–8)

And like the mythical Britain of eighteenth-century patriotic literature, the underlying theme of which John Butt identifies as ‘a lost and irrecoverable Eden,’ Williams’s Peru48 Appear’d like nature rising from the breast Of chaos, in her infant graces drest; When warbling angels hail’d the lovely birth, And stoop’d from heav’n to bless the new-born earth. (IV. 149–52)

In Liberty, Thomson writes to similar effect: See Britain’s empire! lo! the watery vast Wide-waves, diffusing the cerulean plain. And now, methinks, like clouds at distance seen, Emerging white from deeps of ether, dawn My kindred cliffs (Thomson, Liberty, IV. 383–7)

Both Peru and Britain seem to emerge fully formed, bypassing the stadial theory on which Raynal’s and Smith’s economic writings were based. Direct transmission from nature to nationhood replaces the slow progression from rudimentary subsistence to industrial sophistication, thereby effectively writing commerce out of the equation.49 In addition to boasting a common emergence some time in the ‘immemorial past,’ Peru and Britain also share a national symbol, the sea. According to Richard Koebner, England had been identified since the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 as ‘the Empire of the Sea.’50 Williams underscores this parallel by echoing the opening lines of ‘Rule, Britannia!’ in the first lines of Peru. Thomson’s poem begins: When Britain first, at Heaven’s command, Arose from out the azure main, This was the charter of the land,

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And guardian angels sung this strain – “Rule, Britannia, rule the waves; Britons never will be slaves.” (Thomson, ‘Rule,’ ll. 1–6)

Williams’s poem opens comparably: Where the pacific deep in silence laves The western shore, with slow and languid waves, There, lost Peruvia, rose thy cultur’d scene, The wave an emblem of thy joy serene. (H. Williams, Peru, I. 1–4)

Oceanic nations, those ‘Injur’d Isles,’ also share a common vulnerability, and in much eighteenth-century nationalist literature, vulnerability is the necessary companion of innocence.51 ‘Rule, Britannia!’ thus exalts British valor in a ‘curiously defensive tone,’ exhorting Britain to ‘rule the waves,’ not in order to enrich itself through conquest, but in order to defend itself against invasion.52 In The True-Born Englishman (1701), Daniel Defoe is even more explicit about the dangers of England’s national innocence: England unknown as yet, unpeopled lay; Happy, had she remained so to this day, And not to every nation been a prey. Her open harbours, and her fertile plains, The merchant’s glory these, and those the swain’s, To every barbarous nation have betrayed her, Who conquer her as oft as they invade her. So beauty guarded but by innocence, That ruins her which should be her defence.53

Upon her departure for France in 1789, Williams continued this theme of English national vulnerability: My thoughts shall fondly turn to that lov’d Isle, Where Freedom long has shed her genial smile. Less safe in other lands the triple wall, And massy portal, of the Gothic hall, Than in that favour’d Isle the straw-built thatch, Where Freedom sits, and guards the simple latch.54

One may well ask why, if Britain dwells in such rustic peace, does it need to ‘guard’ its ‘latch’? Williams’s suggestion that British freedom

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may be threatened bespeaks an anxiety of infiltration. And like Britain, Williams’s Peru boasts the ‘fertile plains’ and the ‘open harbours’ that both denote innocent virtue and invite conquest. Yet shared virtues and vulnerabilities can only do so much within the discourse of patriotism without a common enemy to rally against. This precious bond of shared aggression was provided by Spain. The similarities between the sixteenth-century conquistadors in Peru and the eighteenth-century Spanish villains – such as the coast guard who cut off Captain Robert Jenkins’s ear (catalyzing the eponymous War of Jenkins’s Ear, 1739–48) and the infamous pirates infesting the waters of British trade routes – would not have been lost on Williams’s readers. Williams’s portrait of ‘Peruvia’s Genius’ anticipating the arrival of the Spanish alludes specifically to Thomson’s image of Britannia contemplating the impending war with Spain. Both Peruvia’s Genius and Britannia sit by the ‘rising breeze’ and the ‘gale’ of the sea in the hope of being soothed (H. Williams, Peru, I. 143; Thomson, Britannia, l. 4). Both are figures of beauty, natural innocence, and vulnerability. The wind ‘expands [Peruvia’s] veil’ and ‘Loose flowed [Britannia’s] tresses; rent her azure robe’ (H. Williams, Peru, I. 143; Thomson, Britannia, l. 6). Both are afraid, Peruvia being ‘Aghast with fear’ and ‘with wild disordered air,’ Britannia bearing an ‘anxious heart’ (H. Williams, Peru, I. 140; Thomson, Britannia, l. 3). This anxiety is triggered, in both instances, by the sight of the ‘sail’ that represents the imminent arrival of the Spanish (H. Williams, Peru, I. 144; Thomson, Britannia, l. 16). In an interesting adaptation, Williams absorbs into the Pacific Ocean the tears that Thomson’s Britannia sheds into the Atlantic, transforming Britannia’s sorrows across space and time into the ‘murmurs of the main’ that calm Peruvia’s spirit (H. Williams, Peru, I. 140). By these intertextual gestures, Williams establishes not only parity but also the trace of a historical continuity between Peru’s and England’s wars with Spain. Like Thomson, Williams offers a sentimentalized representation of the nation, not only as an emanation of ancient, uncorrupted nature, but also as a contemporary site of maritime conflict. Williams also depicts the Peruvians according to the eighteenthcentury Briton’s standard self-image as a peaceful citizen who fights valiantly for justice, but only under absolute necessity. Thomson, again, provides an apt characterization of this national type: on just reason, once his fury roused, No lion springs more eager to his prey –

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Figure 2 John Bell, The Poets of Great Britain complete from Chaucer to Churchill (London: Printed for the author, 1777). ‘Britannia seated on rocks, storm clouds behind, shield resting at left; in circular frame with lion’s head and garland above.’ Courtesy of the British Museum.

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Blood is a pastime; and his heart, elate, Knows no depressing fear. (Thomson, Liberty, IV. 483–6)

Accordingly, when Ataliba and Pizarro first meet, the Inca king hails his foe with ‘native grace,’ and his ‘simple heart’ is charmed by the Spaniard’s ‘eloquence’ and ‘inventive arts’ (H. Williams, Peru, II. 11, 16, 18). But when battle breaks out, ‘Danger and death Peruvia’s sons disdain’ (IV. 107). Like Thomson’s Briton who ‘Knows no depressing fear,’ Williams’s Peruvians ‘Renounce each terror, and for vengeance flame; / Pant high with sacred freedom’s ardent glow, / And [meet] intrepid, the superiour foe’ (IV. 24–6). ‘Touch’d with heroic ardor’ and ‘high of soul,’ the Peruvians courageously ‘receive each fatal wound,’ and although the Spanish boast superior weapons (I. 39–40), Fierce [i]s th’ unequal contest, for the soul When rais’d by some high passion’s strong controul, New strings the nerves, and o’er the glowing frame Breathes the warm spirit of heroic flame. (VI. 9–12)

The Peruvians thus reflect the ‘boldness of the ancient Britons’ as well as their ‘primitive sincerity [and] honesty’ (Newman, 133). By stressing the Peruvians’ heroism alongside their native tenderness, Williams recasts the sixteenth-century battle between Peru and its colonizers as the eighteenth-century conflict between Britain and Spain. In these ways, Williams replaces the liberal commercial values that bound the Peruvian and the European in Marmontel’s Les Incas with a set of tropes that stress the similarities between the Peruvian and the British national character and works to re-articulate British patriotism in an increasingly global context. But while this revision owes much to Williams’s inheritance from the earlier eighteenthcentury literary tradition of Thomson and Defoe, it also bespeaks her immersion in the late eighteenth-century literature of sensibility that privileged the author’s ‘psychological self-identification’ and ‘the sentiments of [the] heart’ over other concerns.55 As Claudia Johnson comments, ‘sensibility has a lot less to do with moralizing or teaching anything about the conditions which make its victims suffer than it does with validating the moral authority of those who look on with sympathy.’56 If we adopt this position, then Williams’s Anglicization of the Peruvians serves at least as much to assert the primacy of her own sensibility as it does to bolster British patriotism or engage her readers’ sympathy with the Túpac Amaru revolt.

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It seems only fitting that Williams herself should have become the object of such authorial self-assertion when the young William Wordsworth published his ‘Sonnet on Seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams Weep at a Tale of Distress’ (1787): She wept. – Life’s purple tide began to flow In languid streams through every thrilling vein; Dim were my swimming eyes – my pulse beat slow, And my full heart was swelled to dear delicious pain.57

Wordsworth’s first quatrain exhibits the affective mechanism of the Romantic poem of sensibility, namely the blurring of the boundary between the emotional subject and the writer who absorbs and articulates that emotion. As Williams weeps, the blood begins to flow in Wordsworth’s veins and, as his heart fills with ‘delicious pain,’ he too begins to weep. But, as in Peru, this gesture of identification gives rise to an equally powerful attention to the authorial self: Life left my loaded heart, and closing eye; A sigh recalled the wanderer to my breast; Dear was the pause of life, and dear the sigh That called the wanderer home, and home to rest. (Wordsworth, ‘Sonnet,’ ll. 5–8)

So profound is the impression of Williams’s pain that Wordsworth, for a moment, dies. And what restores the poet is neither the natural cycle of life nor his shared identity with the object of his gaze. Rather, he is recalled by ‘A sigh,’ that first utterance, harbinger of the private emotion expressed in sentimental poetic language. In this light, one is encouraged to reread Williams’s support for the Peruvian rebels – ‘Peru, the muse that vainly mourn’d thy woes, / . . . Shed the weak tear, and breath’d the powerless sigh’ – as distinctly privileging the affective response of the poet over the suffering of the Peruvians (H. Williams, Peru, VI. 347–56).58 Williams thus begins the work of connecting the patriotic writing subject with the sentimental writing subject, and of substituting a uniquely British sensibility for the vision of enlightened commerce that unified the world in the writings of Raynal and Marmontel. In this gesture, Peru reflects a central dilemma of the period, namely that the language of sensibility often exalted the thoughts and feelings of the writer above his or her subject matter, helping to consolidate the

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centrality of the writing self while also striving to forward humanitarian causes (such as the liberation of Peru) that lay well beyond the ambit of that self. But while Peru, like Wordsworth’s ‘Sonnet,’ may at times seem to have little to do with anything beyond the emotions of the poet, G. J. Barker-Benfield contends ‘that sensibility’s galvanizing of “public opinion” was fundamental to the remarkable legislative initiatives aimed at humanitarian reform during the last third of the [eighteenth] century.’59 Indeed, the eighteenth century abounds with works that, like Peru, attempt to unite the claims of authorial sensibility with those of humanitarian action. As early as 1759, Adam Smith had identified sympathy, that faculty which can ‘interest [a man] in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it,’ as capable of uniting selfinterest and humanitarian sociability (Smith, Theory, 9). On the opposite side of the political spectrum, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France presented sensibility as ‘the affective front of ideology: through its operations, established social and political arrangements are enforced from within’ (C. Johnson, 113). Burke writes: we are so made as to be affected at such spectacles [as the French Revolution] with melancholy sentiments upon the unstable condition of mortal prosperity; and the tremendous uncertainty of human greatness; because in those natural feelings we learn great lessons; because in events like these our passions instruct our reason.60

Yet if Williams had viable models for linking the affective authority of the writing subject with the demands of political engagement, it remains to be seen how useful the examples of either a Smith or a Burke could be in the confrontation she stages between the proprietary poetics of patriotism and sensibility, on the one hand, and the struggle for Spanish American independence, on the other. IV. Imperialist Horizons Peru does more than instrumentalize the Spanish American struggle for independence in the service of developing a British poetic sensibility. It also reflects the historical moment in which British discussions of Spanish America became infused with more unabashedly colonialist language. Nevertheless, Williams’s poem differs critically from contemporary works that asserted an exclusively

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British ascendancy in Spanish America. Works such as Thomas Tickell’s ‘On the Prospect of Peace’ (1782), for example, projected that Britain’s wide-extended hand Shall o’er the main to far Peru command, So vast a tract whose wide domain shall run, Its circling skies shall see no setting sun. Thee, thee, an hundred languages shall claim, And savage Indians swear by ANNA’s name.61

Peru, by contrast, explores an imperialist promiscuity by which, not only the British and Peruvian empires, but all empires – including Spain’s – are validated. Williams begins this surprising naturalization of Spanish conquest by identifying the conquistadors with the sea, her established emblem of Peruvian and British nationhood. As the Spanish are borne toward Peru by the willing waves, the moon (one of the Incas’ principle deities) shines upon them (H. Williams, Peru, I. 138).62 Peru’s national symbol, the ocean that ‘laves / The western shore, with slow and languid waves’ now also ‘th’ incumbent vessel laves,’ as though it registered no difference between Peruvian, Briton, and Spaniard (I. 1–2, 146). Williams goes on to allegorize the conquest, first as one of South America’s typical ‘unrelenting storm[s],’ and then as a conflict between its native flora (I. 131). Although the Spaniards ‘come to plant despair,’ victory ‘Oft tore from Spain’s proud head her laurel bough, / And bade it blossom on Peruvia’s brow’ (V. 58; IV. 31–2; italics added). Vegetation also refigures the Incas’ subjugation when Manco and his people celebrate an ‘antient rite’ in which, ‘mid’ their fetters,’ they ‘twine one festal flower’ (IV. 52, 54). When Manco is finally defeated, ‘conquest . . . / Her sanguine laurel to Pizarro brings,’ completing the metaphorical exchange of plant life (VI. 165–6). Williams also extends her national allegory to the fauna of South America, imagining the conquest as a struggle, not between contending nations, but rather between Peru’s indigenous condor and hummingbird (IV. 175–8). Given that the native Peruvians believed they were descended from the condor, Williams’s depiction of the triumph of the condor over the hummingbird works to naturalize the Incas’ defeat by the Spanish as a defeat by their own hands. Through these metaphorical gestures, the Spaniards lose their status as foreign invaders and, like the British, assume their role as agents of Peruvian nature.

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Although Williams’s accommodation of Spanish empire may at first appear anomalous, it participates in a larger Romantic-era effort to redefine European colonialism as natural, even while advocating revolution in Spanish America.63 Between the early 1770s and the 1780s, British attitudes toward the Spanish empire had shifted significantly. When Anna Letitia Barbauld wrote her poem, ‘Groans of the Tankard’ (1773), silver was still closely associated with the cruelty of the Spanish mines and the opulence of the Catholic Church. Upon finding itself on a Protestant table, filled with simple English water instead of ‘the nectar’d draught’ culled from ‘The richer spoils of either India’s shore,’ Barbauld’s Tankard expostulates:64 Did I for this my native bed resign, In the dark bowels of Potosi’s mine? Was I for this with violence torn away, And drag’d to regions of the upper day? For this the rage of torturing furnace bore, From foreign dross to purge the bright’ning ore? (Barbauld, ‘Groans,’ ll. 53–8)

In the Tankard’s account of the tortures it endured, one hears an unmistakable echo of those suffered by the Spanish American natives forced to work in the silver mines of Potosí. With biting irony, the Tankard then proclaims that its arduous fate would have been justly recompensed if it could have found itself in the service of the more ‘jovial orgies’ and carnivals of the Catholic faith (ll. 65, 67). Better would it have been, the Tankard claims, to have been sent ‘Where on soft cushions lolls the gouty Dean, / Or rosy Prebend, with cherubic face, / . . . Or to some spacious mansion, Gothic, old’ (ll. 70–1, 75). While Deans and Prebends are to be found in both the Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion, and while Gothic mansions exist in England as well as Spain, Barbauld’s message is that the spoils of Spanish America should remain within the sphere of sacerdotal luxury as they are unfit for the likes of sober, Protestant Britons. By the early 1780s, however, Britain’s orientation toward Spanish America had changed and, by extension, so had its attitude toward the region’s famed precious metals. As Britain readied itself to replace Spain as the world’s foremost empire, years of anti-Spanish invective yielded to a discourse in which even gold and silver were linked to the enlightened ideals of progress, improvement, and universal

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benevolence. In this spirit, the London Magazine sought to ‘convey a new Sentiment’ on the subject of gold: Rail then no more at gold, for plain to view Behold an antidote and poison too: Oh! save the shining metal from abuse And the heart turns it to a SOCIAL use; The widow, orphan, and ten thousand more, Prove, that no dross need hang about the ore; Prove, that this glittering treasure may dispense The sterling joys of pure benevolence, While from the golden reservoir may flow The richest streams of SYMPATHY below. (LM, October 1781, 492)

As Britain’s position as overseas master of the Spanish American trade was consolidated, British partisans of reform and revolution examined anew the moral prospects of empire. Perhaps now was the time to continue where Spain had left off, to establish, as Marmontel so memorably phrased it, ‘an empire in men’s hearts’ (Marmontel, I. 19. 189–90). NOTES

1. Alan Richardson defines the Romantic-era ‘epic romance’ as turning ‘from the universality and remorselessly teleological structure of epic proper to the contingency and open-endedness of romance’ (Richardson, 266). See also Quint, 8. 2. Raynal, VI. 14. 414. Citations refer to volume, book, and page number(s). 3. Williams’s footnotes indicate that she relied for historical details on ‘El Inca’ Garcilaso de la Vega’s Comentarios reales de los Incas (1552), which she read in French as Le commentaire royal, ou L’histoire des Yncas, roys du Peru (1632), Raynal’s Histoire, and Robertson’s History. Williams also drew on Françoise de Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Péruvienne (1747), parts of which were presented to the Englishspeaking public in Mrs Thicknesse’s three-volume Sketches of the Lives and Writings of the Ladies of France (1778). 4. Defoe, ‘England,’ 16. 5. W. Robertson, I. 8. 174. Citations refer to volume, book, and page number(s). 6. Thomson, Britannia, l. 167. 7. Thomson, Alfred, ‘Alfred. An Ode,’ 254–5; italics in original.

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8. Liss, 13. 9. Quoted in Pares, 74. In 1741, spurred by Trelawny’s suggestion, the British navy attacked Carthagena with the intention of ‘mak[ing] the English “masters of all of Spanish America”’ (W. S. Robertson, Miranda, 197). 10. Were she to ‘voluntarily give up all authority over her colonies,’ Smith argued, ‘Great Britain would not only be immediately freed from the whole annual expence of the peace establishment . . . but might settle with [the colonies] such a treaty of commerce as would effectually secure to her a free trade, more advantageous to the great body of the people . . . than the monopoly which she at present enjoys’ (Smith, Wealth, II. iv. 7. 132). Citations refer to volume, book, chapter, and page number(s). 11. Dalrymple, I. 28. 12. Quoted in Unknown, ‘Santiago,’ 235. Such statements reinforced the rhetoric of both conquest and of liberty. Spanish Americans lived ‘under the tyranny of old Spain, a tyranny they have long groaned under, and which they are ready to shake off, whenever they shall have a proper opportunity . . . It well becomes a free people to place others in the same condition with themselves. To deliver so many nations from Tyranny will be truer Glory than Alexander gained by all his Victories. Let me add to this, that we shall thereby greatly increase our own Riches, which is the end of all conquests’ (327). 13. W. S. Robertson, Miranda, 198. 14. Rippy, 25. 15. LM, December 1779, 569. 16. Rydjord, 92. Britain’s continental rivals were not convinced by the rhetoric of emancipation. As early as 1776, Bourbon officials in Spain and France were anticipating the British conquest of Spanish America. ‘Such is, indeed the state of the [Spanish] colonies,’ wrote the Comte de Vergennes, that ‘none is in a position to resist the least part of the forces which England is sending to America, and the physical possibility of the conquest appears but too evident’ (quoted in Rydjord, 79). The Spanish minister at the court of France, the Conde de Aranda, warned that Britain plotted the ‘conquest of . . . Spanish territory to serve as indemnity for losses or to pay the cost of the war [with the North American colonies]’ (Rydjord, 80). 17. LM, March 1780, 131–2. 18. LM, April 1783, 189. 19. Quoted in LM, October 1783, 361. 20. McFarlane, 314. 21. Cornblitt, 110–11. 22. This proposal, signed by ‘a faithful friend of the English nation’ is preserved in the official papers of William Pitt (W. S. Robertson, Miranda, 207).

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23. Lynch, ‘British,’ 1. 24. H. Williams, Peru, VI. 325n. Citations refer to canto and line number(s) unless otherwise noted. 25. Likewise, when the father of the Inca maid Aciloe is being tortured by the Spanish, not Aciloe, but rather the forest and the moon, suffer: ‘But now the gales that bend [the wood’s] foliage die, / Soft on the silver turf its shadows lie; / While, slowly wand’ring o’er the scene below, / The gazing moon look’d pale as silent woe’ (H. Williams, Peru, V. 171–4). When Aciloe’s father is restored to her, the ensuing tears and flushed cheeks are not hers, but those of the rainbow: ‘So fall the crystal showers of fragrant spring, / And o’er the pure, clear sky, soft shadows fling; / Then paint the drooping clouds from which they flow / With the warm colours of the lucid bow’ (V. 313–16). 26. LM, October 1781, 470. 27. Pocock, ‘Commerce,’ 34–5. 28. Festa, 211. 29. Raynal qualifies this statement, however, by claiming that the moral constitution of ‘those whose speculations embrace all the countries of the earth’ is entirely distinct from that of retail traders (Raynal, VIII. 19. 194). 30. Smith, Theory, 136. 31. Edward Said identifies the tale as one of those foundational fictions ‘that stand guard over the imagination of the New World’ (Said, Culture, 212). Citing a reviewer for the European Magazine who concluded, ‘no story has ever taken so firm a hold on the public attention,’ Frank Felsenstein also designates the story of Inkle and Yarico as ‘a defining myth of the Enlightenment’ (Felsenstein, xii, xi). According to Gretchen Gerzina, the story of Inkle and Yarico ‘became a touchstone for the complicated dealings . . . where love and honour – all the finer instincts so dear to the public – were pitted against social and commercial gain’ (Gerzina, 8). 32. Felsenstein, 88; italics in original. 33. Wechselblatt, 197. 34. Wechselblatt, 201. Thomas L. Haskell offers a cogent (and subsequently much-contested) analysis of commerce as sentimentally selfregulating in ‘Capitalism and the Origins of Humanitarian Sensibility, Part II,’ American Historical Review 90 (1985): 339–61. 35. H. Williams, Slave Trade, l. 16. 36. Marmontel, ‘Epistle Dedicatory,’ unpaginated. 37. Williams’s knowledge of Inca nuptial ceremonies was derived from Garcilaso’s Commentaire royal and Marmontel’s Les Incas. Garcilaso writes, ‘every year or every two years, at a certain season, the king ordered all the marriageable maidens and youths of his lineage to gather together in Cuzco . . . The Inca placed himself in the midst of the

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38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55.

Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 contracting parties, who were near to one another, and having looked at them, called a youth and a girl, took each by the hand, united them in the bond of matrimony and delivered them to their parents’ (Garcilaso, I. 8. 205). Citations refer to volume, chapter, and page number(s). Following Garcilaso, Marmontel is explicit about the collective nature of Inca weddings: ‘the lovers, who were arrived at the nuptial age advanced; and nothing could be more striking than the immense circle composed of youth in the blossom of life, who constituted the strength and the hope of the state, demanding the right of giving birth to others, and inriching [sic] it in their turn with a new race.’ Once gathered, the Inca addresses the ‘Children of the state’ and enjoins the couples to propagate their race. At this command, ‘a thousand couples, in turn, presented themselves before him’ (Marmontel, II. 30. 45–6). MP, 17 November 1780, 66; italics in original. On the role of print culture in the formation of national identity, see B. Anderson, 61–82. Newman, 128. Colley, 134. Guilhamet, 211. Thomson, Liberty, IV. 480–2, 486–90. Citations refer to canto and line number(s). See Claudia Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995); Gary Kelly, Women, Writing, and Revolution, 1790–1827 (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1993); and Anne K. Mellor, Mothers of the Nation: Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780–1830 (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2002). Williams’s most cherished poets were Thomson and Pope (Kennedy, Williams, 35, 48). Brennan, 45. Thomson, ‘Rule,’ l. 1. Butt, 134. Meek, 5. Koebner, 77. Quoted in Whitney, 59. Kaul, 1–2. Thomson’s allusion to the threat of British slavery allows him to represent Britain as a potential victim of tyranny and thereby to justify colonial expansion as defensive. As I discuss in Chapters 2 and 3, later Romantic-era works such as Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s Pizarro (1799) and Robert Southey’s Madoc (1805) will exploit this notion of British vulnerability more pointedly in order to forge strategic political and affective parallels between Britain and Spanish America. Defoe, True-Born, 30. H. Williams, ‘Farewell,’ ll. 73–8. Frye, 152; Kennedy, ‘Storms,’ 79.

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56. C. Johnson, ‘Review,’ 112–3. 57. Wordsworth, ‘Sonnet,’ ll. 1–4. These lines are distinctly reminiscent of – and possibly inspired by – the aforementioned scene in Peru where Manco and the dying Cora, in an exchange of tears and lifeblood, ‘their melting souls unite’ (H. Williams, Peru, VI. 98–100). 58. Similar assertions of the British poetic prerogative to mourn the woes of Peru and other beleaguered nations abound in the popular poetry of the 1780s. An ‘Elegy on Winter,’ penned by one ‘Amintor’ in the British Magazine and Review, reads: ‘To plead the anguish of the poor distress’d / To some the powers of eloquence are given; / And those of Peru or of Ind possess’d, / Are nought but stewards o’er the boon of Heaven. / ’Tis theirs to wipe the tear from Sorrow’s eye; / ’Tis theirs the pangs of indigence to feel; / ’Tis theirs the balm of comfort to apply. / And soothe the wound that Death alone can heal’ (BM, November 1783, 377). 59. Barker-Benfield, 224. See also Langford, ch. 10. 60. E. Burke, Reflections, 119. 61. Tickell, 18–19. 62. Garcilaso notes that the Incas ‘particularly owed adoration and service to the Sun and the Moon for having sent down their children to them to deliver them from the savage life they had led and bring them the advantages of human existence which they now enjoyed’ (Garcilaso, I. 21. 54). 63. Williams’s revolutionary sympathies are not in question here. From her first published poem, Edwin and Eltruda (1782), to her better-known Letters Written in France (1790–3), Williams distinguished herself as an ‘ardent Republican’ (Kennedy, ‘Storms,’ 87). Williams even received the Venezuelan patriot, Francisco de Miranda, at her Parisian salon in the early 1790s. 64. Barbauld, ‘Groans,’ ll. 37, 34.

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CHAPTER TWO

CREOLE PATRIOTISM AND THE DISCOURSE OF REVOLUTIONARY LOYALISM, 1792–9

I. Radical Nationalism Two plays of 1792, Samuel Morton’s Columbus; or, A World Discovered and John Thelwall’s The Incas; or, The Peruvian Virgin, literalized Helen Maria Williams’s portrait of British-Inca kinship by inserting actual English characters into the scene of Spanish American conquest. Both plays draw upon what Joseph Donahue has called the ‘currently fashionable materials’ of the Spanish conquest of America and reveal a significant reliance on the plot and characterization of Marmontel’s influential novel Les Incas.1 But while both plays were submitted to Covent Garden’s Thomas Harris, only Morton’s Columbus was produced. According to Michael Scrivener, Harris’s choice was explicitly political. The Incas was an ‘ideologically provocative,’ ‘revolutionary, Enlightenment play.’2 Columbus, by contrast, was an overtly ‘nationalistic play’ whose ‘politically conformist’ message agreed with a climate in which ‘the government was moving quickly toward declaring war against France and domestic radicals’ (Scrivener, Incas, 83, 87). The ideological differences between The Incas and Columbus certainly reflect Britain’s political polarization in the years following the French Revolution. Yet the subject of Spanish America did not lend itself easily to the advocacy of any single political agenda. Rather, as we have seen in the cases of Les Incas, the American histories of Robertson and Raynal, and Williams’s Peru, the figure of Spanish America consistently functions to expose the constitutive overlap between apparently antithetical ideological positions.3

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Morton’s English protagonist, Harry Herbert, establishes his claim on viewers’ patriotic sympathies from the start. It is Herbert who, on board Columbus’s ship, is the first to descry the New World on the horizon, a significant gesture toward the age-old English wish of having asserted claims to America before its Spanish rival. Harry addresses this imperial fantasy head-on: ‘I thought that, altho’ King Henry was deprived of the honour of this enterprise, that did not preclude his subjects; so I shipped myself off to Castille.’4 But if Harry precedes Columbus in asserting an ocular empire over America, any claim to British primacy is quickly defused by the English sailor’s complete submission to his Genoese leader. In fact, most of Harry’s invocations of English patriotism are defined in terms of his service to Columbus. When the Spaniards mutiny and conduct the loyal Harry to be tortured, for example, he beseeches Columbus to ‘write to England the story of my fate; that when my fortunes shall be enquired after, my friends . . . may say, Herbert stuck to his commander to the last, and died as an Englishman ought’ (Morton, II, iii, 21). Even more problematic is Harry’s rationale for protecting Columbus. ‘Do you suppose,’ he asks, ‘that I, who had my forefathers chopped to atoms in deciding the preference between a red rose and a white one, will stand idle in the cause of humanity?’ (II, iii, 24). Here, Harry does something potentially more subversive than predicate his English patriotism on fealty to Columbus. He frames the ravages of domestic British warfare as the moral precondition for his defense of a foreign commander. It soon becomes clear that Harry’s role in Morton’s drama is to evoke English laughter rather than English pride. Even as he pledges to redeem Columbus from the criminal imputations of his men, Harry confesses, ‘I don’t know how it happens, that altho’ in some things I am a tolerably active, industrious fellow, yet when I have to seek revenge, I grow so infernally lazy I can scarce find it in my heart to set about it’ (II, ii, 17). It is thus not Harry, but rather his Spanish counterpart, Alonzo, who rises to defend their leader. While Harry’s greatest claim to patriotic virtue is his unquestioning loyalty to Columbus, Alonzo – like his namesake in Marmontel’s Les Incas – establishes his cause as a defense of the Native Americans against the greed of their conquerors. ‘Oh God of justice,’ he declares, ‘may thy awful power bury within [the] earth . . . all who for thirst of gold forget humanity, and dare to make thy sacred name a sanction for their crimes’ (III, iv, 35). Although Harry may appeal to English humor, it is the Spaniard Alonzo who addresses the heart of Britain’s

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imperial ideology, namely its self-perception as the enlightened opponent of Spanish empire. Like Marmontel’s hero, Morton’s Alonzo comes to America ‘to be instructed’ by the natives, ‘not to teach’ them (II, i, 14). And like Marmontel’s King Ataliba, Morton’s King Orozimbo proclaims the superiority of the benevolent Spanish conqueror: ‘On thee depends our fate – yet would I welcome the loss of empire and of life, rather than save them by Alonzo’s misery’ (V, i, 54). Yet Marmontel’s narrative revolves around Pizarro’s conquest of Peru, not Columbus’s ‘discovery’ of America. By conflating the ‘discovery’ with the conquest of America, Morton effectively overwrites the depredations of the conquistadors with the alleged neutrality of the explorer. Given Spain’s political and dynastic links with France, and given that in 1792, England and France were on the brink of war, Morton’s approving treatment of the Spanish conquest treads upon delicate ground. Sensitive to the fact that such gestures might awaken British anxieties about a French ascendancy in Spanish America, Morton prudently diverts his praise of Columbus and Alonzo to a more congenial topic: the celebration of British imperialism. As the Genoese explorer laments at the end of the play, ‘Had I earlier known that Englands [sic] monarch would have graced my fortunes with his victorious banner, then would [the Incas’] freedom have been firmly fixed. – They only who themselves are free, give liberty to others’ (V, iv, 66). Thus, although the patriotic Harry has been relegated to a comic role, none other than Columbus himself serves in his stead to vindicate the British myth of beneficent empire. To be sure, Morton’s palliation of Spanish imperialism is still a far cry from the radicalism of Thelwall’s ‘Jacobin play.’5 As Scrivener has shown, The Incas is an extended allegory designed to exalt the cause of the French Revolution and to condemn Britain’s conservative reaction. When the upright soldier Faulkland (Thelwall’s English stand-in for Marmontel’s Alonzo) is unjustly accused of blaspheming the Sun, his persecution is intended to evoke the flimsy charges of sedition that brought so many suspected radicals to the bar. Continuing the allegory, Thelwall renders the falsification of evidence by government spies as the machinations of the corrupt Peruvian general, Masseru, who manipulates the voice of the mystic oracle to support his allegations against Faulkland. In condemning the priests who ‘cherish’ a ‘superstitious rage’ and who ‘doom [him] to perish / This madness to assuage,’6 Faulkland offers a thinly veiled criticism of contemporary events such as ‘the criminalizing of the Rights of

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Man . . . and state-organized burnings of Paine’s effigy and writings’ (Scrivener, Incas, 81). Faulkland’s rescue from the pyre by the Inca warrior, Rocca, represents ‘the recent republican triumph over Louis’s soldiers at the Tuileries,’ and the King’s final decision to pardon Masseru’s fraud, Scrivener notes, refers ‘to the debate over the fate of Louis, not executed until 1793’ (81–3). The other crucial distinction between Columbus and The Incas is the latter’s explicit anti-imperialism. Unlike both Columbus and Marmontel’s Les Incas, Thelwall’s drama begins with the definitive defeat of the Spanish. In fact, with the exception of the captive, Elvira, and Faulkland’s comically bumbling sidekick, Pedrillo, there are no Spanish characters in the play.7 ‘It is,’ Scrivener notes, ‘as though the Amerindian uprisings of 1780–81 in the Andes had succeeded, rather than resulting in the . . . slaughter of over 100,000 Native Americans’ (85). In addition to allowing for substantially greater Peruvian agency than that found in other British literary treatments of the conquest, the Spaniards’ effective expulsion from Peru reveals that Thelwall was as sensitive to the cause of Spanish American independence as he was devoted to the aims of the French Revolution. In light of Thelwall’s anti-imperialist sympathies, it may seem curious that he credits Faulkland, rather than the Peruvians themselves, with the defeat of the Spanish. It is, of course, a fair assumption that Thelwall’s replacement of the Spanish Alonzo with an English hero was intended to ingratiate the play to British audiences as well as government censors. As Nicoll observes, ‘national feeling was rising to a fever heat . . . With the stirring events across the Channel audiences became unduly sensitive, and many authors, with no hidden meaning, had their works condemned because of supposed satirical or allegorical intent.’8 When choosing Les Incas as his source text, Thelwall would also have known that British theatrical adaptations of French literary works were expected ‘to please a British – not internationally-minded – audience.’9 While these considerations surely bear upon Thelwall’s choice of a protagonist, however, they cannot entirely account for the extent to which Faulkland’s valor overshadows the exertion of Peruvian heroism. Although Thelwall makes no overt attempt to establish a British title to Peru on the grounds of Faulkland’s defeat of the Spanish, the Incas’ gratitude speaks for itself. As Rocca informs the Peruvians, His victorious arm . . . rescued us from the perils that threatened us – We were beaten in every battle – on every side we saw nothing but destruction

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– who was it then rallied our scattered army & led then from defeat to victory? Who was it that instructed us successfully to oppose those tyrants to whom we had previously paid such slavish and unavailing adoration! – who taught us no longer to fear those weapons of human invention which we had ignorantly considered as the lightning bolts of Heaven itself? To whom is Peru indebted for this day’s triumph? Who saved your Incas’ life? yourselves – your families – your country –? Sidney [Faulkland]!10

The Incas, Rocca argues, owe Faulkland more than their gratitude; they owe him their lives and that of their country. ‘Altho’ Peru itself should perish,’ he insists, the Peruvians must ‘cherish’ the liberator’s ‘safety’ (Thelwall, II, v, 123). When Faulkland is led to the sacrificial pyre, Rocca thus begs the priests to take his own life in exchange, making good his promise that ‘sooner than see thee perish – Peru itself shall –’ (III, iv, 136).11 In such instances, the nationalism of The Incas outstrips that of Morton’s Columbus and goes well beyond what may have been required to placate British authorities. There is simply no comparison between Faulkland, the humane and stalwart English conqueror, and Harry Herbert, the laughably lovable English caricature. I do not mean to suggest that Faulkland’s patriotic appeal undercuts the integrity of Thelwall’s consistently outspoken criticisms of the British government. Faulkland’s heroism and the virtual absence of Spaniards from the play strongly suggest that The Incas operates as a critique of Spanish imperialism. It is essential to understand, however, that Britain’s hostility to the Spanish empire, like its material support of creole revolutionaries during this time, is inseparable from the desire to assert commercial and political influence in Spain’s colonies. What Thelwall’s play reveals is the extent to which nationalism and anti-imperialism functioned as mutually consolidating forces in shaping British attitudes toward Spanish American revolution. In all likelihood, Harris’s refusal to produce The Incas reflects his wariness of Thelwall’s radical reputation rather than an objection to the work’s equation of nationalism and independence. And although Thelwall failed to reach a popular audience, contemporary creole insurgents resident in London succeeded. These patriots’ canny fusion of revolution and conservative nationalism had vital implications for British writers later in the decade, most notably for Richard Brinsley Sheridan, whose Pizarro (1799) would realize Thelwall’s project of marshalling British support for liberation overseas to reauthorize the expression of dissent at home.

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II. Justifying Revolution The 1790s were a decade of reactionary panic. Beset by fears of a French invasion, unrest in Ireland and Scotland, and a spate of strikes and mutinies, the British government implemented a policy of systematic repression. Radical organizations were infiltrated by government spies and compelled to meet clandestinely. Advocates of working-class rights, republican ideals, and revolution were systematically silenced, arrested, imprisoned, transported, and even hung. Habeas corpus was suspended, large public meetings were prohibited, and censorship became the order of the day.12 Into this tinderbox entered a wave of Spanish American patriots, come to England to enlist support for their revolution against Spain. Incongruous as it may seem in a climate where the mere word ‘revolution’ could denote treason, the envoys were greeted with general enthusiasm. While British radicals arguing against working-class disenfranchisement were jailed on charges of sedition, British ministers condemned Spain’s social and political discrimination against creoles. While British reformers protesting inordinate taxation incurred the suspicions of the police, the Pitt administration listened sympathetically to creole insurgents’ complaints regarding the unjust duties and taxes imposed by the mother country.13 Given that Britain was always ready to lend a hand in the cause of justice (that is, when it served British interests), the emissaries’ reception is not entirely surprising. What is illuminating is the rather unlikely way in which the patriots appealed to government interests – namely by redefining revolution as the natural extension of loyalty to King and country.14 In his London writings of the early 1790s, the Peruvian patriot Juan Pablo Viscardo y Guzmán took particular care to establish his contempt for the French Revolution. His Essai historique des troubles de l’Amérique Méridionale dans l’an 1780, for instance, warns that ‘under the mask of moderation and humanity,’ France was moving to revolutionize Spanish America and oust Britain from its privileged position in the region.15 In his Lettre aux Espagnols-Américains (1791, 1799), Viscardo disdains even to mention the revolution in France in conjunction with the cause of Spanish American independence.16 Nevertheless, Richard Price’s revolutionary Discourse on the Love of Our Country (1789) was not far from his mind when Viscardo set about drafting the Lettre. In the Discourse, Price traces the principles of the French Revolution back to those of England’s own Glorious Revolution, specifically ‘[t]he right to resist power

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when abused,’ and ‘[t]he right to chuse our own governors; to cashier them for misconduct; and to frame a government for ourselves.’17 Like Price, Viscardo grounds his defense of liberty in a time-honored national tradition. According to the sixteenth-century Aragonese Constitution, he argues, any ‘law which opposes itself to the general good of those men for whom it is made, is an act of tyranny’ and ‘to exact observance to it, is enacting slavery.’18 The King was therefore legitimate only insofar as he ‘preserve[d] [the] rights and liberty’ of his subjects, and any violation of those rights warranted the election of a new sovereign (Viscardo, 338). For both Price and Viscardo, present-day injustices represented a failure to fulfill the legacy of their countries’ constitutional liberality. According to Price, the Test Laws, which ‘deprive of eligibility to civil and military offices, all who cannot conform to the established worship,’ remain a ‘public iniquit[y]’ that dishonors the promise of 1688 (R. Price, 36). By denying Protestant Dissenters the right to hold government office, the Test Laws ignore the fact that ‘a representation in the legislature of a kingdom is the basis of constitutional liberty in it . . . without it a government is nothing but an usurpation’ (39; italics in original). Like Protestant Dissenters, Viscardo contends, Spanish American creoles ‘are declared unworthy’ and ‘incapable’ of holding government office in their own country, ‘[d]eprived of all the advantages of government,’ and subjected to ‘the most horrible disorders and the greatest vices; without the hope of ever obtaining, either an immediate protection, or a prompt justice’ (Viscardo, 333, 331).19 If Price suggested to Viscardo how revolution might be legitimated by reference to an earlier constitutional precedent, it was Edmund Burke – Price’s most vehement opponent – who instructed him how to represent such precedent as conservative.20 In his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Burke contends, ‘from the Magna Charta to the Declaration of Right, it has been the uniform policy of our constitution to claim and assert our liberties, as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity.’21 In a similar tenor, Viscardo looks back to the creoles’ conquistador forebears in order to establish a line of legitimacy dating back to the sixteenth century. It is in ‘gratitude to [these] ancestors’ who ‘respected, preserved, and cordially cherished the attachment . . . to their former country’ that present-day creoles must break from an empire that now ‘frustrate[s]’ their filial love (346, 328–9).22 Just as the noble conquistadors bequeathed to their

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children a legacy of freedom by ‘lavishing their sweat and blood,’ so must contemporary creoles recognize that ‘[p]ersonal liberty . . . is the inestimable inheritance which we ought to transmit to our posterity’ (346). By portraying contemporary creoles as ‘the sole bearers of the Iberian contractual tradition,’23 Viscardo transfers the onus of ‘revolution’ to those who would deprive them of their rightful inheritance, namely ‘the constitution and government of Spain’ (341). Nor were Spain’s misdeeds limited to the ‘corruption of the principles of humanity and morality’ (343). ‘[A]dding to this unprecedented usurpation of our personal liberty,’ Viscardo avers, Spain inflicts on creoles ‘a second usurpation, no less important, that of our properties’ (329). Like Burke’s malignant revolutionaries, modern Spain was thus guilty of both ‘an outrage upon every principle of liberty’ and of ‘the violation of all property’ (E. Burke, Reflections, 240). The creoles’ fight for freedom, representation, and the sanctity of property owed nothing to the loathsome French principle of ‘innovation,’ nothing to the ‘sophisters, oeconomists, and calculators’ that had ‘extinguished’ ‘the glory of Europe’ (47, 113). On the contrary, creole demands were entirely ‘conformable to the system of union and equality, of which the [Spanish] government, in the royal decree, desires the establishment’ (Viscardo, 344). If present-day Spain refused to honor that decree, the Spanish Americans were honorbound to rebel – not under the banner of revolution, but in the name of restoration. Viscardo’s defense of Spanish American independence was not limited to analogies with Britain. As he and his revolutionary colleagues made clear, they regarded England as ‘the mother country of liberty, and the school for political knowledge.’24 Such esteem was borne out by the fact that their intended government for Spanish America was directly modeled on that of Britain. In 1790, when the Venezuelan patriot Francisco de Miranda met with Prime Minister Pitt to explain the form of government he planned to implement in Spanish America, he stressed that ‘[t]he executive power . . . was to be hereditary’ and that ‘[t]he legislative power was to be placed in a bicameral legislature’ consisting of an ‘upper house, or senate’ and a ‘lower house, or “chamber of communes.”’25 In terms similarly calculated to appeal to the British ministry, Viscardo’s Projet pour rendre l’Amérique Espagnole indépendante (1790–1) suggested that no one less than a creole prince should head the coming revolution since ‘[o]nly Princes can truly undertake the heroic role of Liberators.’ For

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Pitt, the creoles’ respect for aristocratic privilege, their commitment to a British-style constitutional government, and their ‘enthusiasm of having a king among a people who have no ideas other than monarchy’ clearly helped to cushion the blow of serving to incite revolution (quoted in Brading, ‘Viscardo,’ 13). In these ways, creole leaders assured the British government that revolution would do as little as possible to disrupt the status quo, that ‘British support for a creole elite would not in itself involve basic social change.’26 According to David Brading, it was Viscardo’s ‘unstable compound’ of loyalty and revolution ‘that rendered the Letter such a potent political instrument, since it spoke in different voices to different readers’ (Brading, ‘Viscardo,’ 37).27 But the Lettre did something more than speak differently to different readers. Its vivid descriptions of the unbounded ‘rapacity’ of the Spanish ‘blood-suckers’ (Viscardo, 333) specifically harked back to a pre-revolutionary moment in which the Whig party stood united, a time when Sheridan and Burke worked together in their parliamentary assault on Warren Hastings, that ‘vulture, that feeds upon the prostrate,’28 ‘thirsting for . . . blood.’29 By restoring integrity to what, in 1791, appeared painfully opposed positions, Viscardo created a flexible patriotic rhetoric that was as effective in the hands of Tories as in those of liberal Whigs. As a result of this synthesis of republican sentiment, monarchical loyalism, and reverence for tradition, the creole insurgents engaged considerable material assistance during their stay in London. They also succeeded in carving out a discourse that significantly expanded the ways in which British writers could express political opposition without incurring the wrath of their government. III. Revolutionary Loyalism in Sheridan’s Pizarro Like Viscardo’s Lettre aux Espagnols-Américains, Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s Pizarro (1799) ‘sought to claim the force of patriotic and loyalist sentiment for . . . radical causes.’30 And like Viscardo’s Lettre, Pizarro achieved this end by speaking in different voices to different readers. As C. C. Barfoot observes, the play ‘gained two different and apparently opposing audiences’ because Tories and Whigs ‘saw different things or the same things in different ways, or even managed to see both things in both ways.’31 Pizarro was, Barfoot continues, ‘a liberal, humanist . . . anti-imperialist Whig play as well as a noble, patriotic . . . home and homeland, Tory play’ (Barfoot, 16). As the cases of Columbus and The Incas illustrate, the conquest

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of Spanish America furnished a historical backdrop that invited such political synthesis. But Sheridan had political resources at his disposal well beyond the historical and geographical setting of Pizarro. As Viscardo had shown, the best ways to defend support for Spanish American independence were, first, to underscore the ideological similarities between creoles and Britons, and second, to repudiate any possible identification between the revolutions in France and in the Spanish colonies. These strategies were to form the political basis of Sheridan’s play. One of the most prominent differences between Pizarro and earlier plays such as Columbus and The Incas is the absence of English characters. In one sense, Sheridan was simply more faithful to the original characters of Marmontel’s Les Incas. In another sense – thanks to the success of Viscardo and Miranda’s political Anglicization of the Spanish American creoles and to Helen Maria Williams’s sentimental Anglicization of the Peruvians – Morton’s Harry Herbert and Thelwall’s Faulkand were no longer necessary to establish British kinship and sympathy with the Spanish Americans.32 Like Williams’s Alzira, Sheridan’s Inca heroine, Cora, is possessed of a fresh English complexion, full of ‘rosy softness.’33 And like the creole patriots represented by Viscardo and Miranda, Sheridan’s Incas ‘serve a Monarch whom [they] love’ and fight ‘for [their] country . . . and [their] homes’ (Sheridan, Pizarro, II, ii, 37). Contemporary reviews attest to the fact that British audiences identified with such instances of Peruvian patriotism. As the Morning Herald commented in regard to a rousing speech by the Inca general, Rolla, ‘a patriotic address by [Mr Kemble], as Chief of the Peruvian Army is one of the . . . most successful appeals to Patriotism, that has ever distinguished the English Drama; the audience felt it as such, and the applause bestowed upon it was tumultuously ecstatic.’34 Sheridan’s other significant departure from his dramatic antecedents was his identification of conquest-era Spain with revolutionary France. Like Bonaparte, Pizarro ‘fight[s] for power, for plunder, and extended rule.’ Like the peoples subject to Napoleonic rule, Pizarro’s men ‘follow an Adventurer whom they fear – and obey a power which they hate’ (II, ii, 37). Such conventional anti-French harangues were apparently just as effective as Sheridan’s appeals to British patriotism. Playgoers duly observed the ‘close coincidence’ between ‘the events of the Spaniards invading Peru and our gallic enemy’s proceedings,’ hailing such ‘happy allusions’ to Britain’s war with ‘the inveterate enemies of social order and happiness’ with ‘such bursts of

