Coming of Age in Burkean England: Bernardo O’Higgins

Ambitious colonial administrators started sending their sons to England in the 1790s when the French Revolution entered its more radical and expansionist phase. England was the Atlantic's greatest sea power, and its language was increasingly the idiom of commerce in the region. Vicente Folch, then governor of West Florida, placed his sons Estevan (Stephen) and Martín at an academy in Hammersmith where he said he hoped they would “learn English to perfection, such skill being of inestimable value in these provinces.”Footnote ⁸ At exactly the same time, in 1797, the Irish-born governor of Chile and eventual viceroy of Peru Ambrosio O’Higgins made similar arrangements for his illegitimate son Bernardo Riquelme, who adopted his father's surname while in England.Footnote ⁹ Originally charged to the care of a miserly clockmaker named Mr. Perkins, he soon transferred to a private Catholic school superintended by Timothy Eeles in the leafy town of Richmond, Surrey.Footnote ¹⁰ It was his first encounter with religious intolerance; as a Catholic, he was disturbed and frustrated to find his options limited since most schools were affiliated with the Anglican Church. Having spent several years as a religious minority in England, it may not be surprising that O’Higgins was sympathetic to the English expatriates in Valparaíso in the 1820s and permitted them to build their own churches and cemeteries at some political cost to himself.Footnote ¹¹

As teenagers do, he promptly fell in love with the headmaster's daughter Charlotte and courted her for weeks until her nervous parents had the strange foreign boy transferred far away to the Margate Academy. Finally he decided he could stand the suffering no longer and wrote a letter of intent to Miss Eeles. Thrilled, but mindful of the rules of propriety, Charlotte turned the letter over to her father who politely but firmly rejected the young man's advances.Footnote ¹² Twenty-five years later, as Supreme Director of Chile, O’Higgins asked his British aide-de-camp John O’Brien to look up his long-lost love, only to learn from her mother that poor Charlotte had died shortly after Bernardo left England in 1800. Mrs. Eeles, no doubt regretting the rejection of her daughter's now-famous suitor, assured him that the girl's “dying wish was to send you her fond greetings.”Footnote ¹³ To soften the blow, Mrs. Eeles sent along a portrait of her daughter and six different types of O’Higgins's favorite English cherry pastries. Bernardo O’Higgins never married and left no legitimate children. Instead, he transferred his paternal feelings to the entire Chilean people.

In 1799, however, the youth was despondent. To distract himself and find a new purpose in life, he headed straight for the home of Francisco de Miranda, who was the most vocal and active propagandist on behalf of Spanish American independence at that time. Legend has it that the conspiratorial Venezuelan taught O’Higgins both mathematics and military strategy and ignited a passionate patriotism that marked the first step toward independence in Chile.Footnote ¹⁴ As O’Higgins spent time with Miranda, he started to conceive of independence as a hemispheric project and came to view his time abroad as a unique opportunity to gain knowledge, skills, and contacts that would help his fellow citizens in their struggle to be free. His departure from London toward the end of 1800 brought with it some serious political counsel from his paternal mentor Miranda, who gave O’Higgins a famous document that he was supposed to read daily and then destroy upon committing its words to memory.Footnote ¹⁵ Miranda stressed that O’Higgins was leaving the zone of safety abroad for enemy territory at home where he should “distrust all men over the age of forty,” especially European Spaniards would despise him not only for having been born an American but also for having broken the chains of ignorance by receiving his education in England.Footnote ¹⁶

Acquiring his political consciousness in England during the crucial years of early adulthood, Bernardo O’Higgins absorbed the cultural values of his adopted homeland and hoped to put them to good use in Chile. In August 1820, he issued a manifesto that reminded his countrymen that as he had been “[e]ducated in the free country of England, that desire which is born with every man in the climate of Arauca was strengthened. Loving liberty, both from sentiment and principle, I swore to assist in procuring that of my country or to bury myself under its ruins.” British residents in Chile never failed to remark upon the Supreme Director's close personal attachment to all things English. Traveler Maria Graham recalled that O’Higgins constantly pressed her for information about her relatives in Surrey, inquired after several of his old friends by name, and spoke wistfully of his days there. He spoke English perfectly and had, she observed, absorbed “a good deal of the free and independent spirit of the nation” while attending school in Richmond.Footnote ¹⁷ Others agreed that O’Higgins was “passionately fond of the countrymen of his father” and intended to retire to Ireland when he left public life.Footnote ¹⁸

