Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (30 page)

The mystique of kingship, together with the realities of political life in the Spain created by Ferdinand and Isabella, therefore combined to inculcate in the generation that conquered America an instinctive sense of the deference that should be paid to the crown. Hernan Cortes, even when defying the authority of his immediate superior, the royal governor of Cuba, went to extreme pains to represent his action as being taken solely in order to promote the higher interests of his prince - as the prince himself would appreciate as soon as he was in possession of the facts. This identification of themselves with royal authority was to be a constant in the life of the conquistadores, and reinforced that sense of loyalty which was to be a trump card in the hands of royal officials determined to give reality to that authority three thousand miles from home.

At the same time, however, the crown's authority by no means went unchallenged, even in Castile itself. Cortes's conquest of Mexico coincided almost exactly with one of the greatest political upheavals in Castilian history, the revolt of the Comuneros, in which the policies and actions of the new king and his Flemish advisers were openly challenged by the cities of the Castilian heartland in the name of the community of the realm.50 Although the Comuneros were defeated in battle in 1521, the beliefs and assumptions that informed their rebellion had been exported to America alongside the cult of loyalty, and they too would take deep root in the political culture of the emerging colonial world.

At the heart of these beliefs and assumptions lay the conviction that the well-being of the community depended on the proper functioning of a contractual relationship between the ruler and the ruled. Prince and subjects together formed an organic community, a corpus mysticum, designed to enable its members to live good and sociable lives according to their respective social stations, under the benevolent rule of a monarch who governed, following the dictates of his conscience, in accordance with divine and natural law. The good prince would not swerve into tyranny, and his subjects in return would serve, obey and advise him faithfully. These were the assumptions that found practical expression in the code of the Siete Partidas, well known to Hernan Cortes and his fellow conquistadores." Deriving from Aristotle by way of Aquinas, they were reformulated at a theoretical level for sixteenth-century Spaniards by the neoThomist scholastics of the School of Salamanca.12 They constituted the premise on which the Spanish patrimonial state in the Indies was constructed, just as they also constituted the premise underlying legitimate resistance to the actions of that state when it acted in ways that were deemed to run counter to the common weal, the bien comun.53

The contractualist doctrines built in to Spanish theories of the state allowed for different levels of resistance. The first and most fundamental of these, which was to have a long and important life in the Indies, was articulated in the formula originally deriving from the Basques and subsequently embedded in later medieval Castilian law, of obeying but not complying. An official or an individual receiving a royal order which he considered inappropriate or unjust would symbolically place it on his head while pronouncing the ritual words that he would obey but not comply: se acata (or se obedece) Pero no se cumple. This simultaneously demonstrated respect for the royal authority while asserting the inapplicability of royal orders in this particular instance. Appearances were thus preserved, and time was given to all parties for reflection. This formula, which was to be incorporated into the laws of the Indies in 1528, provided an ideal mechanism for containing dissent, and preventing disputes from turning into open confrontation.54 Hernan Cortes took obedience without compliance one stage further when, on arriving on the coast of Mexico, he ignored the governor of Cuba's orders that he was to conduct an expedition of reconnaissance rather than conquest. Instead, he denounced him as a `tyrant', and appealed over his head directly to the monarch.55 The right of appeal was fundamental in this society, as was the right of the vassal to be heard by his prince, and between them they provided an essential device for conflict resolution.

The final recourse against what was perceived as `tyrannical' government or unreasonable laws was resort to arms. The most explosive situation faced by the Spanish crown in America before the late eighteenth century was that created by the New Laws of 1542, and particularly law 35, forbidding the creation of new encomiendas and providing for the reversion of existing encomiendas to the crown on the death of the current holder. Faced with the prospect of a revolt by the encomenderos, the viceroy of New Spain, Antonio de Mendoza, in effect activated the process of obeying but not complying by persuading the royal official sent out to enforce the laws to suspend those relating to the encomienda until an appeal could be heard by the Council of the Indies.56

In the highly volatile Peru of the early 1540s the story took a different and more tragic turn. The conquistadores had fought a bitter civil war over the spoils of conquest, the governor, Francisco Pizarro, had been assassinated, and royal authority had yet to be firmly established. Blasco Nunez Vela, the first viceroy appointed to the newly created viceroyalty, was sent out to Lima in 1543 with instructions to enforce the New Laws. The news of the crown's intentions preceded him. An orchestrated response was prepared by the town councils, acting under the leadership of the cabildo of Cuzco. At the same time Gonzalo Pizarro, claiming the governorship of Peru in succession to his dead brother, stepped into the political arena as the leader of the encomenderos, who claimed that their services had been insufficiently recognized and rewarded. To cries of `Long live the king and down with bad ministers' - the standard cry of protest in the Spanish Monarchy - Pizarro set out to recruit an army.

The justification for the revolt threatening the new viceroy on his arrival was the defence of the common weal. The jurists who lent their support to Pizarro argued that `certain royal laws affecting these kingdoms had been made and decreed without their representatives being present' - a clear reference to the traditional formula that `what affects all should be agreed by all.' The viceroy proved intransigent, and in the uprising that followed he was defeated in battle and executed on the battlefield. Gonzalo Pizarro, supremely confident both of his own popularity and of the rightness of his cause, then went far beyond the limits of an already dubious legitimacy by replacing the royal arms by the Pizarro arms on the standards carried by his army. He also did nothing to prevent his adherents from letting it be known that he would shortly be proclaimed king of an independent Peru. Such a proclamation was averted by the timely arrival and skilful manoeuvring of Nunez Vela's replacement, Pedro de La Gasca, who announced a general amnesty in advance of his arrival - an offer that Pizarro rejected. Having divided the opposition, La Gasca then defeated Pizarro in battle, and had him tried and executed for lese majeste in 1548. Honour was subsequently satisfied all round, as Charles V, having already revoked the law abolishing the encomienda, accepted that the rebels, in appealing to him, had recognized his authority. Much of the blame could thus be laid on Nunez Vela for rejecting their supplication. In this way the ground was prepared for the consolidation of royal government in Peru on the basis of an act of oblivion, and of a tacit compromise that rested on the assumption of the fundamental loyalty of the encomenderos and settlers to their lawful monarch.57

