Hello and welcome to Revolutions.

We come now to the beginning of our story. The preliminary work is done, the precursors have come and gone. The dawn of Spanish American independence is at hand, and as with the Haitian Revolution, it was a massive upheaval back in Europe that sent the revolutionary ripples across the Atlantic, wrecking the foundations of Spanish rule in the Americas. It is actually an open debate whether a grassroots independence movement would have begun had not the Spanish monarchy been overthrown by Napoleon in May 1808. But we don’t need to worry about that, because Napoleon did depose the Spanish monarchy in May 1808. And, well, here we go. 

Now, at the end of 1805, the British had won the Battle of Trafalgar, and the French had won the Battle of Austerlitz. And the Battle of Austerlitz ended not just the war of the Third Coalition, but the 800-year-old Holy Roman Empire. The destruction of the Holy Roman Empire led Prussia to declare war on France in October 1806, turning the Third Coalition of Britain, Russia, and Austria into the Fourth Coalition of Britain, Russia, and Prussia. But the Fourth Coalition did not last very long at all. By the end of October, Napoleon had destroyed the Prussian army and captured Berlin. The Russians kept up a fighting retreat but were themselves thrashed at Friedland in June 1807, forcing them to sign the Treaty of Tilsit in July 1807, which, as I mentioned in that episode on the Empire, marks the apex of Napoleon’s imperial career.

Now, it was as a direct result of bringing all of Central and Eastern Europe to its knees that Napoleon’s gaze turned west to the Iberian Peninsula. His anti-British continental system was only going to work if he could cordon off the entire continent. And at that moment, Portugal continued to defy the Emperor and trade with Britain. This was because the British and Portuguese have, like, the single oldest treaty of friendship in European history, dating all the way back to the late 1300s. So, as Napoleon wrapped up the Treaty of Tilsit in July 1807, he immediately demanded the Portuguese break it off with Britain, close their ports, and declare war on their oldest friend.

Now, at this point, the reigning sovereign of Portugal was mad Queen Maria, who had long suffered from some sort of mental dementia. So the acting sovereign was her son, now Prince Regent John, and John’s wife was Princess Charlotte (Carlota) of Spain, the eldest daughter of King Charles IV of Spain. And yes, that will be important to know here in a minute.

Now, the Portuguese royal family did not think Napoleon could possibly be serious about worrying with little old Portugal given all his other concerns. But then they got an ultimatum in August from the French ambassador that if they did not comply and close off the continent, Napoleon would depose a whole lot of them by force. 

But to follow through on that threat, Napoleon had to get the French army from France to Portugal, and that meant going through Spain. Technically, Spain was still its own independent kingdom. So, to keep things nice and legal, negotiations were well underway by the fall of 1807 to secure Spanish approval for the French army to enter its territory. These negotiations, though, just so happened to be unfolding against a backdrop of family drama inside the Spanish royal family, which Napoleon decided was a golden opportunity to do a lot more than just go kick Portugal around. 

So, as we discussed two episodes back, King Charles IV of Spain was an amiable dullard. His wife, Queen Maria Luisa, was a petty despot who liked to play favorites. And the guy somehow running the show was the Queen’s favorite favorite, Manuel Godoy, who had been Prime Minister now off and on for the last 15 years.

Well, enter into this picture now the Crown Prince Ferdinand. Ferdinand had been born in 1784, just as Godoy was catching his mother’s eye. And the boy was raised in a very restrictive environment. Godoy apparently using his influence to stop Ferdinand from getting a proper education or access to royal funds to keep the boy from ever posing a threat to his own rule. So Ferdinand grew up hating the tyranny of Godoy and the triviality of his mother and the stupidity of his father. He also utterly lacked any sort of training, education, or experience that would prepare him to one day run Spain. Not that this would stop him from thinking that he was the man who really ought to be running Spain.

So, with the latest batch of spectacular French victories in 1806 and 1807, Prince Ferdinand got it into his head that he might be able to get Napoleon’s blessing for a move against his hated parents. In October 1807, he wrote a letter to Napoleon asking for a French princess to marry and promising closer union between France and Spain when Prince Ferdinand became King Ferdinand. But his parents and Godoy discovered Ferdinand was going around behind their back, arrested the wayward prince, and rifled around in his papers, discovering that that letter had just been a part of a much wider conspiracy to overthrow Godoy.