O’Higgins provided information about Chile to London merchants who were willing to pay him a subscription of two guineas per month for the favor and thereby not only learned the value of information in the modern age but also came to think of himself as a national authority.Footnote ¹⁹ He marveled that these powerful men came great distances to speak with him because “they have known no other Chilean but me.” Years later, as the leader of independent Chile, he continued his association with British merchants and was perceived by them as favorable to their interests in the region.Footnote ²⁰ A youth spent in England, the most powerful maritime nation in the world, inclined O’Higgins toward a career in what he called “military navigation.” Later, when he was looking to create a Chilean navy and expand its role in maritime commerce, he famously invited Thomas Dundonald, Lord Cochrane, to do the job.Footnote ²¹ Carlos María de Alvear, future Supreme Director of the United Provinces of Río de la Plata, also attended school in England in his formative years after a shipwreck killed his mother and siblings on a journey to Spain in October 1804.Footnote ²² These two figures, like the dozens of Spanish American creole youths who would be sent to England for a patriotic education over the course of the next three decades, absorbed important cultural values while in foreign residence and retained an affection and partiality for English culture, trade, and military alliances later on in life.

From the Andes to Hampstead: Mercedes San Martín

By the time Bernardo O’Higgins and his generation ascended to power, most had married and become parents themselves. In 1824, O’Higgins's close friend and political ally José de San Martín was the hero of both Argentine and Peruvian patriotic military campaigns and the proud father of a seven-year-old daughter. Born in 1816, young María Mercedes Tomasa de San Martín Escalada was much loved by her father who invested in his only child all the same hopes and dreams that he held for his fellow citizens. Her mother Remedios had died shortly after Mercedes was born, leaving the infant motherless and San Martín heartbroken. In recognition of his wife's substantial contributions to the ultimate victory of the Army of the Andes, and reflecting a desire that his own infant daughter Mercedes might have opportunities that had been denied her mother's generation under colonial rule, San Martín declared that Spanish American women had earned the right to a role in the public life of the new nations.Footnote ²³ After his infamous meeting with Simón Bolívar in Guayaquil in 1823, San Martín announced his intention to travel to England where he intended to secure the best education he could for his precious young daughter.Footnote ²⁴ Apparently, as civil war threatened to engulf Peru, San Martín believed a true patriot and honorable man like himself could serve the cause of liberty and unity best by leaving his homeland to prepare the next generation for a brighter future.Footnote ²⁵

San Martín arrived in London at the beginning of May 1824, where his presence immediately set off a firestorm among the bickering Spanish American expatriates. His own appointees to the Peruvian legation, Juan García del Río and Diego Paroissien, were overjoyed to see him and together all three commiserated over the sad fate that had befallen Peru. Others, like the hostile Argentine envoy Bernardino Rivadavia, resented the enthusiastic welcome San Martín received and embarked on a smear campaign intended to portray him as a megalomaniac and aspiring dictator.Footnote ²⁶ His faction also tried to block the small annual pension of 600 pesos that the Congress had granted to Mercedes in 1817 as compensation for the loss of her mother and any potential siblings.Footnote ²⁷ Amid these unpleasantries, San Martín sought the recommendation of Captain Peter Heywood and his wife, who helped him place Mercedes at an expensive private college in the nearby town of Hampstead.Footnote ²⁸ Satisfied with the arrangements he had made for his eight-year-old daughter, San Martín settled in Brussels where the cost of living was lower but regularly traveled back to England to visit her.

During the long days in exile, San Martín devoted much thought to the type of adult he wished Mercedes to become through her education in England and, by extension, defined his ideals for independent Spanish American womanhood as well. In 1825, he composed a famous list for his daughter's education:

1. 1. To humanize her character and make her sensitive even to the insects that harm us.

   As [Stern] once said to a mosquito, opening the window so that it may go out: “Off you go, poor creature, the world is big enough for both of us.”