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applause as fully evince the honest indignation of Englishmen at such arbitrary usurpation.’35 Sheridan was even ‘credited with performing a patriotic service to the nation.’36 As one contemporary critic noted, ‘Mr. Sheridan has perhaps done more for the minister and government by the loyal sentiments in this play than all the pamphlets, newspapers, and Antijacobins, during the present war’ (Britton, 142). Pizarro, Britton urged his readers, ‘ought to be cherished as a national good’ (144).37 But if Pizarro is a patriotic allegory in which noble Britons (in the guise of Peruvians) valiantly resist the treacherous forces of Napoleon (in the guise of Pizarro and his men), it is also a play that speaks directly to contemporary creole claims to national sovereignty. In terms that could have been taken directly from Viscardo’s Lettre, Sheridan describes the child of the conquistador, Alonzo, and the Inca princess, Cora, as ‘the heir of all his father’s loyalty . . . of all his father’s scorn of fraud, oppression, and hypocrisy’ and ‘all his mother’s virtue, gentleness, and truth’ (Sheridan, Pizarro, III, iii, 53). Sheridan, however, pushes the republican implications of British/creole patriotism much farther than Viscardo. Thus, Rolla’s winningly loyal speech asserts that the Spanish/French are driven ‘by a strange frenzy’ while the Peruvians/British follow ‘a Monarch whom we love’ (II, ii, 37), only to conclude with praise for ‘the Revolutionary principle of the Sovereignty of the People:’38 ‘The Throne we honour is the PEOPLE’S CHOICE’ (II, ii, 37). The Anti-Jacobin Review pounced on Rolla’s invocation of the will of the people, citing it as an instance of Sheridan’s despicable attempts ‘to foist his sapping principles on the undiscerning multitude’ and ‘to promote . . . a gradual dissolution of the most sacred ties of society.’39 In its wholesale condemnation of the play, the AntiJacobin even misconstrued Sheridan’s demonization of Napoleon in the character of Pizarro as merely ‘a chief or general painted in the most infamous characters, being only meant as a malevolent portrait of men in high stations, although it be disguised with the cloak of history’ (Rhodes, II. 5). The former liberal, William Cobbett, joined in the attack, charging Sheridan with ‘“truly English” play-vamping loyalty’ intended to ‘inculcat[e] the doctrine of cashiering kings,’ and reproving the play’s admirers for applauding ‘principles, which, if acted upon, would compel his Majesty’s successors to ascend the throne, if they ascended at all, from the hustings of Covent Garden, or of some other place, where “the choice of the people” might be made known.’40 Far from cherishing Pizarro as a ‘national good,’

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Figure 3 ‘Pizzaro [sic] a New Play or the Drury-Lane Masquerade’ (1799). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Cobbett was scandalized that the play ‘should pass for an attachment to the king and his royal progeny,’ pronouncing it ‘a most shocking proof of . . . national culpability’ (quoted in Loftis, 135). Looked at objectively, Cobbett’s accusations were hardly fair. After the execution of Louis XVI in 1793, Sheridan had grown increasingly disillusioned with the aggressive policies of the Directory and, by the end of the decade, had significantly revised his earlier sympathy for the Revolution. Speaking in the House of Commons in April 1798, Sheridan warned that the French came ‘for the sinews, the bones; for the marrow, and for the very heart’s blood of Great Britain’ (Sheridan, Speeches, IV. 471). Although no friend of the Pitt administration, Sheridan cast his support for a unified front against France in unimpeachably patriotic terms. ‘[C]onfident I am,’ he proclaimed, ‘that, as soon as one drop of English blood shall be shed by a Frenchman on English ground, the English valour will that moment rise to a pitch equal to what its most sanguine friends can expect, or its warmest admirers can desire’ (IV. 468). The problem was that the language of Sheridan’s assault on the French, both in Parliament and on the boards of Drury Lane, was all

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too similar to that used to invalidate what he considered his countrymen’s premature desire for war with France. If the French came ‘for the very heart’s blood of Great Britain,’ impelled by ‘frenzy, folly, and rashness,’ and if their dramatic Spanish counterparts were ‘slaves of passion, avarice, and pride,’ ‘by a strange frenzy driven,’ Burke’s incendiary speeches in the years leading up to the war were equally characterized by ‘the frenzy of passion’ and ‘the bitterest of malice,’ worthy of being ‘hatched in the dens and caverns of savage murderers’ (Sheridan, Speeches, IV. 471; III. 185, 67–8; Sheridan, Pizarro, II, ii, 37). Worse still, Sheridan persisted, had been Britain’s conduct once the war was begun. If the French had been rendered ‘wild and unsettled’ by the events of the Revolution, Britain ‘had goaded them into a still more savage state of madness, fury, and desperation’ and had ‘baited them like wild beasts, until at length we made them so.’ In short, Sheridan claimed, Britain itself had ‘created the passions which [it] persecute[s],’ and because the Tory government had sworn to ‘hunt’ the French ‘in their inmost recesses,’ its ministers had no right to ‘come forth with whining declamations on the horror of their turning upon you [the British] with the fury which you inspired’ (Sheridan, Speeches, III. 186). According to Sheridan, Britain’s reprehensible conduct in the war with France was not an isolated case. Britain’s unscrupulous aggression in Europe was not only the mirror image of Napoleon’s; it was also the perfect counterpart to British colonial rapacity in India. In his impeachment proceedings against Warren Hastings, Sheridan charged the East India Company with ‘send[ing] their troops to drain the produce of industry, to seize all the treasures, wealth, and prosperity of the country’ and to ‘call it protection’ (I. 676; italics in original). So too, according to Sheridan’s Rolla, did the Spanish conquistadors (revolutionary France) ‘fight for power, for plunder, and extended rule,’ while claiming to ‘offer . . . their protection’ (Sheridan, Pizarro, II, ii, 37). And this ‘protection’ offered by Spain and France, ‘such . . . as vultures give to lambs – covering and devouring them,’ was no different from Hastings’s ‘protection’ of India, also figured as that ‘of the vulture to the lamb,’ ‘grappl[ing]’ with its ‘harpy talons . . . in the vitals of the prosperity of the land’ (Sheridan, Pizarro, II, ii, 37; Sheridan, Speeches, I. 676). The strident anti-imperialist implications of Sheridan’s self-quotation were not hard to decipher. As Pitt rightly remarked after seeing the play, ‘there is nothing new in it, for I heard it all long ago at Hasting’s [sic] trial’ (quoted in Rhodes, II. 11). Nor was Sheridan’s anti-imperialist indignation limited to Britain’s

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actions in India. If the Spanish conquest of Peru served as an effective analogy for both British and French brutality, it presented an even more explicit parallel with England’s imperial rule in Ireland. As Sheridan was well aware, the most prominent figures in the sixteenth-century Irish conquest (Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Ralph Lane, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Thomas White) were the same men that had been most deeply involved in the English contest with Spain for possession of America. Further, these men not only vied with their Spanish counterparts for control of America, they also modeled their Irish campaigns on those of Cortés and Pizarro. According to historian J. H. Elliott, ‘[t]he Irish experience was of a kind to encourage gentleman adventurers – men imbued with similar values and ideals to those to be found among the Spanish conquistadors, for there was nothing exclusively Spanish about the conquistador ideal.’41 The historical connection between Spanish America and English Ireland also extended to contemporary imperial struggles. Irish volunteers played a seminal role in the Spanish American revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Most notable among them was Bernardo O’Higgins, the child of an officer from County Sligo and a noblewoman from Chillán, who became deeply involved with Miranda and his compatriots while studying in England, went on to serve under General Bolívar, and eventually succeeded him as the supreme dictator of Chile. But while Britons of all political stripes could admire heroes like O’Higgins, Irishmen who fought for independence at home were infinitely less agreeable. Sheridan was thus almost entirely alone when, in 1798 and 1799, he opposed sending English militias to put down the Irish rebels and spoke out in defense of Arthur O’Connor, the radical leader of the United Irishmen and the moving force behind a scheme for armed revolt against England intended to coincide with a French invasion. Without doubt, Sheridan stressed, ‘every effort ought to be exerted to prevent Ireland from falling under the power of France’ (Sheridan, Speeches, V. 17). It must be remembered, however, that resistance to Napoleon was ‘a point totally different from the merit of the [Irish] struggle’ (V. 17). Sheridan’s opinions regarding English imperialism in Ireland are as prominent as his position on India in Pizarro’s dramatization of the Spanish conquest. When the hero Alonzo abandons Pizarro to fight on the side of the beleaguered Peruvians, he is charged – like Arthur O’Connor – with treason. Alonzo protests the accusation in terms that are equally appropriate to England and to Spain:

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I have not warred against my native land, but those who have usurped its power. The banners of my country, when first I followed arms beneath them, were Justice, Faith, and Mercy. If these are beaten down and trampled under foot – I have no country, nor exists the power entitled to reproach me with revolt. (Sheridan, Pizarro, III, iii, 53)

Like Alonzo, Sheridan insists, ‘Mr. Arthur O’Connor is not a traitor, and is incapable of acting hostilely against this country or its constitution’ (Sheridan, Speeches, V. 9). And like the Peruvians, the Irish ‘cherish a love of rational liberty’ (V. 27). It is only the ‘ignorance’ and ‘fierceness’ of their usurpers that misrepresent a ‘country struggling for its liberties’ as one that ‘wages the war of faction’ (V. 49). It is the British government, not the Irish people, which commits ‘treason’ and multiplies ‘plots to . . . ensanguine its horrors’ (V. 27). And it is the British Parliament, like the Spanish conquerors, which proposes to ‘enact torture by law’ and to establish ‘a series of oppressions too degrading, too tyrannical for human nature to endure . . . [m]erely because the men who resist such oppression are called rebels, and those who oppose them are called the king’s troops’ (V. 16). Sheridan’s message to his nation is unmistakable in the exhortation of Elvira, Pizarro’s chastened mistress, to her countrymen: ‘Spaniards returning to your native home, assure your rulers, they mistake the road to glory, to power. – Tell them, that the pursuits of avarice, conquest, and ambition, never yet made a people happy, or a nation great’ (Sheridan, Pizarro, V, iv, 81). Yet despite Pizarro’s many indictments of imperialism, Sheridan is ultimately no more able than were Williams, Morton, or Thelwall to resist the allure of empire. Most tellingly, even as Alonzo condemns Pizarro’s methods of conquest, he takes no small pride in the improvements accomplished in Peru under the Spaniards’ guiding hand. ‘[I]n many a spot where late was barrenness and waste,’ Alonzo points out, ‘pledges of delicious harvest . . . giv[e] cheerful promise to the hope of industry.’ Whereas the Incas once worshipped pagan deities, now they raise their hands ‘in pure devotion to the true and only God.’ ‘This,’ Alonzo boasts, ‘is my work!’ (III, iii, 54). The play’s epilogue, written by the radical William Lamb, reiterates this message of benevolent colonialism by praising nature’s ‘universal reign’ and ‘empire o’er the heart,’ and eulogizing (not without a distinctly Burkean flavor) the tradition that ‘Honour sanctifies, and Time reveres’ (‘Epilogue,’ 84).

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Considered in light of its extended theatrical run and its phenomenal ticket sales, Pizarro was an unparalleled success.42 Perhaps, as one commentator maintained, Sheridan’s dexterity in interweaving patriotism and radical critique had made ‘party-zeal forget itself, and run with the crowd of admirers’ (Britton, 141; italics in original). Or perhaps, as Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, remarked, Sheridan’s combination of loyalism and dissent had only managed to offend all political factions equally. ‘The violent Ministerialists are angry,’ she recorded, ‘that Sheridan should have such applause; the violent oppositionists are as angry at the loyalty of the Play’ (quoted in C. Price, II. 635). Although, as Julie Carlson asserts, Pizarro possessed the ‘capacity to address multiple, even contradictory, situations,’ that did not necessarily mean that Sheridan succeeded in discovering political common ground. Sheridan had settled, rather, for passing ‘two contradictory judgments regarding England’ (Carlson, 363). Moreover, such political polyvocality fell quite short of Viscardo’s happy rewriting of anti-imperialism as conservative nationalism. Sheridan gave British audiences a remarkable spectacle, replete with exotic costumes, theatrical pyrotechnics, an all-star cast including Sarah Siddons and John Kemble, and sets designed by Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg.43 What he did not give them was a vision of Spanish America that could heal Britain’s own internal divisions by producing in their stead a synthetic politics in which empire and imperial revolt, monarchy and republicanism, coalesced. IV. The Limits of Loyalism If Viscardo’s Lettre sheds light on the rhetorical resources available to extenuate revolutionary sympathy during the 1790s, then Sheridan’s Pizarro reveals the critical limit of those resources, namely the question of empire. It would, of course, have been impolitic for Viscardo to draw explicit parallels between the colonial misdeeds of Spain and those of the nation to which he sought to ingratiate himself. Viscardo was therefore careful to avoid any reference to Britain’s imperial ambitions in Spanish America, preferring to imagine British intervention in the region as altruistically combating ‘the horrors of tyranny, of oppression and of cruelty’ and ushering in ‘the reign of reason, of justice, and of humanity’ (Viscardo, 349). As Viscardo knew, however, Britain’s role in America was historically one of resisting independence, not fostering it. And Pitt was not at all averse to a policy of conquest, especially if Britain’s territorial acquisitions could

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either be turned to immediate commercial advantage or bartered for leverage at the bargaining table with France. Behind Viscardo’s ‘agreeable and affecting spectacle’ of American ‘industry,’ ‘prosperity,’ and unity lay a series of bitter imperial disputes between Britain and Spain (349). In 1790, the nation’s long-standing rivalry over control of the Pacific coast of North America came to a head when Spain seized the property of a British subject who had settled on Nootka Sound. A major imperial conflict seemed imminent and Britain intended to make Spanish America its principal theater of war. Proposed schemes against the Spanish colonies included sending an Indian squadron across the Pacific to South America, dispatching a fleet from England via Brazil and around Cape Horn, and employing one or both of these forces to act in conjunction with a squadron sent directly against Nicaragua. Anticipating a British success, Miranda drafted a proclamation to be presented to the liberated Americans announcing an end to Spanish rule and the establishment of an interim government. But despite Miranda’s sanguine hopes, there is little evidence to suggest that British aims in Spanish America were those of liberation. As James Creasy, one of Pitt’s principal advisers on South America, argued, ‘[b]y once getting a superior Naval power in the South Seas, and securing a safe conveyance across this important passage,’ the British ‘would become masters of the Spanish wealth’ and ‘the keepers of the keys to their treasure.’44 By the end of the year, Spain and Britain had reached a settlement and Pitt’s plans of attacking Spanish America were temporarily laid aside (albeit not without hopes that renewed war might again present an opportunity for obtaining a British stronghold). The resolution of the Nootka Sound Crisis was a substantial setback for creole envoys in England. Viscardo’s Lettre was sent to the British Foreign Office where, in spite of its vociferous pronouncements of loyalty to Spain, it was deemed unfit to publish. Viscardo continued to receive a modest government pension, but, as Miguel Battliori comments, ‘[i]t was one thing for Pitt to clandestinely patronize Viscardo, and another for him to allow the publication of such a compromising document and to undertake a project as risky as the independence of Spanish America.’45 Bitterly commenting that he had been ‘sold by a treaty of commerce with Spain,’ Miranda determined, despite his repeated avowals of antipathy to France, that ‘[i]f the British would not let him fight for freedom in America, perhaps he could interest the French in his dream of extending liberty across the sea.’46

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When war broke out again between Spain and Britain in 1796, plans for a British invasion of Spanish America were eagerly revived. Three regiments were to be sent against the River Plate and two against the western coast of South America, augmented by a squadron of 500 convicts from Botany Bay. In January 1798, Miranda returned to England and in 1799, aided by Under-Secretary of the War Office Henry Dundas, renewed his solicitations for armed British intervention. Once again, however, obstacles presented themselves.47 As John Lynch observes, ‘British policy toward Spanish America . . . was essentially negative: it was easier for statesmen to see what they should prevent – principally the extension of French power and ideology in the New World – than to determine what they should promote’ (Lynch, ‘British,’ 1). Meanwhile, Britain’s trade with the Spanish colonies continued apace, little inconvenienced by the outbreak of war. If anything, as Dorothy Burne Goebel attests, the war between England and Spain acted as a stimulus to trade.48 The more Pitt wavered, the more conditions worsened for Viscardo and his associates. As before, the government retained them as informants, to be ‘sounded for information and held in reserve for use in possible operations,’ but remuneration came less frequently and less willingly (5).49 It was to little avail that the envoys insisted that Spanish America was unsuited to a republic, that what their country needed was a British-style constitutional monarchy, or that the creoles regarded France as a nation of decadence and ‘decrepitude’ (quoted in Racine, Miranda, 111). What Britain was seeking was a ‘theatre of war against Spain and a means of challenging her claim to monopoly of trade and territory.’ To this end, the creole patriots in London were ‘no more than a useful source of information and liaison’ (Lynch, ‘British,’ 11). Although Pizarro aroused more controversy than Viscardo’s Lettre, then, it was Sheridan’s play that spoke to the British government’s genuine objectives in Spanish America. The question was not what form of government the independent states should adopt, but rather whether the rewards of imperial conquest in Spanish America outweighed the risks of inciting revolution. Although Pizarro failed to unite the claims of empire and antiimperialism, this failure of ideological cohesion ultimately provides a more accurate reflection of Britain’s Spanish American policy than Viscardo’s Lettre. As such, it also marks the beginning of a significant shift in the way Romantic-era British writing engaged with the figure of Spanish America. For earlier writers such as William

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Robertson and Helen Maria Williams, Spanish America stood very much outside the British empire. On a strictly factual level, this would remain the case throughout the nineteenth century. Yet as Britain consolidated its economic dominance in Spain’s colonies during the years leading up to the Peninsular War, it became increasingly difficult to deny the relationship between its informal empire in Spanish America and its formal empire in India and the Celtic periphery. As we will see in the following chapter, subsequent writers such as Robert Southey would inherit from Sheridan a set of tactics for articulating political opposition (under the aegis of British nationalism) from the safety of a Spanish American setting. But they would also inherit the increasingly uncomfortable imperial associations that had attached themselves to the figure of Spanish America and that threatened its strategic utility. NOTES

1. Donahue, 90. The parallels between the two plays were apparently strong enough to prompt Morton to accuse Thelwall of plagiarism. According to Allardyce Nicoll, Morton’s charge is unfounded. Because ‘the general theme’ of conquest-era Peru ‘was so popular,’ he argues, each author undoubtedly ‘discovered it independently’ (Nicoll, 101n). 2. Scrivener, Incas, 87. 3. See the Introduction and Chapter 1. 4. Morton, I, iv, 3. Citations refer to act, scene, and page number(s). 5. Scrivener, Seditious, 240. 6. Thelwall, II, v, 120. Citations refer to act, scene, and page number(s). 7. The character of Elvira may be intended to recall Elvira Gutiérrez, the mother of the conquistador Diego de Almagro. Almagro followed Pizarro to Peru and later became Pizarro’s rival. 8. Nicoll, 17, 54–5. 9. Grieder, 51. 10. Thelwall, III, i, 124. For much of the play, Faulkland operates under the alias of Sidney. While the reasons for this pseudonym are never fully explained, Scrivener argues that it may have been intended to evoke Algernon Sidney (1622–83), ‘republican hero and martyr to Stuart absolutism,’ after whom Thelwall named his eldest son (Scrivener, Incas, 154n). 11. The Inca King echoes Rocca’s sentiment, expressing the wish (without actually offering) to give his life for the Englishman (Thelwall, III, viii, 148). 12. As Coleridge remembered these years, ‘There was . . . not a town in which a man suspected of holding democratic principles could move

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13.

14.

15.

16.

17. 18. 19.

[ 89

abroad without receiving some unpleasant proof of the hatred in which his supposed opinions were held by the great majority of the people’ (Coleridge, Friend, II. 29). Of course, viceregal authorities in Spanish America were not so amenable to creole protests, and a number of the insurgents were persecuted for the same alleged crimes as their radical British contemporaries. In 1795, Antonio Nariño and several of his colleagues were thrown into prison by the Spanish authorities in the viceroyalty of New Granada for publishing Paine’s Rights of Man. In 1797, a Venezuelan conspiracy ‘to subvert the province and erect it into an independent republic’ was discovered and the leaders were imprisoned. Several escaped, only to be recaptured the following year (W. S. Robertson, Miranda, 225). Seven of the rebels were condemned to death, thirty-six were imprisoned or sent to the galleys, and thirty-two were deported to Spain to face the judgment of the King. Creole writers attracted ministerial attention through economic arguments as well as political ones. In his Lettre aux Espagnols-Américains (1799), Juan Pablo Viscardo y Guzmán argued that the creoles of Spanish America had the same commercial goals as the merchants and ministers of England, that is, to eliminate Spain’s ‘unbridled monopoly’ and ‘mercantile tyranny’ (Viscardo, 329). The day will come, he prophesied, when Spanish America’s ports will ‘be free to all nations’ and Spanish Americans ‘shall be at liberty . . . to visit the most distant regions, there to sell and buy at the first hand’ (343–4). As a result of trade liberalization, the treasures of Spanish America ‘will no longer issue forth like torrents never to return, but . . . will perpetually increase by industry’ and ‘the recompense will not be less to [Britain] than to us’ (344, 347). Quoted in Brading, ‘Viscardo,’ 15. As the 1790s progressed and war broke out between Britain and France, Viscardo’s prediction of France’s intended liberation of the Spanish colonies served as a more and more powerful goad to British action. See Chapter 4. Viscardo’s Lettre was originally written in Spanish in 1791, translated into French by the author that same year, and sent to his supporter and correspondent, James Bland Burges, Under-Secretary of State in the British Foreign Office. The French version of the Lettre was first published in England in 1799, with Francisco de Miranda’s revisions, under a false Philadelphia imprint. In 1801, it was (re)translated into Spanish for distribution in America. In 1808, it was translated into English by the writer known as ‘William Burke’ (possibly the alias of James Mill or Francisco de Miranda). See M. Rodríguez, Introduction. R. Price, 34. Viscardo, 328. In light of such flagrant abuses of justice, Price and Viscardo insist, quiescence is but ‘abjectness,’ more befitting ‘a herd crawling at the feet of

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20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

26.

Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 a master, than . . . enlightened and manly citizens’ (R. Price, 22). If the insulted citizens do not rise up against their tyrants, ‘what difference is there between [a kingdom’s] subjects and a flock of sheep, of which the capricious owner can dispose or make sacrifice at will?’ (Viscardo, 341). Britons cannot afford to wait passively, Price argues, ‘till the acquisition of a pure and equal representation by other countries (while we are mocked with the shadow) kindles our shame’ (R. Price, 41–2). ‘The valour with which the English colonies of America have fought for liberty,’ Viscardo adds, ‘covers our indolence with shame’ (Viscardo, 347). Surely, he charges his Spanish American readers, ‘if we longer bear the oppressions which overwhelm us, it will be said with reason, that our cowardice has merited them’ (348). Although the Lettre has obvious debts to Burke’s reactionary Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke’s earlier speeches against Warren Hastings resonate forcefully with Viscardo’s (and Price’s) arguments against arbitrary power. Before Burke’s break with his liberal Whig constituency, he led the parliamentary attack against the ‘despotism’ of Warren Hastings, Governor General of Bengal, contending, ‘The moment a sovereign removes security and protection from his subjects, and declares that he is everything and nothing, when he declares that no contract he makes with them can or ought to bind him, he then declares war upon them; he is no longer sovereign; they are no longer subjects’ (E. Burke, WS, IX. 459). E. Burke, Reflections, 47; italics in original. This strategy of defending revolution on the grounds of frustrated monarchical allegiance was not unique to Viscardo. When the Spanish American emissary Francisco de Mendiola appeared in London in 1786 to garner support for the liberation of Mexico, he carried a document signed by three Mexican ‘noblemen,’ in which they complained that ‘the tyrannical despotism’ of Spain ‘destroys the Constitution of Liberty which is due us,’ and explained that, although they loved their mother country, they felt ‘constrained by dire necessity to cast off by force the yoke which oppressed them’ (W. S. Robertson, Miranda, 202–3). Pagden, Spanish, 121. PH 1785, 29–30; LC 1785, 112. W. S. Robertson, Miranda, 273. Robertson comments, ‘As was stated in the constitution itself, in form it resembled the Government of Great Britain. This is particularly true of the provisions for a hereditary executive and the regulations regarding the upper house of the legislature’ (274). Lynch, ‘British,’ 4. John Lynch explains, ‘No British government would promote a revolution for independence if it was likely to unleash a social revolution. Aversion to social change inhibited British policy towards Spanish America . . . especially after 1789 when the spectre

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27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41.

42.

43.

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of the French Revolution with its levelling doctrines, and the example of class and racial conflict in the colony of Saint Domingue, haunted British statesmen’ (3). Miguel Battliori suggests, by contrast, that Viscardo’s deference toward the Spanish monarchy is ‘paradoxical’ in light of his ‘pro-independence sentiments and ideas’ (Battliori, 127–8; my translation). E. Burke, WS, X. 32. Sheridan, Speeches, II. 113. O’Toole, 351. Barfoot, 16. On Williams’s Anglicization of the Peruvians, see Chapter 1. Sheridan, Pizarro, II, i, 33. Unless otherwise noted, citations refer to act, scene, and page number(s). Quoted in C. Price, II. 633. Britton, 141. As Cecil Price notes, Pizarro’s popularity was largely due to the fact that ‘[t]he invader might be viewed by English audiences not as Spanish but French’ (C. Price, II. 629–30). Carlson, 362. George III himself was among the audience of Pizarro on 5 June 1799. As Cecil Price suggests, ‘The highly moral and patriotic sentiments of Pizarro helped to qualify the impression [Sheridan] had made on the King by his early sympathy for the French Revolution and his work for reform’ (C. Price, II. 630). Taylor, 176. Quoted in Rhodes, II. 5. Quoted in Loftis, 135; italics in original. Elliott, 24. On the shared religious, ideological, and aesthetic characteristics of early Spanish and English imperialism in America, see Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550–1700 (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2006). Contemporary commentator Samuel Argent Bardsley referred to Sheridan’s Pizarro as a ‘bright Star in the Theatrical Hemisphere’ that ‘astonished the Inhabitants of the Metropolis . . . and drew them forth in crowds, night after night, to contemplate its dazzling Splendour’ (Bardsley, iii). As The Times reported on 25 May 1799, the play’s opening night ‘attracted . . . as splendid and numerous an Audience as had even been assembled at this House [the Drury Lane Theatre] on any previous occasion’ (quoted in Loftis, 136). Throughout its run, Loftis comments, Pizarro was a ‘triumphant financial success’ (Loftis, 140). Nearly all reviews of Pizarro stressed its spectacular effects. According to the True Briton, the scenery was ‘highly magnificent:’ ‘The Tent of Pizarro, the Temple of the Sun, various views of a romantic country, the forest illuminated by the fiery element, and the subterranean retreat, are admirable achievements of the pencil’ (quoted in Loftis, 137; italics in

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44. 45.

46. 47.

48. 49.

Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 original). According to The Times, ‘Pizarro’s Pavilion, and the Temple of the Sun are equal in point of brilliant effect to the best scenes of any of our Theatres; and the machinery, decorations, and dresses were marked with appropriate taste and splendour’ (137). For further discussion of the popular response to Pizarro’s elaborate stage settings, see Russell Thomas, ‘Contemporary Taste in the Stage Decorations of London Theatres, 1770–1800,’ Modern Philology (November 1944): 65–78. Quoted in Frost, 48. Battliori, 133. Translation mine. The original reads: ‘Una cosa era que Pitt lo patrocinara clandestinamente, y otra que le hiciera publicar un documento tan comprometedor, y que se aventurase a una empresa de tanto riesgo como la independencia de la América española.’ Quoted in W. S. Robertson, Life, I. 112; Racine, Miranda, 111. Although Pitt would continue to entertain plans of an attack on Spanish America until his death, these schemes would be not be realized until the disastrous 1806–7 invasions of La Plata and Montevideo. For contemporary responses to the failed expedition, see An Authentic Narrative of the Proceedings of the Expedition under the command of Brigadier-General Craufurd, until its arrival at Monte Video; with an account of the Operations against Buenos Ayres under the command of Lieutenant General Whitelocke. By an Officer of the Expedition (London, 1808); and Buenos Ayres: Truth and Reason versus Calumny and Folly; in which the leading circumstances of General Whitelocke’s Conduct in South America are explained. With an Appendix in Answer to an expensive Publication, reducing every Personality therein advanced (London, 1807). Goebel, 292. While only Viscardo, Miranda, and Joseph Pavia appear to have received government pensions, other creole envoys deemed either less impartial or less trustworthy were retained as unpaid informants. These included Antonio Nariño (from New Granada), Pedro José Caro (from Cuba), Mariano Castilla (from Buenos Aires), and Eugenio Cortés (from Chile).

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CHAPTER THREE

THE ALLURE OF THE SAME: ROBERT SOUTHEY’S WELSH INDIANS AND THE RHETORIC OF GOOD COLONIALISM

Only by bravely embracing a position of poetic, as well as political, weakness can . . . epic speak on behalf of the defeated.1

In the previous two chapters we have charted the development of Romantic-era Britain’s principal strategy for asserting its right to Spanish America, a fundamentally proprietary rhetoric constructed around the figure of affective and cultural British-Spanish American similitude. As I have argued, this assertion of entitlement through similarity – however contrived or duplicitous – functioned to allay late eighteenth-century Britain’s anxiety regarding its increasingly aggressive Spanish American activities by representing them as natural, benevolent, and desirable to the Spanish Americans themselves. As Britain moved toward more overtly colonialist designs on Spanish America in the years following the outbreak of war with Spain in 1796, the rhetorical repertoire supporting claims of British-Spanish American similitude predictably expanded. Less foreseeable, however, were the self-implicating ways in which this repertoire developed, and the apparently nihilistic ends to which the resemblances between Britain and the American victims of the Spanish conquest would be taken. The purpose of the present chapter is to analyze the ways in which the discourse of British-Spanish American identity was both deployed and critically strained in Robert Southey’s transatlantic poem Madoc (1805), a work that presents a powerful critique of colonial violence yet ultimately asserts Britain’s claim to Spanish America in much more extreme terms than those employed by earlier writers such as Helen Maria Williams or Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

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Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 I. Edmund Burke and the Justification of British Empire

India presented the most egregious example of British imperial mismanagement in the Romantic period. From his Speech on Mr Fox’s East India Bill (1783) to his Speeches on the Impeachment of Warren Hastings (1788–95), Edmund Burke attempted to do for late eighteenth-century Britain what the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas had done for Spain over 200 years earlier: to exonerate his nation by exposing its violence and greed before the very leaders responsible for its colonial policy. Pleading his case to Ferdinand and Isabella, las Casas argued: The reason the Christians have murdered on such a vast scale and killed anyone and everyone in their way is purely and simply greed . . . Their insatiable greed and overweening ambition know no bounds; the land is fertile and rich, the inhabitants simple, forbearing and submissive. The Spaniards have shown not the slightest consideration for these people, treating them . . . not as brute animals – indeed, I would to God they had done and had shown them the consideration they afford their animals – so much as piles of dung in the middle of their road.2

In his Speech on Fox’s East India Bill, Burke drew upon las Casas’s language of European barbarism and avarice in order to stress the dangerous parity he perceived between British India and Spanish America and to call his nation to account: Were we to be driven out of India this day, nothing would remain, to tell that it had been possessed, during the inglorious period of our dominion, by anything better than the ouran-outang or the tiger . . . as English youth in India drink the intoxicating draught of authority and dominion before their heads are able to bear it, and as they are full grown in fortune long before they are ripe in principle, neither Nature nor reason have any opportunity to exert themselves for remedy of the excesses of their premature power . . . In India all the vices operate by which sudden fortune is acquired.3

Like las Casas, Burke did not set himself against colonialism per se, but rather against its corruption by unscrupulous fortune seekers.4 In the impeachment of Warren Hastings, he thus entreated his nation to ‘convert the very offences, which have thrown a transient shade upon its government, into something that will reflect a permanent

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lustre upon the honor, justice, and humanity of this kingdom’ (E. Burke, WS, IX. 331). By adopting las Casas’s strategy of imperial self-scrutiny and thereby asserting a parallel between English and Spanish imperialism, however, Burke also delivered a terrifying charge, namely that the actions of England abroad had rendered the empire culpable of the same offenses so often marshaled to stigmatize its imperial rival. If Britain’s imperial misdeeds rivaled those of Spain, so too did its supposedly God-given right to world empire. Implicitly referring to Spain’s divine mandate (symbolized by a Papal Bull) to Christianize the heathens, Burke defended Britain’s ‘domination of the glorious Empire given by an incomprehensible dispensation of Divine providence into our hands.’5 Yet whether the claim was one of common criminality or of common entitlement, the idea that enlightened Britain might present a mirror image of decadent Spain flew in the face of two centuries of the Black Legend, that ubiquitous notion that defined British expansionism as the antithesis of everything its gold-thirsty, unethical, and inhumane Spanish precursor had been. William Robertson, the Abbé Raynal, and Adam Smith had argued that Spain’s mercantilist reliance on the extraction of bullion from its colonies was directly responsible for its barbarous treatment of the natives. By contrast, Britain’s policy of trade rather than settlement in India (and Spanish America) cost virtually nothing to maintain and therefore presented no invitation to reckless ambition and no threat to the humane exercise of power. When Fox’s East India Bill came before the House, however, the legitimacy of indirect rule as a benevolent commercial contract came under fire. Under the aegis of establishing a program of ‘harmonious exchange’ with India, Hastings had created a despotic and corrupt reign that undermined native power structures and required the erection of a militaristic British colony to safeguard his rule.6 Better would it have been, argued Burke, to have established an empire pledged to improve India rather than to tacitly maintain ‘a state in the disguise of a merchant . . . a system of public offices in the disguise of a counting-house’ with no civic responsibility beyond the aggrandizement of its rulers (IX. 350).7 By contrast with the British conquerors of India, Burke explained, ‘[t]he Asiatic conquerors . . . made the conquered country their own. They rose or fell with the rise or fall of the territory they lived in. Fathers there deposited the hopes of their posterity; and children there beheld the monuments of their fathers’ (II. 461). ‘The Tartar invasion,’ Burke conceded, ‘was

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mischievous; but it is our protection that destroys India’ (II. 462). Whereas it had been possible before Burke’s exposure of Britain’s imperial iniquity in India to imagine liberal commerce as the ethical and financial corrective to Spanish-style colonialism, now protectionist imperialism emerged as a haven from the ravages of irresponsible British exploitation. These lessons cast a dark shadow over Britain’s ‘informal’ operations in Spanish America. After the loss of its North American colonies, Britain turned its attention increasingly toward Spanish America, both because it could serve as a much-needed transatlantic trading partner and because it provided an opportunity to vindicate the moral rectitude of British imperialism. While Spain still nominally held the reins of power in the region it was easy to frame incursions by British merchants and traders as missions of political and economic liberation. At the same time, though, Black Legend rhetoric condemning the tyrannical Spanish incumbency could only partially counterbalance the fact that Britain’s economic rapacity was beginning to effect uncomfortable parallels with colonial Spain.8 As in the case of India, Britain’s proudly vaunted ‘harmonious exchange’ with Spanish America was neither harmonious nor exclusively limited to exchange. British merchants financed, and British soldiers and seamen facilitated, the establishment of new Spanish American governments sympathetic to British interests. Intrigues involving the outright seizure of Spanish American territory were the order of the day. In the year before his death, Prime Minister Pitt schemed to annex Spain’s American colonies and, although he did not live to see it, his plans were realized in 1806 and 1807 by the attempts of Sir Home Popham and General John Whitelocke to commandeer Buenos Aires and Montevideo and administer them as British colonies. For Burke, the quintessential error of British imperialism was in observing too great a difference between the colonial and the metropolitan subject. This position was at once radically universalist and radically chauvinist. In his speeches on both North America and India, Burke’s logic was that well-administered subjection to the British constitution conferred the greatest possible freedom on a colony, a freedom based on the colony’s essential similarity to the metropole. Thus, for Burke, the dominant feature of the North American colonists was their ‘fierce spirit of liberty,’ which, it so happened, was their natural inheritance from the English character and constitution. ‘The people of the colonies are descendents of Englishmen,’

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Burke asserted. ‘They are therefore not only devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to English ideas, and on English principles’ (II. 120). The North Americans were in revolt because they were being denied their fundamental bond with the English, their rights as subjects under the British constitution. Burke rhetorically transformed the Americans into Britons in order to argue that true independence was in fact synonymous with continued colonization: Let the colonies always keep the idea of their civil rights associated with your government, – they will cling and grapple to you, and no force under heaven will be of power to tear them from their allegiance. But let it be once understood that your government may be one thing and their privileges another, that these two things may exist without any mutual relation, – the cement is gone, the cohesion is loosened, and everything hastens to decay and dissolution. (II. 179)

In effect, Burke claimed, ‘the more ardently they love liberty, the more perfect will be their obedience . . . This is the commodity of price, of which you have the monopoly’ (II. 180). Burke’s arguments for humane government in India necessarily admitted of greater differences between the colonizer and the colonized, yet the same principles of humanity and shared values inhered. In his Speech on the East India Bill, Burke attempted to elicit his auditors’ sympathy by favorably comparing India with ‘the Empire of Germany’ and ‘the Austrian dominions . . . not for an exact resemblance, but as a sort of a middle term, by which India might be approximated to our understandings, and, if possible, to our feelings, in order to awaken something of sympathy for the unfortunate natives, of which I am afraid we are not perfectly susceptible’ (II. 445–6).9 Even though the Indians were not descended, like the American colonists, from the English, they matched – and even preceded – Europe in civilization and dignity: This multitude of men does not consist of an abject and barbarous populace . . . but a people for ages civilized and cultivated, – cultivated by all the arts of polished life, whilst we were yet in the woods . . . There is to be found an ancient and venerable priesthood, the depository of their laws, learning, and history . . . a nobility of great antiquity and renown; a multitude of cities, not exceeded in population and trade by those of the first class in Europe; merchants and bankers, individual houses of whom have once vied in capital with the Bank of England . . . millions

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of ingenious manufacturers and mechanics; millions of the most diligent . . . tillers of the earth. (II. 444–5)

Extending the implications of this Indian-European resemblance, Burke asserted that ethical empire in India was as good for the Indians as it was for their rulers: ‘I am certain that every means effectual to preserve India from oppression is a guard to preserve the British Constitution from its worst corruption’ (II. 436). For North America and India alike, the principle maintained that the exercise of good imperialism guaranteed the rights and interests of both Britain and its colonies. Despite his unremitting efforts, Burke’s efforts to reform Britain’s colonial policy failed. Hastings’s acquittal in 1795 left an indelible mark on the outlook of first-generation Romantic writers such as Southey and Coleridge. Southey’s Madoc is deeply marked both by Burke’s belief that a recognition of the correspondences between colonized and colonizer could bring about a form of morally justifiable empire and by the ultimate inadequacy of this belief to expiate Britain’s colonial guilt. It was under the influence of this Burkean amalgam of benevolent colonial rhetoric and uncontainable colonial guilt that Southey turned his attention to America, as an object of historical study, as a poetic subject, and as a possible refuge from what he called the ‘treachery corruption and slaughter’ of Europe.10 As the young poet wrote to Horace Walpole Bedford in late 1793, ‘the visions of futurity are dark and gloomy – and the only ray enlivening the scene beams on America.’11 II. The Problem with Britishness In another letter to Bedford from the summer of 1794, Southey elaborated his plan of escape to the banks of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania: Calmly and firmly – after long deliberation I pronounce – I am going to America . . . Should the resolution of others fail, Coleridge and I will go together, and either find repose in an Indian wig-wam – or from an Indian tomohawk [sic], but this is the last resource of disappointment and despair . . . Horace would the state of society be happy where . . . the common ground was cultivated by common toil, and its produce laid in common granaries, where none were rich because none should be poor, where every motive for vice should be annihilated and every motive

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for virtue strengthened? Such a system we go to establish in America. (Southey, NL, I. 70)

Southey and Coleridge’s so-called Pantisocracy scheme was rooted in the radical communitarian belief that by abolishing individual property, mankind could remove the cause of immorality and suffering in the world.12 The influence of William Godwin and Jean-Jacques Rousseau is palpable in this plan, particularly in Southey’s claim that he and his friends struggled under the weight of events ‘which never could happen were man what Nature intended him’ (Southey, LC, 69).13 Perhaps less evident, however, is the profound influence of Southey’s study of the ‘isocratic system’ of the Incas on the development of Pantisocracy. Southey explained: when Peru was discovered by Pizarro the whole country was divided into three parts. the King & the Priests had one each. the remaining part was the property of the nation – they cultivated it by their common toil – the produce was laid up in common storehouses – & enjoyed by all according to their respective wants. individual property thus annihilated – all motives for vice necessarily ceased. this system was established by Mango Capac.14

But if the Pantisocracy scheme was the fruit of Southey and Coleridge’s radically egalitarian, anti-establishment politics, it also reveals the colonialist sympathies that would come to characterize Southey the Tory ‘apostate.’ In the first place, Southey wanted to bring servants to America, an intention that proved a serious bone of contention in relations with Coleridge. Elaborating his ‘reverie’ on the proposed American colony, Southey writes, ‘fancy only me in America . . . my only companion some poor negro whom I have bought on purpose to emancipate.’ In the second place, Southey and Coleridge clearly envisioned their Pantisocratic community as a colony that would have to be defended by violence. Thus, while Southey imagined himself ‘wielding the ax, now to cut down the tree, and now the snakes that nestled in it . . . grubbing up the roots, and building a nice, snug little dairy with them,’ his American idyll was interrupted by the fear of ‘an ill-looking Indian with a tomahawk’ who comes around ‘and scalps me’ (68). As James McKusick comments, despite its radical claims, ‘the Pantisocracy scheme may be regarded as a fairly typical example of European expansionism, intellectually justified by an

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100 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 ideology of political equality and religious freedom, yet grounded at a more unconscious level in an economics of colonial exploitation.’15 As Carol Bolton adds, Pantisocracy ‘conformed to a pattern of colonialism, which at its least ambitious level planned to establish a “cottag’d dell,”16 and at its most extreme led to the British justice system transporting convicts to Botany Bay.’17 Although the Pantisocrats never reached America, Southey attempted to materialize their utopian vision in the early drafts of Madoc. Here too, Southey’s proprietary bent was explicit in his assertion that the twelfth-century Welsh Prince Madoc was the true Manco Capac and, therefore, that the Incas were originally European. As Southey explained, ‘it is my intention ‹on› the basis of the isocratic system to erect my Madoc . . . make Mango Capac – Madoc & you see the main design of the poem’ (quoted in L. Pratt, ‘Pantisocratic,’ 37). Despite this plan, by 1799, Southey had come to the disappointing realization that he had ‘utterly faild’ in ‘identifying Madoc with Mango Capac. No one circumstance of the history of the Peruvian legislator is applied, or applicable to the Welshman’ (Southey, NL, I. 196). A number of recent commentators have read this rejection of the Madoc-Manco Capac link as the mark of an ideological shift. Nigel Leask, for one, argues that Southey turned away from the figure of Manco Capac because, after the execution of Túpac Amaru, the leader of the Inca revolt of 1780–2, and the publication of the American author Joel Barlow’s The Vision of Columbus (1787), an image of the Incas as dangerously revolutionary replaced their earlier portrayal as pacific by writers such as Robertson and Raynal.18 But whether Southey’s reasons for abandoning the plan of identifying Madoc with Manco Capac were principally political or historical, the published version of Madoc was set, not in Peru, but in Florida, which Southey denominated Aztlan, the mythical homeland of the Aztecs.19 Nevertheless, this geo-historical rectification did not resolve the other problems complicating Southey’s use of the Madoc legend. Prince Madoc makes his first appearance in the historical record in the Welsh intellectual John Dee’s Title Royal, presented to Queen Elizabeth I in 1580. As Dee writes, ‘The Lord Madoc, sonne to Owen Gwynedd, Prince of Northwales, led a Colonie and inhabited Terra Florida or thereabowts,’ thereby establishing a British title to ‘all the Coasts and islands beginning at or abowt Terra Florida . . . unto Atlantis going Northerly.’20 In 1583, Sir George Peckham issued his True Report, expanding the implications of Dee’s work to encourage a mission of colonization in America:

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It is very evident that the planting there shall in time right amplie enlarge her Majesties Territories and Dominions (or I might rather say) restore to her Highnesse auncient right and interest in those Countries, into the which a noble and worthy personage, lyneally descended from the blood royall, borne in Wales, named Madock ap Owen Gwyneth, departing from England, about the yeere of our Lord God 1170 arrived and there planted himself, and his Colonies. (quoted in G. Williams, Madoc, 41)

In 1589, following the defeat of the Spanish Armada, Madoc’s legacy was sealed for posterity by Richard Hakluyt’s celebrated Principall Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation.21 For the next two centuries, Britons would look back to Hakluyt’s work to bolster Britain’s claim to America over that of Spain by merit of historical precedence.22 Peckham’s claim that Madoc departed ‘from England’ and Hakluyt’s reference to the ‘Discoveries of the English Nation’ point out what would become a critical strain in the imperial application of the Madoc legend. If the discoverer of America was a Welsh prince, how could his voyage rightfully be ascribed to England? In the early sixteenth century, the answer to this question was relatively simple. ‘Welsh public history,’ as David Armitage explains, was effectively yoked ‘to that of England by the accession of the Tudor dynasty and the Acts of Union in 1536 and 1543.’23 During the climactic years of the first Virginia settlement, when Dee coined the term ‘The British Empire,’ the Welsh even enjoyed ‘a momentary centrality’ on the imperial stage (G. Williams, Madoc, 34–5). Such was not the case, however, when the story of Madoc re-emerged in the late eighteenth century as part of the Welsh national revival.24 During the late eighteenth century, a strong cadre of Welsh nationalist intellectuals known as the Gwyneddigion descended on London and set in motion a wide-reaching movement to rejuvenate Welsh culture and bring about ‘the ultimate emancipation of the whole of Wales.’25 Driven by dynamic personalities such as Edward Williams (better known as Iolo Morganwg), William Jones, John Williams, and William Owen (-Pughe), the Welsh renaissance invoked the legacies of Madoc and other historical Welsh heroes to support the growth of a properly Cambro-British history understood as separate from and even opposed to that of England. It was, they asserted, the original Britons (the Welsh Druids and Celts) who had staved off Saxon, Norman, and Roman invasions until their defeat by the English in the twelfth century.26 The rise to fame of Owain (or

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102 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 Owen) Glyndwr is characteristic of this era. After being considered throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a ‘usurper or misguided rebel . . . Glyndwr seems to burst forth in splendor in the 1770s as a national hero.’27 In 1791, following the vindication of Glyndwr’s legacy, a new and widely read version of Madoc’s history appeared by John Williams, An Enquiry into the Truth of the Tradition concerning the Discovery of America by Prince Madog ab Owen Gwynedd about AD 1170, a work intended not only to prove the existence of the Welsh Indians but also to assert a specifically Welsh claim to America on the basis of the historical identity between Madoc and Manco Capac. The results of this publication were powerful and immediate. Only a month after Jones’s pronouncement, ‘Edward Williams was writing on the subject in the Gentleman’s Magazine, and by March 1792, he and William Owen (-Pughe) had come up with such an amount of “evidence” elaborating on the original thesis that Dr John Williams had to bring out a second edition [of An Enquiry] to incorporate it.’28 Riding on the tide of ‘Madoc fever,’ William Jones employed the legend to encourage all native Welshmen to flee their English oppressors by emigrating to America.29 As Caroline Franklin comments, the renewal of the Madoc legend allowed ‘the marginalised Welsh . . . to envision escaping their own colonisation by “the Saxons” through embarking on their own (post-) colonial adventure’ (Franklin, 79). Of course, not all Britons embraced the separatist impulse at the heart of Welsh nationalism. Edmund Burke, for instance, maintained that when King Henry VIII united Wales with England, the Welsh were granted ‘all the rights and privileges of English subjects’ (E. Burke, WS, II. 149). ‘When the day-star of the English Constitution had arisen in their hearts,’ he asserted, ‘all was harmony within and without,’ and the Welsh became, for all intents and purposes, ‘Englishmen’ (II. 150, 152).30 Canny Welsh nationalists corroborated such prejudices in order to engage the ambitions of the English government in support of their emigration schemes. Capitalizing on England’s interest in Spanish America, Edward Williams wrote in an address to the Royal Society, ‘it might be of great advantage to commerce, the wide continent would take vast quantities from our hands of British manufacturers, we should obtain many valuable commodities . . . perhaps silver and gold’ (quoted in Franklin, 76; emphasis in original).31 When Southey adapted the narrative of Madoc, he was consciously borrowing on a myth that had been shrewdly employed by Welsh patriot-

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scholars to enlist English support for their movement, but also, and perhaps more importantly, to assert that the Welsh – and not the English – were the rightful inheritors of the British nation. The contemporary British reader of Southey’s Madoc (like Southey himself) was thus caught between his or her allegiance to imperial England and a growing awareness of Celtic resistance to English colonialism, between a proud identification with the colonizer and a sympathetic identification with the colonized.32 This contradictory double loyalty was at the center of Southey’s depiction of the exploits of ‘the Briton Prince’ Madoc (Southey, Madoc, I. x. 101). According to legend (and to Southey’s poem), Madoc’s flight from Wales is motivated by his brother David’s violent usurpation of the throne and his complicity with the invading English. Southey thus portrays Madoc’s foundation of a Welsh colony in America as an escape from conquest and domestic rivalry rather than as an act of colonial aggression overseas. As his countryman Cadwallon urges Madoc, there is ‘a nobler conquest’ to be won abroad, ‘Some happy isle, some undiscovered shore, / Some resting place for peace’ (I. iii. 282, 287–8). But if Burke’s ‘myth of imperial venerability’ relied on the scapegoating of the East India Company as the repository of all imperial evils, then Southey exceeded this strategy by casting medieval England itself as the party whose vilification ensured the innocence of Madoc’s colonial mission.33 And while Hastings’s acquittal may have been ensured by late eighteenth-century Britain’s investment in the enlightenment creed of informal empire, one could hardly expect the indictment of the ancient Saxons themselves in the era that witnessed the birth of English nationalism. Madoc works to ease the tension between the competing claims of Welsh and Anglo-British nationalism that were intrinsic to its material at the level of nomenclature. In the first section of the poem, ‘Madoc in Wales,’ the division between the Cymry and the Saxon is overt. On first learning that his brother David has wed ‘The Saxon’s sister,’ Madoc responds in rage, ‘I hate the Saxon . . . may the fire of God / Blast my right hand, or ever it be linked / With the accurst Plantaganet!’ (I. i. 103; I. ii. 85, 90–2). Once Madoc and his followers embark for America, however, Madoc is referred to not only as ‘the Cimbric Prince’ and ‘the Briton Prince,’ but also, more problematically, as ‘the Lord of Ocean,’ a title that cannot help but evoke earlier poetic celebrations of England’s maritime prowess such as John Dryden’s ‘Threnodia Augustalis,’ James Thomson’s ‘Rule, Britannia!’ and Southey’s own ‘Ode. The Spanish Armada’ (II. xxiv.

