By Deborah Besseghini (Università Di Trieste)
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THE RĺO DE LA PLATA INDEPENDENTISTS AND THE VIENNA CONGRESS A diplomatic way towards autonomy (1813-1816) By Deborah Besseghini (Università di Trieste) As news of Napoleon’s defeat and the Vienna Congress reached Río de la Plata, the absolutist and legitimist character of the new order became clear. By the end of 1815, the independent United Provinces of the River Plate were the only South American province that remained free from royal reconquest. In November 1813, Argentine diplomatic agents had begun travelling to Europe and Brazil hoping that the support of Britain, or another major power, could help them reach a compromise with Spain in order to protect Argentine autonomy – at least civil liberties and the freedom of commerce. In this context, the independentists were willing to accept monarchical governments. Various plans were put forward, everything from Manuel de Sarratea’s negocio de Italia, aimed at crowning another, younger son of Charles IV, to Manuel García’s project for a South American monarchy under the protection of the Braganza. The British wanted Buenos Aires to achieve its autonomy and supported the idea of a monarchy in Río de la Plata, but London remained officially neutral and did not mediate with Spain on behalf of the Argentine emissaries. However, in the course of my research I have uncovered evidence that some British agents did help the Argentine emissaries. The aim of this paper is to briefly examine both the formal and the informal role of Britain in independentist plans to achieve autonomy, in the context of the Vienna Congress. The most important external cause of the fall of the Spanish Empire was the crisis triggered by Napoleon’s invasion of the Iberian Peninsula in 1808. For some years after that, England vouched for the integrity of the Spanish Empire against France in the name of the deposed king, Ferdinand, even protecting the South American colonies that had freed themselves from Cadiz from external attacks1. The British, moreover, may have had some role in the revolution of 25 May 1810, which freed Buenos Aires from its ties to the Spanish government of Cadiz2. By 1814, the scenario 1 After the unfortunate British invasions of Río de la Plata in 1806-7 and the Napoleonic invasion of Portugal and Spain in 1808, commercial networks between Britain and Latin America changed, expanding southward and spreading particularly into the region between Rio de Janeiro and Río de la Plata. Because of the Napoleonic trade block of continental Europe, Britain needed new markets for its manufactured products and tried to use the Iberian crisis to establish legal direct trade with Latin America. 2 British warships stationed at the port refrained from intervening on behalf of Spanish authorities as they could have done in the light of the 1809 treaty of alliance between Britain and the loyalist government in Spain. Moreover, as testified by Antonio de Dorna in 1812, “los ingleses” had furnished at least part of the munitions used for the revolution (Ernesto Fitte, Los comerciantes ingleses en visperas de la revolución de Mayo, Buenos Aires, 1967, pp.62-71). The opinion that London was the primary beneficiary of the Latin American revolutions was widespread in the European courts. We should consider the independentist revolutions planned in the early 19th century by exponents of the Pitt government along with the Venezuelan independentist Francisco de Miranda, as well as the British expedition commanded by Sir Arthur Wellesley (the future Duke of Wellington) that was ready to set sail for South America in 1808 in support of the independentists and then deviated towards Spain upon receiving notice of the anti-French insurrection. decidedly changed in the light of Napoleon’s defeat in Spain and the new European equilibrium under construction at the Vienna Congress, and to prevent other powers from forming a coalition around the Spanish cause in America, England needed to maintain good relations with Spain. At the same time, England was also interested in protecting its own trade with South America – which Spain had no intention of liberalizing but the independentists had opened – and keeping a presence in the southern Atlantic to contain the emerging power of the United States, among other things. Thus, circumstances forced Great Britain to carry out a policy of neutrality that could have been seen as a sort of double-crossing in relations between Spain and its rebel colonies. As news of the British success in the Peninsular War and the imminent restoration of Ferdinand VII to the Spanish throne reached Río de la Plata in 1813, it was clear that Buenos Aires needed to mediate with Spain to avoid war. Carlos de Alvear – the leader of the 1812 military golpe along with the libertador San Martín, a member of the ultra-independentist Lautaro Lodge, and a future Supreme Director of the United Provinces of