So King Charles wrote his own letter to Napoleon, saying, “Look, maybe my son isn’t going to make the greatest king, and we should arrange for one of your brothers to succeed me.” So this is all coming to Napoleon’s attention just as his agents are securing permission from Manuel Godoy for the French army to enter Spain.

On October 27, 1808, the Spanish and French signed the Treaty of Fontainebleau, which gave official approval for a French army 28,000 strong to march through Spain on their way to Portugal. The agreement then also stipulated that conquered Portugal would be partitioned into three new units, one of them an independent principality that would go to Godoy himself. And with Prince Ferdinand conspiring against him, Godoy was very interested in transforming himself from mere Prime Minister to an independent French-backed prince. So when the treaty was signed, Godoy was under the impression that he had just secured his permanent ascendancy rather than what he had really secured, which was his imminent demise.

And something of Napoleon’s ultimate intentions in Iberia were already on display because the Emperor did not deign to wait for the treaty to be signed in order to send his troops across the Pyrenees. By the time the Treaty of Fontainebleau was signed, the French invasion of Iberia was already ten days underway. 

The Portuguese royal family, meanwhile, had finally caught wise to the fact that Napoleon meant business, and in a flurry of activity in the fall of 1807, tried to appease him. But by then, it was too late. On November 19, 1807, the French invasion of Portugal began. Vacillating right to the very end between capitulation and making a run for it, the royal family was finally convinced by their oldest friends, the British, that back in France, Napoleon had already announced their collective abdication, so really, they needed to make a run for it. So the whole Portuguese court and thousands of nobles and officials hurriedly tossed their stuff onto whatever ships they could find, and on November 29, they set sail out of Lisbon under British protection, bound for the safety of their domains in Brazil. The next day, the French army entered Lisbon, and the seat of the Portuguese Empire would be Rio de Janeiro for the next 13 years.

Now, the response to all this in Spain was mixed. A lot of people were horrified that Godoy appeared to have sold out the peninsula to the French. But others were hopeful that the arrival of Napoleon might spell the end of the decayed husk of a monarchy currently in place in Madrid and that maybe energetic French modernization efforts would revitalize Spain. But those hopes turned to dread as Napoleon ignored the limited troop number stipulated in the Treaty of Fontainebleau, saying he needed to secure the French occupation of Portugal another 100,000 troops crossed the Pyrenees between December 1807 and March 1808. And then, under various pretexts, these troops started seizing and occupying major citadels, castles, and fortresses all across northeastern Spain. And the locals caught wise quickly that the French had more on their minds than just annexing Portugal. Spanish anger at the Bourbons for having invited the French in led the court to retire from Madrid and set up shop at their winter palace in Aranjuez, which they hoped would be safer from potential mob reprisals. 

But they could not escape. In mid-March, Prince Ferdinand used the general anger against Godoy, in particular, to his own advantage. On March 17, 1808, Ferdinand supporters orchestrated a mob attack on Godoy’s residence in Aranjuez. The attack came so suddenly and violently that King Charles did the only thing he could think to do to quiet them: he dismissed Godoy from service. But now the mob wanted more. They wanted Ferdinand to be king, or else. So two days later came the stunning development. On March 19, 1808, King Charles succumbed to the mob and abdicated the throne in favor of his son. Then, on March 24, Ferdinand entered Madrid to wild cheering. The kingdom had been saved from the decrepit, corrupt relics, and a new day was dawning. 

And yes, a new day was indeed dawning, just not in the way anyone expected. With both the deposed Charles and the newly risen Ferdinand now both writing letters to Napoleon looking for support, Napoleon said, “Hey, I’ve got an idea. Why don’t you both come to the French city of Bayonne, and we’ll talk it all through like civilized men?”

Ferdinand, convinced Napoleon was going to support his claim, arrived in Bayonne on April 20 and was promptly told that he was going to abdicate the throne immediately, or else. Ferdinand tried to resist, but then his father shot up a few days later and just caved in. On May 5, Charles relinquished his claim to the Spanish throne to Napoleon. And then, on May 6, Ferdinand caved in too. He abdicated his claim back to his father from whence it passed immediately on to Napoleon. In what is today called the Abdications of Bayonne, the Spanish Crown passed from the Bourbons to the Bonapartes. Charles IV, Queen Maria Luisa, Prince Ferdinand, and Manuel Godoy would remain prisoners of the French for the next five years. In their place, Napoleon made a major addition to the Bonaparte imperial dynasty that he was building, naming his brother Joseph King of Spain and the Indies.