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104 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 15; I. x. 101; I. iii. 2).34 The problem of Madoc’s Britishness thus remains unresolved and points the way toward yet another, more troubling question of national identity. III. The Problem with Americanness When William Cowper warned his nation in 1781, ‘Thy rulers load thy credit, year by year, / With sums Peruvian mines could never clear,’ he drew on a trope that had figured in British economic discourse since the age of Elizabeth.35 By the early years of the nineteenth century, however, this discourse referred to a much more concrete set of commercial relations with Spanish America and bespoke a more urgent anxiety. Invoking the ever-powerful rhetorical resources of the Black Legend, one early nineteenth-century commentator cautioned lest Britain’s actions recapitulate those of Spain: ‘No sooner did they obtain wealth without labor, than unbridled passions began to predominate, and a love of immoderate enjoyments stamped the Nation with the horrible character of treachery and licentiousness. Woe to the people who obtain wealth without labor!’36 Such admonitions came as a response to the increasingly vocal sentiment that Britain should have possessed Spain’s overseas dominions. John Constance Davie, who would participate in Popham’s invasion of South America, vividly expressed this opinion in his Letters from Paraguay (1805): The more I contemplate on the filth and laziness of these people [the Spanish], the more I regret the miserly Henry, when applied to by Columbus, was not inspired by the demon of avarice, if no more laudable motive could have actuated him, to have fitted out that noble adventurer, and by that means to have secured . . . this rich delightful country, to the Crown of Britain . . . Had the English possessed this southern world, thousands and tens of thousands, nay millions, would have blest the hour when they became their conquerors.37

Spain was the dominant European colonial power of the immediate past; Britain was that of the present. As such, the history of the Spanish empire served to kindle British ambition even as it presented an ominous object lesson on the pitfalls of imperialism. Southey’s correspondence makes evident that he was no supporter of Britain’s territorial ambitions in Spanish America. He was particularly critical of Davie’s Letters, observing to John Rickman that they

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were ‘produced in all likelihood by some one who was privy to Sir H. Pophams buccaneering schemes, and wished to prepare the public for them’ (Southey, NL, I. 445). Based on his knowledge of the region, Southey was outraged by the ‘fatal flaws’ of Davie’s Letters, particularly their ‘fabulous’ misrepresentations of the Spanish American population and their erroneous claims that they would prove unable ‘to repulse a select body of English soldiers and sailors, determined upon conquest’ (Southey, NL, I. 446; Davie, 32). As he commented to Wynn, ‘if we dream of expeditions to Spanish America, they must be mere Buccaneering visits – conquests there are impossible. Look at the beautiful map and see how wonderfully the coast is peopled’ (Southey, NL, I. 314). In January 1807, when news arrived of the rout of British forces in Buenos Aires and Montevideo, Southey wrote despondently to John May, ‘We are going upon a wrong plan with respect to South America, and a ruinous one . . . What should be done is to throw the Spanish colonies open, and leave them alone’ (Southey, SL, I. 406–7). Two months later, he condemned Popham’s conquest as ‘very mischievous,’ insisting that ‘[a]ny such attempt can only end eventually in defeat and shame, tho it may send home dollars at first, and give the existing ministry that patronage which is the game they play for’ (Southey, NL, I. 442). Southey appears to challenge his stated opposition to annexation, however, when he writes in the Preface to Madoc, ‘Strong evidence has been adduced that [Madoc] reached America, and that his posterity exist there to this day . . . retaining their complexion, their language, and, in some degree, their arts’ (Southey, Madoc, ‘Preface,’ 6). Southey endeavors to temper the contradictions of this imperial legitimation by insisting on the innocence and beneficence of Madoc’s conquest. By contrast with the Spanish conquerors of the Black Legend, Southey’s hero and his followers are ‘not of conquest greedy, nor of gold’ and seek only ‘A land in which their portion may be peace’ (II. i. 5; I. viii. 294). Madoc is a ‘blameless warrior,’ fleeing to America not to conquer or exploit but to escape the persecution of David and his English allies, who banish peace ‘With Wars [sic] shrill clarion drenching the red earth / With human blood to aggrandize’ themselves.38 But Madoc’s companions, the wise old Cynetha and his son Cadwallon, significantly disturb this portrait of guiltless flight. When Cadwallon reveals that Cynetha was once heir to the throne and was unjustly usurped by Madoc’s father, America is coopted into the ongoing saga of Welsh iniquity. Although Madoc’s ‘avenging arm is gone abroad,’ Cadwallon warns him, ‘Think of

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106 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 Cynetha! . . the unsleeping eye / Of justice hath not closed upon his wrongs’ (I. iii. 192–4). Madoc may ‘Guid[e] his prow where never mariner / Rushed thro the deep,’ but his implication in his father’s and his brother’s crimes is transplanted, not erased, when he arrives in America ‘rearing Cambrias flag’ (Southey, Madoc 1794–5, I. 8–10). Southey’s ineffectual containment of the imperial violence attending Madoc’s mission is immediately apparent at the level of word choice. When Madoc leaves Wales he is a ‘Wanderer’ and an ‘adventurer’ (Southey, Madoc, I. x. 113, 118). Once in America, he immediately becomes a ‘conqueror’ (II. xviii. 206). In light of Britain’s mounting anxiety of resemblance to the Spanish empire, Southey’s use of the vocabulary of conquest, particularly of the Spanish conquest, represents a prominent failure to ensure the pacific nature of Madoc’s expedition. If there was one word that symbolized all the evils of the Spanish conquest for Romantic-era Britons, it was ‘gold.’ And the word ‘gold’ appears countless times in Madoc, from the hero’s ‘gold-tipt horn of victory’ to the Aztecas’ ‘thin gold hauberk’ and ‘glittering gold,’ to the ‘shrine / Of gold’ adorning the church that houses King Owen’s remains (I. v. 7; I. vii. 30, 86; I. xiii. 95).39 In the 1794–5 edition of the poem, Southey even has his hero return to Europe, like Columbus, Cortés, and Pizarro, ‘bearing store of gold / The liberal produce of that happy clime’ (Southey, Madoc 1794–5, I. 376–7). Engaging the language of the Spanish crónicas more explicitly, Madoc recounts that the Aztecas welcomed him with incense ‘As I had been a god,’ to which Southey adds a footnote from Francisco López de Gómara’s History of the Weast India describing how the Mexicans did ‘reverence to the Captaine [Cortés], burning frankincense’ according to ‘the ceremonye they use in theyr salutations to theyr Gods’ (Southey, Madoc, I. vi. 145; 286n). Madoc essays to separate himself from the manipulative intent of Cortés’s pretended divinity by advising the Azteca king Coanocotzin, ‘think not thou that we are more than men!’ (I. vi. 216).40 But this admission of mortality only serves to strengthen Madoc’s claim to dominion in terms that directly recall the Spanish justification of conquest: He [God] is our strength; . . for in his name I speak, . . And, when I tell thee that thou shalt not shed The life of man in bloody sacrifice, It is his holy bidding that I speak:

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And if thou wilt not listen and obey, When I shall meet thee in the battle field, It is his holy cause for which I fight, And I shall have his power to conquer thee! (I. vi. 220–7)

Even Madoc’s confession as he stands before the powerful Coanocotzin, ‘In truth I felt my weakness,’ quickly turns to ‘trust / In more than natural courage’ and ‘more than mortal strength’ as Madoc draws ‘inspiration’ from his ‘faith in God’ (I. vi. 178, 185–7). To make matters worse, when the Aztecas betray their promise to renounce human sacrifice, Madoc suggests that, like the Spaniards, the Welsh should have thrown down Her [Aztlan’s] altars, cast her Idols to the fire, And on the ruins of her fanes accurst Planted the Cross triumphant. (I. ii. 3–7)

As such statements reveal, Southey’s poem inscribes not only the authority of conquest narratives, but also their insistence on the righteousness of Christian conquest. Drawing on Burke’s strategy of justifying imperialism by diminishing the distinction between the colonizer and the colonized, Southey next attempts to extenuate Madoc’s incursion by recoding the English oppression of the Welsh as the Azteca oppression of their tributaries, the Hoamen. On first encountering the Hoamen, Madoc thus observes: fearless, sure, they were, And, while they eyed us, grasped their spears, as if, Like Britain’s injured but unconquered sons, They, too, had known how perilous it was To see an armed stranger set his foot In their free country. (I. v. 29–34)

As the Hoamen discern the good intentions of Madoc’s men and prepare a feast with which to welcome them, they bring more honor upon themselves: the true shaft Scarce with the distant victim’s blood had stained

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108 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 Its point, when instantly he dropped and died, Such deadly juice imbued it: yet on this We banqueted unharmed, and I perceived, The wisest leech that ever in our world Culled herbs of hidden virtue, was to these Even as an infant. (I. v. 50–7)

Outdoing the wisdom of the Welsh with whom they are compared, Southey’s Hoamen, like Burke’s Indians, invert the conventional colonialist trope whereby foreign natives are to civilized Europeans as children are to adults.41 Southey not only demonstrates the Hoamen’s similarity to the Welsh – and indeed, their superiority in certain arts – he cements their affinity in bonds of kinship, forging his ‘friends’ into ‘brethren’ by converting them to Christianity (II. viii. 48–9). Madoc proposes to his ‘Sister’ Erillyab, the Hoaman queen (II. xxiv. 29): here let us hold united reign. O’er our united people; by one faith, One interest, bound, and closer to be linked By laws and language, and domestic ties, Till both become one race, for ever more Indissolubly knit. (II. xxiv. 30–5)

Southey’s rewriting of the relationship between the Welsh and the Hoamen as one of racial union works to replace the scene of Native American betrayal and abuse by the Spanish with one of consensual Welsh-Indian collaboration and family harmony. Conveniently, Queen Erillyab’s conflation with Aztlan as the ‘Queen of the Valley’ confers upon Madoc familial (rather than military) entitlement to his sister’s city (II. xxiv. 5). But this conflation, while intended to naturalize Madoc’s conquest, awkwardly foregrounds the parallel between the conquered land and the conquered woman that characterizes so many of the conquest and exploration narratives from which Southey borrowed (II. xxiv. 4–5).42 As such, even Madoc’s ‘domestic ties’ with the Hoamen cannot entirely dispel the specter of colonial violence that haunts his landing in America. By 1805, the presence in London of figures such as Juan Pablo Viscardo y Guzmán and Francisco de Miranda had already done much to reveal the common interests and beliefs of Britons and Spanish Americans.43 Nevertheless, the cultural hybridity that marks

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Southey’s poem did not sit well with many readers. A frequent critic of Southey’s work, John Ferriar, complained: the nomenclature of [Southey’s] heroes has shocked what Mr. S. would call our prejudices. Goervyl and Ririd and Rodri and Llaian may have charms for Cambrian ears, but who can feel an interest in Tezozomoc, Tlalala, or Ocelopan? . . . how could we swallow Yuhidthiton, Coanocotzin, and, above all, the yawning jaw-discolating Ayayaca?44

Beyond such resistance to Southey’s ‘torturing words’ lay a deeper uneasiness regarding Madoc’s syncretism (quoted in Madden, 103). The Eclectic Review ‘turn[ed] away disgusted’ from Southey’s ‘deification of a marauder, possibly almost as savage as the Indians themselves’ (Madden, 106–7). After all, did not Southey himself describe Wales as Madoc’s ‘barbarous country’ (Southey, Madoc, ‘Preface,’ 6)? And did he not come dangerously close to ascribing pagan worship to his Welsh heroes when, on the auspicious day of Madoc’s departure, ‘the blessed Sun, alone, / In unapproachable divinity, / Careered, rejoicing in his fields of light,’ or when Cadwallon rejoices that ‘the Lord / Of Light’ beholds the Welsh colony of Caermadoc [home of Madoc] with ‘benignant eye’ (II. xiii. 53–5; II. i. 121–2)? To be fair, the Eclectic’s scruples were not entirely unfounded. What was a Christian reader to make of the fact that, during Madoc’s conversion of the Hoamen, Southey describes the Virgin Mary as ‘A sight, that almost to idolatry / Might win the soul,’ or of the overt parallels between Mary and Coatlantona, the Azteca virgin who gives birth to a ‘Child of no mortal sire’ (II. viii. 29–30; II. ix. 106)? Southey spares no details in painting for his readers the dead Hoaman king, Tepollomi, propped ‘against the wall’ of the Azteca temple ‘by devilish art / Preserved’ or the Azteca priest, his hair ‘matted with the blood . . . / He from his temples drew,’ his arms ‘smeared / Black’ with gore (I. vi. 251–2; II. xii. 28–31). How should a reader respond to the obvious similarities between such heathen horrors and the crucifix on which the ‘aweful Image’ of Jesus ‘hangs,’ ‘fashioned to the life, / In shape, and size, and ghastly colouring’ (I. xiii. 93–5)?45 Southey practically invites this question when he asks, ‘who can gaze / Upon that . . . form, which on the rood / In agony is stretched?’ (II. viii. 30–2). In lieu of an answer to this question, he relentlessly continues the description of Jesus’s statue:

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110 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 his hands transfixed, And lacerate with the body’s pendant weight; The black and deadly paleness of his face, Streaked with the blood which from that crown of scorn Hath ceased to flow; the side-wound streaming still. (II. viii. 32–6)

After such gruesome displays, the reader is left to contemplate a potentially more awkward question: is this the same cross ‘By Madoc’s hand victorious planted’ in America (I. viii. 14)? But if Southey suggests that the ‘“Indianisation” of Europe [is] the inevitable corollary of the “Europeanisation” of America,’ a suggestion that significantly departs from more overtly Anglicizing works such as Peru and Pizarro, that does not mean that Madoc escapes the proprietary logic of these works.46 As Edward Said comments, the emergence of a ‘median category’ between the familiar and the foreign is the fundamental characteristic of European contact narratives.47 This median category (for our purposes here, WelshIndian hybridity) ‘allows one to see new things . . . as versions of a previously known thing’ (Said, Orientalism, 58). But rather than providing ‘a way of receiving new information,’ Said argues, this median category is in fact ‘a method of controlling what seems to be a threat to some established view of things’ (58–9). Following Said, recent scholarship contends that British writing about Spanish America functions to familiarize the foreign according to British fantasies and preconceptions. Carol Bolton asserts, for instance, that Southey, borrowing the strategy of travel writers, ‘has his colonisers control the foreign landscape by overlaying the familiar outlines of a knowledge system from their home country’ onto a landscape that is ‘still largely unknown to them.’48 In addition to travel writing, Southey relied extensively on works by Franciscan missionaries in South America who had ‘adopted the Indians’ ways’ in order to ‘convert them more effectively to the Christian religion’ and ‘impose their own way of life.’49 And this is indeed one of the important lessons Southey’s poem teaches, that even the Enlightenment’s vaunted egalitarianism asserts coercive control and ‘serves colonial expansion’ (Todorov, 248). At the level of plot, Madoc dramatizes this uncomfortably close alliance between European claims of American similitude and colonial aggression.50 When Madoc is drawn into war against the Aztecas on behalf of his Hoamen ‘brethren,’ Southey’s elaborate machinery for replacing violent conquest with shared identity reveals its critical

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Figure 4 Title page. Robert Southey, Madoc (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1805).

weakness (Southey, Madoc, II. viii. 49). Suppressing any mention of his own colonialist motivations, Madoc recounts how the Hoaman boy Lincoya placed The falchion in my hand, and gave the shield,

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112 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 And pointed south and west, that I should go, To conquer and protect. (I. v. 146–9)

But it is precisely by yielding to his sympathy and identification with the ‘feeble and oppressed’ Hoamen that Madoc ‘Instinctively unsheathe[s] the holy sword,’ and ends by wreaking violent retribution upon the Aztecas (II. ix. 73; I. vi. 54). Although Madoc does his utmost to transfer responsibility for his deeds to the Hoamen, at whose ‘request, / For your deliverance, I unsheathed the sword, / . . . and preserved / Your children from the slaughter,’ the disconcerting fact remains that Southey’s hero habitually marshals fellow feeling to inspire and defend imperial aggression (II. vii. 34–6).51 Unable to justify the conquest of Aztlan on the grounds of Welsh-Hoamen identity, Southey attempts to exculpate his hero by presenting the defeat of the Aztecas as a natural disaster – the confluence of volcanic eruption and flood – rather than as an act of military aggression. As the Aztecas flee their home, they cry: The Gods are leagued with them; the Elements Banded against us! For our overthrow Were yonder mountain-springs of fire ordained; For our destruction the earth-thunders loosed, And the everlasting boundaries of the lake Gave way, that these destroying floods might roll Over the brave of Aztlan! (II. xxvii. 128–34)

In this act of voluntary capitulation, the Aztecas obscure Madoc’s force by construing it as the will of nature and their gods. At the same time that this passage naturalizes Madoc’s conquest, however, its implicit reference to the devastation of imperial Rome participates in a larger Romantic-era discourse that defined Spanish American volcanic activity, like its Italian correlative, as a warning against the arrogance of empire.52 More problematic still is the fact that, soon after the publication of Madoc, Southey determined to ‘rewrite the two concluding sections . . . and insert some new catastrophe, to be produced by the agency of Madoc himself and not by a providential interference’ (Southey, NL, I. 400). Although this change was never implemented, Southey’s intention to re-assert Madoc’s martial might reveals a telling resistance to his own palliation of American conquest. In the face of such stubborn imperial ambivalence, Southey deploys yet another set of comparisons intended to redeem the Welsh

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conquest, namely the identification of the Aztecas with the Catholic conquerors of Wales. In one key instance of Welsh-Azteca approximation, Madoc discovers an English plot to exhume his father’s bones and discard them ‘In some unhallowed pit, with foul disgrace’ (Southey, Madoc, I. xv. 153). Madoc succeeds in interrupting the ‘irreverent work’ of the Saxon priests’ ‘polluted hands’ and, turning the situation to advantage, forces them to repackage King Owen’s bones for transport to Caermadoc (I. xv. 206, 231). Madoc’s concern to subvert the colonizer’s desecration of patriarchal remains applies equally on American soil, where the Prince commands the Aztec king, Coanocotzin, to properly inter the body of the defeated Hoaman king, Tepollomi: ‘till that body in the grave be laid, / . . . There is no peace between us’ (I. vi. 256–8).53 In another significant equation, the Azteca priests ignite a sacramental ‘heap of sedge’ before the Welsh, warning them to depart from Aztlan ‘Or, even as yon dry sedge amid the flame, / So shall ye be consumed! (I. vii. 98, 101–3). Underscoring the Catholic significance of this gesture, the 1812 edition of Madoc provides a footnote explaining that ‘[a]t the sacring of the Popes . . . the Master of the Ceremonies goeth before [the new-elected Pope] bearing two dry reeds . . . which he setteth on fire, saying, with a loud voice, Pater Sancte, sic transit gloria mundi [Holy Father, thus passes the glory of the world]’ (289n). But Southey’s alignment of the Aztecas with the medieval English Catholics proves yet another casualty of the overabundant (one might almost say indiscriminate) intercultural comparisons that structure the poem, and soon gives way to a supplementary identification between the Welsh and their Azteca adversaries. As we have seen, Burke’s detestation of the East India Company was fueled in large part by its agents’ acquisitiveness and ostentation. The suspicion of informal empire that Southey shared with Burke is manifest in his attempts to free Madoc and his followers from the damning charge, not merely of extractive economy, but also of its visible correlative, luxury. To this end, Southey posits Madoc’s imperial innocence in direct opposition to the opulence of the Aztecas.54 Southey’s description of King Coanocotzin as he faces Madoc in battle is perhaps the most striking display of Azteca magnificence: Adown his back Hung the long robe of feathered royalty; Gold fenced his arms and legs; upon his helm A sculptured snake protends the arrowy tongue;

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114 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 Around a coronet of plumes arose, Brighter than beam the rainbow hues of light, Or than the evening glories, which the sun Slants o’er the moving many-coloured sea, Such their surpassing beauty. (II. xviii. 56–64)

By contrast, ‘no sculptured dragon sate’ on Madoc’s ‘helm,’ his only ornament ‘a white plume / . . . floating like foam / On the war-tempest’ (II. xviii. 90–3). Yet while Madoc’s ‘white plume’ presents a sober alternative to Coanocotzin’s ‘coronet of plumes,’ and while his simple helm boasts ‘no sculptured dragon,’ the poet ironizes these antitheses by describing the flash of ‘Madoc’s sword’ as ‘like the serpent’s tongue,’ ‘double in its rapid whirl of light’ (II. xviii. 100–1).55 Southey has already shown us how Said’s concept of the ‘median category’ functions to impose European assumptions on non-European contexts. In this instance, however, Madoc’s hybridity reveals the danger that such impositions work to disavow, namely the loss of a stable, authoritative European identity. As Homi Bhabha explains, hybridity ‘reverses the effects of colonial disavowal, so that other “denied” knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority – its rules of recognition.’56 By re-evaluating ‘the symbol of national authority as the sign of colonial difference,’ Madoc’s plume and serpentine sword exceed Southey’s method of intercultural resolution by pushing it to its most extreme conclusion: the ultimate defamiliarization of the British hero (Bhabha, 114). It is in this sense that Madoc’s sword speaks, like British colonial representation itself, ‘in a tongue that is forked’ (85).57 Madoc is not the only victim of this dangerous cultural transaction. The richness and exoticism that characterize Southey’s descriptions of the Aztecas also implicate the British reader who is allured, if not by the Aztecas’ material wealth itself, then by the wealth of language used to describe it. While Southey ostensibly privileges ethical conquest over acquisitive conquest, this hierarchy is compromised by the very passage that celebrates Madoc’s victory: Little did then his pomp of plumes bestead The Azteca, or glittering pride of gold, Against the tempered sword; little his casque, Gay with its feathery coronal, or dressed In graven terrors, when the Briton’s hand

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Drove in, through the helm and head, the spiked mace. (Southey, Madoc, II. xv. 65–70)

Does the excitement of these lines come from satisfaction at the triumph of Welsh simplicity over Azteca sumptuousness or, rather, from the dazzling visual appeal of Southey’s diction? Does the reader enjoy the prowess of Madoc the benevolent warrior or the ‘pomp of plumes’ adorning his fallen enemy? Southey no doubt intended to transfer the acquisitiveness of Burke’s degenerate nabobs to the Aztecas by citing the latter’s custom of seizing the religious sculptures of the nations they conquered and amassing them in their temples (334n). Yet as Southey and his readers well knew, the custom of asserting imperial strength by appropriation was not unique to either the nabob or the Aztec. As Leask points out, Britain’s burgeoning demand for exotic luxuries during the Romantic era was often ‘rationalized in terms of an (always risky) analogy’ with ‘the Athenian practice of incorporating the imagery of its subjugated enemies into its own culture.’58 By vilifying the Aztecas only to evoke their commonalities with the British (and their august classical antecedents), Southey’s struggle to re-imagine British imperialism as predicated on intercultural sympathy spectacularly backfires, implicating both Madoc and the readers of Madoc in the imperial decadence they ostensibly oppose. There is, however, another side to the story. To be sure, Southey’s horrific portrayals of Aztec human sacrifice offered a convenient outlet for his deep-seated antipathy toward fanaticism in general, and Catholicism in particular.59 But we must also acknowledge that Southey’s attention to the similarities of the Welsh and the Aztecs was part of a broader investment in vindicating the reputation of that early civilization Europeans most loved to hate. Southey frequently took issue with the disparaging accounts of the ancient Mexicans disseminated by Enlightenment-era historians such as Robertson and Raynal. In The History of Brazil, he reproaches Robertson for erroneously claiming that the Aztecs had no ‘circulating medium’ beyond ‘cocoa-nuts,’ and reminds his readers that Cortés himself attested to the existence of ‘little pieces of tin, like thin coin’ which ‘were used for money’ (Southey, Brazil, I. 639n). After arguing that Robertson entirely neglects the ‘extraordinary state of civilization’ achieved in pre-conquest Mexico, Southey concludes that the work is ‘grievously deficient’ (I. 644n; I. 639n).60 In Madoc, he takes care to demonstrate the Aztecas’ agricultural and civic improvements, as when

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116 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 Coanocotzin informs Madoc that when they conquered the Hoamen, Aztlan was ‘not, as now, with fruitful groves embowered / Nor rich with towns and populous villages,’ but rather ‘Wild woodland, and savannahs wide and waste, / Rude country of rude dwellers’ (Southey, Madoc, I. viii. 35, 39–40). This proud defense is strengthened by an opportune parallel between Madoc’s ancestors, the chiefs of ancient ‘Britain’ who rose to defend ‘her chalky shores’ and rout ‘the Roman robber,’ and Coanocotzin, whose martial ‘mace’ is ‘Such as old Albion, and his monster brood, / From the oak-forest for their weapons plucked, / When father Brute and Corineus set foot / On the White Island’ (I. xi. 144–5; I. vi. 238, 240–3).61 If Southey goes some way here toward justifying the Aztecas’ conquest of the Hoamen according to the Enlightenment imperative of improvement and the conquerors’ similarity to righteous ‘Albion,’ he extends that approbation by suggesting the proximity of the Azteca faith to Christianity. Southey was familiar with the legend, synthesized and popularized by the seventeenth-century Mexican intellectual Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, which ascribed Egyptian, Hebraic, and Christian origins to the Aztecs. In his Teatro de virtudes políticas [Theater of political virtues] (1680) and his later work, The Phoenix of the West (now lost), Sigüenza claimed that ‘the first Mexicans were descendants of Nephtuhim, son of Mezrain and nephew of Chaim,’ that they had abandoned their ancient homeland of Egypt at the time when the Tower of Babel was constructed, and that ‘the god Quetzalcóatl was no other than the Apostle Saint Thomas, who had visited Mexico long ages before and introduced the Christian faith by his preaching.’62 Unfortunately, as Sigüenza’s contemporary Juan de Torquemada had explained, the early Mexicans, like their counterparts in the Old World, had been ‘led astray by Satan’ and induced to worship the ‘forces and objects of nature that were most prominent and most visible’ (Keen, 182). Southey’s indebtedness to such theories is palpable in Cynetha’s address to the Aztecas: Our God . . . is the same, The Universal Father. He to the first Made his will known; but when multiplied, The Evil Spirits darkened them, and sin And misery came into the world, and men Forsook the way of truth, and gave to stocks And stones the incommunicable name.

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Yet with one chosen, one peculiar Race, The knowledge of their Father and their God Remained, from sire to son transmitted down. ... Nor ever hath that light, howe’er-bedimmed, Wholly been quenched: still in the heart of man A feeling and an instinct it exists. (Southey, Madoc, I. viii. 152–61, 173–5)63

Before the Aztecas’ encounter with the Welsh, the Azteca king already nurses ‘the strong hope’ that they come ‘To pardon and to save’ (I. viii. 16). After Cynetha’s speech, this intimation turns to instant conviction. The people, and even the recalcitrant priests, are ‘stricken by the truth’ (I. viii. 210). Amidst universal hush, the great chief Yuhudthiton declares, ‘I asked of mine own heart if it were so’ and ‘the living instinct there / Answered, and owned the truth,’ upon which ‘an uproar of assent arose / From the whole people’ (I. viii. 237–9, 243–4). Even after the Aztecas return to their pagan belief system and declare war on the Welsh, Southey provides for the continuation of their Christianity through Madoc’s promise of his sister’s hand to his Christian-Azteca ‘brother’ Malinal:64 if, in this near fight, My hour should overtake me, . . as who knows The lot of war? . . Goervyl hath my charge To quite thee, for thy service, with herself; That so thou mayest raise up seed to me Of mine own blood, who may inherit here The obedience of thy people and of mine. (II. xvii. 218–24)

The name Malinal is significant here. ‘Malinal,’ as Southey would have known, was the Nahuatl birth name of Cortés’s interpreter and mistress, her common appellation ‘La Malinche’ being derived from the combination of ‘Malinal,’ its diminutive form ‘Malintzin,’ and ‘Marina,’ the name she received at her Christian baptism. Like Southey’s Malinal, La Malinche betrays her people and plays a key role in facilitating the European conquest of the Aztecs.65 Just as Southey’s substitution of Madoc for Cortés works to produce a vision of good British colonialism, his gender-bending rescripting of La Malinche as the honorable Azteca prince functions to redeem

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118 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 a much maligned figure from the history of the Mexican conquest. More importantly, La Malinche is said to have been the mother of Don Martín, ‘the first mestizo, origin of the Mexican nation, the union of Amerindian and European.’66 In this light, we can see that Madoc’s hope that Malinal and Goervyl may ‘raise up seed’ marks not only Southey’s intention to provide for the continuance of the Christian Welsh Indians, but also a curiously feminized rewriting of the Spanish conquest. But this hopeful prospect reveals at least as much as it conceals the failure of Southey’s plan. For Madoc does not die in battle and Goervyl’s intended marriage to Malinal remains unconsummated at the end of the poem. As Lynda Pratt remarks, Madoc is ‘a foundation epic in which nothing lasting is founded.’67 Perhaps, as commentators from the nineteenth century to the present day have argued, Southey was simply not ideologically consistent enough to successfully execute the challenge he had undertaken.68 Regardless, Southey himself seems to have been quite content with the conclusion of this irremediably non-foundational poem. In 1815, as if to underscore the impossibility of Madoc’s premise, Southey even added a footnote that entirely overturned his original claim that the Welsh Indians existed in America ‘to this day’ (Southey, Madoc, ‘Preface,’ 6). ‘That country has now been fully explored,’ Southey wrote, ‘and, wherever Madoc may have settled, it is now certain that no Welsh Indians are to be found’ (6n). V. Triumph in Defeat As we have seen in the two preceding chapters, the assertion of British embattlement, by coding expansionism as defense, had been marshaled as a guarantor of imperial legitimacy since the early eighteenth century. In a manner consistent with this tradition, Southey works to establish English tyranny (and its correlative, Azteca tyranny) as the precondition for Madoc’s guiltless conquest of America. At the same time, however, Southey’s poem reveals the impotence of this strategy by repeatedly demonstrating how Madoc’s identification with the colonial victim functions to perpetuate an inhumanity that threatens to undermine his imperial benevolence. It is in order to displace this violence that Madoc ends with the projected arrival in America of ‘The heroic Spaniard’s unrelenting sword’ (II. xxvii. 395). But the arrival of the Spaniards serves another critical purpose: it ensures the death of Madoc’s descendants. For the disappearance of the Welsh

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Indians in Madoc is not simply an inconvenient result of Southey’s vacillating political allegiances. On the contrary, Madoc’s descendants must be destroyed. This assertion may appear counterintuitive. Why would Southey go to such lengths to establish the legitimacy of Madoc’s right to Aztlan only to cede that title to the Spanish? Why would he place ‘the confidence of [his] own immortality’ on a work in which the hero proves so tragically mortal?69 And why would Southey explicitly draw upon the rhetorical resources of the imperial epic, boasting that the poem asserted ‘a bolder claim to originality than has been asserted since the voice of Homer awoke its thousand echoes,’ only to deny his hero the fruits of imperial conquest (Robberds, I. 371)? 70 Southey clearly positions Madoc in the tradition of his earlier epic Joan of Arc, referring to the work as ‘my epic poem’ and larding it with all the trappings of the genre, ‘long speeches, catalogues of armies . . . geographical descriptions, shield paintings, lists of killed and wounded, prophecies . . . Auroras, and all the gettings up and going to bed of Phoebus’ (Southey, LC, 91; Southey, NL, I. 137). Yet while taking such care to establish Madoc’s epic inheritance, Southey goes to equal lengths to disavow the poem’s participation in the tradition of Virgil and Homer, defiantly rejecting ‘the degraded title of Epic’71 and placing the ‘Justice’ of his hero above the imperial exploits of the ‘iron-hearted’ Aeneas (Southey, Madoc, ‘Preface,’ 6; Southey, Madoc 1794–5, I I. 3).72 Southey’s aversion to Virgilian epic was by no means negligible. In the 1796 Preface to Joan of Arc, he explained, ‘The general fault of Epic Poems is, that we feel little interest for the Heroes they celebrate . . . to engage the unprejudiced, there must be more of human feelings than is generally to be found in the character of Warriors’ (Southey, Joan 1796, 4). In his concern to privilege ‘human feelings’ over the exploits of ‘Warriors,’ Southey displays his debt to Burke’s argument that ‘[t]he prosperity of no empire, nor the grandeur of no king, can so agreeably affect in the reading, as the ruin of the state of Macedon, and the distress of its unhappy prince’ (E. Burke, WS, I. 118). We should not, however, confuse Southey’s commitment to engaging readerly sympathy with a repudiation of epic itself. As is illustrated by his admiration of the works of Lucan and of Alonso de Ercilla y Zuñiga’s account of the conquest of Chile, La Araucana (1569–89), Southey favored what David Quint calls ‘epics of the defeated,’ works which combine imperial conceits with our ‘delight’

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120 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 in the ‘real misfortunes and pains of others’ (Quint, 8; E. Burke, WS, I. 118). Thanks to its popularization in the 1780s by William Hayley, Southey knew La Araucana, and his borrowings from the poem are evident in his synthesis of Ercilla’s Araucan Indians, Lautero and Lincoza, in the character of Madoc’s young Hoaman follower, Lincoya, as well as in the notes to the poem.73 Southey would have learned from La Araucana that neither the celebration of the imperial losers’ ‘noble character’ and ‘splendid feats of valour’ nor the condemnation of their conquerors’ ‘avaricious severity’ was necessarily incompatible with a glorification of Spain’s imperial triumph.74 In fact, as Hayley contends, it is precisely the Spaniards’ decimation of the Araucans that justifies ‘the eagerness and indignation’ with which the latter ‘meditate the total extermination of the Spaniards from their country’ (Hayley, 215, 224). Because the Araucans have been so cruelly oppressed, in other words, they are entitled to exact an equally cruel revenge. In Madoc, these terms of poetic engagement work to legitimate the Aztecas’ rights to ‘rear a mightier empire’ after their defeat by the Welsh and to resist the subsequent Spanish onslaught (Southey, Madoc, II. xvii. 391).75 When the Aztecas ‘set up / Again their foul idolatry,’ however, ‘Heaven’ itself intervenes, sending the Spaniards to Mexico as ‘its ministers of vengeance’ (II. xxvii. 391–2, 394). As this divine intervention reveals, Southey’s ultimate objective in marshaling the logic of epic vengeance is not to vindicate the Azteca resurgence, but rather that of the Welsh Indian sharers of their destruction. Only by themselves becoming imperial victims can the Welsh expiate their colonial violence. Only by leaving their bones to ‘moulder’ in the American soil can they achieve a lasting identification with those whom they conquered, and it is such identity alone that can confer upon them an immutable claim to territorial possession (I. xv. 253). Understood in this way, the disappearance of Southey’s Welsh Indians is anything but a failure of ideological cohesion. Instead, it represents the very cornerstone of a larger plan to legitimate contemporary British intervention in America as a war of reconquest.76 Madoc’s inability to maintain an unbroken British title to Aztlan (like Burke’s failure to change the course of the British empire in India and America) is thus essential to the construction of Romantic imperialism as an imperialism deferred but gazing hopefully toward its future emergence, an imperialism ‘ever more about to be.’ It

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should come as no surprise then that the rhetoric of ethical colonialism that Southey developed as an alternative to Britain’s unprincipled commercial dominion in Spanish America would unwittingly help to create the rhetorical resources upon which the imperialist resurgence of the later Romantic and Victorian eras would draw.77 It is unclear if this was the result Southey envisioned when, in 1796, he projected giving Madoc ‘to posterity’ in the belief that it would ‘benefit the future’ (Southey, NL, I. 113). Nevertheless, the poet laureate was very much in step with his contemporaries forty years later when he observed, ‘How deplorable it is . . . that this finest portion of the earth’s surface should have fallen into such hands as those of Spain . . . It is painful to reflect on its present condition, and on what it might now have been, had it come into the hands of our countrymen.’78 NOTES

1. 2. 3. 4.

Quint, 209. Las Casas, 13. E. Burke, WS, II. 463. In the case of the war with America, Burke expressed more apparently anti-imperial sentiments, agitating ‘against the imposition of new taxes . . . against fighting the war itself once the colonies had declared independence, and in favor of an early termination of the war even when a British victory seemed likely’ (Bromwich, 9). But despite his early image as ‘a hero to radicals,’ it would be a misrepresentation to paint the Burke of the 1770s and 1780s as simply a republican or ‘dissident.’ After all, his Speech on American Conciliation was inspired by the belief, not that empire itself should be opposed, but rather that the policies of Lord North and George III had distorted Britain into ‘an empire that had turned away from magnanimity’ (10). 5. E. Burke, Epistolary, 54. 6. Pagden, Lords, 10. 7. Prominent contemporary writers such as William Cowper concurred. In his ‘Expostulation’ (1781), the poet asked his nation, ‘Hast thou, though suckled at fair Freedom’s breast, / Exported slavery to the conquer’d East, / Pull’d down the tyrants India served with dread, / And raised thyself, a greater, in their stead? / Gone thither arm’d and hungry, return’d full, / Fed from the richest veins of the Mogul, / A despot big with power obtain’d by wealth, / And that obtain’d by rapine and by stealth? / With Asiatic vices stored thy mind, / But left their virtues and thine own behind’ (Cowper, VIII. 195). Citation refers to volume and page number.

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122 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 8. So powerful was British domination in Spanish America, both legal and illegal, that when Spain declared war against Britain in 1796, the British navy was able to almost entirely sever communications between Spain and her colonies (J. B. Williams, 45). 9. For a useful overview of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century syncretizing efforts to identify commonalities between European and non-European peoples, see Majeed, 10, 12–16, 37, 43, 51–7, 125–6, 130–6, 139–40, and 199–200. 10. Southey, NL, I. 70. 11. Southey, LC, 69. Coleridge’s poem ‘Pantisocracy’ (1794) corroborates Southey’s vision of America as an escape from the corruption of present-day Europe: ‘No more my Visionary Soul shall dwell / On Joys that were! No more endure to weigh / The Shame and Anguish of the evil Day, / Wisely forgetful! O’er the Ocean swell / Sublime of Hope, I seek the cottag’d Dell, / Where Virtue calm with careless step may stray’ (Coleridge, CP, 57–8). See also ‘On the Prospect of Establishing a Pantisocracy in America’ (Coleridge, CP, 58). 12. For a comprehensive historical analysis of Pantisocracy, see Nicholas Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988). See also Speck, 42–61. 13. On Southey’s early influence by Godwin and Rousseau, see Southey, NL, I. 33, 79–80, 86, and LC, 65, 81, 84. 14. Quoted in L. Pratt, ‘Pantisocratic,’ 37. Manco (or Mango) Capac was the legendary founder of the Inca empire. Southey’s ‘The Peruvian’s Dirge over the Body of his Father’ (1805) also pays tribute to the collectivism of the Peruvians (Southey, PW, II. 206–8). 15. McKusick, 108. 16. Coleridge, CP, 57–8. 17. Bolton, Writing, 73. 18. Leask, ‘Southey’s Madoc,’ 140. 19. On Southey’s abandonment of the Manco Capac-Madoc identification, see also Southey, CB, IV. 3. 20. Quoted in G. Williams, Madoc, 39–40. 21. On early English justifications of the claim to America, see John T. Juricek, ‘English Territorial Claims in North America under Elizabeth and the Early Stuarts,’ Terræ Incognitæ, 7 (1975): 7–22. 22. Spain was not without its own pre-Columbian charter myth. Drawing on a spurious late fifteenth-century account, the sixteenth-century historian Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés claimed that Hespero, the twelfth king of Spain, had discovered the Antilles, and therefore that ‘the Spanish occupation of the New World should be regarded as the reconquest of ancient Iberian domains rather than an entirely new venture headed by an Italian and justified by papal donation’ (Brading, ‘Introduction,’ 36).

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23. Armitage, 57–8. 24. On the Madoc legend, see Richard Deacon, Madoc and the Discovery of America, Some New Light on an Old Controversy (London: Frederick Muller, 1966); Thomas Stephens, Madoc: An Essay on the Discovery of America by Madoc ap Owen Gwynedd in the Twelfth Century (London: Longman, Green, and Co., 1893); and Gwyn Williams, In Search of Beulah Land (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980). 25. E. Williams, I. xi. 26. On the importance of nomenclature in the early history of Welsh national identity, see Huw Pryce, ‘British or Welsh? National Identity in Twelfth-Century Wales,’ The English Historical Review, 116: 468 (September 2001): 775–801. In Southey’s Madoc, the terms ‘Britain’ and ‘Gwyneth,’ like the appellations ‘Briton’ and ‘Cymry,’ are frequently used interchangeably. See Southey, Madoc, II. xv. 11, 28. Unless otherwise noted, citations give book, canto, and line number(s). 27. Morgan, 81. 28. Franklin, 75. 29. G. Williams, ‘Evans’s Mission,’ 569. See also Jenkins, 383. 30. Despite Burke’s chauvinistic assertion that the Welsh had become effectively English, he was vehement in his criticism of England’s early treatment of Wales, comparing it to England’s contemporary abuse of its American subjects. After the conquest, Burke explains, England oppressed Wales ‘by all sorts of rigorous laws. They prohibited by statute the sending all sorts of arms into Wales, as you prohibit by proclamation . . . the sending arms to America. They disarmed the Welsh by statute, as you attempted . . . to disarm New England by an instruction. They made an act to drag offenders from Wales into England for trial, as you have done . . . with regard to America . . . They made acts to restrain trade, as you do; and they prevented the Welsh from the use of fairs and markets, as you do the Americans from fisheries and foreign ports . . . Here we rub our hands, – A fine body of precedents for the authority of Parliament and the use of it!’ (E. Burke, WS, II. 148–9). 31. Williams’s strategy for interesting the British government in Spanish American conquest is remarkably similar to that of William Walton, writing on behalf of Miranda’s Grafton Street Circle in London. See Chapter 4. 32. Southey was clearly sympathetic to the cause of the Welsh nationalists. In a letter to his friend and patron Charles Wynn (who claimed a lineal descent from Rodri, Madoc’s brother), he expresses a critical view of England’s territorial and cultural conquest of Wales: ‘George Ellis is learning Welsh. It will be a disgrace to your country if the Saxons are to conquer the literature as well as the land’ (Southey, NL, I. 320). 33. Suleri, 45. An interesting parallel exists between the politics of Madoc

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34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

and those of Southey’s early radical work Joan of Arc (1796). As Southey writes in the Preface to the latter, ‘It has been established as a necessary rule for the Epic, that the subject be national. To this rule I have acted in direct opposition, and chosen for the subject of my poem the defeat of my country. If among my readers there be one who can wish success to injustice, because his countrymen supported it, I desire not that man’s approbation’ (Southey, Joan 1796, 5). For a compelling discussion of Southey’s ‘notion of nationality as a stage trick “to catch the vulgar”,’ see Majeed, 64–75. See also Southey, NL, I. 28. Dryden, X. xviii. 514–5 (citation refers to volume, canto, and line numbers); Thomson, ‘Rule,’ l. 5; and Robert Southey: Poetical Works 1793–1810, V. 223. Cowper, VIII. 193. Quoted in Carnall, 109. Davie, 122. Southey, Madoc 1794–5, I. 11, 5–6. Citations refer to canto and line number(s). Following Southey’s usage, I refer to the Aztecs as the ‘Aztecas’ in the context of Madoc. Throughout the poem, Southey reiterates the claim that Madoc’s conquest of the Aztecas, unlike Cortés’s, is morally justified and achieved only after successive unavailing attempts to establish peace. But while Southey took particular care to distinguish his benign colonialists from their Spanish counterparts, the reader is persistently directed to excerpts from Spanish cronistas and colonial historians including Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Francisco López de Gómara, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, Francesco Saverio Clavigero, José Gumilla, Augustín Dávila Padilla, Gregorio García, Antonio de Herrera Tordesillas, Nicolás del Techo, and Juan de Torquemada. When Southey describes Madoc’s first sight of Aztlan, for example, its ‘battlements all burnished white, that shone / Like silver in the sun-shine,’ he appends a quotation translated from Bernal Díaz’s Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España [History of the conquest of New Spain]: ‘So dazzlingly white were the houses . . . that one of the Spaniards galloped back to Cortes to tell him the walls were of silver’ (Southey, Madoc, I. 6. 125–6; Díaz, 285n). See also Díaz, 287–9nn. For further discussion of Southey’s use of his Spanish sources, see Leask, ‘Southey’s Madoc,’ 146. On Madoc’s reinscription of Columbus’s voyage, see F. Robertson, 12. Soon after Madoc’s publication, Southey regretted the inclusion of so many of Cortés’s exploits. He writes to William Taylor of his intended modification to the poem, ‘I will give up the lake, because it too forcibly reminds the reader of Mexico and Cortes’ (Robberds, II. 88). The change was never made.

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41. Even the landscape of America appears superior to that of Wales. Madoc reflects, ‘Thy summer woods / Are lovely, O my mother isle! . . . / . . . but there, what forms / Of beauty clothed the inlands and the shore! / All these in stateliest growth’ (Southey, Madoc, I. v. 78–9, 81–3). See also Madoc’s astonishment that the mountains of America dwarf ‘The giant Cader Idris’ and ‘Mount Snowdon ‘Shrinks and seems dwindled like a Saxon hill’ (I. v. 189–91). In such passages, Madoc not only praises America, he also pointedly challenges the eighteenthcentury theory of American inferiority advanced by philosophers such as the Comte de Buffon and Cornelius de Pauw. 42. In The Lay of the Land: Metaphor As Experience and History in American Life and Letters, Annette Kolodny points out that the standard imperialist discourse of American discovery encodes a gendered ur-narrative by which the native woman becomes a metonymy of the American land (Kolodny, 3–9). 43. See Chapter 2. 44. Quoted in Madden, 103; italics in original. 45. Tim Fulford notes that Southey’s portrayal of ‘Aztec cannibalism in words normally used to describe the communion cup’ also troubled readers ‘because it effectively aligned Christian and heathen ritual’ (Fulford, Romantic, 137). See Southey, Madoc, II. x. 188–200. 46. Mason, 8. 47. Said, Orientalism, 58. 48. Bolton, ‘Green,’ 127. See also Fernanda Peñaloza, ‘Appropriating the “Unattainable:” The British Travel Experience in Patagonia,’ in Matthew Brown (ed.), Informal Empire in Latin America: Bulletin of Latin American Research (London: Blackwell, 2008), 149–72. 49. Todorov, 248. 50. In this respect, Madoc fatefully portends Sir Home Popham and John Whitelocke’s miscalculation that Spanish Americans would welcome a British invasion on the grounds of shared political interests. 51. According to Edward Meachen, Southey asserts ‘a sense of moral kinship with peoples of different customs and faiths’ based on the conviction that ‘self-transcendence’ is the basis of ‘human reformation’ (Meachen, 592). But because ‘the justification of violence is developed in reaction to the dangers which threaten it,’ Madoc inadvertently accommodates the very violence it means to suppress (605). 52. See also the Aztecas’ adumbration of defeat: ‘the fire of sacrifice, / Fed to full fury, blazed, and its red smoke / Imparted to the darker atmosphere / Such obscure light, as, o’er Vesuvio seen, / Or pillared upon Etna’s mountain head’ (Southey, Madoc, II. ix. 197–201). 53. Southey’s ‘Peruvian’s Dirge’ attributes to the Peruvians a similar concern with burial. The Peruvian warrior sings, ‘Rest in peace, my Father, rest! / With danger and toil have I borne thy corpse / From the

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54.

55.

56. 57.

58. 59.

60.

Stranger’s field of death / . . . My Father, rest in peace! / Rest with the dust of thy Sires! / . . . Oh! could thy bones be at peace / In the field where the Strangers are laid? / Alone, in danger and in pain, / My Father, I bring thee here. / So may our God, in reward, / Allow me one faithful friend / To lay me beside thee when I am released!’ (Southey, PW, II. 206–8). For an illuminating analysis of how British painting of this period works to downplay Britain’s imperial avarice by portraying the Native Americans, rather than their conquerors, as seduced by commodities, see Tobin, 56–80. For another striking resonance between Azteca and Welsh splendor, compare the Aztecas’ ‘feathery breast-plates, of more gorgeous hue / . . . Than the pheasant’s glittering pride’ or the High Priest Tezozomoc’s ‘crown of glossy plumage, whose green hue / Vied with his emerald eardrops’ with the Welsh shore, upon which ‘Such hue is thrown, as when the peacock’s neck / Assumes its proudest tint of amethyst, / Embathed in emerald glory’ (Southey, Madoc, I. vii. 27, 29; II. xiv. 47–8; I. xiii. 59–61). Bhabha, 114. According to Sara Suleri, Britain’s rhetorical self-implication in the identity of the colonized reveals ‘the dynamic of powerlessness underlying the telling of colonial stories’ (Suleri, 1). On Britain’s self-implication in the identity of the colonized, see also Homi Bhabha, ‘The Other Question: The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse,’ in K. M. Newton (ed.), Twentieth-Century Literary Theory, A Reader (New York: Saint Martin’s P, 1997), 293–301; and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Methuen, 1987). Leask, British, 8. See, for example, Southey’s characterization of the Spaniards’ ‘bloody and merciless Priest’ who ‘Mumble[s] his magic hastily’ over the Peruvian’s dead father in ‘The Peruvian’s Dirge’ (Southey, PW, II. 208). Southey adds that Robertson is ‘guilty of such omissions, and consequent misrepresentations, as to make it certain either that he had not read some of the most important documents to which he refers, or that he did not choose to notice the facts which he found there, because they were not in conformity to his own preconceived opinions’ (Southey, Brazil, I. 639n). See also Southey’s letter of 12 January 1803 to John Rickman: ‘Concerning Mexico he [Robertson] has written very carelessly, and drawn a very false conclusion. The arts of life were surprizingly – unaccountably advanced in that country. War – religion – government – all methodized and that most complicatedly’ (Southey, NL, I. 302).