the River Plate – decided to send the aforementioned Manuel de Sarratea to England. The Sarratea mission was organized to obtain Spanish recognition for the autonomy of Buenos Aires through British mediation and to buy weapons. At this point, Commodore William Bowles – the head of the British naval station on the River Plate – wrote to the Admiralty, presenting Alvear as a moderate who, for tactical reasons, had earned credit in Buenos Aires as a radical, democratic independentist3. And the informal British consul in Buenos Aires, Robert Staples, after a meeting with Sarratea in November 1813 (just before the latter left for Europe), wrote to inform the British Foreign Office of the principal objective of Sarratea’s mission. He wrote: Mr. Sarratea... has been very explicit with me. They admitted the full force of the treaty of alliance entered into by England and are willing to treat on the ground that these colonies continuing an integral part of Spain. With respect to Mr. Sarratea, he has the character of being an ambitious man... and is generally looked upon as a man of superior talent... Staples had just arrived from an 1812-13 trip to London to obtain verbal instructions from Foreign Secretary Lord Castlereagh4. In 1812, after Cadiz had refused to recognize Staples’s role as a consul in Buenos Aires, Castlereagh had accepted his plan to return to Buenos Aires as an agent for the Treasury and a confidential agent for the Foreign Office. However, once there, Staples was considered the British consul even if this was not formally the case. Staples wrote a letter of introduction for Sarratea to Undersecretary William Hamilton, in which he clarified that Sarratea 3 Ricardo Piccirilli, San Martìn y la política de los pueblos, Buenos Aires, Gure, 1957, p.193. 4 Staples was the half-brother of Lady Clancarty, the wife of the British representative at the Vienna Congress and the cousin of Lady Castlereagh, the wife of Lord Castlereagh. would explain the nature of his commission for his government to Hamilton in person. This passage may refer to the plan to buy weapons – about which Staples was fully informed – since the objective of mediation had already been clearly explained in his aforementioned letter to the Foreign Office. Sarratea presented himself to Hamilton on 22 March 1814 and we know that he stayed in touch with the Foreign Office, since at the end of that year Commodore Bowles sent some dispatches from the Argentine government to Sarratea care of Hamilton. During the administrations of Gervasio Antonio de Posadas (Alvear’s uncle) and of Alvear himself, Staples had access to Sarratea’s correspondence with the Buenos Aires government from Brazil and Europe. In 1816, after Sarratea’s return, Staples even sent a copy of Sarratea’s correspondence with the Buenos Aires government to the British Foreign Office. Furthermore, between 1813 and 1816 “Consul” Staples and his business partners, John McNeile and George Dickson (the future Argentine consul in London), financed Sarratea’s mission on behalf of the Argentine government through the firm Hullet Brothers in London. The gastos segretos of the mission were financed through bills of exchange from Staples’s firm “porque no se trasluzca que es cosa de gobierno”, as Sarratea wrote. During a stop in Rio de Janeiro on his way to London in 1813, Sarratea met the British ambassador at the Portuguese court in Brazil, Lord Strangford, who suggested that the Buenos Aires government send emissaries to Spain to congratulate the restored King Ferdinand. Strangford wrote to the Argentine Director suggesting the same, and then to London, presenting Sarratea in very flattering terms. Actual autonomy for Buenos Aires within the Spanish imperial system was Britain’s preferred solution for ending the dispute between Spain and its rebel colonies5. Sarratea himself was a partisan of this solution, but his instructions included also the option of obtaining protection from another power. Indeed, if Britain were unwilling to mediate with Spain, Sarratea was authorized to threaten the British government that he would ask Napoleon to recognize Argentine independence. At the same time, the purchase of weapons in England would have helped reinforce the independentists’ position in America and thus help convince Spain to mediate with its rebel colonies. In a letter to Director Posadas, Sarratea summarized the political path he had chosen to take in London with the Latin motto “si vis pacem para bellum”. In 1814, Dickson, McNeile & Co., the firm of John McNeile, friend and business partner of “Consul” Staples, imported to Buenos Aires a significant portion of the weapons Sarratea had bought in England6. 5 As early as 1812, Britain had unsuccessfully tried to mediate with Cadiz on behalf of the Río de la Plata independentists. 6 On some of Dickson-McNeile weapons imports, see also: Rafael Demaria, Historia de las armas de fuego en la Argentina, 1530-1852, Buenos Aires, Cabargon, 1972, pp.239-248.