Napoleon thought that the Spaniards were too complacent, men lacked the moral fiber and courage to do anything but accept the abdications of Bayonne as a fait accompli. And he was basically right about the court nobles in Madrid who had no interest in being on Napoleon’s bad side. But wow, was he ever wrong about the Spaniards generally? Napoleon thought it would take a few thousand troops to garrison the country once it had been seized. But, man, was he wrong about that. A spontaneous citizen riot against the French occupiers in Madrid had already erupted on May 2. The so-called Dos de Mayo Uprising turned into a running street fight between the people of Madrid and French soldiers that was finally crushed by nightfall, whereupon the French executed anyone who had been captured with arms in their hands, kind of setting the tone for the whole rest of the conflict.

The Dos de Mayo Uprising now traditionally marks the beginning of the Peninsular War, the mass Spanish resistance to Napoleon that would require him to deploy not a few thousand troops, but a few hundred thousand troops and contribute mightily to the downfall of his empire. Because it was on that day the Spanish ulcer started to bleed.

Once news of the abdications of Bayonne got out, the rest of Spain went nuts. All on their own and independently of each other. The French had by now occupied a swath of territory in the north, running roughly from Pamplona down to Madrid. But in every province in Spain, local leaders started organizing resistance and declaring their intention to fight the French. And in short order, the institution that would define the early leadership of that Spanish resistance began forming – the Junta, or the Xunta, depending on your preferred pronunciation. 

Operating on the principle that the metaphorical decapitation of the Spanish monarchy meant that power automatically devolved to the people. A junta was a self-selected local committee that proclaimed itself to be the representatives of the local people. By the end of May 1808, the first juntas were forming, and soon every halfway respectable municipality across Iberia had formed its own junta to act as the guardian of local sovereignty until the monarchy could be restored. And by the monarchy, everyone now meant Ferdinand. Charles IV and Godoy were blamed for letting the French in. So it was to Ferdinand that all these juntas pledged their allegiance.

For the moment, these juntas were totally disconnected from each other, and none was superior or inferior to another. Although down in Seville, they rather ostentatiously declared themselves to be the Supreme Junta and made noises about trying to get the others to recognize them as the Supreme Junta. Well, that didn’t wind up happening. But the Seville Junta did become the most important of them all in these early days. Seville was a pretty wealthy little city and as far away from the French as you could get. And so, they were able to start raising a real army to fight the French army. But most importantly, for our purposes here, the Seville Junta declared jurisdiction over the Americas and took the lead in communicating with the leadership in Spanish America to make sure that they all pledged support for resistance, rather than accepting the imposter King Joseph Bonaparte.

Now, it would be months before word could make its way across the Atlantic, but it took considerably less time for word to make its way up to London and into the home of Francisco de Miranda on Grafton Street, where he was once again hard at work on a new, new, new plan for a British-backed liberation of Spanish America. 

As we ended last week’s episode, Miranda was just returning home to London on New Year’s Day 1808, right smack dab in the middle of the Iberian crisis. The British had just spirited away the Portuguese royal family, and French troops were continuing to flood into Spain unchecked.

Now, despite the embarrassing failure of Miranda’s Leander Expedition, the British government was open to talking with him some more about the prospects in Spanish America, in part because Miranda came bearing official dispatches from the governor of Trinidad, who personally believed that the expedition had failed, not because it wouldn’t work, but because it hadn’t been nearly big enough. So the minute he returned home, Miranda got back to work with the blessing of the British government. He sat with his friend James Mill and devised a plan to transform Spanish America into four new states, each one covering one of the four viceroyalties. And then the British government assigned him to work on military logistics with Sir Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington.

Wellesley and Miranda worked up a plan to send a 10,000-man expeditionary force to Venezuela, and they were at the point where units were being transferred around as part of the mobilization, and Wellesley was putting in personal supply orders. But the whole orientation of British policy abruptly changed after the abdications of Bayonne. With reports coming in that the whole of Iberia was resisting the French invaders, the British government decided that the war against Napoleon had to be fought there, not in faraway Venezuela. The troops destined for Spanish America were redirected to an invasion of Portugal. And Wellesley was the one who had to break the news to Miranda that the expedition was going to be canceled.