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As Southey’s notes to Madoc indicate, his preferred histories of Mexico were Fray Juan de Torquemada’s sympathetic Monarchia Indiana (1615) and Fray Francesco Saverio Clavigero’s Historia antica del Messico (1780–1), the latter written specifically to refute the belittling claims of de Pauw, Raynal, and Robertson. Torequemada’s defense of Aztec religion was founded on the belief that natural reason and the search for divinity had produced similar religious developments in all ancient cultures. Like Bartolomé de las Casas before him, Torquemada insisted that even the Aztecs’ most disturbing practices, namely human sacrifice and cannibalism, were also found in early European cultures. Torquemada praised the Aztecs’ political and social institutions and admired their creativity and cultural achievements. Following in the footsteps of Torquemada, Clavigero condemned Aztec human sacrifice and cannibalism, but significantly qualified his criticisms by insisting that because the Mexicans ‘confessed a supreme omnipotent Being’ whom they honored with a ‘uniform worship,’ their religion was ‘less superstitious, less indecent, less childish, and less unreasonable than that of the most cultivated nations of ancient Europe’ (Clavigero, II. 363–4, 436). Furthermore, Clavigero argued, Aztec anthropophagy was by no means unique. In addition to the Greeks and the Ancient Jews, ‘many of those nations which were formerly known by the name of Scythians, and also the inhabitants of Sicily, and the continent of Italy . . . were men-eaters likewise (II. 447). Like his predecessor, Clavigero also lauded the Aztecs’ regular system of governance, the fairness of their laws, their advancements in civic planning and the arts, and the sophistication of their language. 61. Southey’s other techniques for analogizing the Aztecas and the Welsh warrant a brief mention here. In battle, the Aztecas demonstrate an affinity with the ocean similar to that commonly attributed to the British. The Aztecas’ ‘stream of war’ rolls ‘as the ocean waves’ which ‘Foam furious, warning, with their silvery smoke, / The mariner off’ (Southey, Madoc, II. xv. 128–9, 131–2). When the Aztecas concede defeat, lamenting, ‘We must leave / The country which our fathers won in arms,’ the reader is reminded of how ‘The wretched remnant . . . of Owen’s house’ mounted ‘the bark of willing banishment’ (II. xxvii. 134–5; I. xii. 83–4). Madoc’s recognition, on his return from America, that ‘in his father’s hall, / He never more should share the feast’ is also echoed in the Azteca warrior Yuhidthiton’s cry, ‘Shall I behold / A stranger dwelling in my father’s house? / Shall I become a guest, where I was wont / To give the guest his welcome?’ (I. xii. 76–7; II. xxvii. 234–7). Recapitulating Madoc’s removal of King Owen’s bones to America, Yuhidthiton then asks that his conquerors allow him to convey with him ‘The Ashes of my Fathers’ (II. xxvii. 154). Finally, as they embark on their migration to Mexico, the Aztecas take on the

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128 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 title of ‘adventurers,’ formerly attributed to Madoc and his followers, while the Welsh assume the title of ‘conquerors,’ previously attributed to the Aztecas. For this carefully plotted exchange of epithets, see also I. vi. 24, 48; II. xviii. 192, 238; II. vi. 148; II. xviii. 206; II. xxi. 74; II. xxiv. 18, 60, 97; II. xxvi. 38; and II. xxvii. 155, 254, 264, 271, 306. 62. Keen, 192. For other accounts of pre-hispanic migrations to Mexico and the possible Egyptian, Hebraic, and Christian origins of the Aztecs, see Brading, First, 365–6. 63. Despite this apparent borrowing, Southey’s notes demonstrate a rather derisive attitude toward the theory that the Aztecs were descended from the ancient Israelites. See, for example, his comment on Gregorio García’s ‘very credulous and learned book,’ El Origen de los Indios de el Nuevo Mundo (1607) (a work which greatly influenced Sigüenza), ‘It will scarcely be believed that the resemblance between Mexico and Messiah should have been adduced as proof that America was peopled by the Ten Tribes’ (Southey, Madoc, 354n). 64. Throughout the poem, Southey emplots an extensive series of narrative parallels between Madoc and Malinal. Like Madoc, Malinal conscientiously rejects his brother’s corrupt rule. ‘In sorrow come I here,’ he tells Madoc, ‘a banished man; / Here take, in sorrow, my abiding place / Cut off from all my kin, from all old ties / Divorced’ (Southey, Madoc, II. v. 70–3). Malinal’s brother Yuhudthiton overhears this speech and, like King David, in whom Madoc’s words evoke ‘Feelings, that long from his disnatured breast / Ambition had expelled,’ listens ‘as one whose heart perforce / Supprest its instinct’ (I. xvii. 116–17; II. v. 89–90). Malinal also functions as Madoc’s double in war. While Madoc fights in Aztlan, Malinal defends Caermadoc, slaying the warrior Amalhata with ‘The mortal sword of Madoc’ and driving the Aztecas to retreat ‘as midnight thieves / Who find the master waking’ (II. xvi. 269, 84–5). When the conquered Yuhidthiton leaves Aztlan, Malinal recollects their former actions ‘side by side’ in war ‘against the Strangers,’ reminding the reader of King David’s fond remembrance of the days when ‘together’ he and Madoc led the ‘hot and unexpected charge’ against ‘the enemy’ (II. xxvii. 325; I. ii. 41, 43–4). Similarly, Malinal’s entreaty to his brother, ‘By the true love which thou didst bear my youth, / . . . Go not away in wrath, but call to mind / What thou hast ever known me!’ echoes Madoc’s appeal to David as ‘the friend / Who loved thee best’ to ‘Sometimes recal to mind my parting words’ (II. xxvii. 319, 323–4; I. xvii. 110–11, 109). As Malinal’s parting words re-awaken Yuhidthiton’s ‘natural feelings . . . / And thoughts of other days, and brotherly love,’ so too does ‘The affection of [Madoc’s] voice’ work to soften ‘David’s heart’ (II. xxvii. 336–7; I. xvii. 11–12).

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65. By contrast with this reading, Leask argues that Southey ‘re-gender[s]’ La Malinche as Lincoya, Madoc’s faithful Indian boy servant and interpreter’ (Leask, ‘Southey’s Madoc,’ 145). 66. Cypess, 9. 67. L. Pratt, ‘Introduction,’ xxix. 68. See Bolton’s argument that Southey’s inability to offer ‘hope for the future of Madoc’s colony’ is due to the incommensurability of the author’s residual pantisocratic commitments and his emerging imperialist sympathies (Bolton, ‘Green,’ 129). 69. Robberds, I. 371. 70. Southey’s process of composing Madoc bespeaks an almost epic conflict between literary conquest and defeat. He writes to Wynn in 1799, ‘On a great work like Madoc I should think ten years labour well bestowed’ (Southey, NL, I. 181). In the Preface to the 1838 edition of Madoc, he explains, ‘Thinking that this would probably be the greatest poem I should ever produce, my intention was to bestow upon it all possible care’ (Southey, PW, V. 3). This meticulous preparation apparently paid off, for by 1806 Southey could credit himself with possessing ‘more information of South America . . . than any other person in Europe’ (Southey, LC, 212). But if Madoc marks, as Southey insisted, the zenith of his literary efforts, his ‘opus magnum,’ his persistent attraction to the pathos of failure and disappointment cannot be denied (Southey, NL, I. 352). After the advertisement for Madoc appeared in the press, Southey wrote to Taylor that he was ‘disposed to condemn it,’ that he regretted the years he had spent ‘in re-casting and correcting it,’ and that the result of this continuous labor was nothing but ‘a patchwork of style’ (Robberds, I. 490). Although ultimately suppressed, the initial Preface to Madoc pathetically confirms Southey’s remorse: ‘I looked to this as the monument which was to perpetuate my memory . . . However I may disappoint the reader, he may be assured that I have disappointed myself far more’ (Southey, Madoc, 571). 71. It would be inaccurate, however, to assume that Southey’s reference to the ‘title of Epic’ as ‘degraded’ indicates a wholesale rejection of the genre. More often than not, Southey’s criticisms of epic appear less ideologically than stylistically motivated. Southey was particularly scornful of what he viewed as his contemporaries’ tendency to ‘copy with the most gross servility their ancient models’ (Southey, Joan 1798, 203). Indeed, Southey’s pride in Madoc seems to have been, in large part, that it escaped the pitfalls of such imitation. He writes to Wynn, ‘the whole and all its parts are unlike any thing before it. Every incident appears to me original’ (Southey, NL, I. 168). 72. Contemporary reviews reflected Madoc’s generic multiplicity. According to the Annual Review, Madoc was ‘the best epic poem, which, since the Paradise Lost, has quitted the English press’ and warranted

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73.

74. 75.

76.

77.

comparison with the Iliad and Jerusalem Delivered (quoted in L. Pratt, ‘Introduction,’ xix). The General Review of British and Foreign Literature, by contrast, praised the poem (if rather back-handedly), not as an epic, but rather as ‘more interesting than any romance’ its ‘female readers . . . may be in the habit of perusing’ (quoted in Madden, 112). More severely, John Ferriar complained in the Monthly Review that the poem’s ‘dull tenor of mediocrity’ rendered it ‘totally unsuitable to heroic poetry, regular or irregular,’ and imagined its author ‘mounted on a strange animal, something between a rough Welsh pony and a Peruvian sheep, whose utmost capriole only tends to land him in the mud’ (quoted in Madden, 103–4). More recent commentators have tended to ascribe Madoc’s generic inconsistencies to Southey’s ‘political change of heart around the turn of the century’ (Leask, ‘Southey’s Madoc,’ 142). See also Bolton, ‘Green,’ 116–31, and Curry, 348. Southey cites La Araucana at 340n and 341n. See also Southey’s ‘Song of the Araucans, during a thunder-storm’ (1799) and ‘Inscription for a Column at Truxillo’ (1797), the latter of which exhibits a mixture of praise for the conquistador and exaltation of the weak of the earth similar to that of Ercilla. Although Pizarro is a glorious and ‘daring soldier’ rewarded for his unremitting toils by ‘Wealth, and Power, and Fame,’ Southey enjoins his reader whose ‘lot be low, / . . . hard and wretched’ to ‘thank the gracious GOD / Who made you, that you are not such as he!’ (Robert Southey: Poetical Works 1793–1810, V. 372–4, 147). Hayley, 209, 220. In ‘Chimalpoca. A monodrama founded on an event in the Mexican history’ (1799), Southey provides a similar tale of Aztec defeat in the service of future national aggrandizement (Robert Southey: Poetical Works 1793–1810, V. 332–5). For a related discussion of how the United States appropriated the history of the destruction of Native Americans to legitimize their national autonomy from England, see Wertheimer, 52–90. Such justifications of colonial violence in Spanish America would emerge with a vengeance in the later nineteenth century. See George Manville Fenn’s The Golden Magnet: A Tale of the Land of the Incas (1883), Ernest Glanville’s The Incas’ Treasure (1894), H. Rider Haggard’s Montezuma’s Daughter (1891), George Alfred Henty’s By Right of Conquest (1891), William Henry Hudson’s The Purple Land that England Lost (1885), and Henry Giles Kingston’s Manco, The Peruvian Chief; or, An Englishman’s Adventures in the Country of the Incas (1853), On the Banks of the Amazon (1872), and The Heroic Wife, or Wanderers on the Amazon (1874). For an excellent study of nineteenth-century British imperialist fantasies set in Brazil, see Ross

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G. Forman, ‘When Britons Brave Brazil: British Imperialism and the Adventure Tale in Latin America, 1850–1918,’ Victorian Studies 42:3 (2000): 455–87. 78. Southey, ‘Expeditions,’ 15–16.

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CHAPTER FOUR

‘THY WORLD, COLUMBUS, SHALL BE FREE:’ VISIONS OF SPANISH AMERICA DURING THE PENINSULAR WAR

In 1808, Britain’s longstanding rivalry with Spain was interrupted by Napoleon’s invasion of the Iberian Peninsula and the forced abdication of both King Charles IV and his heir, Ferdinand VII. For more than a decade, Spain had effectively functioned as a French satellite in the war against Britain. But with Napoleon’s invasion, the collapse of the Spanish government, and the formation of loyalist provincial juntas, British-Spanish relations entered a new era. The juntas were immediately embraced by Britain as allies against the French and, suddenly, it served British interests to maintain the Spanish empire intact in order to finance the costs of a war in the mother country and to prevent the colonies from falling into Napoleon’s hands. British troops under the command of Arthur Wellesley, poised to sail for Spanish America, were rapidly diverted to the Peninsula. Much to the frustration of Francisco de Miranda and other Spanish American patriots who had long been campaigning in London, official British plans to aid their independence movements seemed to have reached an impasse. Whereas early nineteenth-century poems such as William Lisle Bowles’s The Spirit of Discovery (1804) had frequently asserted ‘British righteousness at the expense of criminalising the Spanish,’ literary works that celebrated the unity of Britain and Spain were now the order of the day.1 In England and Spain (1808), the young Felicia Hemans was among the first to commemorate Britain’s shift from enmity to identification with Spain, announcing: ‘Glory smiles to see Iberia’s name / Enroll’d with Albion’s in the book of fame!’2 Hemans not only calls on England and Spain’s ‘Illustrious names’ to shine together as ‘two radiant gems,’ she also invokes the

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two nations to ‘still united beam,’ erasing the past of their bitter division and colonial competition (Hemans, England, 501, italics added). The assertion of such historical continuity depended, first and foremost, on replacing centuries of anti-Spanish Black Legend propaganda with unqualified praise for Spain’s American conquests. Thus it was, according to Hemans, that during ‘mighty Ferdinand’s illustrious reign,’ the ‘glorious Pilot spread the sail, / Unfurl’d his flag before the eastern gale; / Bold, sanguine, fearless, ventured to explore / Seas unexplored, and worlds unknown before.’ And thus, after extolling the virtues of Ferdinand and the ‘sublime Columbus,’ Hemans celebrates the reign of ‘Imperial Charles’ for unfolding the yet ‘prouder glories’ of Spain’s ‘golden days of arts and fancy bright, / When Science pour’d her mild, refulgent light’ (504). Throughout the poem, Spanish culture and the high moral character of Spain’s citizens bind together the nation’s history from the expulsion of the Moors to the ‘exalted’ resistance to Napoleon (503). ‘Fair truth,’ ‘Ardour,’ ‘generous courage,’ ‘loyalty,’ ‘unshaken fortitude,’ and ‘patriot energy’ are but several of the virtues which ‘in Iberia’s sons are yet the same!’ (503–4).3 As the Napoleonic conflict progressed, a torrent of nationalistic poetry appeared, supporting the Anglo-Iberian war effort by elaborating the cultural, historical, and mythical similarities of Britain and the ‘unchanging race’ of Spain.4 In Sir Walter Scott’s Vision of Don Roderick (1811), the era of Spain’s colonial heyday, though still marred by a spirit of ‘Bigotry,’ becomes one of pastoral romance, the ‘muleteer’ whistling ‘o’er vale and hill, / . . . the merry seguidille’ while ‘Beneath the chesnut [sic] tree Love’s tale was told, / . . . to the tinkling of the light guitar’ (Scott, xxxiv. 392; xxxv. 393). In these lines, Scott explicitly invokes the poetic tradition of ancient Scotland, with its ‘choir of Bards,’ where ‘mystic Merlin harp’d and grey-hair’d Llywarch sung’ (‘Introduction,’ iv. 367). Old Scotland, like Spain, is also a land of undying heroism. As the ‘friends of Scottish freedom’ return ‘from the field of vanquish’d foes’ and sound their ‘hymn of victory,’ so too does ‘Valour . . . harness’d like a Chief of old’ successfully expel the Moors from Spain (‘Introduction,’ iv. 366–7; xxviii. 389). Moving forward to the moment of the Peninsular War, Spanish ‘Valour . . . that Genius of the Land,’ springs ‘To arms’ alongside Britain’s ‘bayonet, brand, and spear,’ and together, the two nations defeat Napoleon (xliv. 398; lv. 402).5 But if, as these poems announce, Britain was now Spain’s committed ally, this did not necessarily mean that she was about to renounce

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134 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 her interests in the Spanish colonies. Should Spain fall under the sway of Napoleon, the Spanish colonies would surely follow, and this was an eventuality Britain was unwilling to accept. Blockaded by Napoleon’s forces on the continent, Britain was in urgent need of imports from Spanish America and vents for her own exports. British ministers and writers who supported independence thus found themselves on the horns of a serious dilemma. On the one hand, they needed to placate the Spanish Americans who looked to Britain for protection. On the other hand, they had to do so without arousing Spain’s suspicions that by abetting revolution in the colonies Britain was betraying her promise to protect them from a Napoleonic incursion. In the face of such a daunting political challenge, it took little time for the divisions in Britain’s loyalties to emerge. I. The Grafton Street Circle’s ‘Paper Assault’ In April 1810, following the lead of Spanish loyalists, creole patriots repudiated Napoleon’s authority, overthrew the Captain-General of Venezuela, and established a junta asserting their continued allegiance to King Ferdinand VII. In July, a new wave of envoys including Simón Bolívar, Luís López Méndez, Andrés Bello, and Matías Yrigoyen was dispatched to London to solicit aid. But whereas before the Peninsular War creole patriots in London had requested assistance against Spain, now they cannily reframed their mission as one of loyal resistance to the French usurper. They were in revolt, so the argument ran, not from a desire to separate from Spain, but rather because they refused to accept Napoleon’s brother Joseph Bonaparte as their ruler. Yet while creoles’ insistence on allegiance to Ferdinand ‘served to cloak’ an act of ‘outright defiance’ in ‘useful ambiguity,’ the British government understood the real stakes for which they played and was reluctant to commit.6 Even when Francisco de Miranda and James Mill presented Foreign Secretary Castlereagh with the terrifying (but false) evidence that Napoleon had already landed troops in Spanish America, their petition met with nothing more than a noncommittal assurance of good will. After all, whether Britain accepted the creoles’ proposals or not, illegal commerce with Spanish America was booming.7 Frustrated by the government’s wait-and-see attitude, members of the Venezuelan legation took matters into their own hands. Gathering around Miranda’s residence at 27 Grafton Street,8 the patriots and their supporters launched a ‘paper assault,’ turning directly to the

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press in an attempt to mobilize public opinion in their favor.9 Through the influence of sympathetic editors such as James Perry, members of the Grafton Street Circle released a steady stream of pro-independence articles and reviews in periodicals including the Morning Chronicle and the Edinburgh Review. Adapting the arguments of Juan Pablo Viscardo y Guzmán’s Lettre aux Espagnols-Américains (1799), these articles emphasized the abiding strength of creoles’ Spanish patriotism as well as the ‘astonishing . . . commercial advantages’ that independent Spanish America would confer upon its liberators.10 The writings of the Grafton Street Circle reiterated, but also updated, Viscardo’s arguments in ways that bore directly upon Britain’s wartime economy. Whereas the rhetoric of Viscardo’s appeal to Britain’s commercial interests had been enthusiastic, but less than urgent,11 the writer calling himself ‘William Burke’ (possibly a pseudonym for Miranda or James Mill) brought the message more forcefully home by insisting that the government could only save ‘the unemployed, starving manufacturers of Britain’ by preventing a French takeover in Spanish America.12 Viscardo’s praise of the ancient Aragonese constitution and its provisions for the right to resist tyranny was similarly applied to contemporary exigencies. In his 1809 review of the English translation of Viscardo’s Lettre, James Mill borrowed Viscardo’s metaphor of illegitimate power as a ‘sea overthrowing its boundaries’13 to address the immediate problem of the continental blockade, calling on his countrymen to ‘inquire, whether . . . barriers can be found to resist the torrent whose pressure we must continue to dread, and resources to supply those, the channel of which is closed against us’ (Mill, ‘Emancipation,’ 280). According to Mill’s associational geography, Spanish America was that ‘barrier’ that could protect Britain from the ‘torrent’ hurtling toward it across ‘the channel.’ If Spanish America and Great Britain could be construed as united through shared victimization by Napoleonic power, and if they were strategically paired by Spanish America’s need for money, men, and materiel, and Britain’s need for wartime trade, then Miranda and his colleagues brought them even closer together by emphasizing their ideological ties. According to Mill, these patriots, like their British counterparts, adopted the comfortingly conservative maxim ‘[t]hat as much as possible should be done for the people, – but nothing by them’ (305; italics in original). Throughout the war, the writers of Grafton Street embraced the British government’s ‘brand of aristocratic reformism, believing that those men who were well educated

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136 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 and independently wealthy would be the least susceptible to corruption and therefore the best prepared to deliberate impartially on behalf of their fellow citizens.’14 What Spanish Americans wanted, they claimed, ‘was to be like Britain, modern, innovative, wealthy, orderly, charitable and aristocratic.’15 The writers of Grafton Street further stressed Britain and Spanish America’s ideological similarities by portraying the creole revolutions as ‘counter-revolutionary, restorative and purifying struggles, hostile to the radicalism of the 1789 French Revolution’16 while positing independence as ‘a return to tradition rather than a disruptive break from the past.’17 In this respect, Napoleon’s invasion was fortuitous for the patriots since it allowed them to claim a contemporary constitutional precedent for their actions, namely that of the politically moderate governing juntas that had formed in Spain to oppose Bonaparte’s regime. In order to effectively ‘invoke the cries of Order and Legitimacy along with their cry for Self-rule and Liberty,’ however, it was necessary to emphasize, in the strongest possible terms, that Napoleon, and not the Spanish American patriots, represented an unconstitutional deviation from tradition (Racine, Miranda, 207). To this end, one article in the Morning Chronicle opposed Bonaparte on the grounds that a ‘government thus arbitrarily assumed must be absolutely null, illegitimate and void, and contrary to all the principles sanctioned by our laws.’18 Such political deviance was not only unconstitutional, it was murderous. Writing from a Spanish dungeon following his arrest for activities in Venezuela, Miranda warned his British allies: I saw then with amazement a repetition of the same scenes of which I had been an Eyewitness in France! I saw multitudes of Men of the most illustrious and distinguished Ranks, Classes and Conditions, treated like the most atrocious Felons! I saw them buried with myself in the horrid Dungeons! I saw venerable age, I saw tender Youth, the Rich, the Poor . . . reduced to shackles and chains and condemned to breathe the mephitic air, which extinguished artificial light, infected the blood and led to inevitable death. (quoted in Racine, Miranda, 245)

Miranda’s message was clear. Napoleonic rule in Spain was a realization of Britain’s worst fear, namely the triumph of the revolutionary principles of 1789. But while creole patriots consistently averred their loyalty to the juntas of Spain and to the restitution of the Spanish crown, they and

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their British colleagues also worked to identify present-day Spain with its maligned Regency government in such a way as to necessitate revolution. In his Additional Reasons for our immediately emancipating Spanish America, Burke reminded his readers: at present, it is almost idle to speak of the Spanish provinces. Spain herself is now notoriously but a province to France; the French chief has already the complete disposal of her councils and resources: and if this be the case with the mother-country; what, if not prevented by us, can save those also of the colonies, from shortly falling under the controul of the same master? (W. Burke, Additional, 22; italics in original)

According to Burke, Spain was now effectively French, and although Britain had promised to protect the Spanish empire, she was most certainly not bound to protect the colonial spoils of Napoleon. Mill seconded Burke’s assertion that the peace with Spain posed no obstacle to Britain’s emancipation of Spanish America. ‘We are now once more at peace with the Spanish nation; and, of course, all idea of using force to detach her colonies is out of the question,’ he circumspectly explained (Mill, ‘Emancipation,’ 297). But, Mill quickly added, because Spain would most likely surrender to Napoleon, the question was no longer whether Britain should ‘secure to herself an immense advantage’ in Spanish America, but rather ‘whether she shall take it to herself, or give it to her unrelenting foe’ (299). Burke agreed. If Britain hesitated ‘to gain the friendship of Spanish America, by bestowing independence,’ he threatened, ‘the French chief will gladly do it for us’ (W. Burke, Additional, 91). II. Rewriting ‘Discovery’ While Miranda and his colleagues flooded the press with calls for Spanish American emancipation, literary Britain was developing its own strategies for negotiating the nation’s dual allegiance to Spain and her refractory colonies. Like their contemporaries at Grafton Street, these writers strove to circumvent Britain’s contradictory commitments by emphasizing the shared endeavor of Spain and her overseas empire. One of the most telling of such efforts was the Whig poet Samuel Rogers’s Voyage of Columbus (1812), a poem purportedly written by one of Columbus’s Castilian companions. Columbus’s voyages of ‘discovery’ exerted a powerful fascination on British readers, particularly in the eighteenth and early nineteenth

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138 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 centuries. Indeed, so much had been written about Columbus during these years that when Francis Jeffrey reviewed the American writer Joel Barlow’s epic poem The Columbiad (1807), his principal criticism was that the subject matter had already been exhausted. ‘It is time to have done with this,’ Jeffrey declared. ‘[T]he History of Columbus is as well known to all who read history, as that of Noah himself; – books are now too numerous, paper too dear, and time too valuable to allow of these unnecessary repetitions.’19 But Jeffrey by no means spoke for the majority of British readers. As we shall see, during the Peninsular War the figure of Columbus provided writers with a potent tool for reconceptualizing the relationship between Spain and the emerging states of Spanish America by recasting the trope of discovery as homologous with independence. Romantic-era writers often referred to the ‘discoveries’ of Columbus in terms that separated his voyages from their relationship to conquest or colonization.20 In James Moore’s Epic Poem on the Discovery of America and the West Indies by Columbus (1798), Columbus appears simply as ‘a man of imagination who is not responsible for the consequences of his imaginings’ (F. Robertson, 8). So too in William Lisle Bowles’s The Spirit of Discovery (1804), emphasis falls on Columbus the visionary rather than on Columbus as the herald of American conquest.21 Alexander von Humboldt famously paid tribute to Columbus’s legacy by calling his achievements ‘a conquest of reflection’ and William Burke praised Columbus for ‘undert[aking] to extend the boundaries which ignorance had given to the world.’22 As Anthony Pagden comments, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries recognized Columbus primarily as a man of enlightenment, ‘a modern before his time,’ and as ‘a true scientific visionary’ rather than as a conqueror.23 Not all, however, shared this understanding of Columbus as an innocent scientific pioneer. In his Histoire des Deux Indes (1770–80), the Abbé Raynal laments Columbus’s first landing in America: ‘Let us forget, if it be possible, the instant of this discovery, this first interview between two worlds, or rather let us recall it to our memory, only to increase our detestation of the one we inhabit.’24 Rather than standing apart from the likes of Cortés and Pizarro, Columbus and his men looked upon the natives, Raynal writes, ‘as a race of imperfect animals, who were only to be treated with humanity, till the necessary information was obtained in regard to . . . the gold mines’ (Raynal, III. 4. 254). Even Washington Irving, whose Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus strove to present the famous

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explorer as a pious man of ‘penetrating genius’ and ‘visionary spirit,’ admits,25 He evidently concurred in the opinion, that all nations which did not acknowledge the Christian faith were destitute of natural rights; that the sternest measures might be used for their conversion, and the severest punishment inflicted upon their obstinacy in unbelief. In this spirit of bigotry he considered himself justified in making captives of the Indians . . . and in selling them for slaves if they pretended to resist his invasions . . . Let it remain a blot on his illustrious name, and let others derive a lesson from it. (Irving, Columbus, II. 561–2)

As such critical statements reveal, the Romantic-period understanding of Columbus was by no means uniform and often encompassed a wide range of incommensurable interpretations. Samuel Rogers’s Columbus bears out his era’s conflicting opinions of Columbus as both a bringer of enlightenment and as the first in the long line of America’s despoilers. In his Preface to the poem, Rogers portrays Columbus as ‘a person of extraordinary virtue and piety’ who brought Christianity to ‘a New World, the inhabitants of which were shut out from the light of Revelation, and given up . . . to the dominion of malignant spirits.’26 The Preface goes on, however, to identify the history of America as a ‘deep tragedy’ and, in the Argument, to portend that Columbus and his followers will ‘mak[e] the World, which [they] came to bless, a scene of blood and slaughter’ (Rogers, ‘Preface,’ 86; ‘Argument,’ 94). Although, as Rogers suggests, Columbus was ‘girt with Godlike power’ and ‘by Heaven designed / To lift the veil that covered half mankind,’ he was also destined to bring ‘Not peace, but war’ and to become, in short, both Spain’s ‘glory and her shame’ (I. 96–7; XII. 131; ‘Preface,’ 88).27 But although Rogers shares his contemporaries’ ambivalence about the morality of Columbus’s voyages, his work stands out for its refusal to separate itself from the discoverer’s ‘superstition’ and ‘bigotry’ (Irving, Columbus, II. 561). Rather than assert a modern, enlightened view of conquest, Rogers openly embraces the ‘religious enthusiasm of the early writers,’ warning his readers, ‘Many of the incidents’ contained in the poem ‘will now be thought extravagant’ for they took place during ‘an age of miracles’ (Rogers, ‘Preface,’ 85–6). Through the mouthpiece of Columbus’s unnamed Spanish companion, Rogers relates the discovery of the New World according to a devoutly Christian eschatology. Columbus frequently calls

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140 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 upon the aid of God (‘Thou All-supreme’) to lead ‘thy servant over land and sea’ (II. 100). And the anonymous chronicler repeatedly invokes parallels between Columbus’s voyage and the peregrinations recounted in the Bible, as when his ship is surrounded by water ‘shoot[ing] in columns to the skies, / . . . As in the Desert burned the sacred fire’ (II. 101).28 Oddly enough, however, the narrator places just as much faith in the Native American deities as he does in his Christian leader. The Argument of the poem portrays America’s gods as no less consequential than Columbus himself: the deities of America assemble in council; and one of the Zemi, the gods of the islanders, announces [Columbus’s] approach. “In vain,” says he, “have we guarded the Atlantic for ages. A mortal has baffled our power; nor will our votaries arm against him . . . Hence; and, while we have recourse to stratagem, do you array the nations round your altars, and prepare for an exterminating war.” (‘Argument,’ 93)

Following his convocation of the spirits, Merion, ‘Chief of the Zemi,’ comes as a vampire to prey upon Roldan, one of Columbus’s companions, and infects him with the spirit of mutiny (VII. 113–14; III. 103). In this instance, as well as during the great storm at sea in which ‘Shrieks, not of men, were mingling in the blast,’ the narrator suggests that America’s ‘Evil Spirits’ are directly responsible for Columbus’s vicissitudes (II. 99; III. 102). Certainly, it was no common Spanish mercenary who could avow the existence, much less the concrete power, of pagan deities, even in ‘an age of miracles.’ Nor could it have been just any conqueror who would censure equally Columbus’s acts of ‘slaughter’ and the American deities’ ‘rites of blood,’ while praising the ‘heroic deeds’ of both parties (III. 103). Like Southey before him, Rogers also links the natives of Spanish America with their conquerors by emphasizing their common suffering.29 Both Columbus and the Native Americans will thus be deprived of their rightful possessions when, as the prophetic ‘Angel’ of the poem foretells, Mexico shall ‘unfold’ her ‘roofs of gold, / To other eyes.’ But Columbus’s victimization goes well beyond the loss of the wealth ostensibly due to him. For like those he conquered, he will be placed in ‘Chains,’ ‘buried in [the] grave,’ and reduced to ‘A spectre wandering in the light of day’ (XII. 130). And, like the American natives detailed in Bartolomé de las Casas’s Brevíssima

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relación, Columbus will be preyed upon ‘By dogs of carnage, howling loud and long’ and the Spanish ‘scent’ will ‘track’ him ‘to the end’ (XII. 130–1).30 As we saw in the previous chapter, this trope of shared Euro-American persecution and destruction was essential to the Romantic construction of territorial entitlement. But whereas Southey’s Madoc invokes this figure in order to suggest a viable British right to Spanish America, Rogers’s Columbus suggests a parity between conqueror and conquered in order to affirm the legitimacy of Spain’s ancient claims to America and, simultaneously, to honor contemporary creole patriots’ ‘insistence on ancestral rights based on conquest.’31 The same year that saw the publication of Columbus witnessed the appearance of two works that engaged the legacy of Columbus in explicit support of Spanish American independence: Frederick Reynolds’s ‘Operatic Drama,’ The Virgin of the Sun, and Anna Letitia Barbauld’s poem, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven. On the surface, Reynolds’s drama presented audiences with yet another work ‘founded on Marmontel’s Incas.’32 Like Les Incas, Reynolds’s Virgin tells the story of Alonzo de Molina, the fictional conquistador who abandons Pizarro and helps the Peruvians to defeat him. As in Marmontel’s work, Ataliba proclaims to Alonzo, ‘to those who conquer us by acts of kindness we glory to pay homage,’ thereby revealing the Incas to be an enlightened people who appreciate the value of benevolent imperialism.33 Elsewhere, however, Reynolds deviates materially from Marmontel’s plot. Most importantly, Reynolds’s real hero is not the Spaniard Alonzo, but rather the Peruvian General Rolla, who ultimately succeeds in overturning the ‘tyrannic law’ that forbids Alonzo’s union with Cora, the Virgin of the Sun (Reynolds, Virgin, III, ii, 68). Marmontel’s Alonzo pleads against the law prohibiting the marriage of consecrated virgins by appealing to the ‘natural emotions of the heart’ shared by the Incas and enlightened Europeans.34 Rolla’s plea, by contrast, is grounded in the value of innovation, precisely the virtue that writers from Bowles to Humboldt had ascribed to Columbus: must the altars of a God all merciful, be held by chains . . . And only by the specious plea of custom – precedent? What precedent had he who taught us to adore this God? – or he, who in a distant clime, saw our new world! and spurning danger, prejudice and toil, steer’d boldly on and won the glorious prize – or he, who landing ’midst a host of fierce,

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142 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 vindictive foes, became at once the oppres’t Peruvian’s friend. Like them, I’ll form, not follow precedents! – be foremost to amend, not copy error, – and see in Heav’n which shall meet most praise! – the Inca who first fram’d this barbarous law, or Rolla, who destroyed it. (III, iii, 74–5)

This speech is significant for several reasons. First, it suggests that Rolla’s revolutionary feat is similar to both the discovery of America and to Alonzo’s defense of the Incas, thereby identifying Spanish expansionism with the triumph of enlightened imperialism. Second, it asserts that native ingenuity, rather than European enlightenment, is sufficient to effect Spanish American progress. Finally, like the writings of the Grafton Street Circle, Reynolds’s drama contends that Spanish American autonomy is consistent with Spanish patriotism. As the reformed Incas revealingly sing at the end of the production, ‘Reign, Inca, reign! / Peace inviting, / Still uniting, / Peru and Spain!’ (III, iii, 78). Like Columbus and The Virgin, Barbauld’s Eighteen Hundred and Eleven posits a continuity, rather than a rupture, between European empire and colonial independence. In fact, Barbauld predicates North America’s political ascendancy on the triumph of British cultural imperialism, imagining how Britain’s ‘Lockes’ and ‘Paleys’ will ‘instruct’ the republicans, how ‘Milton’s tones’ shall ‘the raptured ear enthrall, / Mixt with the roar of Niagara’s fall,’ and how the new republic will ‘revere’ British laws, ‘think [British] thoughts, and with [British] fancy glow.’35 Even if America should rise in proportion to Britain’s fall – and Barbauld stresses that this event is conjectural – it is British, not American, culture that will triumph ‘O’er half the Western world’ (Barbauld, Eighteen, l. 82).36 In this spirit, Barbauld ends her poem with the strikingly ambiguous prophecy that is as much a nod to Spain’s entitlement to America as it is an invocation of Spanish American liberty: ‘Thy world, Columbus, shall be free’ (l. 334). Given the overt patriotism of Barbauld’s apostrophe to her ‘Country, name beloved, revered, / By every tie that binds the soul endeared,’ and given what Tim Fulford and Peter Kitson have called her ‘enthusiastic anticipation of a British cultural imperialism,’37 the extreme hostility that met the publication of Eighteen Hundred and Eleven gives pause (ll. 67–8).38 Nor can one account for critics’ censure on the grounds of thematic novelty, for Barbauld’s treatment of civilization passing from the east to the west is clearly indebted

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to earlier works such as Samuel Johnson’s The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), George Berkeley’s ‘On the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America’ (1752), Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village (1770), and William Lisle Bowles’s The Spirit of Discovery; or, The Conquest of Ocean (1804).39 According to the historical hindsight of the Theological Review, Barbauld’s crime was simply ‘inopportune’ timing.40 Why reiterate, contemporary critics wondered, the ‘Colossal Power’ and ‘overwhelming force’ of Napoleon as Britain struggled under his continental blockade (l. 7)? Was it not shockingly defeatist to admit, as nation after nation capitulated to Napoleon, that ‘Freedom,’ rather than rising to defend its rights, lay ‘Prostrate . . . beneath the Despot’s sway’ (l. 8)? Even Barbauld’s long-time friend Henry Crabb Robinson complained, ‘She does not content herself with expressing her fears lest England should perish in the present struggle; she speaks with the confidence of a prophet of the fall of the country.’41 But Barbauld’s crime was something worse than inopportune timing. And paradoxically, that crime was directly related to her use of two of the period’s most powerful patriotic conceits. Barbauld draws explicitly on the poetic linkages Hemans and Scott had forged between Britain and Spain when she correlates the conditions of wartorn Spain with the blight caused by England’s bad harvest of 1811: Bounteous in vain, with frantic man at strife, Glad Nature pours the means – the joys of life; In vain with orange blossoms scents the gale, The hills with olives clothes, with corn the vale. (ll. 11–14)

Continuing the national elision, Barbauld transforms Spain’s ‘orange blossoms’ into England’s ‘blooming youths,’ the ‘fallen blossoms’ that ‘strew’ the Spanish ‘strand’ (ll. 13, 24, 26). Unlike that of Hemans or Scott, Barbauld’s association of Britain and Spain is founded on shared destruction rather than on common triumph. She specifically co-opts patriotic figures of empire such as Hemans’s ‘immortal crowns of fairest flowers,’ negatively qualifying them as ‘fairest flowers [that] expand but to decay’ (Hemans, England, 504; Barbauld, Eighteen, l. 313). Yet Barbauld’s portrayal of national destruction was by no means inconsistent with the assertion of imperial strength. As Southey’s Madoc had already established, the fall of a nation could be conveniently recuperated both to guarantee its imperial innocence and to legitimize its re-emergence and vengeance.

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144 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 Although the tropes of British-Spanish unity and of national triumph through defeat were not inherently incompatible, their combination in Barbauld’s poem gives way to an associative excess which could not be neatly contained by the terms of Britain’s political allegiances. Whereas portrayals of Britain’s affinity with Spain were underpinned by the claim that British intervention on the Peninsula was altruistically motivated, Barbauld suggests that because her nation has ‘shared the guilt’ of Napoleon’s imperial belligerence, it must also ‘share the woe’ (Barbauld, Eighteen, l. 46).42 By extension, when the ‘Genius’ of civilization ‘turns from Europe’s desolated shores,’ it turns from all of Europe, including Britain (l. 322). It was one thing for commerce, culture, and political power to flee the tyranny of Napoleonic Europe, and indeed much patriotic literature suggested that it had. But for Barbauld to make no distinction between the fate of Britain and that of the countries under Bonaparte’s control was dangerously ‘unfilial’ and suggested, as the Monthly Review complained, that Britain had in fact ‘deserved the ruin which . . . she denounce[d].’43 By exposing the cultural imperialism implicit in Britain’s support for American independence, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven unmasked the nation’s persistent proprietary interests in the Spanish colonies and its duplicity with regard to Spain. By suggesting, further, that Britain was in part responsible for the atrocities of the Peninsular War, it exposed the hypocrisy of Britain’s pretended kinship with the Spanish empire. III. Creolizing Columbus If Barbauld’s poem was out of step with Britain’s wartime selfrepresentation as the loyal ally of Spain and the disinterested savior of Spanish America, it also anticipated the works that emerged at the end of the war, works that cast off all pretense of British-Spanish similitude and argued unconditionally (and despite Britain’s ongoing peace with Spain) for Spanish American independence. Just two months after the reinstatement of Ferdinand VII, William Walton and Don Manuel de Sarratea published An Exposé on the Dissensions of Spanish America (1814), arguing that Spain had ‘bathed’ its colonies in ‘blood and anarchy’ and ‘filled the New World with scenes of horror that outrivalled its conquest.’44 Rather than lauding Britain’s wartime alliance with Spain, Walton and Sarratea admonished Britain for the ‘engagements’ it had ‘contracted with Spain’ and for its resulting ‘apathy’ and ‘coldness’ toward the struggling American

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colonies (Walton and Sarratea, Exposé, iii–v). Turning away, too, from the Grafton Street Circle’s loyalist rhetoric of previous years, Walton and Sarratea insisted that Ferdinand had effectively broken the natural ties between Spain and Spanish America when, on returning to the throne, he immediately moved to wreak ‘vengeance’ upon the American Cortes and crush the emerging states (vi).45 So ‘inordinate’ and ‘dreadful’ did the acts of Ferdinand appear that even habitually noncommittal British statesmen such as the ambassador to Rio de Janeiro, Lord Strangford, hoped ‘that Great Britain [might] be induced to interpose her good offices for the purpose of sheltering the inhabitants of La Plata from the vengeance of Spain.’46 Such anti-Spanish and pro-Spanish American sentiments were powerfully elaborated in contemporary poems such as William Lisle Bowles’s The Missionary (1815) and James Scott Walker’s The South American (1816).47 Drawing on recent English translations of Alonso de Ercilla y Zuñiga’s epic, La Araucana (1569–89), Alonso de Ovalle’s Historical Relation of the Kingdom of Chile (1649), and Juan Ignacio Molina’s Geographical, Natural and Civil History of Chili (1776), The Missionary focuses on the bloody conflict between the Spanish governor of Chile, Pedro de Valdivia, and the valiant Mapuche warrior, Lautaro.48 But although, as Bowles states, the incidents of The Missionary are ‘taken from history,’ the poem begins, not with the Spaniards’ arrival in America, but rather with America’s revenge, represented by Napoleon’s invasion of Spain.49 The ‘mighty genius’ of the ‘Hesperian world’ declares (Bowles, Missionary, ‘Introduction,’ l. 8): Rejoice! the hour is come: the mortal blow, That smote the golden shrines of Mexico In Europe is avenged; and thou, proud Spain, Now hostile hosts insult thy own domain; Now Fate, vindictive, rolls, with refluent flood, Back on thy shores the tide of human blood. (‘Introduction,’ ll. 17–22)

Here, as elsewhere in the poem, Bowles’s ‘mighty genius’ recalls the ‘Genius’ of Barbauld’s Eighteen Hundred and Eleven. Yet Bowles’s ‘genius’ is not a transnational, transhistorical force that passes inevitably from continent to continent and from age to age. It is a specifically retributive, American power. It is ‘Death, the king,’ answering the cries of the native Spanish Americans and coming to ‘doom to fate / The murderers, and the foe [they] hate! (V. 138–9).50

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146 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 As Bowles suggests, the conflict between America and Spain is as relevant to the nineteenth century as it was to the conquest era. To underscore this point, he makes several critical changes to the standard account of the Chilean conquest, particularly to the character of Lautaro. Whereas Ovalle simply comments that Lautaro was ‘bred page to the governor Valdivia,’ Bowles constructs a more complicated story in which Lautaro is stolen from his family and sent to Spain, where he becomes Valdivia’s page, converts to Catholicism, and falls in love with a Spanish orphan before finally coming back to Chile.51 By the time Lautaro returns, he has become ‘bound’ to his people’s ‘deadly enemies’ by ‘tenderest ties,’ and feels himself ‘A homeless stranger in [his] native land’ (I. 311–13, 307). In this respect, he is not unlike Reynolds’s Rolla or Rogers’s Columbus, both of whom are also defined by their transatlantic attachments. But Lautaro differs significantly from these earlier protagonists insofar as his creolization does not work to accommodate Britain’s dual allegiance to Spain and Spanish America, but rather to reflect the impossibility of any such accommodation. On first returning to America, Lautaro’s professions of continued ‘gratitude’ and ‘fidelity’ to his Spanish master recall the strategic wartime claims of creole patriots (II. 135). But when Valdivia and his men attack Lautaro’s village, the native hero and his ‘brave brothers’ think back on ‘Cortes’ desolating march’ and on the ravages caused by ‘proud Pizarro,’ and, like post-war creole patriots, rise openly in arms against the ‘vultures of accursed Spain’ (VII. 235; II. 145, 147; I. 216). Bowles’s lionization of the valiant Lautaro, who ‘bravely stood, / To seal his country’s freedom with his blood,’ was in line with the sentiments of many contemporary Britons (VIII. 310–11). The British Critic praised ‘the bravery and character of the natives, whom the Spaniards, in their day of dominion, were never able to subdue, and who remain free to the present hour.’52 The Critical Review admired Bowles’s depiction of ‘the hardy and never thoroughly-subdued inhabitants of that wild . . . region,’ remarking with undisguised sympathy that their ‘triumphant opposition . . . is surely a theme of lasting and legitimate admiration,’ especially ‘in this age of mad usurpation and illegitimate government.’53 The relevance of Bowles’s message to contemporary Spanish American creoles became equally apparent in 1817, when insurgent envoys in London purchased and refurbished a British vessel for the Chilean navy, christening the ship ‘The Lautaro.’54

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James Scott Walker’s now rather obscure poem The South American appealed even more directly to British interest in the Spanish American struggle for independence. Whereas Bowles had merely hinted at the parallels between Lautaro and contemporary creole freedom fighters, Walker chose for his hero none other than Simón Bolívar, whom he claimed to have met during his residence in Caracas. Walker’s poetic retelling of Bolívar’s campaigns provided him with a venue in which to display his first-hand knowledge of events in Spanish America.55 More importantly, it presented an opportunity to replace the Romantic era’s tortured sentimental narratives of benevolent colonialists and suffering natives with a genuine story of creole liberation. To effect this literary transformation, Walker went back to the source, Marmontel’s Les Incas, and rewrote it. The South American presents a fictionalized account of how Bolívar, like Marmontel’s benevolent conqueror Alonzo, falls in love with a virginal American beauty, rescues her from an earthquake, absconds with her to the forest, and proceeds to sue unavailingly for her hand. In Les Incas, this beauty is Cora, the Virgin of the Sun. In The South American it is Laura, the only daughter of the aging creole patriot, Montillo.56 Both Bolívar and Alonzo act the part of the languishing lover, the former ‘sigh[ing]’ and ‘Counting each hour – for hours seem to delay, / When two fond lovers’ converse they divide,’57 the latter biding his time, ‘Gloomy restless, and impatient . . . distressed and constrained’ (Marmontel, II. 26. 17). Both Laura and Cora play the role of the lovely, dark-eyed maiden whose heart pants for her gallant savior (Walker, I. x, xiv; Marmontel, II. 13; I. 1. 22). In Marmontel’s tale the lovers are torn apart by ancient Inca law, a ‘barbarous institution’ that forbids any Virgin of the Sun from marrying on punishment of death (Marmontel, I. 1. 16). In Walker’s rewriting, however, the Incas’ fabled ‘Fanaticism’ is exchanged for the real tyranny of the Spanish, who would make the happy couple’s lands their ‘prey’ and change their ‘gladsome halls’ into ‘a prison’s gloom’ (Marmontel, I. 1. 16; Walker, I. xvii). Laura’s cautious father enjoins Bolívar, ‘Wait but one year, if then in liberty / Caracas’ valley reigns, my daughter shall be free’ (Walker, I. xvii). Montillo’s conflation of Laura’s liberty and that of Venezuela reveals the core of Walker’s critique of the Marmontelian romance. In place of Marmontel’s well intentioned but counterfactual union of conqueror and conquered, Walker inserts the reality of ongoing colonial struggle. And in place of the colonial romance, in which European

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148 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 possession of the native woman naturalizes possession of the land, he includes an explicitly creole foundation myth in which possession of the American woman is reserved for the American man. Walker proceeds to refigure Columbus as Bolívar and to rewrite the ‘discovery’ and conquest as the attainment of Spanish American independence. Like the bold explorer, Bolívar marches ‘’Mid boundless wilds, and tracts, which ne’er before . . . / . . . the foot of mortal did explore’ (III. xxiv). Like Columbus, who glimpses ‘the green sea-weed’ and is inspired to steer ‘for the promised land with bolder effort,’ Bolívar discovers ‘where the plantane grew, and luscious date’ and ‘onward move[s] with hope elate’ (III. xxv). Yet Walker’s use of Columbus is diametrically opposed to that of Rogers or Reynolds. Although Bolívar shares the navigator’s intrepidity and heroism, Walker makes no converse attempt to creolize Columbus or to otherwise reconcile Spanish expansionism with American independence. Spain may have defeated Inca ‘priestcraft,’ he contends, but Bolívar will conquer the more virulent ‘superstition’ of tyrants and ‘inquisitors’ (IV. xix). Liberty and independence will overshadow the legacy of conquest and Bolívar will effectively supplant Columbus as the visionary who ushers in a new era. But if Walker’s Bolívar becomes an enlightenment hero for the nineteenth century, he does so in terms that are specifically British. According to the prophetic ‘spirit’ of South America, the only sure way that Bolívar can guarantee a lasting independence is by obtaining the favor of ‘Britannia’s land,’ ‘sole monarchs of the warring wave’ (IV. xviii). ‘Court her alliance, for your country’s cause,’ the spirit commands, ‘To her, above the rest, be commerce given; / From her example learn to model laws’ (IV. xix). In fact, this is precisely what the historical Bolívar did when, in 1815, he asked the former British Foreign Secretary Sir Richard Wellesley ‘to be the savior of America.’58 Praising Wellesley as ‘an enlightened and liberal man’ of ‘sublime sentiments’ and paying tribute to ‘the eminent qualities shining in [his] person’ and his ‘distinguished family,’ Bolívar went on to flatter the British nation (not without some imaginative license) as ‘the liberator of Europe, friend of Asia, and protector of Africa’ (Bolívar, ‘Wellesley,’ 153–5). He also thanked private British investors for the ‘unlimited generosity’ they had displayed in ‘rushing to provide us with whatever the republic needed to further its philanthropic purpose,’ calling ‘[t]hese friends of humanity’ ‘the guardian angels of America.’59 Bolívar complemented his flattery with familiar commercial

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enticements, promising that Spanish America ‘offers vast opportunities to her defenders and friends’ and that ‘England, almost exclusively, will see prosperity flow back to her shores from this hemisphere which must depend, almost exclusively, on her as benefactress’ (154).60 Bolívar also appealed to Britain’s political prejudices. By the time he wrote to Wellesley, Walton and Sarratea had already argued that because the Spanish Americans had not ‘received any other political education, than that which agrees with the establishment of a monarchy,’ they were unsuited to ‘the formation of a Republic’ and would best be served by the erection of ‘local constitutional monarchies along British lines’ (Walton and Sarratea, Exposé, 459; Racine, ‘Imagining,’ 221). Bolívar would have been thinking of such arguments in 1819 when he urged the Venezuelan delegates gathered in Angostura to ‘study the British constitution, which is the one that seems destined to bring the greatest good to the peoples who adopt it’ and which represents ‘the worthiest model for anyone aspiring to the enjoyment of the rights of man’ (Bolívar, ‘Angostura,’ 26). The British press portrayed Bolívar as both a political hero and as a man of laudable refinements. In his Journal of a Residence and Travels in Columbia, Captain Charles Stuart Cochrane commended ‘the unceasing, the able, the skilful, and well-directed exertions of Bolivar,’ while also taking time to observe, ‘Bolivar is a good swimmer, an elegant dancer, and fond of music: he is a very pleasant companion at table; neither smokes nor takes snuff, nor does he ever taste spirits.’61 The Literary Magnet of the Belles Lettres, Science, and the Fine Arts reprinted this enumeration of Bolívar’s accomplishments, adding that he ‘is descended from a family of distinction at Caraccas.’62 The New Annual Register quoted one Captain Brown of the Venezuelan Light Brigade, who praised Bolívar’s ‘commanding figure’ as well as his European education, knowledge of the English language, and ‘noble family.’63 Bolívar was also, Brown pointed out, ‘one of the richest men in the Caraccas’ (NA 1820, 82). Crowning Bolívar’s acceptance by fashionable Britain was an advertisement that appeared in Rudolf Ackermann’s Repository of Arts, Literature, Fashions, Manufactures &c for 1823, announcing the arrival in London of the ‘Bolivar hat,’ made entirely of ‘black velvet’ and finished with a handsome ‘brim, narrow and of equal width.’64 Given that Bolívar stood in open opposition to the Spanish crown, and given his admiration for British values, it may seem surprising that he upheld a reverence for the conquerors of America. But he in fact enshrined the legacy of the Spanish empire when he united the

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150 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 independent provinces of Venezuela and New Granada as the republic of Colombia, so named ‘in fair and grateful tribute to the creator of our hemisphere.’65 On the one hand, Bolívar’s naming of Colombia reflects the persistence of creole elites’ sense of entitlement to America by right of their Spanish forefathers’ conquest. By that same token, however, it also inscribes Colombia as a nation marked by the ‘the torments she has suffered from the moment of the discovery until the ravages most recently afflicted on her,’ as a nation steeped in a continuing history of violence and oppression (Bolívar, ‘Jamaica,’ 12). Like Columbus, Bolívar left the stamp of his own irreconcilable identity on America. In 1825, the republican army wrested Upper Peru from royalist control and, in honor of their leader, christened the new nation Bolivia. But the liberal constitution Bolívar drafted for the new republic proved unpopular among conservative creole elites. Their resistance, combined with the collapse of the British money market in December 1825 and the subsequent abandonment of the region’s British-owned mines, soon reduced Bolivia to poverty and violent chaos. From this point, Bolívar’s career and reputation spiraled downward. Peruvian nationalists suspected that he intended to annex their territory to Colombia and balked at his continuing rule. As the decade neared its end, Colombia disintegrated into anarchic war with Peru. Buenos Aires overthrew its president, Mexico was in the grip of a bloody revolution, and conditions in Guatemala and Chile were rapidly deteriorating. As Bolívar watched the republics of Spanish America crumble around him, he gave way to despair. ‘America is ungovernable,’ he conceded. ‘Those who serve the revolution plow the sea.’66 The great ‘Liberator’ (as he was known) ended his career, much like the bold ‘Discoverer,’ with the ‘ingratitude,’ ‘enmity and defamation’ of those he had served casting ‘a shadow over that glory which had been the great object of his ambition’ (Irving, Columbus, II. 547–8) NOTES

1. F. Robertson, 19. 2. Hemans, England, p. 501. 3. For a similar treatment of the struggle against Napoleon as the natural extension of Spain’s heroic past, see Hemans’s early collection, The Domestic Affections (1812), particularly ‘War-Song of the Spanish Patriots’ (Hemans, Domestic, 39–41). 4. Scott, xii. 372. Citations refer to stanza and page number(s).