2. 2. To inspire in her a love of truth and a hatred for lies.

3. 3. To inspire in her a great confidence and friendship, but one based in respect.

4. 4. To stimulate in her a notion of charity for the poor.

5. 5. To respect the property of others.

6. 6. To accustom her to keep secrets.

7. 7. To inspire her sentiments of respect toward all religions.

8. 8. To behave sweetly and mildly toward her servants, the poor, and the elderly.

9. 9. To accustom her to behave formally at the table.

10. 10. To [teach her to] love cleanliness and devalue luxury.Footnote ²⁹

The list itself is frequently anthologized, but less commonly noted is the comment San Martín added on the reverse side: “Inspire her with love for the Patria and for liberty.” Mercedes San Martín remained in England throughout the 1820s, where she met and married another Argentine youth, Mariano Balcarce, who had been studying at the school of William Mosely Watts in Putney, Surrey, since 1826. Thomas Kinder, a member of the famous banking and commercial firm with interests in the Río de la Plata, nominated Mariano Balcarce for membership in the Royal Institution, dedicated to the advancement of science, in 1828, thus granting the youth access to great scientists like Michael Faraday. Together, Mariano and Mercedes formed a powerful political couple and served their country in a variety of diplomatic posts. Mercedes San Martín de Balcarce hosted a famous salon in Paris while her husband was Argentine ambassador there in the mid-nineteenth century.Footnote ³⁰ Balcarce became a vector for commercial and technical connections between Argentina and Europe.Footnote ³¹

Heir to an Ex-Emperor: Iturbide's Son at Ampleforth Academy

About the same time as San Martín deposited Mercedes in Hampstead, similar exigencies and inclinations brought the children of toppled Mexican emperor Agustín de Iturbide to London. Arriving via Italy at the beginning of January 1824, Iturbide's family joined him at his house on Clarges Street. Ranging from four to 17 years in age, Iturbide's nine children were the object of his intense interest and affection.Footnote ³² The ex-emperor was pleased that he had been well received among sympathetic monarchist circles in England, where he believed he could find what he called “the moral security” necessary to build character in his children. To expose them to modern technology and a bustling commercial capital, Iturbide often took his oldest sons Agustín and Ángel out to stroll and marveled at “the amazing traffic of coaches and persons of all classes walking in the streets.”Footnote ³³ His friend Michael Quin remarked that “[Iturbide’s] heart was softened in early life by an affection for the lady who is now the mother of a numerous family. It is in the circle of that family, while his children are around him, that Iturbide is seen most delighted.”Footnote ³⁴ Indeed, much of Iturbide's energy during his four-month stay in England was devoted to the cultivation of his children.

After making the fateful decision to return to Mexico to try to reclaim his throne, Iturbide sent all but his two youngest children off to various academies throughout England, in May 1824. Sabina, age 14, was left at the Sacred Heart Academy in Paris for serious religious education.Footnote ³⁵ Two daughters, likely Juana de Dios, age 11, and Josefa, age 8, were placed at a convent run by Franciscan nuns at Taunton, while two younger girls, María Jesús, age 6, and María de los Dolores, age 5, were left at Spetisbury House near Blandford.Footnote ³⁶ Ángel de Iturbide, age 8, was lodged at Mrs. Mathew's private boarding school in Hampstead. Master Ángel's expenses were recorded as board and tuition, entrance, washing, seat at chapel, writing, pocket money, flannel, worsted socks, two pairs of sheets, six towels, a brush and combs, gloves, and pin cloths, which totaled £26, 6 pence, for the spring term.Footnote ³⁷ For her part, Iturbide's wife, the strong-willed Ana María de Huarte, insisted on accompanying her husband back to Mexico along with their two toddlers Salvador, age 4, and baby Felipe (age unknown).Footnote ³⁸