And Wellesley literally took Miranda out into Hyde Park to break the news, in the hopes that the gaze of potential onlookers would force Miranda to not make a scene. But Miranda did make a scene, and Wellesley later said that he “never had a more difficult business than when the government made me tell Miranda that we would have nothing to do with his plan, even there, he was so angry that I told him I would walk on first a little, that we might not attract the notice of everybody passing. And when I joined him, he was cooler. He said, ‘You are going into Spain. You will be lost. Nothing can save you. That, however, is your affair. But what grieves me is that there never was such an opportunity thrown away.'”

Now, of course, Miranda was wrong about the British going into Spain. That’s not where they were lost. That’s where, in fact, they really started to win. And he was possibly even wrong that a British invasion of Venezuela would have ever succeeded. But whatever happened next, Spanish Americans were going to have to do it on their own.

So, those Spanish Americans started learning about the dramatic events back in Spain in succession, depending on the time it took for news to reach them. And there could be quite a lag time, depending on where you lived.

The first to find out were those in the ports of the Caribbean or the Gulf of Mexico, like Veracruz, Havana, and Caracas, who all found out about the abdications of Bayonne in mid-July 1808. The governor of Havana then sent out further emissaries in multiple directions to spread the word down to the Río de la Plata and then around to Chile and finally Lima, or over to Guatemala and Panama, and from there down to Lima, the great capital of Peru being so isolated on the Pacific side of the continent that they were, of course, the last to find out. It was not until October 4 that the Viceroy of Peru was finally told that Napoleon had deposed the monarchy and installed his brother Joseph, fully five months after the fact.

But shortly after, the sensational news would hit the various cities, the Spanish Americans would then be greeted with emissaries representing the competing factions back in Europe, now trying to secure the loyalty of the Americas. The junta of Seville dispatched representatives everywhere, as did the usurping Bonapartist government. But so too did agents come round from, like, Rio de Janeiro because Princess Charlotte was now the one free member of the Spanish Bourbon royal family, and she was open to being recognized as Princess Regent in exile. So the Spanish Americans had an array of choices about how they were going to proceed. And ultimately, I’m about to walk you through the drama as it played out in New Granada, because that’s the focus of the show, but before I do that, I do want to give you the flavor of how things are unfolding in the other three viceroyalties.

So, up in New Spain, the town council of Mexico City wanted the viceroy to convene some kind of representative junta. After all, New Spain was a rich and civilized kingdom of 6 million people, and Mexico City itself was truly one of the great cities in the Spanish Empire. So its people deserved the same rights as their Spanish cousins. We should have a junta, too!

To the horror of conservative peninsular administrators residing in Mexico City, the viceroy himself seemed to agree. He took repeated meetings with an informal convention of local Mexico City leaders and in mid-September approached the conservative audiencia with a plan to call for the cities of New Spain to send representatives to create a consultative body for the duration of the crisis. The audiencia not only rejected this idea, but fearing that the viceroy was on his way to inviting a full-blown revolution, they orchestrated a coup. 

On September 16, about 300 men stormed the viceregal palace and arrested the viceroy, along with some other prominent criollo leaders. The audiencia then installed a random 80-year-old general as the new viceroy. The movement to form a representative junta was quashed. But the new regime did agree to recognize the authority of the Seville junta and support resistance to the French. And so, this was the basic regime that would be in place when the next crisis comes along in 1810, a crisis that would help spark Father Hidalgo’s insurrection and the beginning of the Mexican War of Independence.

Down in the Río de la Plata, things were complicated by a number of factors. For starters, there was the rather random complication that the acting viceroy, Santiago Liniers, was a Frenchman, so there was strong suspicion on all sides that he would quickly accept the legitimacy of King Joseph Bonaparte. But agents from both the Seville Junta and the Bonapartist government arrived in Buenos Aires in mid-August and both concluded that Liniers’ Frenchness was just not a factor. He refused to recognize the abdications of Bayonne as legitimate.