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Contemporary poems in this vein include John Wilson Croker’s The Battle of Talavera (1809) and Robert Southey’s laureate poem ‘Carmen Triumphale’ (1814). For an insightful analysis of this body of work, see Saglia, 65–143. 5. Scott’s Don Roderick was partly a reaction against Francis Jeffrey and Henry Brougham’s hostile review in the Edinburgh Review of Don Pedro Cevallos’s Exposition of the practices and machinations which led to the usurpation of the Crown of Spain, and of the means adopted by the Emperor of the French to carry it into execution, in which the authors projected the failure of British military intervention in Spain and the ultimate success of Bonaparte. Jeffrey and Brougham admitted that their ‘opinion respecting the probable issue of the contest’ was ‘far less sanguine than that with which the bulk of the people in this country have been fondly flattering themselves,’ and proceded to ‘state a few observations, sufficiently plain, one should think, to have damped the romantic hopes even of the English nation’ (Jeffrey and Brougham, 211). The authors concluded with a damning censure of British policy: ‘Let us not deceive ourselves; we have done all that lies in our power for the ruin of our allies. With the phrases of justice and generosity on our lips, our hearts have been filled with coldness and selfishness. With the cry of helping to put out the fire on the Continent, we have been caught in the act of pilfering for ourselves; and the consolation which we now have, is to reflect, that, beside being detected, we have been stopped in our petty thefts, and are now, perhaps, about to be soundly beaten for them’ (229–30). It was this review that prompted Scott to withdraw his subscription to the Edinburgh Review and that catalyzed the founding of the Quarterly Review the following year. For a critical response to Jeffrey and Brougham’s review, see A Short Methodical Abstract, calm consideration, and consequent appreciation, of the Edinburgh Review, on the Exposition of P. de Cevallos (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1808). I am grateful to Andrew Taylor for drawing this controversy to my attention. 6. Kaufmann, 49. The Venezuelan envoys’ reception in London reveals the degree of caution that was necessary to negotiate Britain’s position as both the ally of Spain and the unofficial protector of Spanish America. The British Foreign Secretary, Sir Richard Wellesley, resolved the dilemma by meeting privately with the emissaries at his home instead of at the Foreign Office. The envoys’ reception in high society offers an illuminating contrast with their ministerial reception. ‘Bolívar, Bello, and López Méndez were lionized during their visit,’ Frank Dawson writes. ‘The Duke of Gloucester, the king’s nephew, invited them to dine, and their carriage rides in Hyde Park, their attendance at the theatre and the visits of several members of the nobility to their hotel suite did not pass unnoticed in the press’ (Dawson, 10). 7. Élie Halévy calculates that the value of British exports to Spanish

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152 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826

8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

America more than doubled during the years of the Peninsular War (Halévy, 264). Historian José Luís Salcedo-Bastardo refers to Miranda’s residence as ‘the crucible of Americanism.’ José Luís Salcedo-Bastardo, Crucible of Americanism: Miranda’s London House (Caracas: Cuadernos Langoven, 1981). On the Spanish American community in London, see also Vicente Llorens, Liberales y románticos: una emigración española en inglaterra (México: Colegio de México, 1952). M. Rodríguez, 182. Drawing upon ‘the notorious partiality of the British public in favour of South American independence,’ James Mill explained the aims of the publicity campaign (Waddell, 35): ‘Something . . . may perhaps be gained by interesting the nation at large in a project which has hitherto been almost exclusively the nurseling of ministers; and thus binding the government to more prompt and effectual exertions in behalf of a cause which may have become popular as well as important’ (Mill, ‘Emancipation,’ 311). Mill, ‘Emancipation,’ 280. Viscardo’s Lettre circulated widely in cheap printed editions throughout the early 1800s and was appended, in English translation, to William Burke’s Additional Reasons for our Immediately Emancipating Spanish America (1808) and William Walton’s Present State of the Spanish Colonies (1810). Other works such as South American Emancipation (1810), the combined effort of Miranda and his secretary José María Antepara, also included excerpts from the English Letter to the Spanish Americans. ‘[W]hat an agreeable and affecting spectacle will the fertile shores of America present,’ Viscardo writes, ‘covered with men from all nations exchanging the productions of their country against ours! How many from among them, flying oppression and misery, will come to enrich us by their industry and their knowledge, and to repair our exhausted population! Thus would America reconcile the extremities of the earth; and her inhabitants, united by a common interest, would form one GREAT FAMILY OF BROTHERS’ (Viscardo, 85). W. Burke, xxviii . For a consideration of the hypothesis that ‘William Burke’ was a pseudonym for Miranda, see M. Rodríguez, Introduction. Viscardo, 74. Racine, Miranda, 257. Racine, ‘Imagining,’ 33. Paquette, ‘Intellectual,’ 76. The creoles should only rebel, Viscardo claimed in the Lettre, because their filial attachment to the mother country had been abused. Because Spain has ‘snatched from us and from our children’ the inviolable rights of conquest, settlement, and tradition, ‘all our duties oblige us to put an end to’ Spanish rule ‘in gratitude to our ancestors’ (Viscardo, 346). Crowning his espousal of conservative respect for constitutional

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18.

19. 20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

[ 153

tradition, Viscardo transfered the charge of revolution to Spain. The real ‘revolution,’ he contended, was that effected in ‘the constitution and government of Spain,’ namely Spain’s assumption of an absolute, unrepresentative power that reduced the creoles to a state of slavery and indigence (341). ‘Since the rights and duties of government and of subjects are reciprocal,’ Viscardo underlined, ‘Spain has been first in transgressing all her duties towards us’ (345). MC, 23 July 1810, 5. This issue of the Chronicle featured the Address of ‘The Supreme Junta of Caraccas to the Persons Composing the Regency of Spain,’ translated from the Caraccas Gazette for 11 May 1810. ‘By this instrument,’ the Chronicle explained, ‘it will be seen, that the vast regions of South America, during the present condition of the parent state, deny its authority, but promise future obedience, if Spain should be rescued from the grasp of the tyrant, and a Constitution should be formed connecting America with the European Monarchy, on the basis of equal liberties and laws’ (3, 2). Jeffrey, 254. Christopher Mulvey argues that for many readers and writers of the Romantic period, the voyages of Columbus signified little more than a journey to the New World (Mulvey, 99). See also Pedro Grases’s suggestion that the Columbian metaphor could be used to encompass any kind of transatlantic discovery (Grases, 85). Other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ‘Columbiads’ served to consolidate this view of the explorer. See Joel Barlow, The Vision of Columbus (1787) and The Columbiad (1807); Marie Anne Fiquet du Boccage, La Colombiade, ou la foi portée au nouveau monde (1756); Timothy Dwight, The Conquest of Canäan (1785); and Richard Snowden, The Columbiad, or, A Poem on the American War (1795). Humboldt, Examen, III. 10 (translation mine); W. Burke, Account, I. 29–30. Pagden, European, 100. Raynal, III. 4. 253–4. Citations refer to volume, book, and page number(s). Irving, Columbus, I. 40. Rogers, ‘Preface,’ 85. Unless otherwise stated, citations refer to canto and page number(s). The structural conceit of Columbus highlights the poem’s sense of unresolved contradictions. Drawing on the trope of the ‘ancient manuscript,’ Rogers presents his work as the translation of an old and fragmentary Castilian document written by a man who ‘sailed with Columbus’ and found in the convent of La Rábida (Rogers, ‘Preface,’ 85). While he draws on various devices to substantiate the manuscript’s authenticity, Rogers also self-consciously undercuts these claims by adding that the text’s ‘style and manner are evidently of an after-time’ and by including

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28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36.

37.

38.

39.

in the poem’s notes anachronistic references to works such as William Robertson’s History of America (1777) (‘Preface,’ 85; 155n). As much a performance of authenticity as a refusal of authentication, Columbus invites the reader to imagine the ‘hallowed morn’ when the author gave his original manuscript to its putative translator, but of the author’s identity only elusively states, ‘Inquire not now’ (‘Preface,’ 89). See also Rogers’s identification of Columbus with Christ, whom ‘St. Christopher carried over the deep waters’ (Rogers, 143n). See Chapter 3. In a note, Rogers refers to las Casas’s account of the dog Bezerillo who, ‘on account of his extraordinary sagacity and fierceness, received the full allowance of a soldier’ (Rogers, 224n). Brading, ‘Introduction,’ 41. Reynolds, Life, II. 391. On earlier adaptations of Les Incas, see Chapters 1 and 2. For a more detailed treatment of the novel itself, see the Introduction. Reynolds, Virgin, II, iii, 49. Citations refer to act, scene, and page number(s). Marmontel, II. 40. 135. Citations refer to volume, chapter, and page number(s). Barbauld, Eighteen, ll. 89, 95–6, 75, 88. Barbauld writes, ‘If prayers may not avert, if ’tis thy fate’ and ‘If westward streams the light that leaves thy shores.’ ‘Perhaps,’ Fancy says, ‘Gothic night may shade the plains / Where Power is seated, and where Science reigns,’ and perhaps ‘Time may tear the garland from her brow, / And Europe sit in dust, as Asia now’ (Barbauld, Eighteen, ll. 71, 79, 121–2, 125–6; italics added). Even as she hazarded these conjectures, Barbauld confessed, ‘I do not wish to be a true prophet’ (160n). Fulford and Kitson, 5. In a letter to Barbauld, Maria Edgeworth praised Eighteen Hundred and Eleven for its ‘noble spirit of patriotism and virtue’ (Oliver, 302.) Barbauld’s most malignant attacker was John Wilson Croker of the Quarterly Review. ‘We had hoped,’ Croker opined, ‘that the empire might have been saved without the intervention of a lady-author: we even flattered ourselves that the interests of Europe and of humanity would in some degree have swayed our public councils, without the descent of (dea ex machina) Mrs. Anna Letitia Barbauld in a quarto, upon the theatre where the great European tragedy is now performing . . . we must take the liberty of warning [Mrs Barbauld] to desist from satire, which indeed is satire on herself alone; and of entreating, with great earnestness, that she will not . . . put herself to the trouble of writing any more party pamphlets in verse’ (Croker, 309, 314). Eighteen Hundred and Eleven also shares its depiction of European

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40. 41.

42.

43. 44. 45.

46. 47.

48.

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morbidity and American ascendance with contemporary creole writing. In the ‘Oath Taken in Rome’ (1805), Bolívar writes that although ‘[t]he civilization blowing in from the East has shown all its faces here . . . the resolution of the great problem of man set free’ was ‘a mystery that would only be made clear in the New World’ (Bolívar, ‘Oath,’ 113). See also Bolívar’s claim in the ‘Jamaica Letter’ (1815) that ‘the arts and sciences that were born in the Orient and that brought enlightenment to Europe will fly to a free Colombia, which will nourish and shelter them,’ and Andrés Bello’s ‘Alocución a la poesia’ [Allocution to Poetry] (1823), which calls upon ‘Poetry’ to ‘leave effete Europe / . . . and fly to where Columbus’ world / opens its great scene before your eyes (Bolívar, ‘Jamaica,’ 30; Bello, ll. 1, 6, 8–9). TR 1874, 404. Quoted in Keach, 570. Some modern critics have reiterated this claim that, for Barbauld, ‘the rise of the American nations spells the doom of Britain; their freedom presumes its decline’ (Kaul, 129). Birn contends, by contrast, ‘We are not necessarily to make of [Eighteen Hundred and Eleven] (as some have) a jeremiad, an immediate prophecy of the fall of London’ (Birns, 551). For other recent perspectives on the politics of Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, see J. Anderson, ‘First Fire;’ Hadley, ‘Wealth of Nations;’ Keach, ‘Regency;’ Mellor, ‘Female Poet;’ Newlyn, Reading, 134–70; Ross, ‘Configurations;’ and White, ‘Joineriana.’ Byron strikes a similar note in The Curse of Minerva: ‘Nay frown not, Albion! / For the torch was thine / That lit such pyres from Tagus to the Rhine: / Now should they burst on thy devoted coast, / Go, ask thy bosom who deserves them most’ (Byron, Curse, ll. 307–10). By contrast, see Hemans’s ‘War and Peace,’ in which Britain affectively compensates for its physical distance from the front by having ‘wept the horrors of relentless war’ (Hemans, Domestic, 97). Quoted in Janowitz, 104; MR 1812, 429. Walton and Sarratea, Exposé, i, v. Bolívar expressed his detestation of the mother country in terms that would likewise have scandalized earlier creole patriots: ‘The hatred we feel for the Peninsula is greater than the sea separating us from it; it would be easier to bring the two continents together than to reconcile the spirits and minds of the two countries . . . the tie that bound [America] to Spain is severed, for it was nothing but an illusion’ (Bolívar, ‘Jamaica,’ 13). Webster, I. 92–3. The Missionary was first published anonymously in 1813, then republished under the author’s name, and with significant revisions, in 1815. All references are to the 1815 edition. William Hayley included translated segments from La Araucana in his Essay on Epic Poetry (1782). In 1804, selections of the poem were

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49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55.

56.

57. 58. 59. 60.

translated by Henry Boyd and published in the Poetical Register and Repository of Fugitive Poetry. 1808 saw the translation and publication of Molina’s History of Chili, including extracts from La Araucana translated by both Boyd and Hayley. Between 1808 and 1814, the seventeen volumes of Thomas Pinkerton’s General Collection of the Most Interesting Voyages and Travels appeared, with the entire fourteenth volume (1813) devoted to South America and including the translation of Alonso de Ovalle’s Historical Relation of Chile. Bowles, Missionary, ‘Preface,’ 296. Unless otherwise stated, citations refer to canto and line number(s). Ovalle, 198. BC 1813, 599. CR 1815, 195–7. Other independence-era ships in the Chilean navy, such as ‘The Moctezuma’ and ‘The Tucapel,’ paid homage to Spanish America’s indigenous heritage. On the ways in which creole insurgents used indigenous ‘nomenclature to proclaim their new vision of history’ and to ‘evoke the pre-Columbian empires whose overthrow they claimed to avenge,’ see Earle, 49. While relatively little is known about Walker’s career, it is certain that he was resident in Caracas at the time of the great earthquakes that took place in March and April 1812. In The South American, he provides eye-witness accounts of contemporary events such as General Monteverde’s royalist victory and British residents’ subsequent escape to Curaçao, adding hagiographic descriptions of how Bolívar ‘in each of his various enterprises was . . . enabled to cause thousands of his countrymen to rally around his standard . . . and boldly to maintain the unalienable right of independence’ (Walker, ‘Preface,’ ix–xi). In fact, Bolívar married a Spanish woman, María Teresa, daughter of Bernardo Rodríguez, Marquis of Toro, during his early years in Madrid. In 1802, the newly-weds set sail for Venezeula. Soon after their arrival, María Teresa fell ill and died, probably of yellow fever. Walker, I. xviii–xix. Unless otherwise stated, citations refer to canto and stanza number(s). Bolívar, ‘Wellesley,’ 154. Bolívar, ‘Angostura,’ 52. Walton and Sarratea also appealed to Britain’s economic self-interest by calling for immediate action to aid the revolution so ‘that the brightest prospects that ever opened on our mercantile enterprize, may not be marred’ (Walton and Sarratea, Exposé, vii). Walker echoes such sentiments: ‘The advantages that might accrue from the independence of South America, would perhaps be greater to England than to any other nation’ (Walker, ‘Preface,’ vii). ‘Were the new government once firmly established,’ Spanish America’s valuable resources ‘would be produced

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61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66.

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in double their present quantity: and the consumption of European dry goods would consequently increase also’ (101–4n). Cochrane, I. 520, 457–8. LMBL 1825, 97. NA 1820, 82. Repository 1823, 118. For a survey of Bolívar’s appearance in the British press, see Calvin Jones, ‘The Images of Simón Bolívar as Reflected in Ten Leading British Periodicals, 1816–1830,’ The Americas 40: 3 (January 1984): 377–97. Bolívar, ‘Jamaica,’ 26. Quoted in Lynch, Spanish, 294.

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CHAPTER FIVE

LORD BYRON’S ‘SOUTH AMERICAN PROJECT:’ ARISTOCRATIC RADICALISM AND THE QUESTION OF VENEZUELAN SETTLEMENT

There can be no field of enterprise so magnificent in promise, so well calculated to raise sanguine hopes, so congenial to the most generous sympathies, so consistent with the best and the highest interests of England, as the vast continent of South America. He must indeed be more than temperate, he must be a cold reasoner, who can glance at those regions and not grow warm.1

I. The Attraction to Spanish America In 1811, Venezuela made history as the first Spanish viceroyalty to declare independence. As Spain’s hold on its colonies continued to weaken during the following decade and a half, British merchants, miners, scientists, and traders rushed to exploit the mineral wealth and raw materials of Spanish America. Thousands of British soldiers enlisted to aid the revolutionary movements. Travelers flooded the British press with vivid accounts of everything from the famed silver mines of Potosí to the medicinal ‘Jesuits Bark’ of Peru, the fatal earthquakes of Caracas, and the cultivation of logwood on the Mosquito Coast. The figure of Spanish America displayed itself in poems, plays, operas, cabinets of curiosity, political tracts, news reportage, reviews, bond prospectuses, and stock market quotations. Creole patriots gathered in England to solicit aid for their revolutions, ministers debated tactics for liberating both the peoples and the untapped wealth of Spain’s rebellious colonies, joint stock companies formed to exploit Spanish America’s gold, silver, and pearls, and prominent

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firms such as Herring, Graham, and Powles contracted loans to the new republics.2 Indeed, Robert Southey did not exaggerate when he described the England of his day as ‘South American mad.’3 It was in the midst of this ferment that Lord Byron began fantasizing about a voyage to Spanish America, ‘of climbing the Andes, and ascending the Oronoco.’4 Byron explained his notion ‘to go to South America’ to John Cam Hobhouse: those fellows are fresh as their world – and fierce as their earthquakes. —— Besides I am enamoured of General Paer5 – who has proved that my Grandfather spoke truth about the Patagonians – with his Gigantic Country.6 – Would that the Dougal of Bishop’s Castle, would find a purchaser for Rochdale – I would embark . . . and possess myself of the pinnacle of the Andes – or a spacious plain of unbounded extent in an elegible earthquake situation.7

Although this expeditionary scheme never materialized, Byron’s combination of wanderlust and republican enthusiasm soon materialized as a serious plan for emigration. He wrote to Hobhouse of his ‘South American project:’ I perceived by the inclosed paragraphs that advantageous offers . . . are to be held out to settlers in the Venezuelan territory . . . I could soon grapple with the Spanish language. —— Ellice or others could get me letters to Boliver [sic] and his government – and if men of little or no property are encouraged there – surely with present income – and if I could sell Rochdale – with some capital – I might be suffered as a landholder there – or at least a tenant – and if possible and legal – a Citizen. —— I wish you would speak to Perry of the M[orning] C[hronicle] who is their Gazetteer – about this . . . I assure you that I am very serious in the idea – and that the notion has been about me for a long time as you will see by the worn state of the advertisement. – I should go there with my natural daughter Allegra – now nearly three years old – and with me here – and pitch my tent for good and all.8 (Byron, LJ, VI. 225–6; italics in original)

As these letters show, Byron’s intentions to settle in Venezuela owed as much to his revolutionary enthusiasm as they did to his desire for domestic and financial stability. Byron’s reading on the subject of Spanish America began, like that of many contemporary Britons, with William Robertson’s History of America (1777). It extended to contemporary travel narratives

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160 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 and poems, as well as to news reports and reviews in periodicals such as the Annual Register, the Quarterly Review, Blackwood’s, the Edinburgh Review, and the Morning Chronicle.9 Byron was also acquainted with a number of people who had been to Spanish America. William Clarke Somerville, whom Byron met in Venice in May 1819, had risen to the rank of major in the Venezuelan army and received the award of a large land grant from the Venezuelan government. According to David Bonnell Green, it was Somerville ‘who first turned Byron’s thoughts to emigration to Venezuela.’10 Like most men of his station during this period, Byron was also connected with relations serving in the Spanish American wars of independence. One such relation was Admiral Sir Thomas Masterman Hardy (the husband of Byron’s cousin and correspondent, Anne Louisa Emily, Lady Hardy), who served as commander in chief for the South American station of the British Navy from 1819 to 1824. Byron also knew Lord Thomas Cochrane, the incendiary Member of the House of Commons and Byron’s fellow charter member of London’s radical Hampden Club. Cochrane’s brilliant career as commander of the Chilean Navy was widely publicized in Britain and could not have been far from Byron’s mind as he contemplated political engagement across the Atlantic.11 Byron, the parliamentary advocate of frame-breaking, the invited leader of the Italian Carbonari, and the devoted partisan of Greek revolution, took an enduring interest in the independence movements that tore through Spanish America during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. But while the homage paid to the American patriot Simón Bolívar in Byron’s choice of a name for his yacht is well known, the depth of Byron’s investment in the republican cause across the Atlantic has been less thoroughly studied. In a diary entry from January 1821, Byron urged the struggle of the Neapolitans by comparison with heroic ‘South America [who] beats her old vultures out of their nest’ (VIII. 36). Later that year in his ‘Detached Thoughts’ Byron seconded the infamously apocalyptic message of Anna Letitia Barbauld’s poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, predicting that ‘in a century or two the new English & Spanish Atlantides will be masters of the old Countries in all probability – as Greece and Europe overcame their Mother Asia’ (IX. 17).12 And it was his consideration of the revolutions in ‘[t]he two Americas (South and North)’ that led Byron to the radical conclusion, ‘There is nothing left for Mankind but a Republic’ (IX. 49). Given Byron’s political sympathy for the Spanish American

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republicans, it is striking that the letters proclaiming his plans to settle in ‘Bolivar’s Country’ indicate no desire to participate in the revolutionary struggle (IX. 173). As Byron confessed to Hobhouse in October 1819: ‘My taste for revolution is abated . . . I do not want to have anything to do with the war projects – but to go there [to Venezuela] as a settler’ (VI. 226–7). Emphasis falls in the letters of this period, not on revolution, but rather on Byron’s longing for a home and a nation: I want a country – and a home – and if possible – a free one – I am not yet thirty two years of age – I might still be a decent citizen and found a house and a family . . . I could at all events occupy myself rationally – my hopes are not high – nor my ambition extensive – and when tens of thousands of our Countrymen are colonizing (like the Greeks of old in Sicily and Italy) from as many causes – does my notion seem visionary or irrational? (VI. 226; italics in original)

But why would Byron contemplate relocating to a land in the throes of revolution in order to avoid political engagement? Further, if Byron was intent on steering clear of armed conflict, why did he renounce his plan for Venezuelan settlement in 1823, only to sail for active service in the Greek revolution? The question of why Byron chose Greece over Venezuela becomes yet more problematic when one considers that Byron, like his contemporary Jeremy Bentham, clearly understood the parallels between the Spanish American and Greek revolutions.13 Byron was thus able to draw upon his knowledge of the wars in Colombia to offer military advice to the London Greek Committee: I would presume to suggest but merely as an opinion – resulting rather from the melancholy experience of the brigades embarked in the Columbian Service – than from any experiment yet fairly tried in Greece – that the attention of the Committee had better perhaps be directed to the employment of Officers of experience – than the enrolment of raw British Soldiers – which latter are apt to be unruly and not very serviceable – in irregular warfare – by the side of foreigners.14 (X. 170; italics in original)

In The Age of Bronze (1823), Byron made the association between revolutionary Spanish America and Greece more explicit:

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162 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 One common cause makes myriads of one breast, Slaves of the East, or Helots of the West; On Andes’ and on Athos’ peaks unfurled, The self-same standard streams o’er either world; The Athenian wears again Harmodius’ sword; The Chili chief abjures his foreign lord; The Spartan knows himself once more a Greek; Young Freedom plumes the crest of each Cacique; Debating despots, hemmed on either shore, Shrink vainly from the roused Atlantic’s roar.15

Byron continued to develop the theme of Greece and Spanish America’s ‘common cause’ in The Island (1823), where he imagines his British hero Torquil alternately ‘Fixed upon Chili’s shore, a proud Cacique’ and ‘On Hellas’ mountains, a rebellious Greek.’16 And just as Byron’s poetic treatments of Spanish American and Greek revolution are often found side by side, so too his plans for emigration to Venezuela and to Greece at times seem interchangeable. In August 1822, he was ‘fluctuating between it [Venezuela] and Greece,’ identifying both prospects simply as ‘residence in an unsettled country, where I shall probably take a part of some sort’ (IX. 198).17 And in January 1823, only six months before sailing for Cephalonia, Byron wrote indecisively to Douglas Kinnaird, ‘I think of going to Greece perhaps to America’ (X. 86). To date, there have been a number of compelling, but rather romanticized, explanations of Byron’s decision to sail for Greece rather than Venezuela. B. R. McElderry Jr suggests that the enduring appeal of Spanish America for Byron was ‘the very charm of remoteness which [it] exercised upon the romantic side of his nature,’ concluding that Byron’s plan of Venezuelan emigration ‘was largely one of escape.’18 By contrast with what Doris Langley Moore calls the ‘escapist dreams’ of American emigration, Byron’s plan to sail for Greece was ostensibly founded on nostalgia, the desire for fame, and a certain exalted poetic sensibility:19 Greece he had worshipped since his schooldays as the cradle of human freedom. There in 1810–11 he had spent perhaps the most pleasant year of his youth. Through Childe Harold, Greece had helped him win fame in the world which he loved better than he liked to admit; it might once again reflect some glory on his name. And so it did. Service and death in the cause of Greek independence had for Byron and his generation

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a poetic quality, an embodiment of loyalty to great traditions that rose above party and above the scandals of private life. (McElderry, 178)

Biographer Fiona MacCarthy explains Byron’s choice of Greece as the land in which he would fight for freedom by suggesting that Byron saw revolutionary Greece as a politicized re-incarnation of his early homoerotic education among the ‘Horatians’ at Harrow School and of his promiscuous youthful travels through Greece.20 Similarly, Jonathan David Gross argues, ‘because his own heart was moved in politics as in love, Byron sought ‘some nobler hero’s name’ in Greece by remaining faithful to his erotic nature and the politics of feeling it inspired.’21 Although neither MacCarthy nor Gross touches on Byron’s Venezuela scheme, one may infer from their silence that Spanish America lacked the erotic valence that ultimately drew Byron to patriotic service for Greece. By far the most common explanation for Byron’s philhellenism, however, is that the Greek War of Liberation ‘was a cause which roused enthusiasm in every liberal’s heart,’ one which ‘carried a particularly irresistible appeal to a generation fed upon the wisdom of classical writers. Such enthusiasts made no distinction between the inhabitants of Athens in the age of Pericles and their descendants.’22 Yet while there is undoubtedly truth to this claim, it overlooks the very unromantic acuity with which Byron saw the shortcomings of contemporary Greeks. On being approached by a group of Greek exiles in Italy with the offer of the crown of Greece, for example, Byron was dubious: ‘you must first show yourselves more capable than you did in the last events before I can take upon me to answer either for myself – or for any prospect of assistance from the people of England’ (Byron, LJ, X. 177). Byron’s critical attitude toward the Greeks is corroborated by Thomas Smith, to whom Byron confessed, ‘I know them as well as most people . . . but we must not look always too closely at the men who are to benefit from our exertions in a good cause, or God knows we shall seldom do much good in this world.’23 Standard accounts of Byron’s philhellenism also fail to shed light on why Byron should have chosen the cause of Greece over that of South America, a cause which clearly also ‘roused enthusiasm in every liberal’s heart.’ Byron’s identification of Greece as the ancient wellspring of Western culture is unquestionable, but one must counterbalance the allure of the old with that of the new in Byron’s imagination. In The Age of Bronze, Byron exalts Spanish America precisely because

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164 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 Where Cortes’ and Pizarro’s banner flew, The infant world redeems her name of “New.” ’Tis the old aspiration breathed afresh, To kindle souls within degraded flesh. (Byron, Bronze, vi. 266–9; italics in original)

Similarly, in The Island, Byron argues that Spanish America is the only land of genuinely new political promise. The New World, Byron writes, is effectively new no more, save where Columbia rears Twin giants, born by Freedom to her spheres, Where Chimborazo, over air, earth, wave, Glares with his Titan eye, and sees no slave. (Byron, Island, II. iv. 75–8; italics in original)24

Although it is not within the bounds of this chapter to fully assess Byron’s ultimate decision to sail for Greece, the sections that follow attempt to account for the reasons why Byron did not sail for Spanish America. They argue, moreover, that these reasons are substantially more complex than have been previously understood. In addition to shedding light on Byron’s particular beliefs and affinities, Byron’s choice not to settle in Venezuela provides a uniquely valuable window onto the class dimensions of early nineteenth-century Britain’s informal empire in Spanish America. II. The Resistance to Spanish America As Byron well knew, British interest in Spanish America was principally driven by economic motives. Lord Brougham’s memorable pronouncement that ‘[t]here can be no field of enterprise so magnificent in promise . . . as the vast continent of South America’ eloquently reflected contemporary Britain’s commercial excitement (quoted in Lynch, ‘Great Britain,’ 15). Works such as James Mill’s 1809 review for the Edinburgh Review of Juan Pablo Viscardo y Guzmán’s Lettre aux Espagnols-Américains (1799) reinforced Britons’ vision of Spanish America as a ‘magnificent source of industry and wealth:’ every eye, we believe, will ultimately rest on South America. A country far surpassing the whole of Europe in extent, and still more, perhaps, in natural fertility . . . is, after a few prudent steps on our part, ready

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to open to us the immense resources of her territory, of a population at present great, and likely to increase with most extraordinary celerity, and of a position unparalleled on the face of the globe for the astonishing combination of commercial advantages which it appears to unite.25

Consistent with other publications by his liberal constituency, Mill’s review appealed to readers’ humanitarian sympathies as well as their pocketbooks.26 After elaborating the benefits of the unrestricted trade that would result from Britain’s ‘emancipation’ of Spanish America, Mill presents Spanish American independence as the just and providential recompense for the ravages of the Peninsular War (Mill, ‘Emancipation,’ 285): ‘it seems as if that Providence, which is continually bringing good out of evil, were about to open a career of happiness in the new world, at the very moment when, by the mysterious laws of its administration, it appears to have decreed a period of injustice and calamity in the old’ (280). John Murray’s Quarterly Review took a more cautious position regarding Britain’s role in the Spanish American revolutions, but was equally sanguine regarding the commercial advantages of more liberal trade with the region. In their review of the Abbé de Pradt’s Des Colonies et de l’Amérique (1817), Richard Colley Wellesley and William Jacob opined, ‘We would abstain from aiding the Spanish Americans against the mother-country, – not because we dread the re-establishment of their independence, but because we doubt the probability of so peaceable a result from the success of the colonies against Spain.’27 But while they resisted the interventionist attitudes of more liberal writers such as James Mill and William Walton, the reviewers nevertheless maintained: It would have been no creditable symptom of the state of the public feeling in England if it had been altogether unmoved on a question forcibly applying itself to so many just sentiments and lofty prejudices, nay, if its tendency had not been rather favourable than otherwise to the cause of the Americans. (Wellesley and Jacob, 531)

In the Quarterly Review as in the Edinburgh Review, patriotic and humanitarian rhetoric (whether Whig- or Tory-biased) was firmly wedded to fiscal gain. As Wellesley and Jacob tellingly concluded their review, ‘whether the colonies become independent nations, or whether they continue to be governed by Spain, advantages must accrue to British commerce’ (560).

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166 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 At home, thousands of investors staked their fortunes on Spanish American stocks and bonds; as many merchants crossed the Atlantic to capitalize, first hand, on the revolutionary ferment. Between 1820 and 1822 alone, 30,000 tons of British cargo left England for Spanish America. By 1823, ‘up to 100 British commercial houses had been established in South America. At Buenos Aires, where [the] British community numbered some 3,000, half of the public debt and much valuable property were in British hands’ (Lynch, ‘Great Britain,’ 9).28 On arriving at Valparaíso in 1822, Maria Graham commented that with its preponderance of ‘English tailors, shoemakers, saddlers, and inn-keepers,’ the city most resembled ‘a coast town of Britain.’29 But as a nobleman whose class position had famously rendered him unwilling to accept remuneration for the sales of Childe Harold, Byron was certainly not drawn to act the part of the merchant or speculator in Spanish America. When he spoke to historian George Bancroft about his initial plan to tour the region, Byron was particularly careful to distinguish himself from the mob of British speculators flocking there. Bancroft records that Byron ‘believed that he should judge its people with impartiality; thus far, he said, none had gone among them but speculators; he should go unprejudiced.’30 Byron was also eager to assure the influential merchant and politician Edward Ellice, to whom he wrote for information about Venezuela, ‘I do not go there to speculate’ (Byron, LJ, IX. 174; italics in original). In the cantos of Don Juan written during 1822 and 1823, Byron’s antipathy toward overseas speculation is unmistakable. He writes scathingly of moneylenders’ involvement in Britain’s commerce with Spanish America: Every loan Is not a merely speculative hit, But seats a nation or upsets a throne. Republics also get involved a bit; Columbia’s stock hath holders not unknown On ’Change; and even thy silver soil, Peru, Must get itself discounted by a Jew.31

Speculation was not merely noxious for Byron. Because of its connection to paper money, it seemed to lack any essential substance whatever. Describing Juan’s approach to England, Byron notes sardonically,

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each wreath of smoke Appeared to him but as the magic vapour Of some alchymic furnace, from whence broke The wealth of worlds (a wealth of tax and paper). (Byron, DJ, X. lxxxiii. 657–60)

But money proves yet more illusory than ‘vapour.’ In Canto XII, it is exposed as nothing more than ‘pure imagination,’ a debased echo of that Romantic inspiration which ‘Gleams only through the dawn of its creation’ (XII. ii. 15–16).32 In The Age of Bronze, Byron extends his critique of speculation by comparing the financial operations of the London Stock Exchange (‘the crushing Stocks’) to the perilous ‘shifting rocks’ of the Odyssey (‘The new Symplegades’): Or turn to sail between those shifting rocks, The new Symplegades – the crushing Stocks, Where Midas might again his wish behold In real paper or imagined gold. That magic palace of Alcina shows More wealth than Britain ever had to lose, Were all her atoms of unleavened ore, And all her pebbles from Pactolus’ shore. There Fortune plays, while Rumour holds the stake, And the world trembles to bid brokers break. (Byron, Bronze, xv. 660–9)

According to Byron’s satiric logic, if British foreign policy is financed by nonexistent money, it is because Britain itself abounds, not in bullion or real material wealth, but rather in those bankers, such as the Rothschilds, who create the dangerous illusion of wealth: How rich is Britain! not indeed in mines, Or peace, or plenty, corn, or oil, or wines; No land of Canaan, full of milk and honey, Nor (save in paper shekels) ready money: But let us not to own the truth refuse, Was ever Christian land so rich in Jews? (xv. 670–5)

Anti-Semitic jibes notwithstanding, The Age of Bronze stands out for its canny use of the trope of speculation to illuminate the connections

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168 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 between England’s economic exploitation of Spanish America, Spain, and Russia: Columbia feels no less Fresh speculations follow each success; And philanthropic Israel deigns to drain Her mild per centage from exhausted Spain. Not without Abraham’s seed can Russia march, ’Tis gold, not steel, that rears the conqueror’s arch. (xv. 680–7)

Passing eastward from America to Europe, the tyranny engendered by British investment finally comes to poison Greece, where Czar Alexander I ‘prates of peace, / How fain, if Greeks would be his slaves, free Greece!’ (x. 444–5). The Age of Bronze was prompted by the 1822 Congress of Verona, which was convened, in large part, because the French intended to forcibly replace the constitutional government of Spain with the Bourbon King Ferdinand VII. Because Ferdinand ‘had expressed the hope of regaining Spain’s lost American colonies,’ the French proposal directly threatened Britain’s indirect rule in the independent Spanish American republics.33 Byron’s grasp of the reasons behind Britain’s opposition to this proposal made it impossible for him to believe (if, indeed, he ever had) that Britain’s support for Spanish American independence was either disinterested or founded upon what the Quarterly Review called ‘just sentiments and lofty prejudices’ (Wellesley and Jacob, 531). In Don Juan, Byron exposes the link between Britain’s international policy and its overriding concern with commerce, defining England’s merchant class as ‘Those haughty shop-keepers, who sternly dealt / Their goods and edicts out from pole to pole, / And made the very billows pay them toll’ (Byron, DJ, X. lxv. 518–20). In The Age of Bronze, this spurious partnership of ‘goods’ and ‘edicts’ leads to a series of economic contingencies that are apparently too upsetting to even be articulated: ‘And Waterloo – and trade – and —— (hush! not yet / A syllable of imposts or of debt)’ (Byron, Bronze, xiii. 536–7). Don Juan further unmasks the imperial designs of speculation by asserting that Britain’s extensions of ‘freedom’ to other countries are, in effect, offers of servitude. Britain is the ‘False friend, who held out freedom to mankind, / And now would chain them, to the very mind’ (Byron, DJ, X. lxvii. 535–6). Under the guise of financial support for liberty, Byron argues, England has ‘butchered half the earth, and bullied t’other’ (X. lxxxi. 648).