Iturbide's eldest son and heir-apparent, 16-year-old Imperial Prince Agustín II was installed at the boarding school of Mr. Collins in South Hall, Ealing, in the northeast section of London.Footnote ³⁹ He quickly transferred to the prestigious Ampleforth College where as late as 1826 young Iturbide was still listed as a “parlour boarder,” or post-school age privately supported student. Ampleforth was a small school, with 40 or 50 students enrolled each year, and closely associated with the nearby Ampleforth Abbey. It was run by Benedictine monks with a religious curriculum intended to prepare young Catholic boys to take their monastic vows. Although few consistent records from the early nineteenth century remain, there are indications that the monks provided high-quality instruction in secular subjects that included modern languages and chemistry. A student's diary from 1816 shows that besides attending mass and vespers, taking communion, and keeping up with their academic work, Ampleforth boys led a remarkably diverting and active life. Their education schedule built in plenty of time for skating, student theatrical productions, making toffee, spending time among the instruments in a dedicated music room, paying charitable visits to the old and infirm, and, that most English of all passions, gardening. A printed program for the annual examination of Ampleforth College's students in 1827 lists their public recitations in fields of Greek, English from the age of Caesar, general history from 300 years before Christ, Latin, geography (both physical and global), French, mathematics, and public speaking.Footnote ⁴⁰

After providing for his children's education and safety in England, Iturbide prepared to return to Mexico. As he departed on his final, fateful expedition, the disgraced ex-emperor left his eldest son with some valuable counsel. In it, Iturbide adopted the tone of a patriotic statesman and devoted father when he wrote what is clearly a farewell letter. Youth was a time that was particularly dangerous because one is easily overtaken by passions, he explained; Iturbide thought the same phenomenon could be observed in young nations as well. In order to combat a natural tendency to hotheaded action, Iturbide advised his son:

In a sense, he was addressing the Mexican nation as well. Iturbide rightly predicted that his son's behavior would become a matter of national public record and stressed that the boy had a responsibility, therefore, to conduct himself in the best manner possible. Young Agustín was encouraged to surround himself with virtuous and educated men because, his father said, “in their company you will always gain something.” Just as San Martín constructed a list of desirable traits in his idealized daughter, so too did Iturbide sketch the qualities that he wished to cultivate in his idealized son: affability, a sweet disposition, officiousness, respect for his teachers and those of greater skill and experience, and a sensibility to the needs of those who surrounded him. By studying hard in England and cultivating a virtuous public persona, Agustín would become a “good son, a good brother, and a good patriot.”Footnote ⁴² Indeed, in Iturbide's mind, those roles and responsibilities overlapped.

Young Iturbide took up the challenge. In a solemn reply to his father's letter, the self-identified “hereditary prince” lauded his father's disinterested, patriotic decision to renounce their family's titles and work selflessly for the advancement of public happiness in the ungrateful fatherland that had earlier raised him up as emperor.Footnote ⁴³ Even Iturbide's stoic words as he faced the firing line were crafted to link for all eternity his patriotism with his paternity:

At the end of July, a scant two weeks after the public execution, the editors of Mexico City's newspaper El Sol disingenuously urged national reconciliation, advising their readers that Iturbide “has expiated by his death whatever offences he may have committed against his country. . . . As long as Iturbide lived and was dangerous, we constantly endeavoured to expose the maneuvers of his partisans,” but now his death somehow “changes the state of things.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Yet, another Iturbide threat still remained. As the living embodiment of his martyred father's legacy, Prince Agustín's mere existence raised the specter of a future run at power and served as an uncomfortable reminder of regicide and bitter faction at the heart of the new nation. For this reason, the jittery Mexican envoy José María Michelena reported to the Secretary of Foreign Relations that he had assigned agent Juan Mancebo to monitor the “ambitious” boy's daily movements and associations.Footnote ⁴⁶

