Bolivar: American Liberator (16 page)

The next meeting did not accomplish much more. The foreign minister was friendly, but his gaze was firmly on the war with Napoleon and the Spanish collaboration necessary to win it. Even so, the Latin Americans took heart. They had been admitted to the highest diplomatic court in the world. They had aired their views on the aspirations of a people. As the Earl of Harrowby commented portentously,
“The events in Caracas are the beginning of a great drama. The curtain has been raised sooner than we thought.” The Venezuelans came away with little doubt that, despite England’s immediate commitment to Spain, their long-term ambitions had been understood: the Creoles were serious about freedom.

There was another ally to be won in London—Francisco de Miranda—and, although the delegates had been instructed to avoid him, Bolívar departed once more from the script. He sought out the fabled revolutionary, whose rhetoric against the Spanish king had grown only stronger now that Spain was under Napoleon’s boot. The old veteran was sixty—a grizzled version of the dashing adventurer he once had been—but he welcomed his compatriots with all the enthusiasm of a young man.
“Despite his age,” Andrés Bello commented, “he seemed at the peak of his youth and ideals, still working to promote the independence of Spanish America.” Miranda invited them to
his house at 27 Grafton Street, which for many years had served as a gathering place for Latin Americans in London. According to López Méndez, it was Miranda who eagerly undertook to make them at home in that bewildering city:

The only person with whom we consulted with any confidence—and who gave us the preparatory briefings we needed—was our countryman; he more than anyone else, with his extensive experience and travels, his long contacts with the local government, and well-known exertions on behalf of America, was in a position to give us broad and reliable advice.

It is very possible that Miranda even briefed Bolívar on how to renew talks with the British foreign minister. Miranda knew a great deal about Lord Wellesley, having been a close friend of his more famous brother, the Duke of Wellington. In fact, Miranda had been on the Foreign Ministry’s payroll—receiving a modest pension—for quite some time. Just two years earlier, before Napoleon changed the world order by invading Spain,
the Foreign Office had been on the verge of assisting Miranda in a new liberating expedition. Wellington eventually was instructed to take Miranda for a walk on London’s streets and give him the bad news that England was coming to Spain’s aid, not Venezuela’s. If anyone could prepare Bolívar for British fickleness and cunning, it was Miranda.

Bolívar and his colleagues spent much of their time in the old general’s comfortable house, availing themselves of his remarkable library, which contained six thousand volumes, many of them annotated in his own hand. Miranda also took pleasure in introducing the travelers to his distinguished circle, inviting them on visits to the Duke of Gloucester; the Duke of Cumberland; the chancellor of the exchequer, Nicholas Vansittart; the abolitionist William Wilberforce; the educator John Lancaster; and John Turnbull, his personal financier. But the English sought out the Venezuelans on their own, eager to learn about the recent events in Caracas: Lord Wellesley’s son Richard was a frequent visitor to Morin’s Hotel, as were other members of London society. For them, and indeed for anyone who would listen, Bolívar painted a splendid picture of Spanish American independence, of how a desire for liberty had galvanized the continent, and of the investment opportunities in store for any who would aid the cause.

There is little doubt that he spoke of such things in gatherings of the Great American Reunion, a Masonic lodge that Miranda had founded
in London for radical Spanish Americans. In general, the Masonic movement of secret societies had proved to be a singularly powerful force for revolution throughout the Atlantic world, and the society of Freemasons in Miranda’s day was enormous, counting such eminences as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, the Marquis de Lafayette, William Pitt, the Duke of Wellington, Alexander Pushkin, and Sir Walter Scott. At meetings of Miranda’s Great American Reunion—held routinely at his Grafton Street house—Miranda became a mentor to many a starry-eyed young rebel. Eventually,
the three preeminent figures of the Spanish American wars for independence—the Argentine liberator José de San Martín, the Chilean hero Bernardo O’Higgins, and Bolívar—sat in Miranda’s library, met with his friends, and thought through their strategies for insurrection.