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Byron’s understanding of Britain’s investment in Spanish America clearly informed his judgment of the multitude of British soldiers who had gone to aid the revolutions. While some volunteers were no doubt motivated by republican sympathies, the vast majority were mercenary soldiers in search of wealth – a fact that goes some way toward explaining Byron’s refusal to engage in Venezuelan ‘war projects.’34 Even the illustrious Lord Cochrane, who allegedly assumed command of the Chilean Navy in order to ‘pursue his crusade for freedom,’ was, at bottom, ‘a fighting man with a sword for sale’ (Lloyd, 139, 171). Spanish America was a magnet for Britain’s many retired half-pay officers and unemployed soldiers in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. By 1819, when the government passed the largely unenforceable Foreign Enlistment Act forbidding Spanish American commissioners from recruiting in Britain, over 5,000 mercenary soldiers had already joined the armies of Bolívar and José de San Martín.35 As one writer for the Quarterly Review fumed: shoals of foreign buccaneers are gathering round the shores of this unhappy country, and, under the ridiculous pretence of patriotism, are keeping up the unfortunate contest [between Spain and her colonies] with the view of enriching themselves at the expense of both parties. The interested succours, and the sordid views of the Cochranes and M’Gregors [sic] can deceive no one; their sole object is plunder.36

While Byron certainly did not always see eye to eye with the publications of John Murray, it is not hard to imagine that a nobleman of earnest republican persuasion would approve of such censure. British merchants such as the Jamaica-based Maxwell and Wellwood Hyslop worked in tandem with their military counterparts, completing the circle of financial and military support for Spanish America. As the commercial agents of Bolívar, the Hyslops ‘acted as agents for the patriot governments,’ carrying ‘British hardware, textiles, and machinery into Cartagena and earn[ing] bullion and raw material which they shipped to Liverpool’ (R. Miller, 39; Lynch, ‘Great Britain,’ 9).37 Like the Hyslops, other prominent British merchants such as John and William Parish Robertson frequently acted under the protection of ‘British naval commanders in South American waters.’38 If such merchants exemplify the degree to which British commerce was bound up with British military support for the republican cause, they also illustrate the ideological dimensions of these activities. Drawing out the liberal equation between British commerce and the cause of

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170 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 global freedom, Bolívar addressed the Hyslops: ‘Twenty or thirty thousand rifles, a million pounds sterling, fifteen or twenty warships, munitions, several envoys, and any volunteers who may wish to fight under the American flags – that is all that is needed to bring liberty to half the earth and set the world in balance’ (quoted in Lynch, ‘Great Britain,’ 9; italics added). General John Miller perhaps best captured this state of affairs when he wrote that while many British merchants approved of the revolutions, ‘their sympathies and their interests went hand in hand.’39 The situation in Parliament was no more altruistic. In the debate over the Foreign Enlistment Bill, statesmen magnanimously argued that the bill would ‘repress the rising liberty of the South Americans’ while pointing out, in more material terms, that it would also destroy ‘every hope of [Britain’s] commercial advantage’ in the region (Lynch, ‘Great Britain,’ 12). III. Class Anxiety and the Aristocratic Radical It is safe to say that the inducements that made South America so attractive to Britain’s Hyslops and Cochranes were precisely those that deterred Byron. But Byron’s aversion to what the Quarterly Review dubbed ‘the cupidity of mercantile speculation’ was more complex than any clear-cut aristocratic disdain (Barrow, 352). It was also fueled by an anxiety of personal complicity. During the years 1819 and 1820, Byron’s concerns about money accelerated simultaneously with his plans for Venezuelan emigration. Indeed, the two issues were not only concomitant but also mutually reinforcing. As Moore observes, the treasure of zecchini, florins, scudi, and colonnati carefully stockpiled by Byron’s secretary Lega Zambelli ‘derived an additional lustre from the thought that fortune would mean freedom to begin the new life he [Byron] recurrently dreamed of, in Spain perhaps or in one of the far Americas’ (Moore, 249). In January 1820, Byron wrote to his half-sister Augusta Leigh: There is nothing which I should dread more than . . . to have to act in such scenes as I think must soon ensue in England. It is this made me think of S[ou]th. America . . . so that I can but preserve my independence of means to live withal . . . in this coming crash . . . All I desire is to preserve what remains of the fortunes of our house. (Byron, LJ, VII. 15)

Byron’s letters from this period also stress his concern over the sluggish sale of Newstead Abbey and his desire to sell his property at Rochdale,

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and insist that his agents in England (John Cam Hobhouse, Douglas Kinnaird, and John Murray) provide him with ready money. It is striking to see the transformation of this gentleman poet who once refused payment for the sale of his works. As Byron wrote to Hobhouse and Kinnaird: I have been cloyed with applause & sickened with abuse; – at present – I care for little but the Copyright, – I have imbibed a great love for money – let me have It . . . Whatever Brain-money – you get on my account from Murray – pray remit me – I will never consent to pay away what I earn – that is mine . . . I care for nothing but “monies.” (VI. 91–2; italics in original)

As he became increasingly desperate for cash during his stay in Italy, Byron even began to fancy himself a kind of Shylock figure. He wrote pathetically to Kinnaird, ‘I have imbibed such a love for money that I keep some Sequins in a drawer to count, & cry over them once a week.’ The letters of this year are littered with the doleful refrain, adapted from Henry VI: ‘My fee – My fee.’ But as much as Byron allowed himself to articulate financial anxieties and embarrassments, he nevertheless took care to assert his class position, equivocally identifying himself in one letter as ‘a Gentleman who has “a proper regard for his fee”’ (VI. 98). Considered in this light, Byron’s excoriation of the Congress of Verona in The Age of Bronze – in which ‘Shylock’s shore’ becomes the modern moneylender’s ‘New Jerusalem’ – takes on a more selfcritical cast (Byron, Bronze, xv. 704, 695). In 1821, as recompense for their financial services, the Rothschild brothers were made barons by the Austrian emperor. Byron duly mocked what he saw as the penetration of Europe’s aristocracy by the ranks of bankers and moneylenders, depicting ‘[Abraham’s] followers mingling with these royal swine, / Who spit not “on their Jewish gabardine,” / But honour them as portion of the show’ (xv. 698–700). Byron’s aristocratic resentment of the nouveaux riches is unmistakable in these lines. But one also observes the strain that Byron’s money problems placed on his sense of class identity. Written during a period in which he tenaciously clung to his noble standing while also counting and crying over his ‘Sequins,’ these lines suggest that Byron may have feared that he too comprised a ‘portion of the show.’40 With the help of his agents, Byron strove to negotiate his position as a cash-poor aristocrat by transferring his capital from stocks

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172 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 to more conservative, ‘gentlemanly’ investments in land. He wrote to Kinnaird: I shall never rest while my property is in the English funds – do, for God sake – let it be invested in land or mortage [sic] although at present loss. – I have no faith – but a dread & detestation of the funds – founded upon the revealed religion of their utter worthlessness – & wretched imposture . . . do look out – & vest the £66,000 – in some more solid shape than this wretched phantom of your dead & buried finances, which appears to me the Spider’s web of all weak enough to fly on “blest paper Credit.”41. . . Land – mortgage – anything but the nothing – to which for the present you have annihilated the sum paid – by investing it in the debt of an insolvent people & a swindling Government. (Byron, LJ, VI. 102; italics in original)

Ironically, Byron’s considerations regarding the disposal of his inherited property brought him well within the ambit of the British mining investors he despised. On one occasion, Byron observed, ‘the rich ores of precious metals found in the American mines, besides the vast quantities of gold washed from the alluvial soil, form of themselves powerful weapons in contending with an enemy.’42 And his friend Edward Trelwany records that Byron often thought of purchasing ‘a principality of auriferous soil in Chili or Peru’ and trying his hand at mining.43 It is scarcely possible that the contradictions of his situation could have been lost on this lord who eulogized ‘Ambrosial Cash’ – however facetiously – and identified ‘the love of money’ as ‘The only sort of pleasure which requites’ (Byron, DJ, XIII. c. 799, 795–6).44 Byron’s use of the word ‘independence’ in his correspondence suggests just such a self-conscious position. When he writes of finding financial stability in Venezuela as the attainment of ‘independence,’ Byron is bringing his aristocratic pretences into a strained dialogue with his revolutionary political allegiances, his acquisitiveness, and his economic vulnerability (Byron, LJ, IX. 174): I am told that land is very cheap there [in Venezuela] – but though I have no great disposable funds to vest in such purchases – yet my Income such as it is – would be sufficient in any country (except England) for all the comforts of life, and for most of it’s [sic] luxuries. —— The War there is now over – and as I do not go there to speculate – but to settle – without any views but those of independence – and the enjoyment of

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the common civil rights – I should presume such an arrival would not be unwelcome. (IX. 173–4; italics in original)

What is remarkable about Byron’s use of the term ‘independence’ here is that it appears in the very context in which he eschews engagement in the struggle to maintain Venezuela’s political ‘independence’ in favor of his own financial ‘independence.’ Perhaps attempting to justify such purely private interest, Byron stresses that ‘[t]he War there is now over.’ But the war was not over, and Byron knew it. Although Venezuela had declared independence from Spain in 1811, Bolívar had united Venezuela, Ecuador, and Colombia as the Republic of Colombia in 1819, and the Republic’s armed struggle would continue until 1824. Byron’s strained use of the verb ‘to colonize’ is equally revealing. In his letter to Hobhouse of 3 October 1819 (cited above), Byron compares his plan of Venezuelan emigration to that of the ‘tens of thousands of our countrymen’ that are ‘colonizing (like the Greeks of old in Sicily and Italy) from as many causes.’ In a letter written two days later to James Wedderburn Webster, Byron elaborates his position vis-à-vis ‘colonizing:’ ‘I have some idea of going with my natural daughter Allegra to settle in South America – provided a colonizing plan which I have heard of – as about to be proposed by some Commissioners from Venezuela now on their way to England – be put in execution’ (XI. 228). Surely the man who had written The Curse of Minerva and who would soon author the anti-imperialist South Seas poem The Island was not contemplating joining the colonizers of South America. But even were he to envisage such a venture, Byron was well aware that the notion of an English ‘colonizer’ in Venezuela was a categorical anomaly given Johnson’s standard definition of ‘colony’ as ‘[a] body of people drawn from the mothercountry to inhabit some distant place.’45 If, with the exception of Guiana and Honduras, Britain had never ‘acquired territorial rights on the South American mainland,’ Britain certainly could not be construed as the ‘mother-country’ of Venezuela by any stretch of the imagination.46 While according to contemporary usage, it is possible that Byron simply meant ‘settling’ when he wrote ‘colonizing,’ it is more likely that his choice of terms was intended to endow his proposed settlement with an air of the outré and the politically misfit. The key reason, then, behind Byron’s abandonment of his Venezuela scheme was the extent to which it exposed the precariousness of his position as what David V. Erdman calls ‘an aristocratic rebel.’47

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174 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 Byron’s conflicts were familiar to those facing many Opposition Whigs in the early nineteenth century: when hard-pressed landlords transformed themselves . . . into financial speculators or fundholders, they found their political interests also transformed. And even those Whigs who remained landowners changed their tune as the Reform movement grew increasingly ‘popular’ [middleclass]. (Erdman, ‘Genteel,’ 1073)

In The Age of Bronze, Byron brilliantly rebukes the self-seeking landowners who would have prolonged the war with Napoleon ‘to keep grain prices and rents inflated’ (Beaty, 176): They roared, they dined, they drank, they swore they meant To die for England – why then live? for Rent! The peace has made one general malcontent Of these high-market patriots; war was Rent! Their love of country, millions all mis-spent, How reconcile? by reconciling Rent. And will they not repay the treasures lent? No: down with every thing, and up with Rent! (Byron, Bronze, xiv. 624–31)

In these lines, Byron relentlessly drives home the mercenary hypocrisy of contemporary English landholders. At the same time, however, the unsparing satirist had also implicated himself as part of what he dubbed ‘The land self-interest’ when, strapped for cash, he raised the rents at his own Newstead Abbey to make ends meet (xiv. 600). Erdman argues that Byron’s early political activism in London was curtailed by the recognition of such incompatible allegiances: ‘A nearly bankrupt baron, he could favor neither the fiscal schemes of this land of “blest paper credit” nor a foreign policy upon which he, in common with the Whigs, laid the blame for the economic distress and dislocation of classes in England.’48 This conflict of interests told painfully on Byron’s sense of subjective coherence.49 Erdman relates that, ‘listening to his lawyer’s report of the tangled insolvency of his estates, [Byron] feared he would “always be an embarrassed man” and imagined himself in actual danger of being elbowed by “broken shopkeepers” and “starved mechanics”’ (Erdman, ‘Rinaldo,’ 199). This anxiety was only compounded when, after Byron’s second reformist speech in the House of Lords, he was given to understand

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that his ‘manner of speaking was not dignified enough for the Lords, but was more calculated for the Commons.’50 If, as Erdman asserts, the radical positions Byron defended in Parliament in 1812 and 1813 were ‘assumed more realistically by speculators . . . and members of banking families,’ then Byron’s uncomfortable sense of complicity with the British merchant class and investors in Spanish America was prefigured during his early political career in London (214–15). Far from what McElderry calls an ‘escape’ from domestic concerns, what Byron saw when he looked honestly at emigration to Venezuela was the familiar set of incongruent loyalties he had suffered from in London. Even his ostensibly humble plan of becoming a gentleman planter in Venezuela sounded dissonantly with his claim in Don Juan that ‘Gentleman farmers’ were ‘a race worn out quite’ (Byron, DJ, IX. xxxii. 251). Furthermore, the revolutionary movements in Spanish America lacked an aristocratic leadership and Byron held that social change – however radical – began, not with the people, but with ‘their betters.’ He wrote to this effect in Don Juan: ‘To mend the people’s an absurdity, / A jargon, a mere philanthropic din, / Unless you make their betters better’ (X. lxxxv. 677–9). Byron’s political activity in Italy and Greece was characterized by this preference for aristocratic rebellion. The Carbonari with whom he allied himself in Ravenna were themselves dispossessed nobility, and the patriot whose side Byron chose in the Greek liberation struggle was no less than Prince Mavrocordato. And although Mavrocordato’s designation as ‘Prince’ was technically a courtesy title applied to Greek rulers under the Turks, that title, ‘frail as it was, was more likely to impress Byron with his aristocratic prejudices than that of some self-appointed klepht general’ (Marchand, III. 1152). While Byron ardently admired Simón Bolívar, then, and while General Bolívar’s respect for the liberality of the British monarchy was widely known, ‘the Liberator’ was certainly no aristocrat.51 Despite his ‘aristocratic prejudices,’ however, Byron’s work with the London Greek Committee forced him to recognize that the political similarities he had admiringly noted between Greece and Spanish America in his correspondence, in The Age of Bronze, and in The Island were much less noble than he had once imagined. Once in Greece, Byron rapidly became ‘uncomfortably aware that he and . . . Prince Mavrocordato were acting as agents of Benthamite Radicalism, opening the Mediterranean to British commerce’ (Erdman, ‘Genteel,’ 1069). As he tellingly wrote to the London Greek Committee in May 1823:

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176 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 I need not suggest to the Committee the very great advantage which must accrue to Great Britain from the success of the Greeks – and their probable commercial relations with England in consequence . . . the consideration might weigh with the English people in general – in their present passion for every kind of speculation —— they need not cross the American Seas – for one much better worth their while – and nearer home. (Byron, LJ, X. 170)

In Greece, Byron found himself engrossed in a struggle for liberty that depended just as heavily upon British investment as the struggle in Spanish America. By 1823, several Spanish American republics were already defaulting on their loans and the Spanish American debt crisis was well underway. British speculators perceived that they would need to look elsewhere than America to find a trading partner that could compensate for their losses. Byron himself was now in the unpleasant position of enticing the merchants, bankers, and brokers he had once spurned to invest in his beloved Greece. Nor was his new role as supplicant to speculators the full extent of Byron’s bitter reconciliation with the forces that had deterred him from Venezuela. He also found himself in the awkward position of encouraging British settlement in Greece: The resources even for an emigrant population – in the Greek Islands alone – are rarely to be paralleled – and the cheapness of every kind of not only necessary – but luxury – (that is to say – luxury of Nature) fruits – wine – oil – &c. – in a state of peace – are far beyond those of the Cape – and Van Diemen’s land – and the other places of refuge – which the English population are searching for over the waters. (X. 170–1; italics in original)

Here, then, was a link between England’s ‘present passion for every kind of speculation’ and the English search for ‘places of refuge . . . over the waters.’ And it was Byron himself (directly contradicting his earlier claims to George Bancroft and Edward Ellice) who provided the suggestion that settlement and speculation were not mutually exclusive. Now Byron had not only consented to pander to the classes he despised, he had also directly associated himself with those classes. After all, he too had sought a place of refuge over the sea, not only in Venezuela, but also in ‘van [sic] Diemen’s land – of which,’ he wrote, ‘I hear much as a good place to settle in’ (IX. 215). Byron’s interest in Venezuela and Greece, taken in the context of

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his reflections on the British economy, his own financial embarrassments, and his final capitulation to the forces of speculation, powerfully exposes the underlying class basis of Romantic-era Britain’s informal empire in Spanish America. Byron’s correspondence with the London Greek Committee, in particular, has broad implications for Britain’s informal empire as well as for Byron’s late writing, as it elucidates both the tension and the complicity between aristocratic anti-imperialism and liberal economic interests during the early 1820s.52 Indeed, the unstable positions of aristocratic prerogative, republicanism, and economic liberalism expressed in Byron’s correspondence belie the outspoken opposition to both empire and speculation found in so much of his late poetry, and work to unsettle any easy political opposition between aristocratic conservatism and bourgeois liberalism during the Romantic period. NOTES

1. Lord Brougham to Parliament, 13 March 1817. Quoted in Lynch, ‘British,’ 15. 2. During the investment boom of 1822–5, Colombia, Buenos Aires, Mexico, Chile, Peru, and Central America all floated loans on the London exchange, the total value of which amounted to nearly £20 million. For a detailed discussion of the boom, see Chapter 6. 3. Southey, LC, 212. 4. Ticknor, I. 165. 5. ‘General Paer’ is likely a misspelling of General [José Antonio] Paez, the distinguished cavalry commander of the Venezuelan patriot army. Byron read of General Paez in John Hippisley’s Narrative of the Expedition to the Rivers Orinoco and Apuré, in South America (London: John Murray, 1819). 6. Marchand notes, ‘Commodore John Byron recorded in his “Journal” . . . that in passing through the Straits of Magellan they saw natives who were giants, seven to eight feet high. Since no one else (except some of Commodore Byron’s companions) ever saw them, this account has been taken for a traveller’s tall tale. But in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (vol. V, July, 1819, pp. 431–3), which Byron has undoubtedly seen, there was a note on Patagonia in which it was said that a lieutenant of the navy (unnamed) recently returned from a voyage there reported seeing some natives of enormous size, and particularly two chiefs who measured eight feet in height’ (Byron, LJ, VI. 212n). 7. Byron, LJ, VI. 212. 8. The ‘inclosed paragraphs’ outline the incentives for settlement: ‘Fathers of families are to become citizens the moment they land . . .

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9.

10. 11.

12.

Export duties free for five years.’ The paragraphs also announce the departure for London of two Venezuelan commissioners ‘with ample powers’ to entice emigrants (Prothero, IV. 356). Hobhouse was scandalized by Byron’s ‘South American project.’ He wrote indignantly to John Murray, ‘it is impossible that Lord B. should seriously contemplate, or, if he does, he must not expect us to encourage, this mad scheme . . . our poet is too good for a planter – too good to sit down before a fire made of mare’s legs, to a dinner of beef without salt and bread. It is the wildest of all his meditations – pray tell him’ (Smiles, I. 409). In a more moderate tone, Murray wrote to dissuade Byron from his ‘plan of South America:’ ‘if you will reflect upon all that has yet transpired – you will be assured I think that there can be no security for property in that Country for this half Century to come – every account and the decided opinion of every . . . man well informed upon that subject here testifieth unto the truth of this’ (Murray, 293). Byron knew the ‘Connecticut wit’ Joel Barlow’s epic The Columbiad (1807), which he claimed was ‘not to be compared with the works of more polished nations’ (quoted in Moore, 49). Byron was more appreciative of his friend Samuel Rogers’s long poem The Voyage of Columbus (1810). Of William Lisle Bowles’s The Missionary (1815), he wrote briefly but approvingly, ‘Pretty – very’ (Byron, LJ, V. 187, 193) and ‘[s]omewhat visionary’ (V. 199). In the Edinburgh Review, Byron read reviews of works such as François Depons’s Voyage à la Partie Orientale de la Terre-Firme dans l’Amérique Meridionale (July 1806), Helms’s Travels from Buenos Ayres, by Potosi, to Lima (October 1806), Humboldt’s Researches concerning the Institutions and Monuments of the Ancient Inhabitants of America (November 1814), and Della Patria di Cristoforo Columbo (December 1816). In the Quarterly Review, Byron read reviews of works including William Walton’s Present State of the Spanish Colonies (June 1812), Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent (January 1816, April 1819, and July 1821), de Pradt’s Des Colonies et de l’Amérique and Des trois derniers Mois d’Amérique (July 1817), and Outline of the Revolution in Spanish America, by a South American (July 1817). For a comprehensive account of Byron’s reading on Spanish America, see McElderry, 162–77. Green, 99. According to Thomas Medwin, Byron commented, ‘There is no man I envy so much as Lord Cochrane. His entrance into Lima, which I see announced in to-day’s paper, is one of the great events of the day’ (Medwin, 229). Although he did not live to see Cochrane assume command of the Greek Navy in 1825, Byron would undoubtedly have approved. On Barbauld’s Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, see Chapter 4.

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13. For a discussion of Byron and Bentham’s ideas regarding the relationship between Spanish America and Greece, see F. Rosen, Bentham, Byron, and Greece: Constitutionalism, Nationalism, and Early Liberal Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1992). On Bentham’s role in formulating governmental schemes in Spanish America, see Miriam Williford, Jeremy Bentham on Spanish America: An Account of His Letters and Proposals to the New World (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State UP, 1980). 14. On the disorderly conduct, mutiny, and desertion of young British soldiers in Colombia, see Hippisley, chs 4, 6, and 16. 15. Byron, Bronze, vi. 272–81. Citations refer to stanza and line number(s). 16. Byron, Island, II. viii. 83–4. Citations refer to canto, stanza, and line number(s). 17. This appears to be the only instance in Byron’s correspondence where he suggests that he may take an active part in South American politics. 18. McElderry, 177. 19. Moore, 227. 20. MacCarthy, 39, 464. 21. Gross, 171. 22. Lloyd, 173. For further accounts of Byron’s philhellenism, see Douglas Dakin, British and American Philhellenes during the Greek War of Independence 1821–1833 (Thessaloniki: The Society for Macedonian Studies, 1955); Alexis Dimaras, ‘The Other British Philhellenes,’ in Richard Clogg (ed.), The Struggle for Greek Independence (North Haven, CT: Archon Books, 1973); William St Clair, That Greece Might Still Be Free: The Philhellenes in the War of Independence (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1972); and Christopher Montague Woodhouse, The Philhellenes (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1971). 23. Quoted in Marchand, III. 1107. 24. During the early nineteenth century, Mt Chimborazo (in present-day Ecuador) was believed to be the highest peak on earth. The explorers Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé de Bonpland attempted (and failed) to reach the peak in 1802. Simón Bolívar’s ascent of the mountain is commemorated in his meditation ‘Mi delirio sobre el Chimborazo’ [My delirium on Chimborazo] (1823). 25. Mill, ‘Emancipation,’ 280. 26. See also John Allen, ‘Review of Voyage à la Partie Orientale de la TerreFirme, dans l’Amérique Meridionale, fait pendant les Années 1801, 1802, 1803, et 1804.’ Edinburgh Review (July 1806): 378–99. The interests on behalf of whom publicists such as Mill and Allen wrote were Britain’s liberal merchant sector and the republican agents of Spanish America who had been agitating for aid in London since the 1780s. On the rhetorical strategies of Mill and his colleagues, see Chapter 2.

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180 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 27. Wellesley and Jacob, 548. 28. On British financial communities in Spanish America, see Chapter 6. See also M. Brown (ed.), Informal, 1–77; Humphreys, ‘British Merchants;’ Marichal, Bankruptcy of Empire; and Mulhall, English in South America, 324–454. 29. Graham, 17. 30. Bancroft, 196. 31. Byron, DJ, XII. vi. 42–8. Citations refer to canto, stanza, and line number(s). 32. Byron’s claim that money ‘Gleams only through the dawn of its creation’ may be read as an ironization of Shelley’s depiction of inspiration in A Defence of Poetry (1821): ‘the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness . . . when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conception of the poet’ (Shelley, 531). 33. Beaty, 171. 34. On the role played by British officers in Spanish America, see M. Brown, Adventuring through Spanish Colonies; Gregory, Brute New World; Mulhall, English in South America; and M. E. Rodríguez, Freedom’s Mercenaries. 35. R. Miller, 37. 36. Barrow, 352. After distinguishing himself for his service in the Venezuelan Army, Gregor MacGregor used his knowledge of Spanish America to invent an independent nation called Poyais, of which he claimed to be the cacique (or ruler). Opening a Poyasian legation in London, MacGregor ‘organised at least four bond issues for a nominal total of £200,000, sold lands to colonists and officer commissions in the new “national army and navy” and even printed currency’ (M. E. Rodríguez, I. 129). 37. Maxwell Hyslop was a personal friend of Bolívar and served as his benefactor ‘when the future liberator was a penniless refugee in Jamaica in 1815’ (Humphreys, 162). 38. Humphreys, 161. 39. J. Miller, II. 221–2. Jean Franco’s analysis of the motivations of British travelers to Spanish America is yet more explicit: ‘Given the mystery that surrounded the Spanish Empire and the gothic shudders the Catholic Church inspired in good Protestants, it is no wonder that the British approached the possibility of travel to postindependence Latin America with a sense of moral purpose. They were in fact missionaries of capitalism whose aim was nothing less than the informal colonization of the continent’ (Franco, 133). 40. As Cain and Hopkins argue, nineteenth-century British aristocratic

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41.

42.

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status depended on a ‘contempt for the everyday world of wealth creation and of the profit motive as the chief goal of activity’ (Cain and Hopkins, 24). Borislav Knezevic adds, in terms particularly relevant to Byron’s aristocratic self-fashioning, ‘One of the corollaries of the casual attitude towards acquisition of wealth . . . was the genteel penchant for the cult of the amateur in every kind of political or social activity’ (Knezevic, 16). Byron quotes Alexander Pope, ‘Of the Use of Riches, an Epistle to the Right Honourable Allen Lord Bathurst’ (1732): ‘Once, we confess, beneath the Patriot’s cloak, / From the crack’d bag the dropping Guinea spoke, / And gingling down the back-stairs, told the crew, / “Old Cato is as great a rogue as you.” / Blest paper-credit! last and best supply! / That lends Corruption lighter wings to fly!’ (Pope, ll. 35–40). By comparison with Pope’s ironic emphasis on the advantages paper credit gives to Corruption, Byron’s adaptation of these lines in The Curse of Minerva (1811–2), asserts that even Corruption itself has become exhausted and encumbered by paper credit: ‘See all alike of more or less bereft, / No misers tremble when there’s nothing left. / “Blest paper credit,” who shall dare to sing? / It clogs like lead Corruption’s weary wing’ (Byron, Curse, ll. 243–6). Nathan, 137. Cain and Hopkins observe with revealing ambiguity, ‘Working directly for money, as opposed to making it from a distance, was associated with dependence and cultural inferiority’ (Cain and Hopkins, 23). Trelawny, 155–6. It is likely that Byron derived his interest in the ‘auriferous soil’ of Chile and Peru – like his desire to climb the Andes – from Alexander von Humboldt, whom he greatly admired. For Humboldt’s discussion of the ‘auriferous soil’ of Spanish America, see Humboldt, Personal, 314, 342–3, and 860–3. See also Byron’s memorable profession: ‘Oh gold! I still prefer thee unto paper, / Which makes bank credit like a bark of vapour’ (Byron, DJ, XII. iv. 31–2). S. Johnson, 68. Cain and Hopkins, 276. Erdman, ‘Genteel,’ 1068; italics in original. Erdman, ‘Rinaldo,’ 197. Byron would later satirize the contradictions of the noble reformer in the person of Don Juan’s Lord Henry: ‘A friend to freedom and freeholders – yet / No less a friend to government – he held, / That he exactly the just medium hit / ’Twixt place and patriotism – albeit compelled, / Such was his Sovereign’s pleasure (though unfit, / He added modestly, when rebels railed) / To hold some sinecures he wished abolished, / But that with them all law would be demolished’ (Byron, DJ, XVI. lxxii. 617–24).

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182 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 50. Medwin, 229. 51. Examples of Bolívar’s deference toward the British crown abound. In a letter of November 1826 to Foreign Secretary Canning, Colonel P. Campbell relates the events of a dinner given by the General: ‘His Excellency requested my permission to propose a toast, and after warmly dwelling on the virtues of His Majesty and the debt of gratitude due from Colombia to England, he proposed the health of the King of Great Britain, and hoped that all present would join him in three times three cheers . . . General Bolivar then stood up, and after a very eloquent speech in which he expressed his own gratitude and that of his country for the conduct pursued by the Government of Great Britain towards Columbia [sic], and his admiration of its liberality, he proposed the health of Mr. Canning . . . and which he drank in the same manner’ (Webster, I. 425). See also Webster, I. 426–7, 526–37. 52. Scholars such as Cain and Hopkins, David Cannadine, Raymond E. Dumett, Borislav Knezevic, and Tom Nairn have shown that ‘the history of the relationship between the patrician elites and the middle class(es) in Britain’ is not – as traditional British history maintains – one of overt antagonism or of begrudging toleration, but rather one of ‘convenient cooperation’ (Knezevic, 12). As Cain and Hopkins explain, this ‘cooperation’ entailed ‘the creation of a new form of capitalism [‘gentlemanly capitalism’] headed by improving landlords in association with improving financiers who served as their junior partners’ (Cain and Hopkins, 101). Because finance capital was a relatively invisible form of wealth acquisition, it was ultimately ‘more eligible for co-optation into the elite than the forms that involved a direct connection to production’ (Knezevic, 16). See David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (New York: Vintage, 1999) and The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain (New York: Columbia UP, 1999); Raymond E. Dumett (ed.), Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Imperialism: The New Debate on Empire (New York: Longman, 1999); and Tom Nairn, The Break-up of Britain (Melbourne: Common Ground, 2003).

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CHAPTER SIX

THE SPANISH AMERICAN BUBBLE AND BRITAIN’S CRISIS OF INFORMAL EMPIRE, 1822–6

I. Spectacular Projections During the years 1822–5, Britain experienced a veritable mania for speculation in the newly independent states of Spanish America. An astonished Princess Lieven, wife of the Russian Ambassador in London, exclaimed, ‘You cannot imagine how mad everyone here has gone over the companies in South America. Everybody is buying shares. Everybody, from the lady to the footman, is risking pinmoney or wages in these enterprises.’1 This was no exaggeration. In only three years, the new Spanish American governments floated approximately £20 million in bonds while British capitalization of Spanish American mining companies reached over £30 million.2 As Giorgio Fodor notes, ‘For centuries the silver of Mexico and Peru had inflamed [the] European imagination; now these riches seemed open to British enterprise and capital.’3 The reading public was whipped up to a fever pitch by contemporary periodicals’ reports of easy and spectacular profits. Encouraging articles followed the transaction of every loan. Information on the potential risks to investors was slim. Foreign works on Spanish America such as those of the Abbé de Pradt and Alexander von Humboldt were translated, republished, and avidly discussed in prominent periodicals such as the Annual Register, the Quarterly Review, and the Edinburgh Review. British newspapers such as The Times, the Morning Chronicle, and the Courier carefully followed the Spanish American independence movements, including in their pages details of each military victory, character descriptions of the revolutionary leaders, projections about

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184 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 the commercial benefits to come, and – what was new for British readers – regular stock and bond quotes.4 In 1822, the first Spanish American bond prospectus was advertised in the press. Purchasers were assured that Colombia’s natural resources were ‘unbounded’ and that the region’s mines would issue enormous revenue ‘when they are in full work which it is expected they will shortly be.’5 Soon after the floating of the Colombian loan, loans to Chile, Peru, Mexico, Buenos Aires, and Central America, as well as stock in various Spanish American mining ventures, were advertised according to the same model of sanguine economic projections. The Morning Chronicle crowed that Mexico ‘produces everything necessary to the comforts and luxuries of man.’6 The Rio Plata Mining Association claimed that grains of gold ‘appear in sight when the rain washes away the dust which covers the surface.’ A woman, on stepping out of her hut after a rain, ‘found a piece of gold weighing twenty ounces,’ an occurrence found ‘so frequently in the rainy season that it would require much time to detail them.’7 Loans to Mexico and the Rio Plata Mining Association were fully subscribed within days of their announcement. Reflecting on the purchasing frenzy, the New Times dryly commented, ‘if the very respectable Mr Lemuel Gulliver were to appear on stage again, and to issue proposals for a loan to the Republic of Laputa, he would run a hazard of being suffocated by the pressure of subscribers to set down their names.’8 Spanish American issues came to dominate the Foreign Stock Exchange throughout 1823 and 1824 amid unequivocal endorsements from the press.9 As the Morning Chronicle succinctly informed its readers, ‘there is no better way to dispose of surplus money than by investing in South America.’10 To cite only one example of the unprecedented growth of Spanish American issues, stock in the Mexican Real del Monte Mining Company jumped from £70 to £1,350 during the first half of 1824. As the year progressed, a spate of new mining issues, as well as new commercial operations such as the Columbian Pearl Fishery Association, found enthusiastic subscribers. By the end of the year, amid rumors of Britain’s impending recognition of the new nations, the British financial community was in a state of unparalleled jubilation. In late December of 1824, Foreign Secretary Canning and Prime Minister Lord Liverpool announced Britain’s diplomatic recognition of Mexico, Colombia, and Buenos Aires. Two months later, word reached Britain that Simón Bolívar had defeated the last of the royalist troops in Peru. Amidst such happy news, stock and bond prices reached an all-time peak.

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During the years of the speculation boom, an entire cultural niche was carved out to support the Spanish American craze. The acclaimed improvisatore Signor Pestrucci regaled high society with spontaneously composed verses lauding Bolívar.11 Melodramatic extravaganzas such The Vision of the Sun; or, the Orphan of Peru played at Covent Garden, dazzling audiences with their ‘palm-tree grove[s],’ ‘spicy incense,’ ‘Cougars,’ ‘ripe Pine-apple[s],’ and ‘glittering arms.’12 But while such performances appealed to political sympathies and the public hunger for exotic novelty, the most prominent aspect of Britain’s Spanish American industry during these years was its consistent concern with investment. Rudolf Ackermann, London’s fashionable entrepreneur, engraver, and publisher, designed opulent bond certificates for the Colombian loan, each ‘surmounted by the Colombian eagle and coat of arms, with scantily-clad male and female allegorical figures representing the Orinoco and Magdalena rivers’ (Dawson, 29). In November 1823, James Robinson Planché’s popular musical drama Cortez; or, The Conquest of Mexico delighted audiences, not with glittering calabashes and enchanted halls of porphyry, but rather by explicitly dramatizing the quest for wealth in the New World. Several days later, as if by design, the press released news that the first Mexican loan, to the amount of £5 million, would soon be available for subscription. The Spanish American spectacle to reach the widest audience during this period was William Bullock’s Mexican Exhibit at the Egyptian Hall in London. For much of 1824 and 1825, audiences could see native ‘vegetable produce, habitations [and] costume’ as well as ‘the colossal and enormous idols, the great calendar and sacrificial stones, temples [and] pyramids’ and ‘pure ores of gold and silver’ – all for the price of one shilling.13 A real ‘Indian’ identified as Jose Cayetana Ponce de Leon, decked out in traditional garb, was even on hand in his native ‘Mexican Cottage’ to ‘explain the different objects in the Exhibition to visitors’ (Bullock, Descriptive, 6, 8).14 A very short list of the items on display in the Modern half of the exhibition alone would include the maguey (or ‘tree of wonders’), ‘the prickly pair, or tunna,’ the ‘Granidillo, or Water Lemon,’ ‘the Magnificent Alligator Pear or Avocata,’ ‘Models of Indians,’ ‘a young Flamingo,’ various ‘Humming birds,’ and ‘Silver Ore, of the kind called Colorada, as taken from the mine.’15 Like the anonymous author of The Vision of the Sun, Bullock clearly understood that Spanish America’s bountiful raw materials could prove lucrative well

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186 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 beyond the domains of investment and industry. In the stock market as on the stage and in the exhibition hall, Spanish America sold. II. The Bubble Bursts Attention to Spanish America was not entirely the province of popular spectacle during these years, as is shown by the 1825 publication of Felicia Hemans’s American epic The Forest Sanctuary and Robert Southey’s A Tale of Paraguay. Hemans’s poem is narrated by a Spanish conquistador who, upon returning to Spain, converts to Protestantism, then flees to America seeking asylum from the Inquisition. The poem consists of his memories and reflections on Spain as he travels, first through South America, and then to North America in search of religious freedom. Southey’s poem, for its part, follows the wanderings of a Guaraní family, the last of their tribe to survive the Paraguayan colonial wars of 1750–6. The family encounters a benevolent Jesuit and removes to his reduction, where they die of that infamous colonial disease, smallpox. Southey’s narrative was faithfully based on Martin Dobrizhoffer’s recently translated Account of the Abipones, an Equestrian People of Paraguay (1821), a work Southey himself very favorably reviewed for the Quarterly.16 Yet while both poems bear the tell-tale marks of contemporary interest in Spanish America, they stand out, not for any allusions to investment, commerce, or indigenous productions, but rather for their complete avoidance of Britain’s commercial and political interests in the region. The material omissions that characterize The Forest Sanctuary and A Tale of Paraguay were certainly not the products of authorial ignorance. Hemans and Southey were perhaps the most well informed poets of their day on the subjects of Spain and Spanish America.17 Both corresponded with the prominent London-based Spanish exile and intellectual Joseph Blanco White (1775–1841). It was on Blanco White’s pseudonymous Letters from Spain, by Don Leucadio Doblado, ‘one of the most powerful and impressive pictures perhaps ever drawn, of a young mind struggling against habit and superstition,’ that Hemans based her narrator’s conversion from Catholicism to Protestantism.18 Moreover, it was this text, Hemans claimed, that had given her the initial inspiration for The Forest Sanctuary.19 In addition to The Forest Sanctuary, Hemans published numerous poems on Spanish themes, namely ‘The Abencerrage’ (1819), Songs of the Cid (1822–3), The Siege of Valencia (1823),

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‘Juana’ (1828), and Songs of Spain (1834), as well as translations of early Spanish poets such as Garcilaso de la Vega and Francisco de Quevedo (Translations, 1818). Southey wrote even more extensively on Spain and Spanish America, as evidenced by his Letters Written During a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal (1797), his poems Madoc (1805) and Roderick, Last of the Goths (1814), his translations Amadis of Gaul (1803) and The Chronicle of the Cid (1808), his pseudonymous Letters from England, by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella (1807), his massive History of the Peninsular War (1823– 32), and his numerous reviews of texts relating to Spain and Spanish America for the Quarterly Review and the Annual Register. While it is perhaps understandable that Hemans and Southey, both Tories, would have preferred a more sober depiction of Spanish America than their zealous liberal contemporaries, the stark blankness and downright morbidity that characterize their texts is arresting. Gone are Bullock’s parrots and gold ore, Planché’s mercenaries, and Ackermann’s scantily-clad native bodies. One finds instead, in the case of The Forest Sanctuary, a landscape that is never described more specifically than as ‘a North American forest’ and a ‘wilderness’ (Hemans, Forest, ‘Advertisement,’ unpaginated). Like Hemans, Southey chose a site of relative cultural blankness for A Tale of Paraguay, commenting on his poem, ‘The circumstances which are true, are very few, very simple . . . There is little or no passion in it.’20 And while, unlike The Forest Sanctuary, the specific national setting of Southey’s Tale is identified, the fact that contemporary Paraguay was the least well known of the new Spanish American states serves to obscure and abstract the context of the poem. What was known of Paraguay was outdated and related principally to the Jesuit missions that had been outlawed in 1768. As Alan Bewell points out, ‘The social experiment that took place in the Jesuit “Republic” of Paraguay was a favourite topic among eighteenth-century philosophes . . . Voltaire, Diderot, D’Alembert, and the ex-Jesuit Raynal celebrated the “republic” of Paraguay as the realization of a communistic ideal.’21 The 1784 text on which Southey based his poem, Dobrizhoffer’s Historia de Abiponibus, forms a part of this body of work. Even at the time of its original publication, however, the Historia referred to a missionary system that had ceased to exist fifteen years ago. And much had changed since the state of Paraguay had separated from the Viceroyalty of La Plata and ousted its Spanish governor in 1811. The most circumstantial of these changes was the rise to absolute

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188 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 power of Paraguay’s isolationist dictator José Gaspard Rodríguez de Francia. Throughout his reign (1814–40), Francia pursued a strict ‘policy of non-intercourse’ with Europe and Paraguay’s powerful neighbors in Río de la Plata.22 Merchants who traveled to Paraguay without a license were frequently detained for years and suffered the confiscation of their property. The noted scientist Aimé de Bonpland was kidnapped by Francia in 1821 and detained for years after having been discovered cultivating mate on the banks of Paraguay’s principal waterway, the Río Paraná. According to the accounts of John and William Parish Robertson, two Scottish merchants who sought to establish commercial relations in Paraguay throughout the 1810s and early 1820s, Francia ‘intervened in affairs of the smallest detail,’ once berating an English trader for trying to sell poorly-made cloth: ‘This is the way you hucksters of rags vend your unsound and deceitful manufactures over the world. The Jews are cheats but the English are downright swindlers . . . the veriest mountebanks and pedlars.’23 In 1824, Britain sent its first consul to the United Provinces, Woodbine Parish. Although Parish eventually succeeded in restoring the liberty and property of a number of British detainees in Paraguay, he was unable to convince Francia to liberalize his trading policies. By 1825, all communications between Parish and the dictator had come to an end. As a result of this diplomatic stalemate, Paraguay was one of the only Spanish American states never to float a loan on the British stock exchange and one of the few nations that had not been formally recognized by the British government by 1825. In this era of speculative mania, the absence of commerce with a country necessarily meant a scarcity of interest and of information. The most up-to-date and revealing accounts of the state were to be found in the Robertsons’ Letters on Paraguay (1838–9), Francia’s Reign of Terror (1839), and Letters on South America (1843), but these works would not be published until the end of Francia’s regime.24 By contrast with Southey’s Tale, the protagonist of The Forest Sanctuary does not even identify his location in America, but rather refers to a remembered Spain to which he can never return. Constantly longing for his native home, the narrator’s actual environment is portrayed in terms of lack and negation: ’Tis not the olive, with a whisper swaying, Not thy low ripplings, glassy water, playing Through my own chestnut groves, which fill mine ear

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... – I hear the winds of morn – Their sounds are not of this! – I hear the shiver Of the green reeds, and all the rustlings, borne From the high forest, when the light leaves quiver: Their sounds are not of this! – the cedars, waving, Lend it no tone: His wide savannahs laving, It is not murmur’d by the joyous river! (Hemans, Forest, I. iv. 32–4; I. vi. 46–52; italics added)25

While one may be tempted to hear in these sonic negations a faint echo of Keats’s ‘ditties of no tone,’ the ‘unheard’ melodies of Hemans’s poem do not give rise to ‘more happy, happy love! / For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d.’26 Nor does the narrator’s sense of displacement, like Keats’s, allow him to fill ‘some other Body – The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women.’27 Rather than identifying a multiplicitous negative capability in the absence of Spain, the negations that characterize the narrator’s experience are distinctly not productive, not generative, and not life-giving. In the cases where Hemans does figure the poem’s landscape in more positive terms, her choice of flora generally works to highlight its European, rather than its uniquely American, characteristics. This lack of geographical specificity is especially evident in one of the poem’s most frequently occurring images, that of the oak. The narrator muses: I see an oak before me, it hath been The crown’d one of the woods; and might have flung Its hundred arms to Heaven, still freshly green, But a wild vine around the stem hath clung, From branch to branch close wreaths of bondage throwing, Till the proud tree, before no tempest bowing, Hath shrunk and died, those serpent folds among. (I. xi. 84–92)

Contemporary readers would have recognized in this lofty, though embattled, oak the patriotic symbol of British imperial strength. But Hemans also deploys images of the oak in connection with Spain, as in the narrator’s description of his flight from the prison of the Inquisition: ‘A rent oak thunder’d down beside my cave, / Booming it rush’d, as booms a deep sea-wave’ (II. xx. 176–7). Even Hemans’s citation of that quintessentially American author Washington Irving’s

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190 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 Bracebridge Hall, with its description of an ‘oak of prodigious size . . . overpowered by an enormous wild grape-vine’ on the banks of the Missouri River, suggests a classical point of reference rather than an American one (294n).28 As Irving notes, ‘It seemed like Laocoon struggling ineffectually in the hideous coils of the monster Python’ (Irving, Bracebridge, I. 138). The place where Hemans’s narrator settles, then, is presented both as a visual cipher, devoid of national specificity, and as a location outside of human culture, a realm ‘where farewell ne’er was spoken’ (Hemans, Forest, II. lxxiv. 681). In order to preserve the cultural vacuum he has found in America, this narrator whose life exists principally in memory actively seeks to cancel his own narration of those memories. As John M. Anderson points out, the protagonist consistently (though, of course, ineffectually) ‘resist[s] the temptation to narration’ by refusing to recount such dramatic scenes as his torture by the Inquisition and his emotion at his wife’s sea burial during the passage to America.29 Of his torture in a dungeon of the Inquisition, the narrator elusively states, ‘It is no tale / Even midst thy shades, thou wilderness, to tell! (II. xiv. 118–19; italics in original). Of his feelings upon his wife’s death, the narrator merely comments, ‘I will not speak of woe; I may not tell – / Friend tells not such to friend – the thoughts which rent / My fainting spirit’ (II. lxiii. 575–7). In addition to her erasure of the narrator’s past, Hemans writes both colonial and Native American history out of her poem. The protagonist’s self-exile to America is patently inconsistent with the reasons for which sixteenth-century Spaniards went to the New World, namely to seek wealth and social aggrandizement, and to promulgate the Catholic faith. Even the narrator’s more historically credible deeds as a conquistador are stripped of agency. In the account of his regiment’s attack on the natives of Peru, the reader encounters no blood-curdling details such as those found in the narrations of Cortés’s or Pizarro’s campaigns. Instead, the native population is abstracted, represented only as ‘Indian bow and spear’ or as a ‘javelin shower,’ while the conquistadors are objectified as ‘mountain deer’ that are ‘Hemm’d in [their] camp’ by native assaults and as ‘a tempest of despair’ spreading across the Andes (I. xxiv. 212–15). The carnage of war is similarly depersonalized: ‘Moonlight, on broken shields – the plain of slaughter, / The fountain-side – the low sweet sound of water’ (I. xxix. 257–8). And although the narrator originally proposed to return to South America after his conversion to Protestantism, he finds on his second arrival an America in which

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‘the war-notes of [his] country rung’ (II. lxviii. 626). As Gary Kelly observes, Spain ‘is already too present’ there, and the wanderer must flee north to find sanctuary beyond the bounds of imperial civilization, ‘To hide in shades unpierc’d a mark’d and weary head’ (II. lxiii. 628).30 In a deleted passage from the manuscript preface to The Forest Sanctuary, Hemans writes that the poem ‘is intended more as the record of a Mind, than as a tale abounding with romantic or extraordinary incident’ (quoted in Kelly, 207; emphasis in original). In this sense, the otherwise nondescript oak described by the narrator as strangled by ‘a wild vine’ is refigured as a metaphor for private human consciousness: ‘Alas! Alas! – what is it that I see? / An image of man’s mind,’ the narrator laments as he gazes upon the tree (Hemans, Forest, I. xi. 98–9). In addition to granting her broader psychological latitude in depicting her European narrator, Hemans’s absorption of American nature by the protagonist’s mind serves a distinctly political function. While the strangled oak represents an unnamed threat to Britain’s imperial primacy, Hemans’s negations of a palpable American reality and her insistence that America exists only in the mind of her protagonist would have specifically evoked British investors’ anxieties as one after another Spanish American bond prospectus proved misleading, illusory, and in some cases, patently fabulous. Through its erasures and omissions, Hemans’s poem offers a metaphorized reflection of what Desmond Gregory has called Britain’s ‘almost invincible ignorance about conditions in Latin America’ (Gregory, 1).31 In this respect, The Forest Sanctuary offers support to the warnings issued by conservative newspapers such as the Courier, the Morning Herald, and the weekly John Bull, namely that it was dangerous and unwise to invest in nations and companies about which too little was known (Dawson, 13).32 Signs of Britons’ ignorance were everywhere. From 1822 through 1825, every day seemed to announce the formation of a new mining outfit and a new roster of eager purchasers. The Annual Register recounted how naïve investors scrambled to buy any kind of Spanish American bond and stock, even those of which ‘scarcely any thing was known except the name.’33 Once the speculative mania was in full swing, companies needed to provide precious little data in order to awaken ‘all the gambling propensities of human nature’ (AR 1825, 3). Accordingly, loan prospectuses contained less and less concrete information. The prospectus for the General South American Mining Association,

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192 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 for instance, only vaguely stated that South America ‘abound[s] in valuable minerals and contains inexhaustible Resources in Gold, Silver, Quicksilver, Copper, and other metals’ (quoted in Dawson, 103). Potential investors in the Potosi, La Paz and Peruvian Mining Association were told even less. That association’s prospectus simply read: ‘The mineral wealth of Peru, and particularly of Potosi, is too well-known to require any comment’ (Dawson, 105). Many companies did not even have specific mines under contract when they solicited public subscription. Company directors often ‘used the first shareholder downpayment to dispatch agents to negotiate leases with local mine owners’ after only a cursory perusal of Alexander von Humboldt’s outdated and significantly unreliable reports on Spanish America’s mineral resources (102–3). Britons’ willful blindness to the issues in which they were investing was perhaps most dramatically evinced in 1822 when the infamous swindler Sir Gregor MacGregor floated a £200,000 loan to the imaginary Central American nation of Poyais, of which he claimed to be the ruler. To support the credibility of his hoax, MacGregor opened a Poyasian legation and office in London, selling land to prospective settlers. Flyers were circulated describing ‘the opulence of [Poyais’s] cosmopolitan capital St Joseph, which boasted not only elegant avenues and public buildings, but also an opera house’ (41). And like the earlier Spanish chronicles sent back to Europe to bolster interest in the New World, the slew of books and pamphlets Macgregor published ‘praised this Garden of Eden where with minimal effort poor men could become rich’ (41–2). Tragically, of the 200 eager emigrants who sailed for Poyais, fewer than fifty ever returned to Britain. Most were killed by local Mosquito Indians or expired from hunger and fever in the insalubrious jungles and swamplands of Central America. Needless to say, they died without ever having found a trace of Sir Gregor’s fabled avenues, parks, or opera house. Southey’s erasure of native culture and Spanish imperialism reinforces this message regarding the dangers of the Spanish American unknown. The last survivors of their tribe, Southey’s Guaraní protagonists are stripped of their native culture and reduced to more basic means of procuring survival. Whereas (as Southey points out with some disgust) it was traditional in Guaraní society for the father to simulate the pains of childbed when his wife gave birth, that tradition has been rendered obsolete. When Monnema, the mother of the family, gives birth to a son,

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This could not be done; he [Monnema’s husband] might not lay The bow and those unerring shafts aside; ... None being there who should the while provide That lonely household with their needful food.34

Likewise, although Monnema had been famed in her village for her skill in spinning pottery, ‘These occupations were gone by: the skill / Was useless now, which once had been her pride’ (Southey, Tale, I. xxiv). As in The Forest Sanctuary, this eradication of native culture is complemented by the erasure of Spanish colonialism. Indeed, the only European character in Southey’s poem is the well meaning but ultimately ineffectual Austrian Jesuit Martin Dobrizhoffer. As Southey knew, the Jesuit reductions in Paraguay were not associated with Spanish rule but existed as independent theocracies whose work was to Christianize and to protect the native population from the brutal forced labor of the Spanish encomienda system. While Southey’s Guaraní protagonists all die, then, they are not destroyed by rapacious conquistadors, but rather by the melancholy of missionary life and by smallpox, that ‘dire disease . . . / Which Africa sent forth to scourge the West’ (I. i). Smallpox, not the imperialism with which it was associated, is the ‘conquering malady’ that ultimately destroys Southey’s native protagonists (I. ix). Southey’s Tale, however, presents something more than a flight from colonialism or an ominous reminder of Britons’ ignorance of Spanish America. Rather, it unmakes the enlightenment vision of benevolent colonialism.35 In the Histoire des Deux Indes (1770–80), a text Southey knew well, the Abbé Raynal had described the Jesuit settlements in Paraguay as paragons of good colonialism.36 He praised the ‘civilization’ of these societies, calling them ‘the most beautiful edifice that has been raised in the New World’ (Raynal, IV. 8. 253–4). The Guaraní family of Southey’s Tale takes refuge, then, from a state without culture in a state of consummate culture. Whereas in Hemans’s American sanctuary ‘farewell ne’er was spoken,’ Southey’s natives must bid ‘a first and last farewell’ to their forest retreat in order to ‘mingle with the world’ in a town ‘of happiest polity’ (Hemans, Forest, I. lxxiv. 681; Southey, Tale, III. li, xiii). Yet even while paying respect to Dobrizhoffer’s civilizing arts and paternal care, Southey frames the sacrifice that such care demands of its native beneficiaries in terms that are more suggestive of domination than of protection: ‘his [Dobrizhoffer’s] whole careful course

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194 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 of life declares / That for their good he holds them thus in thrall, / Their Father and their Friend, Priest, Ruler, all in all’ (Southey, Tale, IV. vii). In addition to his questionable authoritarianism, Southey stresses that Dobrizhoffer, like the Guaranís, will inevitably fall prey to the missionary system he represents: It was his evil fortune to behold The labours of his painful life destroy’d ... And all of good that Paraguay enjoy’d By blind and suicidal Power o’erthrown. (III. xvii)

As David Simpson observes, Dobrizhoffer is engaged ‘in an historically failing enterprise; his painfully established Christian community would not survive the violence generated by the same imperialism that it contingently makes possible.’37 What we discover in Southey’s poem is thus similar to what we find in The Forest Sanctuary, namely the irredeemable destructiveness (and self-destructiveness) of European imperial culture. But Hemans and Southey do not stop with erasing Spanish America as a site of culture and history. They not only strip bare their landscapes; they also render them as places of death.38 In lieu of experiencing America, Hemans’s protagonist experiences memory, specifically the memory of his dead wife Leonor and his dead friends Alvar, Inez, and Theresa. The New World becomes for him a place to experience human mortality, not human culture. From the outset of the poem, America is figured as a non-productive and non-reproductive space. Although the narrator and his son do reach America, the death of Leonor at sea and the depopulation of the American landscape render impossible any further propagation of human society. Not only is Leonor prevented from giving birth to a child in America, her body, ‘a thing for earth’s embrace, / To cover with spring-wreaths,’ is buried at sea and cannot join among the ‘blest / That earth to earth entrust’ (Hemans, Forest, II. lvii. 527–8; II. lxi. 558–9). Her ‘slumberer’s clay’ will never ‘rise at last, and bid the young flowers bloom, / That waft a breath of hope around the tomb’ (II. lxi. 560–2). Despite the joy the narrator takes in his ‘blessed child,’ he can understandably cry, ‘’tis well to die, and not complain’ (I. x. 88). Recent scholarship, by contrast with the present reading, has argued for the culturally reconstructive dimensions of death in