Disputing Diplomatists at Stonyhurst Jesuit Academy

Not all political enemies treated each other so frostily. Indeed, it was not impossible that cultured opponents could converse civilly while representing different factions. Often, their respective children and families provided the subject matter for pleasantries before thorny diplomatic issues were raised. For example, in 1817, the liberal daily newspaper The Morning Chronicle announced that the Duke of San Carlos, a Peruvian by birth and Spain's new ambassador to London, had arrived and intended to put his 10-year-old son at the prestigious Jesuit college of Stonyhurst in Lancashire.Footnote ⁴⁷ At the time, San Carlos was entertaining the possibility of entering into talks with several of the Spanish American plenipotentiaries in Europe, including Bernardino Rivadavia of Argentina.Footnote ⁴⁸ A meeting between the two men took place in June 1818 and moved along positively enough until Rivadavia refused to make any concessions to the Spanish Crown and insisted on having his “full and unlimited powers” recognized before negotiations could proceed any further. Obviously, the two men failed to accomplish much in their public roles as diplomats, but during their conversations they at least could connect as parents. When Rivadavia brought his own sons over for an education later in the 1820s, he recalled San Carlos’ advice and initially placed them at Stonyhurst as well.

Young Bernardino Rivadavia and his brother Joaquín attended Stonyhurst College from 1822 to 1826. Archival records indicate at least 35 other children with Spanish or Portuguese surnames attended the institution during the 1820s. The reasons are not surprising. It was an excellent school, one that blended a deep humanistic religious education with a strong emphasis on science and observation.Footnote ⁴⁹ A contemporary prospectus paints an idyllic portrait where even the youngest children were exposed to a “regular course of classical education” that included reading, writing, spelling, Latin, French, and instruction in general religious principles and the Sacraments. Stonyhurst had one of the most advanced scientific laboratories for students in all of England until the 1850s and was among the first schools to be lighted with gas. Tuition was a reasonable 40 guineas per year and included room, board, fire, candles, pens, ink, paper, school books, linen, washing, and some items of clothing. Parents or their agents were responsible for any expenses occasioned by a child's illness, plus pocket money, postage, and other sundry expenses.Footnote ⁵⁰ Rivadavia's agents, Hullett Brothers of Liverpool, were also the agents for the Argentine government and seem to have paid his sons’ Stonyhurst tuition bills from the national coffers, thus blurring the distinction between the Argentine representative's personal expenditure and those of the state. The Hulletts’ Liverpool office also paid the bills of Antonio Carrasco in 1824, and its main London branch authorized payment for the education of Charles [Carlos] Pérez from 1821 to 1823. The offices of Messrs. Brotherston and Company in Liverpool handled the accounts of Domingo Santiago Toro, a young Chilean brought to study in England by Diego Paroissien and Juan García del Río, from 1822 to 1823.Footnote ⁵¹

The South American boys at Stonyhurst were visited by their fathers’ friends and agents whenever one happened to be in the area. Argentine General Tomás de Iriarte stopped by the school on his way from London to Liverpool and provided his friend Rivadavia with a frank report because otherwise “my silence would be criminal.”Footnote ⁵² Indeed, the harsh conditions of British schools were sometimes part of the appeal. Iriarte had brought his wife's 15-year-old asthmatic nephew Francisco de Cires to lodge with the family of John Parish Robertson in Scotland in order to pursue his education and receive the benefits of the brisk climate. He also agreed to act as chaperone for a somewhat wilder lad, 19-year-old Carlos Terrada, whose mother hoped that the boy's debauched morals would improve with “the benefit of the severe discipline of English colleges.”Footnote ⁵³ Cires may have settled into a tame and healthy existence in Edinburgh— it seems that even his wheezing dissipated—but Iriarte remarked sadly that he was too late to save Terrada who was “advanced in his career of vice.”

Domingo Santiago Toro arrived at Stonyhurst in August 1822, around the same time as the Rivadavia boys. His patron, Diego Paroissien, made a visit to the school two weeks after depositing young Toro there and recorded in his diary that, although the house was large and airy, he did not appreciate the dirty sheets. On the other hand, their library was good and they possessed a fine mineral collection that almost made up for the other shortcomings.Footnote ⁵⁴ Within a year, Toro was able to write a brief paragraph to Paroissien in English “in order that you may see that I do not lose any time studying in this College, I continue studying as well and as much as I can possible [sic] do.”Footnote ⁵⁵ More telling, however, is the longer letter in Spanish attached to it in which Toro says he had wished to write more in English “but it is impossible to [do that] because of the little free time that I have . . . we have such long lessons that there is no time for anything else.” In fact, busyness was fast becoming a hallmark of the British national character in the post-Napoleonic era. All of the Spanish Americans in London, young and old alike, commented on their surprise at the fast pace and constant need to be occupied productively that they observed in the English people.