Further complicating things, though, was the very close proximity of the regent to Brazil. So the Río de la Plata had the strongest faction in support of recognizing Princess Charlotte as regent. And then, of course, there were little rivalries inside the Río de la Plata that complicated things even further. So, for example, the leadership of Montevideo organized a junta of their own, but mostly it was driven by their long commercial and political rivalry with Buenos Aires. They didn’t want all of this to wind up with them becoming like vassals of Buenos Aires. And then, there were peninsulares inside Buenos Aires who never liked Liniers to begin with, and on January 1st, 1809, they tried to stage a coup to oust him. But since Liniers still had the complete loyalty of a large and well-trained militia, this coup attempt failed.

So while things in the Río de la Plata were, like, chaotic, with lots of long knives being drawn, the Viceroyalty of Peru kind of went in the opposite direction. And they were by far the least affected by any kind of internal turmoil. As I said, they did not even get word of the abdications of Bayonne until October 1808. And at that point, the viceroy simply said, “Right, nothing changes. I’m still in charge, and I’ll be running things in the name of King Ferdinand until he can be restored.” The viceroy was popular with both the peninsulares and criollo elite of Lima, so when he decreed on October 13, “Look, I’m just going to be in charge until further notice,” there was no real push to challenge him. Peru was and would remain the least revolutionary of all the viceroyalties.

So coming back around now to events in New Granada, we can also come back around now to Símon Bolívar and follow along in a bit more detail as he and his countrymen wrestle with the crisis caused by the abdications of Bayonne. 

So we left Bolívar back in Paris at the beginning of 1806, having returned from his walking tour of Italy and his pledge to liberate his country or die trying. But estranged now from his fortune back in Venezuela, Bolívar decided it was time to return home. But with Napoleon’s armies rampaging around and the British patrolling the coasts, this was much easier said than done. So Bolívar had to borrow money and then make his way up to the neutral port of Hamburg just as Napoleon was sweeping across Germany on his way to Berlin. Bolívar then departed Hamburg on a neutral ship in November 1806, bound for the United States of America. He landed in Charleston in January 1807 after a particularly rotten voyage that saw Bolívar himself become incredibly sick along the way. But he did manage to make friends with an American from South Carolina on the ship, who brought the sick and penniless Bolívar into his home, where he could recuperate. And once he was recovered, Bolívar headed up to Philadelphia, where he was finally, finally able to make direct contact with agents in Caracas and arrange a cash draw to pay off the debts he had been accruing and secure passage home. All told, Bolívar spent about five months in the United States, where he says that he “encountered rational liberty for the first time”, though he also encountered the lingering bad taste Miranda had left in everybody’s mouth, thanks to the Leander debacle, and the prospects of his now sworn oath to liberate his country seemed to be as far away as possible. And certainly the Americans he encountered were not at all optimistic about the chances of rational liberty coming to Spanish America anytime soon. 

Back in Caracas by June 1807, the now 24-year-old Bolívar took up his place as a young member of the inner circle of the Caracas aristocracy, and outwardly he spent his time managing estates and the family businesses. But on the side, Bolívar was meeting with like minded liberals of that aristocratic set mostly drawn from the younger generation like himself. Under the guise of book clubs and social parties and card games, they would meet to talk politics. Among them were his older brother, Juan Vicente, a few of his mother’s brothers, including the uncle he had so famously clashed with as a child. Also various members of the extended Del Toro family and then finally, Andrés Bello, who had once briefly been Bolívar’s tutor and who was now the principal secretary to the Captain General of Venezuela. 

All through 1807 and early 1808, there wasn’t much to do but talk, though it was clear that there was an informal division between older guard criollo who feared any revolutionary action would open the doors to real Haitian style revolution, and then those, like Bolívar, who were ready to take the risk if an opportunity presented itself. 

Well, of course, an opportunity then did present itself in July 1808. During his routine work as secretary to the Captain General, Andrés Bello came across two notices in an English newspaper that bore the sensational news that Napoleon had deposed the Spanish monarchy. He rushed this to the Captain General, but the Captain General dismissed him and said, “That can’t possibly be true. That’s just British propaganda.” But then, on July 15, two ships arrived at practically the same moment that confirmed the story, although they did tell two completely different versions of it.

So, the first ship was flying under a French flag that turned out to be bearing official emissaries from the Bonapartist government, saying that Spain has been conquered. Joseph Bonaparte is now King of Spain, and please accept this as the new state of affairs. The second ship, however, was British, and the Captain said, “No, that is not right at all. Yes, the monarchy has been deposed, but all of Spain is in insurrection. Do not recognize the French government because none of your countrymen have.”