Miranda’s lodge, like all Masonic lodges, was considered anathema by the Spanish crown and Catholic Church, which looked on revolutionary cells with alarm, and so it was spied on routinely by royalist agents. In 1811, one of those
agents intercepted a letter from an Argentine “brother” to a New Granadan, revealing the names of all men who had been officially inducted into Miranda’s secret society. Andrés Bello was among them, as was Luis López Méndez—Bolívar’s companions on that fateful trip. Even the outspoken Caracas deacon José Cortés de Madariaga was listed as having taken the vows at Grafton Street. Curiously, Bolívar is not on the list.
Given his later criticisms—even prohibition—of secret societies, it is likely that he found the concept of secret brotherhoods pointless in a people’s revolution. Not for him the undeclared war.

But Miranda and Bolívar could not have agreed more on central questions of independence. When they were alone, they discussed the gritty questions of founding a republic, and every particular it entailed. In countless countries Miranda had visited, he had always
made a point to study its public services—to take notes on how Philadelphia or Vienna served their urban populations, and how drastically these services were neglected in Madrid.
He spoke of irrigation, mines, schools, museums, penitentiaries, public health, and the fine details of administration, and Bolívar listened with fascination. They spoke, too, of the public morality essential to any democracy, and spent long hours discussing
the singular example of the United States. Dazzled by the older man’s worldliness and wisdom—but mostly by his record as a man of military action—Bolívar implored him to return and rejoin Venezuela’s struggle for independence.

Miranda balked. He had seen Venezuelan indifference at first hand and did not believe that he would ever be welcomed as a leader. As summer grew into autumn, Bolívar used all his powers of persuasion to convince the general that he was wrong.

Those weighty conversations between Miranda and Bolívar did not always take place in Miranda’s library. The two appeared everywhere together—at the opera, the theater, in Piccadilly, at the Royal Observatory, or strolling through Hyde Park or Kew Gardens—and the London papers breathlessly reported their outings. They must have made an eccentric pair, ambling through London’s streets: the elegant, handsome older man with the irrepressible, highly strung youth, conversing spiritedly in Spanish, stopping to argue their points. Miranda introduced Bolívar to
the portraitist Charles Gill, a student of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s, and evidently to his tailor, too, for Gill’s portrait of Bolívar in London depicts him in a dashing jacket with a high collar and a black cravat—the very picture of English period elegance. His hair is slicked back, his chin hard with purpose, his eyes lit with resolve.

Bolívar also managed to navigate the city on his own. Many years later, he told of a
“singular adventure” at a London brothel that both amused and amazed him. In the course of negotiating his desires with one of the prostitutes, he made a request that infuriated her, and she accused him of being a homosexual. She raised such a ruckus that the entire house came running, and when he tried to calm her with a few banknotes, she threw them scornfully into the fire. She didn’t speak Spanish and he didn’t speak English, so there was no hope of correcting her misapprehension. As he later related to friends, he ended up exiting the house of pleasure “with far greater urgency” than he had entered it. Little could he have known that the woman probably feared for her life. Only weeks before, on July 8, the London
police had raided the White Swan, a Vere Street “molly” house, as transgender clubs were then called, and arrested a group of suspects. An angry mob followed the
accused homosexuals to Bow Street Station, knocking them down, pelting them with mud, and threatening far worse. The men were charged with attempted sodomy; a number of them were hanged. The prostitute clearly had England’s harsh laws in mind when she voiced her objections. For Bolívar, however, that incident became a striking metaphor for the vast cultural distance that separated London from Paris. Two years before his death, he still had a vivid memory of it.

ON SEPTEMBER 22, 1810, BOLÍVAR
left London for Caracas on a sleek eighteen-gun sloop, the HMS
Sapphire.
He had intended for Miranda to travel with him and indeed Miranda had his luggage and sixty-three books carried on board with that objective in mind. But Lord Wellesley thought it unwise to allow the old revolutionary to make his voyage home under a British flag. The
Sapphire
sailed without him, arriving in La Guaira on December 5 and delivering Bolívar alone. Miranda managed to book himself on a far less comfortable packet boat, and reached Venezuela on December 10. López Méndez and Bello decided to stay on in the house on Grafton Street, where they continued Miranda’s diplomatic efforts and went on to play very different roles in the revolution.