Utilitarianism and Self-Government at Hazelwood School

Rivadavia returned to London as a private citizen in September 1824 when Bartolomé de las Heras replaced Martín Rodríguez as governor of Buenos Aires province.Footnote ⁵⁶ He promptly alienated many of the resident Spanish Americans with his haughty demeanor and even challenged José de San Martín to a duel. Upon the advice of his friend and mentor Jeremy Bentham, Rivadavia transferred his sons to an experimental school called Hazelwood that was located just outside Birmingham.Footnote ⁵⁷ He was so pleased with the results that he later sponsored six other Argentine youths, mainly the sons of friends and political allies, to attend the same school. Hazelwood was influenced by Bentham's idealized Chrestomathia plan, which operated on the pedagogical theory that students learn best through inquiry and investigation and not by rote memorization. Hazelwood's curriculum stressed science and good government, encouraged frequent changes in subject and setting throughout the day to keep the students’ attention, abolished corporal punishment, and employed the monitorial system currently being popularized by both Joseph Lancaster and Andrew Bell.Footnote ⁵⁸

The school itself was founded in 1819 by Thomas Wright Hill and his sons Rowland, Matthew, and Arthur. It attracted children from progressive families throughout England and abroad. Sir Francis Place and Leigh Hunt both sent their sons to Hazelwood. John Bowring sponsored the education of several Greek boys whose fathers were active in the Greek liberation movement. The Hill family had close connections to Dr. Joseph Priestley and were strong proponents of the natural sciences. Accordingly, children at the school were encouraged to experiment with electricity, build all sorts of apparatuses, and take measures of physical phenomena. Bentham wrote to Simón Bolívar suggesting that a similar school be built in Colombia. José Cecilio del Valle, a Guatemalan statesman and correspondent of Bentham, praised Hazelwood extensively in his Memoria sobre la educación.Footnote ⁵⁹ These were important and formative experiences that influenced the Latin American youths’ attitudes and actions later in their public lives.

Matthew Davenport Hill described his family's approach to education in 1825 by noting that it was not intended:

Instead, the school aimed to teach students the value of self-government and self-education. The business of learning, in this view, was like a science. Keeping in mind that one was forming future citizens, it was more important to treat these children as reasonable beings “without endangering the subordination necessary in all government.” In this way, it was more important to instill habits of self-discipline that would outlive the presence of the master. It was exactly this notion which appealed to these boys’ Spanish American fathers. A letter from an English correspondent in Buenos Aires printed in the Caledonian Mercury in June 1826 reported:

It went unsaid that the boys’ residence and training in England would surely improve their social standing and business connections after they returned home.

Hazelwood School had several important innovations beyond the scientific and rational base of its curriculum. Its main operating principle was to leave as much power and responsibility in the hands of the boys as possible so as to train them in the exercise of public authority. Masters set the times and subjects for study, but the boys themselves controlled most of the details of the school's daily routine. For example, upstanding boys would be elected as conservators of the school's property, the books, drawings, and instruments “belonging to the general body.”Footnote ⁶² Others were elected to be prefects in their dormitory or serve as “silentiaries” during mealtimes. Students served as judges, magistrates, defense attorneys, and executive cabinet members, and sat on a treasury board. There were subcommittees for the purchase of books, instruments, and gymnastic equipment, and for overseeing the obligatory charitable activities. While carrying out these functions, students absorbed the values of a participatory system based on rules and order through direct experience.

The Hazelwood School was also unique for its monthly newspaper, which was written, printed, and published by the boys themselves on equipment they owned and maintained. Glancing through the pages of the Hazelwood Magazine, it seems clear that impressionable boys not only were taught their academic subjects but were also encouraged to identify with liberal causes in England and throughout the world. In October 1824, just as the Rivadavia brothers and their young friend Antonio Rodríguez arrived at Hazelwood, the student body was raising a subscription on behalf of London's Greek Committee, the organization chaired by Bentham's friend John Bowring. It was intended to support the efforts of the Greek patriots against the Turkish occupation.Footnote ⁶³ In August, an agent of the Greek patriots visited the school. The next month Captain Basil Hall visited and presented the students with a copy of his travels to South America and discussed with them the nature of the revolutions in that quarter. One student sent a letter to the editor about the sorry state of the miners in England, in which he proudly proclaimed that he was “most violently liberal” and made a pun about a passing canal steamer which he reported as “General Miner” [that is, General Mina].Footnote ⁶⁴ Clearly the Hazelwood students were encouraged to immerse themselves in the politics of liberty and drew connections between movements for its advance throughout the world.