The Captain General then vacillated over what to do. But spontaneous demonstrations broke out in Caracas against the French that became so menacing that the French envoys quietly got back on their boat in the middle of the night and sailed away. 

So, with recognizing King Joseph out of the question, it now came down to: Do we form our own junta and recognize Ferdinand, or do nothing and just keep the vice regal apparatus in place untouched? I mean, what do we do? Now, the kind of liberal criollo that Bolívar hung out with agitated for a local junta that would recognize King Ferdinand. I mean, we are every bit as deserving of a junta as any other city in Spain.

Now, the Captain General made a few noises that he might entertain the necessity of a junta. But then on August 3rd, a representative from the Seville Junta arrived and said, “Look, we are actually the Central Resistance Government, and we’ve decided that Venezuela ought to just stick with its existing system. We will recognize that the Captain General is the supreme authority here in Venezuela, and he will recognize that we are the supreme authority back in Spain, and then he will work with us to defeat the French.” This, of course, sounded great to the Captain General, and he slammed the door shut on calling any kind of locally representative junta, going so far as to arrest some of the leading pro-junta liberals. 

But Bolívar was not among those arrested because he was really not down with their objectives because everybody was scrambling to recognize King Ferdinand. It was really all just down to how they were going to do it. Meanwhile, Bolívar was the only guy around who had ever actually met Ferdinand, and Bolívar hated Ferdinand. 

Remember, back during his first trip to Spain, Bolívar had been in and around the court at Madrid, and Prince Ferdinand was just a year younger than Bolívar. The two teenagers not only met, they had, like, played tennis against each other. And Bolívar was of the opinion that Ferdinand was a spoiled brat son of a detestable royal family that he had no interest in ever bending his knee to. But Bolívar did slip out of Caracas to avoid any unpleasantness with the Captain General because he was, at this point, kind of marked as a budding radical.

Meanwhile, over in New Granada proper, that is the future country of Colombia, a representative of the Seville Junta reached Cartagena on August 9 and quickly secured the loyalty of that city. But then it took that guy another month to finally make his way up the Magdalena River to Bogotá, arriving in early September. And there he bore the same basic message that had been taken to Caracas: keep the vice regal apparatus in place. Don’t bother setting up a junta. It’s really not necessary. Just keep your existing government and bureaucracy in place and please be prepared to support the great patriotic war of resistance back in Spain any way you can. The viceroy in Bogotá was all too happy with this arrangement, and he quickly nipped in the bud any attempt by the elite in Bogotá to form their own junta. 

But the criollos back in Caracas were not ready to give up that easily. And after a few months, they drew up a petition signed by a bunch of local leaders saying, “We have the right to form a junta” and demanded the Captain General allow them to do so. They presented this petition on November the 24th, but the Captain General was not interested. In his mind, this was all settled. And so in response, he made a sweep of the city, arresting everyone who had signed the letter and making a big show of repression to demonstrate just how he felt about all of this junta nonsense. Bolívar, though, was not picked up in this sweep either because he had not signed the letter. He was not going to recognize Ferdinand, and in his mind, this was all the beginning of independence, and he would settle for nothing less. But it would not be until 1810 that events finally caught up to Bolívar’s vision for the future of Spanish America.

So that’s where things stood at the end of 1808 in all four American viceroyalties, with the viceroys themselves continued to be the ultimate authority. All four recognizing the legitimacy of Spanish resistance to the French and the authority of the civilian junta, with attempts to create American juntas mostly suppressed.

So we’ll finish up today by heading back over to Spain so that we can follow the further organization of the various independent juntas into a single central junta and its subsequent call to invite the Americans to officially participate in the government, which would help create the first real waves of independence in 1809. 

So, as I mentioned, Napoleon drastically underestimated Spanish resistance and had brushed off Talleyrand’s repeated advice to please not do what you are about to do. But in his defense, Napoleon had just crushed the Austrians, the Prussians, and the Russians. I mean, what was Spain compared to the great military powers of Central and Eastern Europe?