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Hemans’s poem. Gary Kelly claims that Hemans’s narrator ‘attempts to sublate’ the deaths of his friends that have been killed by the Inquisition ‘in his own subjective life, turning their otherwise meaningless deaths into meaningful ones’ (Kelly, 207). Through this subjective recuperation, in memory, of his loved ones, Hemans’s conquistador represents ‘a specifically “feminine”’ consciousness that radically disrupts the masculine ‘discursive order’ and, as such, ‘remains as a vanguard consciousness of the post-Revolutionary world’ (207, 209). Other important critical work substantiates this claim that death offers an opportunity for human renewal and for the validation of culturally redemptive, feminine-coded values. Nanora Sweet contends that the figure of death in poems such as ‘Stanzas on the Death of Princess Charlotte’ (1817), Stanzas to the Memory of the Late King (1820), and Dartmoor (1821), gives rise to a ‘feminization of national consciousness’ which in turn produces ‘sustaining domestic institutions’ in place of male-dominated martial institutions.39 Writing of The Forest Sanctuary, Marlon Ross suggests that in the absence of a maternal figure, ‘[e]arth and its elements become feminine presences’ and that ‘the father and the son begin self-consciously to create their own community of feminine affection.’40 So too, in her reading of The Forest Sanctuary, Nancy Moore Goslee emphasizes the ways in which Hemans’s evasion of the possibility of Spanish-Indian intermarriage, combined with the death of the narrator’s wife, forces the ‘maternal-enough father’ and his child to develop feminine virtues within themselves and through their relationship with the land.41 To be sure, there is much in Hemans’s poetry to suggest the culturally recuperative function of death. In Modern Greece (1817), although Sparta is destroyed and its ruins subsumed by wild flora, Hemans places this decline in the service of human renewal: ‘Oh! thus it is with man – a tree, a flower, / While nations perish, still renews its race.’42 In The Forest Sanctuary, however, man neither ‘renews his race’ in America nor emerges as what Kelly calls the ‘sovereign subject’ of the liberal state (196). Hemans’s poem posits death, not as cultural renewal, but more problematically, as the failure of culture. In this respect, The Forest Sanctuary bears an important resemblance to Hemans’s earlier ‘triumph’ poem, The Restoration of the Works of Art to Italy (1816). Ostensibly a poem about the return of great Italian works of art after their expropriation by Napoleon, The Restoration is also a poem, as Sweet has pointed out, about the very impossibility of that restoration. Undercutting her celebration

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196 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 of the works’ reinstatement in Italy, Hemans grieves: ‘Vain dream! degraded Rome! thy noon is o’er, / Once lost, thy spirit shall revive no more.’43 According to Sweet, true restoration cannot take place after a culture’s imperial devastation. The Italian works of art ‘cannot be restored: as plunder now, they will never be restabilized’ (Sweet, 176; italics in original). In The Forest Sanctuary, the imperial dream of Spanish America – like Italy’s pre-Napoleonic culture – cannot be restabilized after its desecration. The freedom-seeking protagonist of The Forest Sanctuary must therefore find refuge in a space untainted by colonial rapine, in this case, amid the untrammeled wilds of North America. Yet even in The Restoration, Hemans leaves open the possibility, however slight, of the persistence of culture. ‘For there has Art survived an Empire’s doom,’ she writes, ‘And reared her throne o’er Latium’s trophied tomb’ (Hemans, Restoration, ll. 323–4). Responding to such lines, Sweet argues that the possibility of restoration ultimately remains equivocal and contested in The Restoration. In The Forest Sanctuary, by contrast, Hemans’s narrator seeks haven in a site portrayed as perennially cultureless and in which cultural restoration is thereby a moot point. In North America, as opposed to Italy or Greece, there are not even the remains of a desolated imperial culture, not even a ‘ruined pile’ over which ‘Verdure and flowers in summer-bloom may smile, / And ivy-boughs their graceful drapery spread’ (Hemans, Greece, viii. 76–8). Southey’s poem, like The Forest Sanctuary, ‘is a story of death’ without redemption (Simpson, 22). In some sense, however, Southey’s Guaranís face a kinder fate than Hemans’s Spanish exiles. With the passing of the Guaranís’ tribe, a benevolent nature will overwhelm and transform the place where culture dwelt: On the white bones the mouldering roof will fall; Seeds will take root, and spring in sun and shower; And Mother Earth ere long with her green pall, Resuming to herself the wreck, will cover all. (Southey, Tale, I. xii)

But while nature may be renewed through human death,44 Southey’s Paraguay, like Hemans’s America, is a place in which human reproduction cannot take place.45 Even before encountering Dobrizhoffer, the shadow of death is already upon Monnema and her husband, Quiara. On the birth of their first son, Southey ominously predicts: ‘unto them a child is born: / And when the hand of Death may reach

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the one, / The other will not now be left to mourn / A solitary wretch’ (I. xxxi). And when the Guaraní family finally does reach the colonial village, Southey comments starkly: ‘these poor children of the solitude / Began ere long to pay the bitter pain / That their new way of life brought with it in its train’ (IV. xxviii). Though the bones of their devastated tribe will enrich America’s soil, the Guaraní protagonists themselves are inevitably bound to die from the outset of the poem. In this respect, the deaths of Southey’s native characters are perhaps more disturbing than the death of Hemans’s exiles. While Hemans’s narrator and his son will eventually fade away, their demise is figured as the extension of a pious life of pastoral isolation. By contrast, Southey affirms that death is ‘best’ for the Guaranís, that their death is more ‘proper’ than their life (IV. xlviii). Writing of Mooma, the daughter of Monnema and Quiara, Southey ensures his readers that death will in fact provide her with a more fitting home than culture ever could: Mourn not for her! for what hath life to give That should detain her ready spirit here? Thinkest thou that it were worth a wish to live, Could wishes hold her from her proper sphere? That simple heart, that innocence sincere The world would stain ... Maiden beloved of Heaven, to die is best for thee! (IV. xlviii)

Confirming that it is the natives themselves who prefer death to culture, Southey adds that ‘in his heart’ Mooma’s brother, Yeruti, ‘said to die betimes was best’ (IV. liv, lv). If in the midst of such morbidity, the reader recalls the Dedication to the poem, in which Southey presents a paean to the joys of fatherhood, the fate of the Guaranís seems crueler still.46 Criticism of Southey’s ‘poetic swan song’ has tended to explain its bleakness as either the product of Southey’s diminishing powers as a poet or as a Christian parable in which death is seen as a deliverance from the pains of life.47 Southey certainly felt his poetic inclination waning at the time he was composing the Tale. In 1823, he confessed to Joseph Cottle, ‘The love of writing poetry is departed from me’ (Southey, NL, II. 249). It is also likely that the melancholy, backward-looking impulse of the poem was a reflex of Southey’s

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198 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 sense that his own time on earth was nearing an end. Southey wrote in this vein to John King: I am old enough to have outlived half the persons with whom I was familiar twenty years ago! and old enough to dream, waking as well as sleeping, too much of the past. Thus it is – in youth our reveries are of hope – when we begin to [go] down the hill of life they are made up of remembrance. Something of this fee[ling I] have expressed in some verses to my eldest daug[hter in a] poem upon a Jesuit story. (II. 121)

Ernest Bernhardt-Kabisch suggests that death also appears in the poem as ‘a liberator from the tyranny of custom . . . a restorer of Paradise’ (Bernhardt-Kabisch, 98). According to this reading, it is unsurprising that the Tale, as Southey claims, was conceived as a ‘reverent offering to the Grave,’ a ‘garland for the brow of Death’ (Southey, Tale, ‘Dedication,’ 8). But beyond the biographical explanations one can adduce for the haunting quality of the poem, it is clear that A Tale of Paraguay was also the expression of Southey’s increasing horror at the effects of modern imperialism and industrial capitalism, particularly as they related to Britain’s relationship with Spanish America. Just as the absence of Spanish American culture in A Tale of Paraguay and The Forest Sanctuary reflects the ignorance of British investors in the region, the poem’s overwhelming insistence on death allegorizes the subsequent devastation of these investors and, potentially, of their nation. In December 1821, Southey wrote to Walter Savage Landor: Nothing can be more mournful than the course of events abroad. All that the Spanish-Americans wanted they would have obtained now, in the course of events, without a struggle if they had waited quietly. A free trade could not, from the first, have been refused them, nor any internal regulations which they thought good; and now the separation would have taken place unavoidably. As it is, it has cost twelve years of crime and misery. (Southey, NL, II. 230–1)

Southey was not thinking only of the ‘misery’ of Spanish Americans. Anticipating the dire repercussions of Britain’s over-zealous investment in Spanish America, he continued, ‘Of [disaffection] we shall hear plentifully when the bills of restriction are expired, and of [distress] also, when it shall be found (as it will be) that the renewed

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activity of our manufacturers will have again glutted the South American markets’ (II. 232). Southey’s letters of this period, moreover, express what Alan Bewell has called the ‘belief that England was about to be visited by a plague brought on by materialist commercialism’ (Bewell, 119). As Southey warned in 1820, ‘It is a frightful thought, but it has occurred to me . . . that Providence may send pestilence among us . . . to punish us.’48 In his Colloquies, he explained the grounds for this concern: ‘as the intercourse between nations has become greater, the evils of one have been communicated to another . . . Diseases . . . find their way from one part of the inhabited globe to another, wherever it is possible for them to exist.’49 A year later, as the cholera was ‘closing round’ him, Southey harked back to his predictions of 1820, writing that the disease had perhaps been sent by ‘Providence’ to spare Britain ‘from the consequences which the manufacturing system must otherwise inevitably produce’ (Southey, SL, IV. 285, 290). In this very literal sense, the death by colonial disease of Southey’s Guaraní protagonists represents the dire effects, on both sides of the Atlantic, of British informal imperialism. As early as 1823, these effects were beginning to be felt acutely in Britain. Blackwood’s’ early warning that the Spanish American ‘bubble’ would ‘burst to the ruin of thousands’ had proven all too true.50 In a letter reprinted in the New Times, a British merchant in South America warned that the Colombians were ‘by no means in that state of moral advancement which I find many persons in England erroneously suppose them to be.’ British investors should not so gullible as to expect Colombia to uphold ‘those sacred principles upon which the established Governments of Europe maintain their credit.’51 Later that year, the Morning Herald increased investors’ fears by printing a letter from an English merchant in Bogotá, complaining that Colombia was ‘entirely destitute of funds’ and that because the 1822 bonds had been ‘given by persons who had not the power to do so, they . . . will be liable to heavy deductions.’52 Reports regarding corruption and governmental instability throughout Spanish America, stock jobbing, fraud, the freezing of funds, the deferral of loan payments, and loan rescissions flooded the press. Lawsuits proliferated as disgruntled investors who had been denied their promised subscription installments sought government intervention and relief, to no avail. Meanwhile, the Rio Plata Mining Association, whose prospectus had claimed that grains of gold ‘appear in sight when the rain washes away the dust’ had its land concession revoked. Infuriated investors

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200 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 learned that even had the concession been respected, the company’s mines were ‘too far removed from supplies, transport, water and ports,’ that the ‘climate was hot, dry, and inhospitable,’ and that ‘local authorities were corrupt, unreliable, and shameless in demanding bribes’ (Dawson, 121).53 In addition to a foreign and treacherous climate, ventures suffered from bad roads, insufficient ports, and the fact that many of the mines had been neglected, and consequently flooded, during fifteen years of civil war. British mining technology did not adapt itself well to the Spanish American landscape, the ore was not as rich as had been predicted, local labor was difficult to come by, and miners and their materials had to be brought, at significant cost, from England. Given these challenges, even the best capitalized companies were grossly underfinanced and British investors quickly came to realize ‘that the “El Dorado” which they had expected to find in Spanish-America simply was not there’ (Jones, 176). Ever outspoken in its skepticism, the New Times accordingly urged its readers to refuse ‘the insane project of sending millions of money to God knows whom at Mexico.’54 More comically, a phony theatrical handbill appeared on the walls of the London Stock Exchange in 1823, announcing a new play entitled ‘The South American Jugglers’ and starring one Don Juan de Rowley Powley and one Don Carlos de Herring-Guts. These names were clearly intended to mock one of the principal loan contracting outfits responsible for the Colombian loan, namely the firm of Herring, Graham, and Powles. Herring was also one of the principle contractors involved in transacting the Mexican loan. Britons’ disillusionment was palpable in contemporary travel narratives and the periodicals that reviewed them. Treatments of Spanish America, once unboundedly enthusiastic, increasingly exposed the degree to which previous misinformation had created false hopes and investors’ subsequent ruin. In January 1824, the Quarterly Review (a publication that generally supported trade liberalization with Spanish America) reviewed three recent travel narratives about Spanish America, Maria Graham’s Journal of a Residence in Chile, Captain Basil Hall’s Extracts from a Journal written on the Coasts of Chili, Peru, and Mexico, and Peter Schmidtmeyer’s Travels to Chile. The reviewer stressed the ‘exaggerated, and often very erroneous representations’ provided by most reports from Spanish America, blaming British visitors for ‘reporting what they were told rather than what they saw’ and ‘rais[ing] the most extravagant ideas of . . . fertility, wealth, populousness, and civilization.’55 By contrast, he

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lauded Hall, Schmidtmeyer, and Graham’s honest and unromantic accounts of ‘the want of food, of water, and of resting-places . . . the fatigue arising from rude means of conveyance, unformed roads, and uncivilized guides and attendants . . . the melancholy feelings excited by travelling for days through barren or uncultivated districts, or over steep, dangerous, and frozen mountains’ as useful correctives to other ‘too favourable statements’ (QR, January 1824, 441–2). One revealing instance of such ‘honesty’ was Captain Basil Hall’s sardonic depiction of the misery of a people ravaged by war: Lima has been described as the “Heaven of women, the purgatory of men, and the hell of jackasses,” and so, perhaps, it may be in times of peace; but the war had now broken down such distinctions, and all parties looked equally miserable . . . scarcely any circumstance in society occupied its wonted place. Even in families . . . sincerity and confidence were banished, just at the moment when the pressure of the war was most urgent.56

Schmidtmeyer stressed the more salient issue of mining. The reviewer summarized his Travels: There was a period when the gold and silver mines yielded an annual quantity of their metals, to the amount of about 700,000 dollars. Mr. Schmidtmeyer visited the once celebrated mines of Uspallata, where he found neither inhabitant nor habitation . . . The once productive mines of Tiltil are stated by the same gentleman to “have been abandoned because of the accumulation of water.” (461)

Of one destitute man, Scmidtmeyer pathetically writes, ‘no golden harvest shone on his ragged garments, nor was there any other indication of reward for the hard toils, of which his wrinkled weatherworn face and his exhausted body manifested the effects’ (quoted in QR, January 1824, 461). Far from presenting a land in which gold could be easily had, Schmidtmeyer and Hall described a landscape in which humanity struggled simply to survive.57 Nor were travelers merely critical of the region’s mineral poverty and decimation by war. Spurred by disappointment and resentment, narratives extended to outright condemnations of the Spanish American people and their culture. As Jones observes, most travel writers and reviewers ‘were quite critical of the Spanish-Americans for their lack of cleanliness, laziness, civil disorder, and religious

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202 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 intolerance’ (Jones, 255). An exemplary case of such criticism is Maria Graham’s description of her reception by one of the highestranking families in Chile: ‘The greatest kindness is shown by taking things from your own plate and putting it [sic] on that of your friend; and no scruple is made of helping any dish before you with the spoon or knife you have been eating with, or even tasting or eating from the general dish without the intervention of a plate.’58 Going on to detail a fête at the palace of the viceroy, Graham comments disparagingly, ‘It is but lately that the ladies of Chili have learned to sit on chairs, instead of squatting’ (Graham, 68). Graham takes particular notice of ‘a handsome fat lady . . . all in blue satin’ who ‘had a spitting-box brought and set before her, into which she spat continually, and so dexterously as to show she was well accustomed to the manoeuvre’ (74–5). As the writer for the Quarterly Review commented with disgust, such scenes ‘evince a grossness of manners very remote from what is to be seen in any part of Europe, or even in decent company in North America’ (QR, January 1824, 454). The disenchantment displayed in such texts reached its apotheosis during the stock market crash and ‘panic’ of 1825. Heavy overspeculation in Spanish American imports had resulted in a surplus that caused stock and bond prices to plummet. The much-anticipated Spanish American markets for British commodities had proven woefully inadequate to their supply. A frightening number of prestigious British trading firms and banks collapsed, taking smaller country banks along with them. The gold reserves of the Bank of England ran dangerously low. A freeze was placed on credit, and payments were suspended. Shareholders defaulted on their purchase installments, began to sell their shares at enormous loss, and even dissolved their associations. Trading at the Foreign Stock Exchange ground to a halt. In the last three weeks of December alone, over seventy financial institutions failed or suspended payments. By the end of the year, over 1,000 private bankruptcies had been reported and, as the Annual Register noted, ‘the agitation in the City [London] exceeded every thing of the kind that had been witnessed for many years . . . All the usual channels of credit were stopped; and the circulation of the country was completely deranged.’59 The gloves were now off. In its coverage of Mexico’s first congressional meeting, the Annual Register disparaged Bolívar’s declaration that ‘America . . . has resolved the problem which most interests the human race’ by directing ‘desolating beams’ upon ‘despotism:’ ‘It is melancholy to think, how low in point of intellect that legislative

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Figure 5 R. Cruickshank, ‘The Bubble Burst – or the Ghost of an old Act of Parliament’ (1825). Courtesy of the British Museum.

assembly must be, to whose ears such rhapsodies and nonsense can be acceptable’ (AR 1826, 199). The Annual Register winced, too, at the ‘matchless effusion of pedantry and bombast’ that characterized Bolívar’s address to the Congress of Panama. He spoke ‘with a zeal and copiousness betraying not merely bad taste, but poverty and barrenness of mind, want of experience, ignorance of all that is worth knowing, and an absence of the habits of thought which are required in active life.’60 The Annual further complained that Spanish America’s leaders ‘speak and . . . write like boys who have just left school, as if their minds had been stationary since they attained the age of puberty: they exhibit scarcely a single trace of a reason accustomed to observe human affairs, to analyze their combinations, or follow their consequences.’ Surely such incapacity was the mark of a ‘defective turn of mind’ (AR 1827, 420). To make matters worse, the United Provinces of the River Plate were ‘involved in the most embarrassing financial difficulties.’ The foundation of a national bank was ‘followed almost immediately

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204 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 by a declaration of its inability to meet its engagements, and by a suspension of cash payments’ (392). Of the national bank failure, the Annual Register observed, ‘It added not a little to the singularity of the transaction, that this . . . should have occurred in the very region of gold and silver, and in a state whose very name, in some measure, connects it with metallic wealth’ (392–3). The situations in other regions of Spanish America were even less promising. ‘Financial embarrassment, disregard of public credit, and internal dissention, manifested themselves still more distinctly in Colombia’ (394). Peru, which Colombia had materially aided in its struggle for independence and from which it expected due remuneration, was in financial disarray and, unable to negotiate a new loan in London and therefore unable to pay the interest on its previous debt, plunged into lawlessness and corruption, pulling Colombia down along with it (403–5, 414–15). When the May and July dividends of the Colombian loan came due, the sums that ‘had been collected for the purpose of being sent to Europe’ were ‘applied to other purposes in violation of the law’ (405–6). Chilean bondholders in London were soon disappointed of their revenue in similar fashion (418). The outlook was indeed bleak. As the Annual Register concluded its summary of the year, ‘throughout the South American States there was little that was promising . . . every where reigned disunion and uncertainty, theoretical symmetry, and practical confusion. In none of them could any man feel the least confidence that what existed to-day would exist tomorrow’ (419). Romantic-era Britain’s longstanding romance with Spanish America was, it seemed, officially dead. III. British Conquistadors and Spanish Capitalists By troping the death of a Spanish conquistador in North America and the decimation of the Guaraní in Paraguay as properly British calamities, The Forest Sanctuary and A Tale of Paraguay continue the strategies of earlier British treatments of Spanish America. Works such as Helen Maria Williams’s Peru (1784), John Thelwall’s The Incas (1792), Samuel Morton’s Columbus (1792), Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s Pizarro (1799), and Robert Southey’s Madoc (1805) identified the Briton with the Spanish American through the nationalist rhetoric of victimization, according to which sincerity and vulnerability are the guarantors of morally legitimate political power. But while The Forest Sanctuary and A Tale of Paraguay recall such proprietary gestures of identification, they deviate from works such as Peru and

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Pizarro by presenting the devastation of America as irremediable by British authority. Gone are the glorious hopes of Britain’s complete commercial penetration of an independent Spanish America that had underwritten Williams’s and Sheridan’s texts. By 1825, these hopes had been realized and, rather than stimulating the British economy, they seemed to have precipitated its collapse. During the year of Britain’s worst financial catastrophe in over a century, the narrative by which Spanish American victimization stood tacitly for British imperial dominance must indeed have been worn very thin. Ironically, Britain’s fascination with Spanish America came to a grinding halt at the precise moment of its long-awaited consummation. The consequence of this disappointment was not only disenchantment with Spanish America, but also with Britain’s policy of informal empire in the region. Rueful commentators scorned the arrogance of their earlier speculation, and in a stunning volte face even suggested that Spanish protectionism had been less harmful than British free trade. As one writer for the Quarterly Review assessed the situation: Much had been said of the monopolies by which, under the Spanish colonial system, European goods were rendered to the consumers at enormously high prices. We suspect those evils to have been over stated, and believe they arose more from the extent of capitals in classes of individuals, than from any regulations of the government. They more resembled the monopoly enjoyed by the brewers and distillers of London, than that which the laws have conferred, in the case of tea, on the East-India Company. (QR, January 1824, 464)

In fact, the same writer maintained, colonial monopoly offered freer trade to Spanish America than the official free trade system of the new republics. ‘The situation of trade in Chili does not seem to be bettered by the introduction of this boasted freedom which the republicans have bestowed upon it,’ he argued, bemoaning the fact that ‘[t]he same influence which was exercised by individual capitalists is now exercised by those at the head of affairs’ (464). With these words, the Quarterly Review effectively converted the long-berated Spanish monopoly system into a more familiar series of local ventures by individual capitalists. Whereas throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the Spanish American revolutions were justified according to the economic principles they shared with Britain, now those same revolutions were denounced

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206 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 as commercially retrograde and authoritarian. Defeated by its own commercial enlightenment, Britain now transferred to its Spanish American allies the stigma of economic backwardness it had once applied to their Spanish tyrants. By contrast with the maligned Spanish American republicans, the former Spanish colonialists emerged as a lost population to be mourned. Basil Hall opined that ‘the sinking race of Spaniards’ in America are far better informed men, more industrious, and more highly bred than the natives in general. As merchants they are active, enterprising, and honourable in their dealings . . . They are much less tainted with bigotry than the natives; they are men, taken generally, of pleasing conversation and manners, and habitually obliging to all. (Hall, II. 285)

The Quarterly Review echoed these sentiments: ‘These men were not only possessed of the capital, but of what intellect and commercial integrity was to be found in those countries . . . All of them were in succession stripped of the wealth which they possessed, and in many instances they were first either secretly or openly put to death, without even the shadow of a trial’ (QR, January 1824, 466). Whereas in previous years, British writers had depicted the native and creole inhabitants of Spanish America as the victims of Spanish prejudice and unjust persecution, now the roles were reversed. And Britain, as we have seen throughout this study, was ever ready to take the side of the victim – that is, when that side corresponded with its own interests. Popular entertainments of the day also suggest parallels, not between patriotic Britons and revolutionary Spanish Americans, but rather between British and Spanish imperialists.61 Under the guise of a conquest-era Mexican set-piece, James Robinson Planché’s Cortez presents a thinly veiled allegory of contemporary British speculation in Spanish America. The play opens with a chorus of Spaniards attempting to flee their Mexican foes and retreat to Cuba. Cortez’s farrier Sancho explains the reason for this intended flight in terms that directly echo the sentiments of disillusioned investors in Mexican mines: ‘Cortez promised us gold for the gathering – dainty gathering truly! marry, an’ I am to purchase booty at the expense of my brains.’62 Indeed, ‘gold for the gathering’ was precisely what British companies such as the vaunted Real del Monte Mining Association had promised. And like the speculators the New Times had deemed

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‘insane,’ Sancho had good reason to lament that he must obtain his promised loot ‘at the expense of [his] brains.’ To Sancho’s complaint, the soldier Diego answers with a tellingly dark off-repetition of the familiar stock solicitation: ‘’Twill cost thee next to nothing . . . but silence’ (Planché, I, i, 2). Another dissenter, Velasquez de Leon, joins in: ‘Cortez has deceived us. Must we be sacrificed to his ambition and imprudence? What can a handful of men effect against millions?’ (I, i, 2). In this response, Velasquez refigures the millions of ‘vastly underrated’ obstacles besetting the new mining companies as ‘millions’ of native adversaries (Dawson, 112). And the sanguinary Cortez, in his role as overzealous mining company director, casts a harsh light on the ostensibly enlightened humanitarianism of British activity in Spanish America. Assembling his timorous followers, he argues: Have you scarcely found footing in this fairy region, where spring for ever reigns upon the earth, and summer wantons in the air? Whose rivers, shaming Lydian Pactolus, have waves of silver rolling over sands of gold? And do you start thus early at the mere dream of danger . . . The eyes of the old world are upon you; the new one is in your grasp . . . Cortez will share . . . his wealth with none but the enterprising. (Planché, I, i, 16)63

Like the unreflecting investors who cast in their lots under the sway of persuasion, Cortez’s men rally to his banner, crying: ‘We’ll follow Cortez! . . . Yes! we swear it. We’ll swear any thing!’ (I, i, 16). Audiences must have smiled with bitter recognition at the retrograde imperialism of Planché’s modern-day speculator when Cortez announced to his restive followers, ‘I will plant [the cross] in triumph, amid the ruins of idolatry; I will overturn yonder horrible altars, red with the blood of human victims, my cause is that of glory and the true faith’ (I, i, 3). After all, was not the cause of British capitalists in Spanish America also that of ‘glory’ and the new ‘true faith?’ Despite the early dissension of his men, Cortez (and with him, the promise of South American investment) ultimately manages to win an unlikely, last-minute victory. Deviating conspicuously from his ‘faithfully followed’ historical sources, Planché closes his play with the bloodless reconciliation of Montezuma and Cortez (‘Advertisement,’ unpaginated). As Montezuma welcomes the Spaniards into his city, he complacently declares, ‘Brave General . . . I accept the embassy of the King who sends you, and lay my empire at his feet’ (III, v, 49–50).64 And lest viewers miss the purport of

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208 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 this victory as the vindication of their speculative ventures, Planché renders the message unmistakable by stressing that Cortez eschews Montezuma’s proffered conquest in favor of open commerce. Cortez thanks Montezuma for his offer, but insists that Spain desires only ‘to open a communication between the two monarchies, and join in lasting amity their respective rulers’ (III, v, 50). Cortez’s claim that he comes to Mexico in order to establish a mutually beneficial exchange between Spain and the New World ingeniously resists the distinction between Spanish conquest and British informal empire. But while the conqueror’s success implies that of contemporary investment in Spanish America, the counter-factualism of that success places a distinct strain on the play’s encouraging message. Informed viewers would undoubtedly have noticed Planché’s unfaithfulness to the historical record. They had only to continue the metaphor according to which British informal imperialism recapitulates Spanish conquest in order to conclude that Planché’s happy ending was a misrepresentation, both of Cortés’s military invasion and, more importantly, of Britain’s economic penetration of Spanish America. William Bullock’s Mexican Exhibition of the following year continued Planché’s strategy of troping speculation as conquest.65 Bullock’s use of the word ‘enterprise’ in praise of ‘[t]he ardour and enterprise of the British merchant’ particularly recalls Planché’s description of Cortez’s Mexican conquest as ‘enterprizing’ (Bullock, Descriptive, iv; Planché, I, i, 16). Bullock’s rhetoric also repeats that of the Spanish chroniclers themselves, a gesture that serves to emphasize the continuity between British and Spanish imperialism. Just as Bernal Díaz del Castillo (the eyewitness observer of Cortés’s Mexican campaign) attends carefully to the produce of Mexico and is eager to aver the reality of his claims, ‘minutely detail[ing] every article exposed for sale in [Mexico’s] great market’ and insisting that ‘what I have stated is a fact,’ so too Bullock notes that all of the ‘produce’ in his display is ‘indeed reality’ (Bullock, Descriptive, 5–6).66 Reiterating, at times almost verbatim, Díaz’s account of ancient Mexico’s ‘majestic . . . temples, towers, and houses,’ Bullock remarks on the modern city’s ‘beautiful churches, palaces, and noble streets’ (Díaz, I. 219; Bullock, Descriptive, 5). By borrowing the Spaniards’ descriptions of their encounter with ancient Mexico to ‘justify and corroborate’ his own observations on modern Mexico, Bullock creates a historical and discursive continuity by which contemporary Britain is the improver and continuator of the Spanish conquest.67 As Bullock enthusiastically comments, ‘Mexico, the unreal El Dorado of Elizabethan times,

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seems destined to become, in our day, really what it was pictured centuries ago’ (Bullock, Modern, 3; italics in original).68 Yet as the works of Hemans and Southey suggest, modern Britain’s resemblance to sixteenth-century Spain was not ultimately as auspicious as Planché and Bullock might have liked to imagine. Despite the critical expositions of modern Spanish America offered by writers such as Graham, Hall, and Schmidtmeyer, many Britons went to capitalize on the region without the slightest interest in or knowledge of its real conditions. Indeed, William Robertson’s comment that the Spanish conquerors ‘undertook their expedition in quest of one object [‘plunder’], and seemed hardly to have turned their eyes toward any other’69 might have been applied with equal justice to the members of the General South American or the Potosi, La Paz and Peruvian Mining Associations, those British entities which, as Dawson asserts, came to ‘replace the Spaniards as conquistadores’ (Dawson, 3; italics in original). To be sure, with the bursting of the Spanish American bubble, Britons were forced to acknowledge the ways in which their devastation resembled, not that of the Spanish Americans, but rather that of Spanish America’s conquerors. A pathetic letter reprinted in the Morning Chronicle – that one-time champion of Spanish American speculation – exemplified the tragedy. In January 1826, one ruined man wrote that he had purchased Peruvian bonds at their highest price, only to watch them fall and crash. ‘[U]nless some remittances come from Peru before next April,’ he worried, ‘nothing can be looked for.’70 When April came, Peru suspended payments on its loan. The anonymous investor signed himself ‘Pizarro.’ As this British ‘Pizarro’ realized all too well, the concomitant collapse of Spain’s and Britain’s dominance in Spanish America had effectively dissolved the opposition between informal and formal imperialism. NOTES

1. Quennell, 282. 2. Although some of this investment can certainly be attributed to liberal enthusiasm for the cause of the Spanish American revolutions, most speculators had more mercenary motives. As Calvin Jones observes, ‘Most of the English purchasers had not bought these bonds issued by the South American republics because of any desire to establish or protect their independence, nor on account of any sympathy for these states. Bonds or stocks issued by any country or company were purchased without any question being asked concerning their political ambitions or affiliations’ (Jones, 238, 240).

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210 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 3. Fodor, 22. Beyond those cited in this study, there are a number of useful historical studies treating nineteenth-century British investment in Spanish America. See Daniel Bushnell and Neill Macaulay, The Emergence of Latin America in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994); Leland Hamilton Jenks, The Migration of British Capital to 1875 (London: J. Cape, 1938); Oliver Marshall (ed.), EnglishSpeaking Communities in Latin America (London: Palgrave, 2000); D. C. M. Platt, Latin America and British Trade, 1806–1914 (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1972); and Fred J. Rippy, British Investment in Latin America: A Case Study in the Operations of Private Enterprise in Retarded Regions (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1959). 4. Dawson notes, ‘despite the high taxation and sales price, and the devotion of nearly a third of the usual four pages to advertising, Latin American items frequently occupied over 20 per cent of the total columns devoted to news reports’ (Dawson, 12). 5. Quoted in Dawson, 29. 6. MC, 4 December 1823, 2. 7. Quoted in Head, 143; italics in original. 8. NT, 14 October 1822, 2. Whig periodicals such as the Morning Chronicle and the London Magazine generally supported the Spanish American revolutions in the belief that independence would increase British trade in the region. By contrast, Tory periodicals such as Blackwood’s and the New Times opined that the revolutionary wars hurt Britain’s existing trade and predicted that independence would destroy British prospects of stable and ongoing trade with Spanish America by unleashing social chaos. As early as 1822, however, even some liberal periodicals aired concerns about speculation in Spanish American markets. See LM, April 1822, 59, and September 1822, 34–5. 9. In addition to coverage in the periodical press, the 1820s saw the publication of numerous essays and books on mining in Mexico. For an overview, see Robert W. Randall, Real del Monte: A British Mining Venture in Mexico (Austin: U of Texas P, 1972). 10. MC, 29 October 1823, 2. 11. Courier, 18 June 1825, 4. 12. Vision of the Sun, I, i, 19, 20, 3, 6. Citations refer to act, scene, and page number(s). See also Augusta; Or, The Blind Girl (1823). 13. Bullock, Descriptive, title page, 9. 14. Writing of this ‘very amusing’ exhibit, Dorothy Wordsworth noted that the Mexican native was ‘not the least interesting object’ (Wordsworth, Letters, I. 141). 15. Bullock, Modern, 13–14, 17, 19, 23, 25–7; italics in original. 16. Southey’s niece Sara Coleridge was the translator of Dobrizhoffer’s Account. Southey warmly writes of the work, ‘Perhaps there is no other [Jesuit publication] which gives so full and picturesque an account of

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17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

24.

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savage life; it has a liveliness, an originality, a freshness which makes even garrulity attractive’ (Southey, ‘Review,’ 278). In 1812, Southey wrote to James Burney regarding his knowledge of Spanish America, ‘I know more about it, in all likelihood, than any, or perhaps all, other persons in England’ (Southey, NL, II. 22). Hemans, Forest, 296n. Chorley, I. 105. Southey, NL, II. 102. Bewell, 98. J. H. Williams, 343. The United Provinces of the Río de la Plata, dominated by Buenos Aires, refused to respect the independence of Paraguay and, in order to punish the wayward province, imposed exorbitant taxes on their exports. John Hoyt Williams explains, ‘In an attempt to coerce Paraguay economically and bring it to its knees, Buenos Aires only stiffened Paraguayan nationalism and produced a voluntary, xenophobic isolation of the breakaway province’ (343). Southey appears to have been curiously unsympathetic to the contemporary struggles of the Paraguayans. Writing of Dobrizhoffer’s Account, he notes disparagingly that it contains ‘much incidental information concerning the state of the Spanish inhabitants, – who had certainly not improved in any respect when Azara wrote his account of the country, forty years afterwards . . . It is yet to be seen whether the civilizing influence which Buenos-Ayres, as a great and free commercial city, may exercise over the interior, will be able to counteract the tendency of barbarous independence’ (Southey, ‘Review,’ 323). Southey refers to Félix de Azara’s Voyage dans l’Amérique méridionale, contenant la description géographique, politique, et civile du Pargauay et de la rivière de la Plata. (4 vols. Paris, 1809). Quoted in Gregory, 11. Eduardo Galeano asserts that most histories of Paraguay are marred by ‘[t]he optical distortions imposed by liberalism.’ By contrast, he argues, ‘[u]ntil its destruction, Paraguay stood out as a Latin American exception – the only country that foreign capital had not deformed. The long, iron-fisted dictatorship of Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia . . . had incubated an autonomous, sustained development process in the womb of isolation . . . There were no great private fortunes when Francia died, and Paraguay was the only Latin American country where begging, hunger, and stealing were unknown; travelers of the period found an oasis of tranquillity amid areas convulsed by continuous wars’ (Galeano, 207–8). The Annual Register and the New Monthly Magazine offer two exceptions to the general silence of the British press regarding Paraguay. The New Monthly briefly reported (three years after his detention) that Francia had captured Aimé de Bonpland (NMM, October 1824, 447–8). In its historical digest for the year 1824, the Annual Register merely

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25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

stated: ‘Francia retained his power in Paraguay, where he adhered to his system of excluding all commerce with foreigners’ (AR 1825, 231). The following year, the Annual informed its readers that ‘the power of doctor Francia continued to be absolute,’ that ‘he took steps for the abolition of monastic establishments within his province,’ but that ‘[t]he influence of Mr. Parish’s representations [had] induced him to deviate from his extraordinary system of detaining every foreigner whom he found within his limits’ (AR 1826, 216). In its 1827 issue, the Annual Register commented that in Paraguay ‘the spirit of provincialism prevailed in a higher degree than even in any other part of South America. Partly from this circumstance – partly from their secluded and inland situation – and partly from the inconsiderable progress which they had made in any species of improvement or industry, – the Paraguayans were little affected by the convulsions of the surrounding countries.’ The Annual called Francia the ‘enemy of all republics,’ explaining that ‘[h]is system of policy was, to prevent, as far as possible, any intercourse with foreign countries; thereby at once confirming his own power, and flattering the prejudices of the Paraguayans, who conceive themselves to be a chosen race, superior to the rest of mankind’ (AR 1827, 391). ‘So pertinaciously,’ the article continued, ‘did he adhere to this non-intercourse system, that a foreigner who was found within the limits of Paraguay was seldom permitted to quit it at his pleasure. He applied himself sedulously to the improvement of his military forces, and was a determined enemy of Buenos Ayres, who looked upon Paraguay as part of their own possessions, and on Francia as a rebel, or at least an usurper . . . Bonpland, the French naturalist, had been detained for several years at Assumption, the ordinary fate of scientific travellers who imprudently trusted themselves in the power of Francia; for such persons he uniformly detained, from no other apparent motive than to keep the rest of the world in ignorance of the state of his own sovereignty’ (391–2). Unless otherwise noted, citations refer to canto, stanza, and line number(s). Keats, ‘Ode,’ ll. 14, 11, 25–6. Keats, ‘Letter,’ 295. Irving, Bracebridge, I. 138. J. M. Anderson, 71. Kelly, 208. Hemans’s objective in emptying and interiorizing her forest landscape was also a Protestant one, calculated to impugn what Hemans perceived as Catholic materialism. According to Hemans’s narrator, Catholicism ‘strives to bind / With [its] strong chains to earth, what is not earth’s – the mind,’ in flagrant denial of the fact that the light of true faith is ‘too bright’ for gaudy pomp and ceremony (Hemans, Forest, II. iv. 31,

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32.

33. 34. 35.

36. 37.

38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

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35–6). Remembering the Protestant martyr Theresa as she ascended the pyre of the Inquisition, the narrator thus approvingly reflects that her ‘glad soul from earth was purified’ (I. xxxviii. 340). Given the contemporary context, Hemans’s and Southey’s portrayals of America as an empty space differ crucially from earlier eighteenthcentury works that defended British colonialism ‘in terms of one or another variant on the Roman Law argument known as res nullius. This maintained that all “empty things,” which included unoccupied lands, remained the common property of all mankind until they were put to some, generally agricultural, use. The first person to use the land in this way became its owner’ (Pagden, Lords, 76; italics in original). AR 1825, 3. Southey, Tale, I. xxix. Unless otherwise noted, citations refer to canto and stanza number. Tim Fulford has argued that Southey’s Tale was ‘designed to promote missionary colonialism as a model Britain should follow in its own empire.’ But if Southey’s Tale strives to produce a version of Christian colonialism that would rectify the misdeeds of rapacious empirebuilding, that goal is significantly undermined by the fact that ‘the missionary colonialism which Southey supported is seen,’ like the commercial slavery Southey abhorred, ‘to bring about the Indians’ deaths’ (Fulford, ‘Blessed,’ para. 4). Raynal, IV. 8. 234–9. Citations give volume, book, and page number(s). Simpson, 23. Simpson provides the subtext for this statement earlier in his essay: ‘Jesuit generosity is itself enabled only by the military conquest of the Guaranis by the Spaniards; it works to compensate for the very violence that makes its own good intentions both possible and necessary, and it is also itself an important agent of colonial settlement’ (Simpson, 21). Hemans’s and Southey’s texts participate in what Patrick Brantlinger calls ‘extinction discourse,’ or the European discourse according to which the disappearance of ‘primitive races’ was understood as ‘inevitable’ (Brantlinger, 1). Brantlinger comments, ‘Savagery . . . was frequently treated as self-extinguishing. The fantasy of auto-genocide or racial suicide is an extreme version of blaming the victim, which throughout the last three centuries has helped to rationalize or occlude the genocidal aspects of European conquest and colonization’ (2). Sweet, 179. Ross, 294. Goslee, 243. Hemans, Greece, lix. 581–2. Citations give stanza and line number(s). Hemans, Restoration, ll. 309–10. Southey’s rather morbid use of the word ‘pall’ to characterize the verdure of ‘Mother Earth’ casts some doubt on the notion that the

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214 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 Guaranís’ death is counterbalanced by organic rebirth. 45. In his insistence on native non-reproductiveness in the mission, Southey takes an important liberty with his source text. In his review of Dobrizhoffer’s Account, Southey himself notes that although the native population ‘was on the whole declining’ in the Jesuit reductions, it was also ‘increasing in some of these settlements’ (Southey, ‘Review,’ 286). 46. Southey writes to his daughter Edith May, ‘How have I doted on thine infant smiles / At morning, when thine eyes unclosed on mine’ (Southey, Tale, ‘Dedication,’ 5). 47. Bernhardt-Kabisch, 97. 48. Southey, SL, III. 184–5. 49. Southey, Colloquies, I. 57–8. 50. Blackwood’s, October 1819, 109. 51. NT, 28 January 1823, 2. 52. MH, 25 July 1823, 3. The Colombian loan was transacted by Francisco Antonio Zea; Antonio José de Irisarri negotiated the Chilean loan. 53. The full extent of investors’ deception by the Rio Plata Mining Association is detailed in Francis Bond Head’s Journeys Across the Pampas and Among the Andes (1826), excerpts of which were reprinted in the London press soon after its publication. Upon its establishment, Head explains, the government of La Plata ‘had formed the design of aiding its resources by the mineral treasures of the country, and had endeavoured to allure from foreign countries the capital for working its mines which its own subjects were unable to supply . . . Its functionaries sent directions to their agents in Europe to form an association for the purpose of working the mines within its limits. This company was formed under the name of the Rio de la Plata Mining Association; the government contracted to assign to it certain mines as the subjects of its operation; the capital was subscribed; a considerable expenditure was incurred, and ultimately it turned out, that the undertaking was a hopeless enterprise, because the government which seduced the shareholders into it, had not strength enough, or honesty enough, to fulfil its own engagements. The provinces thought fit to dispose of their own mines according to their own views, and disavow the contract of the general government’ (AR 1827, 392–4). 54. NT, 19 November 1823, 2. 55. QR, January 1824, 441. The reviewer elaborates, ‘All those writers, whilst displaying the capabilities of the soil, neglected to inform us of the extent in which those capabilities had been called into action; and when describing the climate chiefly dwelt upon that which was most genial and salubrious. From such accounts, the European, who inseparably associates with such advantages the ideas of dense population and abundant production, will necessarily be misled’ (441). 56. Hall, I. 108–10.

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57. For other influential travel narratives that emphasized the unromantic conditions in Spanish America, see Joseph Andrews, Journey from Buenos Aires through the Provinces of Cordoba, Tucuman and Salta, to Potosi, thence by the Deserts of Caranja to Arica, and subsequently, to Santiago de Chile and Coquimbo, undertaken on behalf of the Chilean and Peruvian Mining Association, in the years 1825–6 (1827); J. A. B. Beaumont, Travels in Buenos Ayres, and the Adjacent Provinces of the Rio de la Plata, with Observations Intended for the Use of Persons Who Contemplate Emigrating to That Country or Embarking Capital in Its Affair (1828); and John Miers, Travel in Chile and La Plata, including accounts respecting Geography, Geology, Statistics, Government, Finances, Agriculture, Manners and Customs, and the Mining Operations in Chile. Collected during a Residence of Several Years in These Countries (1826). 58. Graham, 67. 59. AR 1826, 122–4. 60. AR 1827, 420. 61. Foreign observers were also quick to remark that Britain had functionally replaced the Spanish in America. During his service as French Foreign Minister under Louis XVIII (December 1822–August 1824), François-René Chateaubriand wrote (not without a hint of national ressentiment), ‘from the moment of their emancipation, the Spanish trans-Atlantic states have become a species of English colonies. Their new masters are not beloved, for, in point of fact, one never loves masters. British pride humiliates those whom it protects; indeed, foreign supremacy represses altogether, in the new republics, the spread of the national genius’ (Chateaubriand, II. 229). 62. Planché, I, i, 2. Citations refer to act, scene, and page number(s). 63. In The Age of Bronze (1823), Byron also compares the illusory wealth of British speculators with the real wealth of the classical world: ‘That magic palace of Alcina shows / More wealth than Britain ever had to lose, / Were all her atoms of unleavened ore, / And all her pebbles from Pactolus’ shore. / There Fortune plays, while Rumour holds the stake, / And the world trembles to bid brokers break’ (Byron, Bronze, xv. 664–9). For a detailed discussion of this passage, see Chapter 5. 64. In fact, Montezuma died a prisoner of the Spanish. Directed by Cortés, Montezuma entreated his people to desist in their war against the Spanish. William Robertson recounts: ‘When he ended his discourse, a sullen murmur of disapprobation ran through the ranks; to this succeeded reproaches and threats; and the fury of the multitude rising in a moment above every restraint of decency or respect, flights of arrows and volley of stones poured in so violently upon the ramparts, that before the Spanish soldiers, appointed to cover Montezuma with their bucklers, had time to lift them in his defence, two arrows wounded the

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65.

66.

67. 68.

unhappy monarch, and the blow of a stone on his temple struck him to the ground . . . The Spaniards without molestation carried Montezuma to his apartments, and Cortes hastened thither to console him under his misfortune. But the unhappy monarch now perceived how low he was sunk; and . . . scorned to survive this last humiliation, and to protract an ignominious life, not only as the prisoner and tool of his enemies, but as the object of contempt or detestation among his subjects. In a transport of rage he tore the bandages from his wounds, and refused, with such obstinacy, to take any nourishment, that he soon ended his wretched days’ (W. Robertson, II. 5. 15–16). Citations refer to volume, book, and page number(s). Robert Aguirre emphasizes, by contrast with this argument, that Bullock’s exhibition opposed ‘the Spanish model of violent military domination’ to ‘the British model of gentlemanly, informal, and “reciprocal” engagements’ (Aguirre, 22). Bullock celebrates ‘the reciprocal advantages’ attending ‘an intercourse of the most liberal and extended nature between the Mexican and British nations’ (Bullock, Descriptive, iii). He condemns the Spanish conquerors as ‘a band of desperate adventurers’ and their colonialist descendents as ‘oppressive, yet indolent task-masters,’ claiming that Mexico ‘wanted but the fostering hand of a free, enlightened, and enterprising European nation, to raise them to that rank, which in every political point of view, their situation so well entitled them to enjoy’ (19, iv). Bullock then triumphantly asserts that Britain is that ‘protecting power’ (iv). Díaz, I. 236. Anthony Pagden defines such truth-telling discourse according to the rhetorical category of ‘autopsy:’ ‘It is the appeal to the authority of the eye witness, to the privileged understanding which those present at an event have over those who have only read or been told about it’ (Pagden, European, 51). By reiterating the Spanish insistence on veracity, Bullock works to vindicate the validity of the chronicles’ glowing tales of Mexico after their repudiation by Enlightenment-era historians, particularly William Robertson. The accounts of Mexico given by its conquerors, Robertson wrote in 1777, were but ‘the inquiries of illiterate soldiers . . . conducted with so little sagacity and precision’ that the end results are ‘superficial, confused, and inexplicable’ (W. Robertson, II. 7. 146). Taking direct aim at such statements, Bullock writes, ‘no author is more mistaken than our illustrious Robertson, whose well written volume contains no information on the former state of America’ (Bullock, Ancient, 6). Bullock, Ancient, 8. After asserting the parallels between his own information-gathering ‘enterprise’ in Mexico and that of Díaz, Bullock extends the parallel to the British viewing public, who will imminently need such information ‘in so far as our new relations [with Mexico] are about to be actively

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cultivated’ (Bullock, Descriptive, 21; Bullock, Modern, 5). In this way, British audiences become sharers in the imperial project of discovery as they gaze upon the modern produce and ancient artifacts of Mexico. 69. W. Robertson, II. 7. 146. 70. MC, 10 January 1826, 3.

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Periodicals The Annual Register. 1825–7. Cited as AR. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. October 1819. The British Critic. July–December 1813. Cited as BC. The British Magazine and Review; or, Universal Miscellany. November 1783. Cited as BM. The Courier. 18 June 1825. The Critical Review; or, Annals of Literature. 1776, 1777, 1815. Cited as CR. Literary Magnet of the Belles Lettres, Science, and the Fine Arts. 1825. Cited as LMBL. The London Magazine; or, Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer. December 1779, March 1780, October 1781, November 1781, April 1783, October 1783. Cited as LM. The Monthly Review. January–June 1778, January–April 1812. Cited as MR. The Morning Chronicle. 23 July 1810, 29 October 1823, 4 December 1823, 10 January 1826. Cited as MC. The Morning Herald, 25 July 1823. Cited as MH. The Morning Post and Daily Advertiser. 17 November 1780. Cited as MP. The New Annual Register; or, General Repository of History, Politics, and Literature, for the Year 1819. 1820. Cited as NA. The New Monthly Magazine. October 1824. Cited as NMM. The New Times. 14 October 1822, 28 January 1823, 19 November 1823. Cited as NT. The Political Herald and Review; or, A Survey of Domestic and Foreign Politics. 1785. Cited as PH.