Pizarro's rebellion was a highly unusual act of outright defiance to the authority of the crown in colonial Spanish America, just as the revolt of the Comuneros remained a unique act of large-scale armed insurrection in the history of Habsburg Castile. Both in Castile and in the Indies a heavy state apparatus was imposed on society in the name of royal authority. But the weight of this apparatus was to some extent alleviated by a political culture which, although lacking the more obvious institutional restraints on the arbitrary exercise of power, was postulated on the basis of a reciprocal relationship that required and expected a continuous process of negotiation between the monarch and his subjects. Lobbying and petitioning (fig. 13), compromise and counter-compromise, formed the everyday stuff of political life in Spain's empire of the Indies. Over the best part of three centuries this tacit compact between monarch and subjects did much to ensure a high degree of outward compliance to the orders of the crown. The settlers remained loyal to a distant monarch, who, they continued to believe, would respond to their complaints and redress their grievances once he was properly informed. It was a convenient fiction in which all parties participated during the period of Habsburg rule, and when it began to wear thin under the new Bourbon dynasty in the eighteenth century, the loyalty which held Spain and its overseas possessions together would be strained to the limits.

The combination of a bureaucratic state structure with a culture of loyalty that permitted resistance within certain understood limits gave colonial Spanish America the appearance of a politically stable society. Reality did not always coincide with appearance, but conflicts were in general resolved and crises contained. The political stability, however, had the effect of trivializing much of public life. With so many areas of government under the control of royal officials, a substantial amount of the colonial elite's time and energy in the Habsbsurg period was devoted to maintaining the outward and more symbolic manifestations of power and status. Although there were always unwelcome encroachments on local autonomy to be fended off, much political energy was expended in endless jockeying over rank and ceremonial within the narrow confines of municipal life.

Such matters would also occupy the colonial elites of British America. Here, however, the nature of colonial government allowed considerably more scope for the independent exercise of effective political power. This was a society whose political and administrative institutions were more likely to evolve from below than to be imposed from above. It was also a society that operated in a political culture more effectively grounded in notions of representation than the political culture transferred to America from Castile.

The absence of close control by the British crown in the early stages of colonization left considerable latitude for the evolution of those forms of government that seemed most appropriate to the people actively involved in the process of overseas enterprise and settlement - the financial backers of the enterprise and the colonists themselves - as long as they operated within the framework of their royal charter. Care was taken in drawing up the Virginia Company's charter of 1606 to guarantee to the colonists and their children all the `liberties, franchises and immunities' enjoyed under English laws.58 But the imposition of martial law in 1611 following the early troubles of the colony was hardly a source of encouragement to colonists or potential colonists looking to find themselves in possession of the `liberties, franchises and immunities' of Englishmen. The `Great Charter' of 1618 was designed to respond to their grievances by improving administration, settling the question of land tenure, and replacing martial law with English common law The reforms included provision for the establishment of a Virginia Assembly, which met for the first time in 1619.59 It was in 1619, too, that Nathaniel Butler arrived as governor in the faction-ridden island of Bermuda with instructions from the Bermuda Company to summon an assembly as quickly as possible, because `every man will more willingly obey laws to which he hath yielded his consent.'60 In stark contrast to Spanish America, therefore, representative forms of government came to British America within a few years of settlement.

The Virginia Assembly of 1619 and the Bermuda Assembly of 1620 were attempts to resolve problems relating to public order, local administration and the raising of taxes for public purposes by recourse to the well-tried English expedient of involving the `political nation', and through it the wider community, in the processes of government. The `political nation' in the colonial context, as in the metropolitan, meant property-holders, but the nature of that context was likely, especially in the initial stages of settlement, to favour a franchise that was wider than in England. As early as 1623 reports of `democracy' in Plymouth Colony were causing concern at home, and William Bradford had to reassure the colony's supporters that women and children did not possess the vote.61 Practice would vary widely from one colony to the next, but there were continuing uncertainties about the definition of `freemen' on the farther shores of the Atlantic. In relation both to voting and to office-holding, these uncertainties enlarged the range of opportunities for many immigrants well beyond what they could have expected at home.

More significant, however, than variations in the character of the franchise was the sheer fact of representation through the institutionalized forum of representative assemblies, such as were not allowed to emerge in the viceroyalties of Mexico and Peru. Once the pattern had been established in Virginia and Bermuda there was every chance that it would be followed elsewhere as new colonies were founded. This was partly because voting was an established feature of joint stock companies, and was therefore likely to be transferred with relative ease to colonial settlements operating under company charters. The most striking example was provided by the Massachusetts Bay colony, which was unique in that both the charter and the government moved across the Atlantic with the first settlers. Once a year the adult free males of the Bay colony would assemble in their capacity as company stockholders to elect a governor and assistant governor for the coming year.62 But, irrespective of the practices of company organization, there were other forces at work to push the new colonies towards the establishment of government by consent. At a time when some of the most influential leaders of the opposition to Charles I were involved in colonial ventures, and when the very existence of parliament itself was under threat from the crown, there was a strong natural predisposition to re-create in the colonies representative bodies modelled on an institution that had come to be identified with the preservation of traditional English liberties.