Brave New Spain: An Irishman's Independence Plot in Seventeenth-Century Mexico

Abstract

To rule, O Fortune, we go; Do not wake me up, if I am asleep, And if it be true, do not let me slumber. Prince Segismundo, in Calderón de la Barca’s Life is a Dream (1635) On the evening of 26 October 1642, constables working for the Mexican Inquisition made an extraordinary arrest in a humble district of Mexico City near the Convento de la Merced. Working on a tip-off from a neighbour, they detained a thirty-one-year-old Irish man known by the hispanicized name of Don Guillén Lombardo de Guzmán. In his apartment, they found drafts of an independence proclamation that announced a new reign in Mexico and declared him ‘king of New Spain’. The decree laid out a revolutionary plan to abolish slavery, end the repartimiento (the forced drafting of indigenous labour), and establish a limited monarchy based on popular mandate and parliamentary consultation. The constables also found drafts of letters to the pope and several kings in Europe announcing that New Spain would henceforth be open to free commerce. Subsequent testimony to the Inquisition by Don Ignacio, Don Guillén’s indigenous friend and collaborator, revealed that the Irishman had been relying on peyote-induced visions to discern the correct time to take power with the assistance of a militia formed of Indians and African slaves. For inquisitors gathering evidence in the case, this ‘diabolic plot’ at first seemed merely the work of a deranged foreigner. Yet their prisoner’s potential threat became ever clearer as they began to realize that he knew the inner workings of institutions in the viceroyalty and of the society that he planned to ‘liberate from Spanish captivity.’1 In this year, when news of real and feared rebellions circulated throughout the Atlantic world, the inquisitors set themselves to the task of discovering how Don Guillén could have imagined such a plot, the sources he might have used to develop it, and to what extent his plan might have reflected the convictions and participation of others. Building on the trial evidence that the inquisitors gathered, as well as on Don Guillén’s own texts, this study reconstructs the transatlantic experiences, ideas and encounters that Don Guillén synthesized into this unique seventeenth-century proposal for political sovereignty in the New World.2