In all, at least 14 South American boys attended Hazelwood in the mid 1820s, the majority of them from Buenos Aires. They were Bernardino and Joaquín Rivadavia, Antonio Rodríguez, Luis Castro, Gregorio de Molina, Pedro Pico, Pedro Álvarez, Miguel Valencia, José Castro, M. Echeverría, N. R. Peña, and Manuel Monasterio. Vicente and Juan Rocafuerte were from Guayaquil.Footnote ⁶⁵ The school itself was a perfect training ground for future civic leaders and the Spanish American boys quickly made their presence felt. In the ceremonies at the close of each term, the boy with the highest achievement in each subject was recognized publicly and permitted to choose his own prize from a large selection of books, scientific apparatus, and artistic materials. Spanish American boys figured prominently in the lists of subject awards throughout their time at Hazelwood, choosing among their prizes copies of The Beauties of Shakespeare, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, and Cruikshank's illustrated Byron.Footnote ⁶⁶ For the rest of the nineteenth century, these boys and their families remained attached to the erudition and status associated with British education that fortified their self-image as a patriotic, practical, aristocratic governing elite.

Hazelwood consciously set out “not to play but to work; to rear men and not children, and to prepare boys not for the nursery but for the great world.”Footnote ⁶⁷ While at the school, the impressionable Spanish American students absorbed English radical cultural and political values as well. The boys were not only proficient in their academic subjects, but they sometimes assumed posts in student government within months of their arrival as well. Vicente Rocafuerte appears in the transcripts of a school committee meeting in 1827, making a motion that recently purchased prints be hung for display. He also argued that the salary for playing bassoon in the school band was too low, especially when one considered that the instrument was more difficult to play than the clarinet but inexplicably lower paid. A lively debate ensued, following the parliamentary rules of order, with motions being made and seconded until a compromise sum was reached.Footnote ⁶⁸ In this way, Spanish American youths gained practical experience in the arts of parliamentary procedure and gentlemanly debate, the power of persuasion, and the exercise of authority on behalf of their constituents. These were powerful lessons that transcended the confines of the institution and carried implications for their future roles in the greater world, just as the Hill family had envisioned.

Spanish American boys were also present and active in the school's student-run judicial system. In August 1827, there was a generalized debate among the student body on the subject of “the comparative advantages of requiring unanimity, or deciding by a majority, in juries” in which “the power of persuasion and words was stressed over the rote memorization of a particular argument.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Miguel Valencia reported on the Hazelwood Assize trial of September 5, 1827, in which a boy identified only as “S. M.” was indicted for the crime of falsehood. A month later, Valencia served as “counsel for the defendant; in the case of “J. M. v M. E.” over an incident of assault without provocation. N. R. Peña was called as a defense witness. The case turned on the issue of foreignness, as Valencia closed by noting that “my client is a foreigner, so indeed is the plaintiff; but again the Plaintiff is better acquainted with English than my client, and it is therefore very probable that the Defendant took these bad expressions in a worse sense than they were meant.Footnote ⁷⁰

Nevertheless, Valencia lost his case. He served as counsel for the prosecution in another Assize case held the next summer. The jury heard the evidence, then deliberated for three and a half hours before returning a verdict which agreed with Valencia that the defendant in that particular case, “J. C.,” had been acting as a de facto teacher and therefore it was “even more encumbent upon him to follow the rules.”Footnote ⁷¹ This sentiment exactly mirrored that of their Spanish American fathers and their English hosts, who shared the belief that those in power had a moral duty to set a positive public example for their fellow citizens. There were many efforts to introduce an English-style jury system throughout Spanish America in the early Republican period.