So, from the territory that the French held down to about Madrid, the French launched multiple columns out in every direction in the summer of 1808 to complete the envelopment of the Iberian Peninsula. Now, mostly, these columns found themselves harassed by independent bands of local resistance fighters. And this is famously where the term guerrilla starts to enter the military lexicon as the Spanish word for ‘little war’. But the Seville junta managed to organize detachments of the Spanish regular army and patriotic volunteers into an actual army almost 30,000 strong, that they then sent to block the advance of a 25,000-man French army into Andalusia. In mid-July 1808, that Spanish army won a resounding victory at the Battle of Bailén, forcing the complete surrender of the French. And I should mention here that among those fighting at Bailén was a Buenos Aires-born captain in the Spanish army named José de San Martín.

So the shocking defeat at Bailén, plus mass resistance everywhere else, sent French plans into complete disarray. King Joseph made what was supposed to be his permanent entrance into Madrid on July 19, but he stayed in the city for not even two weeks before prudently withdrawing back to more secure territory on August 1st. The French advance in 1808 was halted and then reversed. By the end of summer, the French armies would be regrouping back behind the Ebro River.

Then, to make matters worse, the British launched their invasion of Portugal in August under the command of Arthur Wellesley, future Duke of Wellington, bringing with him troops that had very recently been earmarked for the invasion of South America. And the failure of the French to secure the rest of Spain left the French army, who were holding Portugal, cut off from any resupply or reinforcement. In short order, a combined British-Portuguese army defeated the French outside Lisbon at the Battle of Vimeiro on August 21. But then the British did not press home their advantage. Wellesley had already been slated to be replaced as commander of the British forces, and when his new superiors arrived, they cut a deal with the French over Wellesley’s strenuous objections. The British actually agreed to transport the beaten 20,000-man French army out of Portugal and back to France, stipulating further that they would be allowed to take their weapons and any personal property with them. That personal property, of course, being all the Portuguese loot they could carry. These insanely lenient terms caused quite a little scandal back in London, and an investigation into the affair was convened. And while the senior British officers were officially cleared of any wrongdoing, Wellesley was the only one who was returned to active service.

So by the fall of 1808, the Spanish resistance had a bit of breathing room to try to organize their government, and the various juntas agreed to try to form one executive junta representing all of them to try to coordinate national defense. On September 25, the first meeting of the so-called Central Junta convened at Aranjuez, with each provincial junta granted two seats at the table. But though the Central Junta did successfully convene, that was kind of the only thing it ever successfully did. The men participating were hopelessly at odds with each other. Some were old guard, absolute monarchist conservatives who fully intended to restore Ferdinand and the old regime. Others were new-style liberal reformers who planned to use this opportunity to establish some kind of constitutional monarchy and generally modernize Spain. So though they all had a common enemy, they were not at all pulling in the same direction, a fact soon exploited by their common enemy, the French.

So the tide turned again when Napoleon decided that the situation in Spain had gotten bad enough that he needed to show his marshals how to run a war. In November 1808, the Emperor himself was in Spain, along with 100,000 reinforcements, bringing the total number of French forces in Spain up to a staggering 275,000. Napoleon then ordered a massive double envelopment of Iberia that pretty much steamrolled all organized resistance in its path. The Central Junta was soon enough in full flight to Seville, aka as far from France as they could possibly get. Napoleon himself then reentered Madrid on December 4 at the head of an 80,000 man army. 

Now convening in Seville, the Central Junta did manage to make two momentous decisions. First, they signed a treaty of friendship with the British on January 15, which was of course really important for their war effort, but for our purposes was most especially important because it really reopened contact with the Americas, since the British were now facilitating rather than blocking movement across the Atlantic. And then, on January 22, the Central Junta issued a decree to their American cousins inviting them to send representatives to sit in the junta. Each viceroyalty was to send one man each, as were the major provinces of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Chile, Guatemala and the Philippines. As we will see next week, this was a decision that kept the ball rolling in Spanish America towards independence, because it acknowledged the right of the Americans to participate in the government as equals, even if they weren’t really equals with the peninsulares. But even more immediately, it was the regions not invited to participate in the junta that really kept the ball rolling towards independence. And next week, we will move through the events of 1809 and 1810. The province of Upper Peru and then the city of Quito had both been denied special representation in the junta and as a result, would declare de facto independence from all other authorities, save the deposed King Ferdinand himself in the summer of 1809. And while South America was starting to get more chaotic, the wind of the Peninsular War blew so hard against Spain that the Central Junta collapsed in early 1810, leaving yet another power vacuum that this time was fully exploited by radicals in the Americas to declare themselves independent. And in Caracas, Símon Bolívar will finally have a cause that he can get behind. 

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