Giulio Alberoni, Reform Through the Vía Reservada and the First Creation of the Viceroyalty of New Granada
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Chapter 4 Giulio Alberoni, Reform through the Vía Reservada and the First Creation of the Viceroyalty of New Granada Although the reales cédulas of May 27, 1717, claimed that the decision to cre- ate a viceroyalty in northern South America had been discussed “in various occasions”,1 no corroborative evidence of this has ever been found. The only other document from the period to suggest that the idea of creating a vice- royalty was seriously considered before 1717 is an entry within the memoirs of the Duke of Saint-Simon, a member of Philip V’s French entourage. According to him the Prince of Santo Buono, viceroy of Peru, had recommended in 1716 segregating the provinces of New Granada, Cartagena, Panama and Quito from Peru to establish a third viceroyalty with its capital in Santa Fe. According to Saint-Simon, the king had approved this project that same year.2 Indeed, the almost complete absence of documentation pertaining to what undoubt- edly constituted a dramatic transformation of the administrative structure of Spanish America has long puzzled historians. There is no record of a consulta produced by the Council of the Indies equivalent to that produced by the Council of Castile before the introduc- tion of the Nueva Planta of Catalonia. There is no indication that any high- ranking governmental officials based within the province or recently returned from it were consulted, as was the case with the chevalier d’Asfeldt concerning the Nueva Planta of Majorca.3 There is not even evidence that the different authorities who might have been involved in such a decision voiced either sup- port or opposition to it in the months leading up to April 29, 1717, as was the case before the abolition of the fueros—and suppression of vice-regal rule—in 1 “Real cédula por la cual se crea el Virreinato del Nuevo Reino de Granada en 27 de mayo de 1717” reproduced in full in Jerónimo Becker and José María Rivas Groot, El Nuevo Reino de Granada en el Siglo XVIII (Madrid: Imp. del Asilo de Huérfanos del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús, 1921), pp. 200–03, at 200. 2 Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon, Mémoires complets et authentiques du duc de Saint- Simon sur le siècle de Louis XIV et la Régence (Paris: Librairie de L. Hachette et Compagnie, 1856), vol. XIV, p. 17. I am grateful to Aaron Olivas for bringing this passage to my attention. 3 See supra, chapter 3. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004308794_006 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the prevailing CC-BY-NC License at the time of publication. Giulio Alberoni, Reform through the vía reservada 113 Valencia and Aragon in 1707.4 Whilst this lack of a paper trail may be the result of ineffective record keeping or the inevitably eventful history of archival repositories, this chapter argues that it resulted from the context within which the decision was made at court. A series of drastic changes, following the logic and dynamic of the reforms discussed in Chapter 3, had affected the central institutions of American government in the months immediately preceding the decree of April 29 because of the rise to (almost) absolute power of Abbot Giulio Alberoni. Thus, the decision to create a viceroyalty in New Granada was taken through the vía reservada, the executive mechanism of government introduced by Philip V during the War of the Spanish Succession allowing the king and his Secretaries of State and the Cabinet to deal with key matters of government without the intervention of the governing Councils. The creation of the viceroyalty of New Granada was part of a series of reforms introduced in 1717 that sought to increase royal authority over Spain’s government of and trade with the Indies. Alberoni intended to improve the economic govern- ment of the region by weakening and sidestepping institutions such as the Council of the Indies and the merchants’ guild of Seville. At the same time, the crown expected to reduce political infighting in northern South America and increase royal revenues obtained from the region. 4.1 Giulio Alberoni’s Rise to Power and the Decline of the Council of the Indies Alberoni, a clergyman from Piacenza and, thus, a subject of the Duke of Parma, had arrived in Spain in 1711 in the service of the Duke of Vendôme, whom he had met and impressed during the Italian campaigns of the War of Succession. Once in Madrid Alberoni displayed extraordinary political skills and managed to become a confidant of Philip’s Savoyard wife, Queen Maria Luisa. He also secured appointment as the representative of the Duke of 4 Enrique Giménez López, Militares en Valencia (1707–1808). Los instrumentos del poder borbónico entre la Nueva Planta y la crisis del Antiguo Régimen (Alicante: Instituto de Cultura ‘Juan Gil-Albert’/Diputación de Alicante, 1990), pp. 9–19. It is possible that the matter was discussed in one of the ad-hoc juntas organized in 1715 and 1716 by Giulio Alberoni to dis- cuss Spanish commercial policy, but if that was the case, no evidence of it has survived. On these juntas see, Adrian J. Pearce, The Origins of Bourbon Reform in Spanish South America, 1700–1763 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), pp. 55–56..