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230 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 Fulford, Tim. ‘Poetic Hells and Pacific Edens.’ Romanticism on the Net 32–3 (2003). Fulford, Tim. Romantic Indians: Native America, British Literature, and Transatlantic Culture. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. Fulford, Tim. ‘Romanticism and colonialism: races, places, peoples, 1800– 1830,’ in Timothy Fulford and Peter J. Kitson (eds). Romanticism and Colonialism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 35–47. Fulford, Tim and Peter J. Kitson. ‘Romanticism and colonialism: texts, contexts, issues,’ in Timothy Fulford and Peter J. Kitson (eds). Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780–1830. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 1–12. Furbank, P. N. Diderot: A Critical Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992. Galeano, Eduardo. Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. Trans. Cedric Belfrage. New York and London: Monthly Review P, 1973. Gallagher, John and Ronald Robinson. ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade.’ The Economic History Review 6:1 (1953): 1–15. Gerzina, Gretchen. Black London: Life Before Emancipation. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1995. Goebel, Dorothy Burne. ‘British Trade to the Spanish Colonies, 1796–1823.’ The American Historical Review 43:2 (1938): 288–320. Goslee, Nancy Moore. ‘Hemans’s “Red Indians:” Reading Stereotypes,’ in Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh (eds). Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780–1834. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1996. 237–61. Grases, Pedro. ‘Britain and Hispanic Liberalism, 1800–1830,’ in John Lynch (ed.). Andrés Bello: The London Years. Richmond, Surrey: Richmond Publishing Co., 1982. 83–98. Green, David Bonnell. ‘Three New Byron Letters.’ Keats-Shelley Journal 5 (1956): 97–101. Gregory, Desmond. Brute New World: The Rediscovery of Latin America in the Early Nineteenth Century. London: I. B. Tauris, 1993. Grieder, Josephine. ‘Marmontel’s Prose Fiction on the English Stage.’ Enlightenment Essays 4:1 (1973): 46–59. Gross, Jonathan David. Byron: The Erotic Liberal. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001. Guilhamet, Leon. The Sincere Ideal: Studies on Sincerity in EighteenthCentury English Literature. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1974. Hadley, Karen. ‘“The Wealth of Nations,” or “The Happiness of Nations”? Barbauld’s Malthusian Critique in “Eighteen Hundred and Eleven.”’ College Language Association Journal 45: 1 (September 2001): 87–96. Halévy, Élie. A History of the English People in 1815. London: T. F. Unwin, 1924.

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INDEX

Acapulco, 38 Ackermann, Rudolf, 185 Addison, Joseph, story of Inkle and Yarico (with Steele), 47–8, 48 Africa, 2, 3, 35, 50 Aguirre, Robert, 216n Alembert, Jean le Rond d’, 187 allegories, 63, 72–3, 80, 206 Allen, John, 179–80n Almagro, Diego de, 88n American War of Independence Burke’s anti-imperial sentiments, 121n ‘Amintor’ (poet), 69n Anderson, Benedict, 53 Anderson, John M., 190 Angostura, 149 Annual Register, 160, 183, 187, 191, 202–4, 211–12n Antepara, José María, 152n anti-French sentiment creole patriots, 134 Sheridan, 18, 79, 81–2 anti-imperialism Byron, 22–3, 173, 177 Sheridan’s Pizarro, 78, 82–3, 84 in Thelwall’s The Incas, 73, 74 and Viscardo’s conservative nationalism, 85 Anti-Jacobin Review, 80

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anti-Spanish sentiment in literature of early nineteenth century, 144–6 see also Black Legend Antilles, 122n Aragonese Constitution, 76, 135 Aranda, Pedro Pablo Abarca de Bolea, Conde de, 66n Araucan Indians, 120 Aravamudan, Srinivas, 29–30n, 32n aristocratic reformism, 135–6 aristocracy, and Byron’s uneasy situation, 23, 170, 171–3, 173–4, 175–6, 177 Armitage, David, 101 Ataliba, King of the Incas, in literary works, 11, 42–3, 53, 60, 72, 141 Auckland, William Eden, 1st Baron, 4 Australia, 2 Austrian empire, 97 Aztecs legend of origins, 116 as portrayed by Raynal and Robertson, 7–8, 48 in Southey’s Madoc, 19–20, 100, 106, 115–16, 120, 127–8n Bancroft, George, 166, 176 Bank of England, 202

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238 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 bankers/banking in Byron’s The Age of Bronze, 167, 171 firms supporting independence movements, 22 United Provinces of the River Plate, 203–4 Barbauld, Anna Letitia Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812), 21, 141, 142–4, 145, 160 ‘Groans of the Tankard’ (1773), 64 Bardsley, Samuel Argent, 91n Barfoot, C. C., 78 Barker-Benfield, G. J., 62 Barlow, Joel The Columbiad (1807), 138, 178n The Vision of Columbus (1787), 100 Battliori, Miguel, 86, 91n Bedford, Horace Walpole, 98–9 Bell, John, The Poets of Great Britain (1777), 59 Bello, Andrés, 134, 151n, 155n benevolent colonialism and Britain’s Spanish American activities, 93 Burke’s rhetoric of, 95, 98 Incas in Marmontel’s Les Incas, 141, 147 narratives of, 13, 35, 50, 84 vision dismantled in Southey’s A Tale of Paraguay, 193 Bentham, Jeremy, 161, 179n Berkeley, George, 143 Bernhardt-Kabisch, Ernest, 198 Bewell, Alan, 187, 199 Bhabha, Homi, 114 Black Legend, 7, 16, 95, 96, 104, 133 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 160, 177n, 199, 210n Blanco White, Joseph, 186 Board of Trade, 4 Bolívar, Simón, 148–50, 154–5n, 155n, 160, 175, 179n British soldiers’ support of his army, 22, 169

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courting of British establishment, 134, 148–9, 182n creation of Republic of Colombia, 173 criticized by Annual Register, 202–3 links with British merchants, 169, 170 marriage, 156n in Walker’s The South American, 21, 147–8 ‘Bolivar hat’, 1, 149 Bolivia, 150 Bolton, Carol, 100, 110 Bonaparte, Joseph, 134 Bonaparte, Napoleon see Napoleon I Bonpland, Aimé de, 179n, 188, 211n, 212n Botany Bay, 87, 100 Bourbons, 6, 34, 41, 168 Bowles, William Lisle, 141 The Missionary (1815), 21, 145–6, 147, 178n The Spirit of Discovery; or, The Conquest of Ocean (1804), 132, 138, 143 Boyd, Henry, 155–6n Brading, David, 78 Brantlinger, Patrick, 213n Brazil, 25–6n, 86 Brennan, Timothy, 55 Britain alliance with Spain during Peninsular War, 132, 133–4, 144 Bolívar’s courting of, 148–9, 182n casting of Spanish colonial policy as evil, 7, 104 class basis of financial involvement in Spanish America, 23 commerce and economics in policy on Spanish America, 3, 6, 25, 164–5 criticized by writers for new ties with Spain, 143–4, 144–5 cultural industry around Spanish America, 23–4, 185–6 fascination with Spanish America, 1–2, 23–4, 25, 158–9, 185–6, 205

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Index fear and repression during 1790s, 75 gaining of ascendancy in Spanish America, 35, 41, 64–5, 104 ignorance about conditions in Spanish America, 191–2, 198 impact of Marmontel’s Les Incas, 10–11 importance of Hakluyt’s history, 101 literary love affair with Spanish America, 15, 23 loss of North American colonies, 2, 11, 37 official rejection of policy of Spanish American conquest, 20 plans for invasion of Spanish American colonies, 86, 87 revolutionary creoles’ plans for gaining support, 40–1 settlements in Spanish America legitimized, 38–9 Sheridan’s criticism of, 79–80, 81–3, 83–4 speculation in Spanish American states, 183–6 stock market crash, 23, 24, 25, 150, 202, 205 support for Spanish American revolutions, 21–2, 22–3, 137, 158, 165 trade in luxuries and appropriation of cultures, 115 unity with Spanish America through Napoleonic aggression, 135–6 vision of kinship with Spanish Americans, 7, 15, 49, 79 writers’ patriotic linkage with Spanish America, 17, 18, 51–2, 53–4, 60, 79–80 Britannia, 21, 58, 59 British colonialism and commercial policy in Spanish America, 3, 4, 15–16, 36–9 India, 2, 82 in language of poetry, 62–3 Sheridan’s criticisms, 18, 82

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[ 239

British constitution as creoles’ model for Spanish America, 87, 149 Price and Viscardo on failure of, 76 British Critic, 146 British Empire, 2 Burke’s views, 95, 121n ‘informal empire’ in Spanish America, 2–3, 25, 88, 96, 113, 177, 199, 205 origin of term, 101 Thomson’s poetic portrayal, 16, 35–6 British government Foreign Office’s banning of Viscardo’s Lettre, 86 as model for Spanish America, 77 policy of repression in 1790s, 75 Sheridan’s message to, 87 British imperialism Burke’s rhetoric, 96–8 entertainments suggesting parallels with Spanish imperialism, 25, 206 and expansionism as defense, 118 Morton’s celebration of, 72 and Romanticism, 2–4, 120–1 Southey’s struggle with, 115, 198 Viscardo’s treatment of, 85–6 Williams’s view, 50–1 British Magazine and Review, 69n Britons (original), 101 Britton, John, 80 Brougham, Henry, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux, 3, 4, 151n on attraction to Spanish America (quotation), 158, 164 Buenos Aires, 4, 10, 39, 96, 150, 166, 184 Bullock, William, Mexican Exhibition (1824–5), 24, 185–6, 208–9 Burges, James Bland, 89n Burke, Edmund, 7, 38, 82, 90n, 107, 121n criticism of British colonialism, 94–5, 96–8, 103

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240 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 Burke Edmund (cont.) impeachment proceedings against Hastings, 19, 78, 94, 94–5 influence on Southey, 98, 107, 113, 115, 119 Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), 62, 76, 77 on Welsh as ‘Englishmen’, 102 Burke, William, 89n, 135, 138, 152n Additional Reasons for our immediately emancipating Spanish America (1808), 137 Burney, James, 211n Butt, John, 56 Byron, George Gordon, 6th Baron The Age of Bronze (1823), 161–2, 163–4, 167–8, 168, 171, 175, 215n Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18), 162, 166 class identity, 23, 170, 171–3, 173–4, 175–6, 177 The Curse of Minerva (1811–12), 155n, 173 Don Juan (1819–24), 166–7, 168, 175 exposure of link between Britain’s foreign and commercial policies, 168–9 hostility to British speculation, 23, 166–7, 167–8, 168, 170 interest in Spanish American independence movements, 22–3, 160–2 The Island (1823), 162, 164, 173, 175 plan to emigrate to Venezuela, 22, 23, 159, 160, 161, 162, 164, 169, 170, 172–4 reading on subject of Spanish America, 159–60 Byron, Commodore John (Lord Byron’s grandfather), 177n Cain, P. J., 26n, 181n, 182n Cannadine, David, 182n Canning, George, 4, 182n, 184

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capitalism, 28n, 182n, 198 Caracas, 1, 147, 149, 158 Caraccas Gazette, 153n Caribbean islands, 3, 26n Carlson, Julie, 85 Caro, Pedro José, 92n Carthagena, 3, 40, 66n Castilla, Mariano, 92n Castillo, Bernal Díaz del, 124, 208, 216n Castlereagh, Robert Stewart, Viscount, 3, 4, 134 Catholic Church, 64 Catholicism in Hemans’s The Forest Sanctuary, 212–13n in Southey’s Madoc, 113, 115–16 Cavendish, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, 85 Celtic periphery, 2, 19, 88 see also Ireland; Scotland; Wales/ Welsh Cevallos, Don Pedro, 151n Charles IV, King of Spain, 132, 133 Chateaubriand, François-René, 215n Chile, 1, 3, 37, 41, 83, 119, 146 dissident creoles’ proposal for, 40 impact of stock market collapse, 150, 204 Lord Cochrane as commander of navy, 160, 169 Maria Graham’s comments about, 202 and speculation frenzy, 184, 205 Christianity in Rogers’s Voyage of Columbus, 139–40 in Southey’s Madoc, 107, 109–10, 116–18 and Spanish colonialism, 94, 95 civilization Barbauld’s treatment of, 142–3, 144, 145 and Burke’s view of India, 97–8 and writers’ praise of New World societies, 8, 13, 115–16, 193 class identity, Byron’s concerns, 166, 171–2, 176–7

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Index Clavigero, Francesco Saverio, 124n, 127n Cobbett, William, 80–1 Cochrane, Admiral Thomas, 10th Earl of Dundonald, 160, 169 Cochrane, Captain Charles Stuart, 149 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 88–9n, 98, 98–9, 122n Coleridge, Sara, 210n Colley, Linda, 53 Colombia, 21, 149–50, 161, 173, 184, 199, 204 colonialism and cause of Spanish American independence, 1–2 and Pantisocracy scheme, 99–100 visions of Raynal and Robertson, 5–7 Williams’s perspective, 15–16, 64 see also benevolent colonialism; British colonialism colonization Burke’s rhetoric, 97 Byron’s use of term in correspondence, 173 Diderot’s condemnation of, 30 and Madoc legend, 100–1 and writers’ use of Columbus figure, 138 Columbian Pearl Fishery Association, 184 Columbus, Christopher, 19, 150 in Hemans’s England and Spain, 133 in Marmontel’s Les Incas, 11 in Morton’s Columbus, 71, 72 writers’ and readers’ fascination with, 21, 137–8 and writers’ recasting of trope of discovery, 138–42, 148 commerce advantageous Peace Treaty concessions for Britain, 39 and Britain’s role in Spanish American revolutions, 165–6, 169–70 and British colonial policy in

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[ 241

Spanish America, 3–4, 15–16, 25, 36–9 and British vision of Spanish America, 164–5 and Byron’s political activity in Greece, 175–6 changing opinion over link with colonialism, 95–6 Marmontel’s perspective, 13, 49 and nature, 45 in Raynal’s and Robertson’s visions of colonialism, 5–7, 34, 44, 49 and territorial acquisition, 4 in Thomson’s poetic treatment of empire, 35–6 Williams’s refusal to celebrate, 16, 44–5, 47, 49 see also trade comuneros, 39, 40 Congress of Vienna (1822), 168, 171 conquest and British commercial policy regarding Spanish America, 37 perspectives of Raynal and Robertson, 34 Pitt’s policy towards, 85–6, 87 in Rogers’s The Voyage of Columbus, 141 Southey’s critique in Madoc, 93, 105–7 in Williams’s Peru, 16–17, 63–4 and writers’ use of Columbus figure, 138–41 conquistadors, 58, 63 British and Spanish, 83, 209 in Hemans’s The Forest Sanctuary, 186, 195, 204 in Sheridan’s writings, 82, 83 Cora (wife of Manco Capac), 43, 141, 147 Cortés, Eugenio, 92n Cortés, Hernán, 19, 30, 35n, 83, 115, 138, 190, 208, 215–16n in Marmontel’s Les Incas, 11 in Southey’s Madoc, 106, 117, 124n Cottle, Joseph, 197

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242 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 Courier, 183, 191 Covent Garden Theatre, 24, 70, 80, 185 Cowper, William, 104, 121n Creasy, James, 86 creoles concerns over Spain’s treatment of, 75, 76 figures in English literary works, 21 justification of revolutions, 76–8, 79, 136–7 patriots soliciting English aid, 1, 17–18, 20–1, 40, 75, 87, 132, 158 relevance of Sheridan’s Pizarro, 80 see also Grafton Street Circle Critical Review, 29n, 146 Croker, John Wilson, 150n, 154n Cruickshank, R., 203 Cuba, 52, 206 see also Havana cultural imperialism, 142, 144 cultural industry around Spanish America, 23–4, 185–6 cultural restoration, in Hemans’s The Forest Sanctuary, 194–6 cultural/intercultural identity in Southey’s Madoc, 108–9, 110–12, 113–15 in Williams’s poetry, 16, 51, 53–5 see also national identity Dalrymple, Alexander, 37 Dalrymple, Captain William, 38 Davie, John Constance, Letters from Paraguay (1805), 104, 104–5 Dawson, Frank, 151n, 210n death in Hemans’s The Forest Sanctuary, 194–6 in Southey’s A Tale of Paraguay, 196–8 Dee, John, account of Madoc legend, 100–1 Defoe, Daniel, 35, 57, 60 Devonshire, Duchess of see Cavendish, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire

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Diderot, Denis, 30n, 187 diseases, 46, 186, 193, 199 Dobrizhoffer, Martin Account of the Abipones (1821), 186, 187, 214n in Southey’s A Tale of Paraguay, 193, 193–4, 196 ‘Don Juan’ (dissident creole), 40 Donahue, Joseph, 70 drama, 24, 141–2, 185 see also plays; theatre; under specific playwrights Drury Lane Theatre, 81, 91n Dryden, John, 103 Dumett, Raymond E., 182n Dundas, Henry, 3, 87 East India Bill (Charles James Fox), 94, 95–6, 97–8 East India Company, 18, 82, 103, 113 Eclectic Review, 109 economics Britain’s interests in Spanish America, 3–4, 164 British discourse on commercial relations, 104 liberalism, 13, 23, 177 Raynal’s and Robertson’s analyses of Spanish policy, 5–7, 34 economy relevance of Viscardo’s arguments for independence, 135 stock market crash (1825), 23, 24, 25, 150, 202–4, 205 Ecuador, 173, 179n Edgeworth, Maria, 154n Edinburgh Review, 135, 151n, 160, 164–5, 165, 178n, 183 Ellice, Edward, 166, 176 Elliott, J. H., 83 empire burning question of, 2, 85 see also British Empire; British imperialism; imperialism; Spanish imperialism England/English Burke on character of, 96–7

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Index Glorious Revolution (1688), 75–6 in Hemans’s England and Spain, 132–3 and Welsh nationalism, 102–3 Enlightenment tradition egalitarianism and conquest, 110, 116 influences on Williams’s Peru, 34–5, 49 Thelwall’s The Incas, 70 use of ‘noble savage’ concept, 53 views of commerce and free trade, 45, 49 visions of benevolent colonialism, 8, 141, 193 Williams’s break with writers in, 41–2 epic romance, 34, 65n Southey’s view, 119–20 Ercilla y Zuñiga, Alonso de, La Araucana (1569–89), 119–20, 145, 156n Erdman, David V., 173–4, 174, 175 ethical conquest/empire in Burke’s speech on India, 98 in Southey’s Madoc, 114–15, 121 Europe advantages gained from monopoly trade, 3–4 Barbauld on Napoleon’s tyranny in, 144 in Burke’s speech on India, 97–8 Byron on British investment in, 168 imperial culture, 2, 194 Europeans, mythical kinship of Incas with, 11, 15, 49, 51 exchange, 2 and British idea of enlightened commerce, 44, 96 Peruvians’ natural system of, 14–15, 16, 63 expansionism British, 95, 118 Pantisocracy scheme, 99 Spanish, 142, 148

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[ 243

Fabian, Johannes, 9 Fanon, Frantz, 2 Felsenstein, Frank, 67n femininity and British national identity, 54–5 in Hemans’s The Forest Sanctuary, 195 Ferdinand VII, King of Spain, 132, 133, 134, 144, 145, 168 Ferriar, John, 109, 130n Festa, Lynn, 30n, 45, 46 finance see bankers/banking; economics; economy Florida, 26n as setting of Southey’s Madoc, 100 Fodor, Giorgio, 183 Foreign Enlistment Act (1819), 169, 170 Fox, Charles James see East India Bill France British fears of invasion by, 75 British-Spanish alliance against, 132, 137 Miranda’s turn to, 86 proposal for Bourbon rule of Spain, 168 in Sheridan’s Pizarro, 17, 18, 79, 82 trade with Spanish colonies, 35 Williams’s departure for, 57 see also anti-French sentiment; French Revolution; Napoleon I (Bonaparte) Francia, José Gaspard Rodríguez de, 188 Franco, Jean, 180–1n Franklin, Caroline, 102 free trade, 1, 4, 49 and Britain’s colonial policy on Spanish America, 16, 25, 35, 37, 38 Raynal’s view, 45 French Revolution Burke’s reflections on, 62 creole patriots’ hostility towards, 75–6, 79, 136 Sheridan’s disillusionment with, 81–2 in Thelwall’s The Incas, 72–3

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244 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 Fulford, Tim, 2, 28n, 125n, 142, 213n Galeano, Eduardo, 211n Gallagher, John, 3, 4, 27n Garcilaso de la Vega (‘El Inca’), 67–8n, 69n, 187 General South American Mining Association, 192, 209 ‘Genius’ (spirit of nation), 144, 145 genocide, ‘extinction discourse’, 213n Gentleman’s Magazine, 102 George III, King of Great Britain and Ireland, 91n, 121n Germany adaptations and translations of Les Incas, 10, 17 empire, 97 Gerzina, Gretchen, 67n Gibbon, Edward, 7 Gibraltar, 35 Gilbert, Sir Humphrey, 83 globalization, 28n Glyndwr, Owain, 101–2 Godoy, Juan José de, 40 Goebel, Dorothy Burne, 26n, 87 gold and Britain’s changing attitude to Spanish America, 64–5 and British speculation, 158, 184, 206–7 Byron’s observations on, 172 mines in Peru, 41 Rio Plata Mining Association’s claim, 184, 199 use of word in Southey’s Madoc, 106 Goldsmith, Oliver, 143 Goslee, Nancy Moore, 195 Grafton Street Circle, London, 123n, 134–6, 142, 145 Graham, Maria, 24, 166, 200–1, 202, 209 Grases, Pedro, 153n ‘Great Rebellion’ see Peruvian revolt (1780–2) Greece in Byron’s The Age of Bronze, 168

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as Byron’s choice of destination, 161–4 Byron’s political and military support for revolution, 22, 23, 160, 175, 176, 177 Green, David Bonnell, 160 Gregory, Desmond, 191 Grenville, William Wyndham, 1st Baron, 4 Gross, David, 163 Guaraní tribe, in Southey’s A Tale of Paraguay, 186, 192–3, 193, 193–4, 196–7, 199, 204 Guatemala, 150 Guiana, 2, 26n, 173 Guilhamet, Leon, 54 Gustav III, King of Sweden, 51 Gutiérrez, Elvira, 88n Gwyneddigion (Welsh nationalist group), 101 Hakluyt, Richard, Principall Navigations (1589), 101 Halévy, Élie, 151n Hall, Captain Basil, 24, 200–1, 206, 209 Hampden Club, London, 160 Hardy, Admiral Sir Thomas Masterman and Lady Louise Emily, 160 Harris, Thomas, 70, 74 Harrow School, 163 Haskell, Thomas L., 67n Hastings, Warren (Governor of Bengal), 38 acquittal of, 98, 103 impeachment proceedings against, 2, 18, 19, 78, 82, 90n, 94–5, 95 Havana, 37 Hayley, William, 120, 155n, 156n Head, Sir Francis Bond, 24 Helman, Isidor Stanislaus, 12 Hemans, Felicia, 209 England and Spain (1808), 20, 132–3, 143 The Forest Sanctuary (1825), 24, 186, 187, 188–91, 193, 194–6, 197, 204–5

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Index Modern Greece (1817), 195 poems on Spanish themes, 186–7 The Restoration of the Works of Art to Italy (1816), 195–6, 196 ‘War and Peace’ (1812), 155n Herring, Graham, and Powles (firm), 22, 159, 200 Hespero, twelfth king of Spain, 122n Hippisley, Captain Gustavus, 38 Hippisley, John, 177n Histoire philosophique et politique des Deux Indes (Raynal, 1770–80) account of indigenous peoples, 7–8, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13–14, 14–15 integrated vision of colonialism and commerce, 5, 6, 49 on Jesuit settlements in Paraguay, 187, 193 lamenting of Columbus’s landing in America, 138 on moral dangers of commerce, 45–7 on Spain’s imperial economy, 5–7, 95 and Williams’s Peru, 16, 34, 35, 41, 42, 44–5, 45, 47, 56 The History of America (Robertson, 1777), 153n, 159, 209, 215–16n, 216n account of indigenous peoples, 7–8, 8–9, 13–14, 15 integrated vision of colonialism and commerce, 5, 6 on Spain’s imperial economy, 6, 7, 95 and Williams’s Peru, 16, 34, 35, 41, 42 Hobhouse, John Cam, 159, 161, 171, 173 Hofkosh, Sonia, 2 Homer, 119 Honduras, 2, 26n, 173 Hopkins, A. G., 26n, 181n, 182n House of Lords, 174–5 humanitarianism appeal of Mill’s liberal views, 165 and authorial sensibility, 62

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Humboldt, Alexander von, 138, 141, 179n, 181n, 183, 192 hybridity, 114 Hyslop, Maxwell and Wellwood, 169, 170 Iberian Peninsula, Napoleon’s invasion, 132, 136, 144 ideologies Pantisocracy, 100 Romanticism and imperialism, 2, 3, 15 ties between creole and British patriots, 135–6 imperialism formal and informal, 3, 209 see also anti-imperialism; British imperialism; cultural imperialism; empire; Spanish imperialism Incas/Peruvians changing image after Inca revolt, 100 ‘Great Rebellion’ (1780–2), 15, 16, 37, 39 in Hemans’s The Forest Sanctuary, 190 in Marmontel’s Les Incas, 12, 13–14, 34–5 mythical kinship of Europeans with, 11, 15, 49, 51, 79 policy of benevolent conquest, 8, 141 Raynal’s and Robertson’s portrayals of, 7–8, 13–14, 14–15 in Reynolds’s The Virgin of the Sun, 141–2 in Williams’s Peru, 16, 17, 34–5, 41–4, 51, 53–4, 57, 58–60 India, 2, 3, 88, 95 and Burke’s speeches against British policy, 94, 96, 97–8 and Sheridan’s condemnation of British colonialism, 82 indigenous populations of Spanish America dissidence in early 1780s, 39–40 narrative of victimization, 204, 206

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246 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 indigenous populations (cont.) Raynal and Robertson on Spanish treatment of, 5 in Rogers’s The Voyage of Columbus, 140–1 vision of Britain’s kinship with, 7, 15, 49 see also Araucan Indians; Aztecs; Guaraní tribe; Incas/Peruvians intelligence, 41, 52–3 investment British policy regarding Spanish America, 3, 166 British speculation, 23, 183–6, 191–2 Byron’s critique of speculation, 23, 166–7, 167–8, 168, 170 and Byron’s political activity in Greece, 176 over-speculation causing crash, 199–200, 202, 209 Ireland, 18, 75 Sheridan’s criticism of English rule, 83–4 Irving, Washington, 138–9, 189–90 Italy, Byron’s involvement, 22, 160, 175 Jacob, William, 165 Jamaica, 37, 169 Jefferson, Thomas, 41 Jeffrey, Francis, 138, 151n Jenkins, Captain Robert, 58 Jesuits, 38, 40, 187, 193 ‘Jesuits Bark’, 1, 158 John Bull, 191 Johnson, Claudia, 60 Johnson, Samuel, 143, 173 Jones, Calvin, 201–2, 209n Jones, William, 101, 102 Journal of a Residence and Travels in Columbia (Cochrane, 1825), 149 Keats, John, 189 Kelly, Gary, 191, 195 Kemble, John, 85 King, John, 198

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Kinnaird, Douglas, 162, 171 Kitson, Peter, 2, 28n, 142 Knezevic, Borislav, 181n, 182n Koebner, Richard, 56 Kolodny, Annette, 125n Kotzebue, August von, 10, 17 La Plata, 3, 20, 92n, 145 Lamb, William, 84 Landor, Walter Savage, 198 Lane, Ralph, 83 Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 11, 31n, 94–5, 127n, 140–1, 154n Latin America, 3 Lautaro (Mapuche military leader), in Bowles’s The Missionary, 21, 145, 146, 147 Leask, Nigel, 100, 115 Leigh, Augusta, 170 Les Incas, ou la destruction de l’empire du Pérou (Marmontel, 1777), 12, 65, 68n appeal for British readers and writers, 9–11 characters and themes, 11–13 comment in dedication to King of Sweden, 51 on Incas’ natural commercial sensibility, 13–15, 44, 49, 60 influence on later writers, 70, 73, 79, 141, 147–8 and Williams’s Peru, 16, 34–5, 41–2 Lewis, Matthew, 10 liberalism, 13, 23, 169–70, 177 liberty and British commerce in Spanish America, 170 Burke on English and North American spirit of, 96–7 Thomson’s Liberty, 54–6, 58 writers’ defense of, 3, 21, 76–7 Lieven, Princess Dorothea, 183 Lima, 201 Liss, Peggy, 37, 40 Literary Magnet of the Belles Lettres, Science, and the Fine Arts, 149

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Index literature/writers and British infatuation with Spanish America, 15, 23 celebrating new unity of Britain and Spain, 132–4 linking Spanish imperialism and Spanish American struggle, 21, 137–44 proponents of Spanish American independence, 20–1, 141–50 Romantic writers’ engagement with imperialism, 2–4 see also plays; poetry; under specific writers Liverpool, Robert Banks Jenkinson, 2nd Earl of, 184 London arrival of Welsh nationalists, 101 Byron’s early political activities, 160, 174–5 creoles seeking support for cause, 40, 87, 132, 134 impact of stock market crash on, 202 Mexican Exhibition (Bullock), 185–6 see also Covent Garden Theatre; Grafton Street Circle London Greek Committee, 23, 161, 176, 177 London Magazine, 38–9, 44, 65, 210n López de Gómara, Francisco, 106 López Méndez, Luís, 134 Louis XVI, King of France, 81 Louisiana, 26n Loutherbourg, Philippe Jacques de, 85 Lower California, 38 Lucan, 119 Lynch, John, 87, 90–1n MacCarthy, Fiona, 163 McElderry, B. R., 162–3, 175 McFarlane, Anthony, 39 MacGregor, Gregor, 169, 192 McKusick, James, 99–100

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[ 247

Madoc (Southey, 1805) adoption of Madoc legend, 19–20, 100, 102–3, 105–8, 109–10, 118 Burkean influence, 98, 107, 113, 115 Christianity addressed in, 107, 109–10, 116–18, 117–18 compared with Rogers’s Columbus, 140, 141 intercultural comparisons/ identities, 24, 93, 103–4, 108–9, 110–12, 113–15, 118, 204 portrayal of Aztecs, 115–16 reflection of political and colonial developments, 18–19, 143 Spaniards’ arrival in, 118–19, 120 title page, 111 Welsh Indians, 19–20, 102, 118, 118–19, 119, 120 Makdisi, Saree, 28n Malinal (‘La Malinche’), in Southey’s Madoc, 117–18 Manco Capac, 43–4, 63, 99, 100, 102 Marmontel, Jean-François see Les Incas, ou la destruction de l’empire du Pérou Mavrocordato, Prince Alexander, 23, 175 May, John, 105 Meachen, Edward, 125n Medwin, Thomas, 178n Mendiola, Francisco de, 40, 90n merchants detained in Paraguay, 188 fears of Spanish American ‘bubble’ bursting, 199 and plans for British military intervention, 41, 96 rush to Spanish America in 1820s, 1, 166, 169–70 Mexican Exhibition (1824–5), 24, 185–6, 208–9 Mexicans legend of origins, 116 see also Aztecs Mexico British designs on, 3, 36, 37, 38

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248 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 Mexico (cont.) British encouragement of investment in, 184, 185 natural resources, 183, 184 official diplomatic recognition of, 184 revolution, 150 in Robertson’s and Raynal’s histories, 7–8 Mill, James, 25, 32n, 89n, 134, 135, 137, 152n, 164–5 Miller, General John, 170 minerals/mining and Byron’s concerns about own investments, 172 failure of ventures in Spanish America, 150, 200 rush to exploit Spanish American resources, 1, 22, 158, 183, 184, 192, 206–7 and Spanish economic policy, 5 see also Potosí silver mines Miranda, Francisco de, 25, 69n, 79, 83, 89n campaigning for Spanish American revolutions, 40, 108, 134, 137 and English plans for intervention in Spanish America, 77, 86, 87, 132 meetings at Grafton Street residence, 123n, 134–6 warning message from Spanish dungeon, 136 missionaries see Jesuits Molina, Juan Ignacio, Geographical, Natural and Civil History of Chili (1776), 145, 156n Montevideo, 3, 20, 92n, 96, 105 Montezuma, 215–16n in Planché’s Cortez, 207–8 Monthly Review, 10, 130n, 144 Moore, Doris Langley, 162, 170 Moore, James, Epic Poem on the Discovery of America (1798), 138 Moreau le jeune, Jean Michel, 12 Morganwg, Iolo see Williams, Edward

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Morning Chronicle, 135, 136, 160, 183, 184, 209, 210n Morning Herald, 79, 191, 199 Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, 52–3 Morton, Samuel, Columbus; or, A World Discovered (1792), 10, 17, 70, 71–2, 73, 74, 78–9, 79, 84, 204 Mosquito Coast, 1, 3, 38, 158 Mulvey, Christopher, 153n Murray, John, 165, 169, 171, 178n Nairn, Tom, 182n Napoleon I (Bonaparte) in Barbauld’s Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, 143 invasion of Iberian Peninsula, 132, 136, 144, 145 Sheridan’s references to, 17, 79, 80, 82 as threat to Spanish colonies, 18, 20, 21, 134 Nariño, Antonio, 40, 89n, 92n national identity, 53, 54–5, 56 see also cultural/intercultural identity nationalism and anti-imperialism in Viscardo’s Lettre, 85 in Morton’s and Thelwall’s plays, 70, 74 Wales and Madoc legend, 19, 101–3 Native Americans see indigenous populations of Spanish America nature and commerce, 45 in literary portrayals of Spanish America, 42–4, 44–5, 63 and nationhood, 56 Netherlands, 35 New Annual Register, 149 New Granada, 39, 40, 89n, 149–50 New Monthly Magazine, 211–12n New Times, 184, 199, 200, 206, 210n

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Index New World Byron’s enthusiasm for, 163–4 as place of death in Hemans’s The Forest Sanctuary, 194 publicity creating interest in, 192 in Rogers’s The Voyage of Columbus, 139–40 in Walton and Sarratea’s Exposé, 144 Newman, Gerard, 53, 54 newspapers/press coverage of Peruvian revolt, 16, 52–3 coverage of Spanish American independence movements, 183–4 portrayal of Bolívar, 149 responses to literature about Peru, 18 warnings about investing in littleknown countries, 191 see also under titles Nicaragua, 86 Nicoll, Allardyce, 73, 88n Nootka Sound, 86 North America, 3, 86, 142, 144 Britain’s loss of colonies, 2, 11, 37, 96 Burke’s speech on, 96–7, 98 see also American War of Independence; United States North, Frederick, 2nd Earl of Guildford, 38, 121n O’Connor, Arthur, 83, 84 O’Higgins, Bernardo, 83 Ovalle, Alonso de, Historical Relation of the Kingdom of Chile (1649), 145, 146, 156n Oviedo y Valdés, Gonzalo Fernández, 122n Owen (-Pughe), William, 101, 102 Paez, General José Antonio, 177n Pagden, Anthony, 138, 216n Paine, Thomas, The Rights of Man (1791), 72–3, 89n Panama, 37, 203 Pantisocracy, Southey and Coleridge’s scheme, 99–100

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[ 249

Paraguay, 186, 187–8, 193, 196 Parish, Woodbine, 188 Parliament Byron’s second reformist speech, 174–5 debate over Foreign Enlistment Bill, 170 Sheridan’s speeches, 81–2, 84 Patagonia, 40, 159 patriotic rhetoric in Barbauld’s Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, 143 Sheridan, 17, 18, 80, 81–2, 85 in Viscardo’s writings, 18, 78 Williams’s use of, 16, 17, 18, 49, 50, 53, 60 patriotism Peruvian, 79 poems linking British and Spanish, 20 sentimental poetry of eighteenth century, 16, 61 significance in Southey’s Madoc, 18 see also creoles Pavia, Joseph, 92n Peace of Paris (1763), 37 Peckham, Sir George, True Report (1583), 100–1 Peninsular War (1808–14), 20, 88, 132, 165 and literature celebrating BritishSpanish unity, 132–4, 138, 144 Pennsylvania, 98 periodical literature coverage of Peruvian revolt, 16 early visions of commerce in Spanish America, 44 literary reviews, 130n, 146, 200–1 portrayal of Bolívar, 149 pro-independence articles, 135 reports encouraging investment in Spanish America, 183–4 see also under specific titles Perry, James, 135 Peru, 1, 40, 158 Bolívar’s defeat of royalists, 184 and creation of Bolivia, 150

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250 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 Peru (cont.) encouragement of British to invest in ventures, 183, 184 financial collapse, 204, 209 in Marmontel’s Les Incas, 10 perceived threat of Bolívar, 150 in Robertson’s and Raynal’s histories, 7–8 Sheridan’s criticism of Spanish conquest, 82–3 Peru (Williams, 1784), 15–17, 62–3 British sensibility, 49, 61–2 identification of Britons with Spanish Americans, 16, 24, 50, 70, 79, 204 influence of earlier works, 10, 34–5, 45, 47 naturalization of conquest, 17, 63–4 omission of economic theme, 44–7, 49 similarities with Thomson’s poetry, 16, 55–7, 58–60 support for Spanish American independence movements, 16, 17, 41–2, 49–50 use of patriotic rhetoric, 53–4, 55–6 Peruvian revolt (1780–2), 15, 16, 37, 39, 44, 51–2 in Williams’s Peru, 41, 49–50, 61 Peruvians see Incas/Peruvians Pestrucci, Signor, 185 Pinkerton, Thomas, 156n pirates, 58 Pitt, William (Pitt the Younger), 66n, 75, 77, 78, 81, 85–6, 86, 87, 92n, 96 Pizarro, Francisco, 83, 138 in literary works, 11, 13, 60, 79, 80 Planché, James Robinson, Cortez; or, The Conquest of Mexico (1823), 24, 185, 206–8, 209 Plate, River, 87 plays, 70, 200 see also drama; theatre; under specific playwrights

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Pocock, J. G. A., 30n, 45 poetry anti-Spanish and pro-Spanish American, 145–8 Byron’s anti-imperialist works, 22 linking British and Spanish patriotism, 20, 24 nationalistic works during Peninsular War, 133 see also under specific poets politics and Bolívar’s appeal to Britain, 149 Byron’s concerns and early activism, 160, 164, 174–5 contrasting ideologies in Morton’s and Thelwall’s plays, 70 debates on colonialism and Spanish American independence, 1–2, 18 Spanish juntas formed to oppose Napoleon, 136 Ponce de Leon, Jose Cayetana (real ‘Indian’ in exhibition), 185 Pope, Alexander, 181n Popham, Sir Home, 4, 20, 96, 104, 105, 125n Portugal, and mercantile Britain, 25n Potosi, La Paz and Peruvian Mining Association, 192, 209 Potosí silver mines, 1, 64, 158 Pownall, Governor Thomas, 38 Poyais (imaginary Central American nation) hoax, 192 Pradt, Dominique-Georges-Frédéric Dufour de, Abbé, 165, 183 Pratt, Lynda, 118 Pratt, Mary Louise, 2, 32n press see newspapers/press; periodical literature Price, Cecil, 91n Price, Richard, Discourse on the Love of Our Country (1789), 75–6 Quarterly Review, 151n, 160, 165, 168, 169, 170, 183, 187, 200–1, 202, 205, 206 Quetzalcóatl, 116 Quevedo, Francisco de, 187

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Index Quint, David, 20, 119–20 on speaking for the defeated (quotation), 93 radicalism and British repressive measures, 75 Byron’s defense of, 175 in literary works, 18, 72–3 Southey and Coleridge’s Pantisocracy scheme, 99 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 83 Raynal, Guillaume-Thomas-François, Abbé, 115 see also Histoire philosophique et politique des Deux Indes Real del Monte Mining Company, Mexico, 184, 206 Repository for Arts, Literature, Fashions, Manufactures &c, 149 republicanism Byron, 23, 160–1 in creole insurgents’ bid for independence, 78 and link between commerce and British support for Spanish Americans, 169–70 revolution Byron’s enthusiasm for, 159, 160–1 creole patriots’ task, 21, 75 examined in Viscardo’s writings, 75–6, 77, 77–8, 79 see also French Revolution; Peruvian revolt; Spanish American revolutions Reynolds, Frederick, The Virgin of the Sun (1812), 21, 141–2, 146 Richardson, Alan, 2, 54, 65n Rickman, John, 104–5, 126n rights in British proclamations to Spanish dependencies, 36 in Burke’s speech on North America, 97, 98 Río de la Plata, 188 Rio Plata Mining Association, 184, 199–200

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[ 251

Robertson, John and William Parish, 169, 188 Robertson, William, 25, 87–8, 115 see also The History of America Robertson, William Spence, 40 Robinson, Henry Crabb, 143 Robinson, Ronald, 3, 4, 27n Rogers, Samuel, 21 The Voyage of Columbus (1812), 137, 139–41, 146, 178n Romanticism and British imperialism, 2–4, 120–1 engagement with figure of Spanish America, 87–8, 158 epic romance, 65n naturalization of European colonialism, 64 poetry of sensibility, 61 symbolism of gold in Madoc, 106 writers in context of British colonialism, 3, 5, 7, 9, 98 writers’ use of Columbus figure, 138–9 Ross, Marlon, 195 Rothschild, brothers, 167, 171 Russia, 168 Said, Edward, 67n, 110 Saint Domingue, 26n, 91n Salcedo-Bastardo, José Luís, 152n San Juan de Ulloa, 37 San Martín, José de, 22, 169 Sarratea, Don Manuel de, An Exposé on the Dissensions of Spanish America (with Walton, 1814), 144–5, 149, 156n satire, 73, 167, 174 Schmidtmeyer, Peter, 200–1, 209 Scotland, 52, 75, 133 Scott, Sir Walter, The Vision of Don Roderick (1811), 20, 133, 143 Scrivener, Michael, 70, 72, 73 Shelburne, William Petty, 2nd Earl of, 37 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 180n

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252 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 10, 93 Pizarro (1799), 17, 18, 24, 74, 78–82, 81, 82, 83–5, 85, 87, 110, 204, 204–5 political sympathies and speeches, 18, 78, 81–3, 83–4, 88 Siddons, Sarah, 85 silver, 64, 64–5, 158, 183 see also Potosí silver mines Simpson, David, 194 slave trade/slavery, 2, 26n asiento, 35, 39 Williams’s censure of, 48–9, 50 smallpox, 186, 193 Smith, Adam, 3–4, 29n, 37, 46, 56, 62, 95 Smith, Thomas, 163 Somerville, William Clarke, 160 Southey, Robert, 1, 88, 150–1n, 159, 209 correspondence, 98–9, 104–5, 198 criticism of British colonialism and commerce in Spanish America, 104–5, 198–9 on epic, 119–20 plan to escape to America, 98–9 review of Dobrizhoffer’s Account, 211n, 214n A Tale of Paraguay (1825), 24, 186, 187, 192–4, 196–8, 204–5 writings on Spain and Spanish America, 187 see also Madoc Spain alliance with Britain during Peninsular War, 132, 133–4, 144 associated with Britain in Barbauld’s Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, 143–4 Britain’s wars with, 18, 36, 87, 93 conquest explored by writers, 16–17, 35, 63–4, 106–7 detrimental effect of Peace Treaty concessions to Britain, 39 in Hemans’s England and Spain, 132–3

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identified with France in Sheridan’s Pizarro, 79, 82 imperial disputes with Britain, 86 juntas formed to oppose Napoleon, 136–7 pre-Columbian charter myth, 122n protectionist trade policy, 20 Raynal’s and Robertson’s views of imperial economy, 5–7, 34 Viscardo’s condemnation of, 77, 78 weakening of hold on colonies, 158 see also Spanish imperialism Spanish America Anglocentric approach, 51–2 Britain’s fascination with, 1–2, 23–4, 25, 158–9, 185–6, 205 Britain’s informal empire, 2, 25, 88, 96, 177, 205 bursting of ‘bubble’, 23, 199–201, 203, 209 and Byron’s enthusiasm for the ‘new’, 163–4 collapse of republics, 150 economic changes and unrest during early 1780s, 39 financial crisis by 1823, 176 theme showing overlap between antithetical ideologies, 15, 70, 79 unity with Britain through Napoleonic aggression, 135–6 Spanish American independence bridging of political gaps by cause, 1–2 and British speculation in region, 23, 176, 183–6 Byron’s interest in, 160–2 literary works in support of, 20–1, 49–50, 141–50 Mill’s perspective, 165 Viscardo’s defense of, 77–8 see also creole patriots Spanish American revolutions British soldiers’ rush to aid, 22, 169 British support for, 21–2, 22–3, 64, 165–6, 169 Byron on lack of aristocratic leadership, 175

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Index end of British support after stock market crash, 205–6 Irish volunteers’ involvement, 83 patriots’ gathering of English support, 1, 40, 75, 158 Viscardo’s perspective, 17–18 Spanish Armada, 101 Spanish colonies Barbauld’s exposure of Britain’s interests, 144 under threat from Napoleon, 18, 20, 134 weakening of Spain’s hold on, 158 writers’ criticism of Spanish colonialism, 144–5 Spanish imperialism British condemnation of, 15, 25, 58, 75, 104 Burke on Christianizing policy of, 95 condemned by Bartolomé de las Casas, 94 depictions of parallels between British imperialism and, 25, 206 destruction of Araucans, 120 erasure in Southey’s and Hemans’s poems, 192–3 monopoly trade, 205 Raynal’s and Robertson’s analyses of, 5–7, 28n, 34 Sheridan’s rhetoric against, 82–3, 84 Southey’s observation on, 121 treatment by Morton and Thelwall, 72, 74 The Spectator, 47 Steele, Richard, story of Inkle and Yarico (with Addison), 47–8, 48 Stock Exchange, London, 167, 184, 200, 202 stocks and bonds, 184, 191–2, 202, 209, 209n Strangford, Percy Smythe, 6th Viscount, 145 Susquehanna River, Pennsylvania, 98 Sweet, Nanora, 195, 195–6

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taxes, 39, 44 territorial occupation, 3, 4 Test Laws, 76 theatre Kotzebue’s adaptations of Les Incas, 10, 17 see also drama; plays; under specific playwrights Thelwall, John, The Incas; or, The Peruvian Virgin (1792), 10, 17, 70, 72–4, 78–9, 79, 84, 204 Theological Review, 143 Thomas the Apostle, Saint, 116 Thomson, James, 16, 60 Alfred: A Masque (1740), 36 Britannia (1727), 35–6, 58, 59, 60 Liberty (1736), 54–5, 56, 58 ‘Rule, Britannia!’ (1740), 56–7, 103 Tickell, Thomas, 62–3 The Times, 4, 91n, 92n, 183 Tories, 78, 82 Torquemada, Juan de, 116, 124n, 127n trade Britain’s policy regarding Spanish America, 11, 37–9, 95, 96 consolidation of Britain’s dominance, 65 Marmontel’s perspective, 13 see also commerce transculturation, Europe, 2 travel narratives, 24–5, 110, 200–2 travellers, 1, 158 Treaty of Methuen (1703), 25n Treaty of Paris (1783), 38–9, 40 Treaty of Utrecht (1713), 35 Trelawny, Edward, 37, 172 Trinidad, 26n The True Briton, 91n Tucker, Josiah, 37 Tucuman, 40 Túpac Amaru II, 15, 16, 39, 44, 100 United Irishmen, 83 United Provinces of the River Plate, 203–4, 211n United States, 41

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254 ] Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 Valdivia, Pedro de, 21, 145, 146 Valparaíso, 166 Van Diemen’s Land, 176, 177 Venezuela, 3, 149–50 Byron’s plan to emigrate to, 22, 23, 159–60, 161, 162, 164, 170, 172–3, 175, 176–7 declaration of independence, 158, 173 revolution and subsequent events, 134–5, 136 Vera Cruz, 37, 38 Vergennes, Charles Gravier, Comte de, 66n Vidall, Don Luis, 40 Virginia, British settlement, 101 Viscardo y Guzmán, Juan Pablo, 40, 75, 77, 87, 108 Lettre aux Espagnols-Américains (1791), 17–18, 75–8, 80, 85, 85–6, 86, 87, 89n, 135, 152–3n, 164–5 Voltaire, 187 Wales/Welsh Burke’s criticism of England’s treatment of, 123n history tied to England in early sixteenth century, 101 Madoc legend and nationalist revival, 19, 101–3 Southey’s recoding of English oppression of, 107–8, 109, 112–15, 118 Walker, James Scott, The South American (1816), 21, 145, 147–8, 156–7n

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Walpole, Horace, 29n Walton, William, 152n, 165 An Exposé on the Dissensions of Spanish America (with Sarratea, 1814), 144–5, 149, 156n War of Spanish Succession (1701–14), 35 War Council, 37 War of Jenkins’s Ear (1739–48), 58 War Office, 3, 4 Webster, James Wedderburn, 173 Wechselblatt, Martin, 47 Wellesley, Arthur, 132 Wellesley, Richard Colley, 21, 148, 149, 151n, 165 West Indies, 3, 38 Whigs, 78, 137, 174 White, Thomas, 83 Whitelocke, John, 20, 96, 125n Williams, Edward, 101, 102 Williams, Helen Maria, 84, 88, 93 poetry from 1780s, 48–9, 50–1, 57 Wordsworth’s early sonnet on, 16, 60–1 see also Peru Williams, John, 101, 102 Williams, John Hoyt, 211n Windham, William, 4 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 210n Wordsworth, William, 16, 60–1, 62 Wynn, Charles, 105, 123n, 129n Yrigoyen, Matías, 134 Zambelli, Lega, 170

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