Bolívar was dismayed to see what had become of Venezuela in his absence. While he had been touting unconditional independence in the drawing rooms of London, the Caracas junta had cemented its ties to Ferdinand VII, weakened its influence in the provinces, and splintered into a score of bickering factions. The jealousies between Coró, Maracaibo, and Caracas had festered and, in the opinion of one traveler,
“a deadly animosity exists, for which I fear much blood will yet be shed.” The junta seemed wholly unaware of the civil unrest beyond the capital. The blacks and pardos did not trust the Creole government and were saying so openly, declaring a steadfast loyalty to the Regency. The royalists were busily recruiting the lower classes to their cause. Blind to those realities, the junta had set out to mimic the government of the United States of America, although that example—born of a rare ethnic and ideological solidarity—was singularly unsuitable for a populace that had no uniformity of race, class, or experience, and so couldn’t agree on much of anything.

Worried that Miranda would feel he was stepping into a quagmire, Bolívar went about trying to rally support for him. But it wasn’t easy to persuade men who felt Miranda was a poseur—or, worse, a deserter—that they should bury their resentments and give the old general a hero’s welcome. When Miranda arrived on December 10, Bolívar raised a good crowd to meet him at La Guaira, but the
only member of the junta who was there to greet him in any official capacity was the fearless Deacon Cortés de Madariaga. The junta itself had decided to put the best face on an awkward state of affairs by issuing a frigid salutation.

That day, Bolívar was merely an austere figure in the milling throng. Beside him, in splendid robes, Cortés seemed to tower over him. They watched from the pier as the British brigantine
Avon
approached, ferrying the great man from Curaçao.
Expecting to be greeted as the leader of the newly formed Venezuelan government, Miranda had dressed to honor the occasion. He appeared on the prow of his ship in the glorious old uniform in which he had led French troops in the battles of Maastricht and Neerwinden.
The coat was sky blue, the trousers white, the vivid tricolor sash of the Great Republic across his breast. He was a barrel-chested man—full-lipped, straight-backed—but he looked a good decade older than his years. His thinning hair was powdered and pulled into a scrawny tail. In one ear, he sported a single gold ring, as was the fashion among European gentlemen of his generation.

The royalist historian José Domingo Díaz made the observation:

I saw Miranda enter in triumph, welcomed as a gift from heaven, with all the hopes of the worst rabble-rousers resting on him. He was then about sixty-five years of age, serious looking, tirelessly loquacious, altogether too friendly toward the dregs of society, and ever ready to boost their hopes. The wildest saw him as a political sage, the only one capable of heading the government; moderates with more rational minds, on the other hand, saw him as a looming danger.

So it was that the general came home after his bumbling 1806 invasion. It was soon clear to Miranda that Bolívar, the “wildest” of them all, had overestimated the enthusiasm with which his countrymen would receive him. He would come to learn that even Cortés de Madariaga—despite
his presence on the dock—
had bombastically opposed his return, threatening to leave Venezuela if Miranda were allowed reentry. The priest had appeared only to deliver the junta’s pointedly cold salutation. As Miranda traveled to Bolívar’s house,
where he would lodge for the next few days, he began to absorb the reality of his situation. For all of Bolívar’s fine words, Venezuela was unprepared for drastic change. He would have to grasp the reins. They would not be handed to him.

What
was
handed to him three weeks later was
a title of lieutenant general with an equivalent salary and benefits. These were hardly satisfactory, he complained, for a dignitary with his experience. Miranda insisted he be named a full general and paid commensurate wages. When his objections went ignored, he decided to mount a political campaign to rouse the public on his behalf. Such an effort might have seemed normal enough in England, but in Venezuela, emerging from the twilight of colonialism, it struck the Creoles as outlandish. Even so, with Bolívar’s help, he managed to win a seat in congress as the representative of the province of Pao. Bolívar, on the other hand, made no effort to run for election or seek a government position. Indeed, in the bureaucratic shuffle, the junta had
demoted him from lieutenant colonel to captain. Undaunted, he threw himself wholeheartedly into assisting Miranda. Together, they took over a party called the Patriotic Society and Miranda did what any modern politician would do in a run for election: make speeches; call on powerful people in the community; write hectoring pieces for his party’s newspaper,
El Patriota de Venezuela.