The Hazelwood School, with its student-led government, its juries and assize courts, its academic competitions that stressed useful knowledge and the spirit of inquiry, represented a powerful cultural experiment in which young Spanish American boys were trained in the values of a participatory political culture at a formative age. The Rocafuerte boys’ uncle and sponsor Vicente Rocafuerte consciously studied the English models of Joseph Lancaster, Robert Owen, and Hazelwood and recommended that they be replicated back in America. He wrote to Mexican Minister of Foreign Relations Juan de Dios Cañedo that these models would encourage “the happy application of work and industry directed by science and progress of civilization.”Footnote ⁷² For his part, Miguel Valencia went on to a distinguished career as a lawyer and journalist in Argentina; he taught at law schools in Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro (while in exile for opposing Juan Manuel de Rosas). He was the editor of a daily newspaper in the British style, El Telégrafo de Comercio: Diario Comercial, Científico y Literario (1832), and was a devoted Freemason. Rivadavia's sons, like Valencia, were partisans of the anti-Rosas unitario exile faction, but unlike their former classmate they switched sides in 1843 and became known as federalist “double-crossers.”Footnote ⁷³

Central Americans at the Vicar's Residence

Although children from the southern hemisphere came to England in greater numbers, several Central American youths also spent their formative years in English educational establishments and later recalled the tremendous influence the experience had on their perception of civil society. Young Miguel García Granados, who later became a general and served as president of Guatemala from 1871–1873, and his older brother José Vicente traveled to London where they spent three years studying in various settings. Miguel was 15 years old when he arrived on November 30, 1824, and soon found a place as a “border [sic]” in the home of an Anglican vicar in Dopford. He was the oldest of the dozen or so boys who lived together and followed a highly regimented routine:

1. 8:30 A breakfast of tea and toast followed by an hour of geometry, and then reading in ancient history (García particularly liked the Greeks).

2. 12:00 Private instruction from the master in geometry and algebra taken in his room.

3. 2:00 Lunch consisting of “plain puding [sic],” soup, meat pasty with potatoes, cooked “greens,” and some tart or pastry for dessert. At the beginning, the bewildered boy ate lots of soup before he learned what to do with the “budín.”

4. The afternoon was spent in further reading and then some vigorous exercise.

5. 7:00 The master again visited him in his room and read aloud some chapters of Blair's Rhetoric.

6. 8:00 Cold evening meal of leftovers, fried potatoes, tea, and toast.

After dinner, the boys were allowed free time to visit friends or play chess while the vicar smoked a pipe and enjoyed his class of sherry. At 10:00 pm, all retired to their rooms to read for another hour or hour and a half.Footnote ⁷⁴ Every Saturday after dinner, Miguel would go to London for an overnight visit to his Guatemalan friends Ignacio and Manuel Aycinena, who were enrolled in a school in Tooting.Footnote ⁷⁵

In retrospect, García Granados noted that he actually spent very little time at his studies, although he read a lot “without method or direction.” His chief interest, like that of Bernardo O’Higgins 20 years earlier, was in learning the arts of war. The vicar may have been “an intelligent man who knew how to teach” but nonetheless he apparently failed to make much headway because the sociable lad admittedly spend half his time chatting.Footnote ⁷⁶ Miguel and José Vicente took the obligatory educational tour through Scotland and ventured on to France in 1826. When they returned to London, the brothers halfheartedly applied themselves to taking lessons in English language, rhetoric, and Latin from the Spanish liberal exile Antonio Alcalá Galiano.

While in London, Vicente García Granados wrote two patriotic poems for El Repertorio Americano, a serial journal devoted to the diffusion of useful knowledge for Spanish America that was edited by Colombian Juan García del Río and Venezuelan Andrés Bello. In these two pieces, both of which appeared in the April 1827 number, a person using the initials “G. G.” provided a “Canto to the Independence of Guatemala” that praised the “Sons of Kaqchiquel” whom the Gods and their own efforts have blessed with the glory of achieving independence.Footnote ⁷⁷ García Granados mixed classical and Romantic genres and references to create a link between the triumph of liberty in the ancient past and the ongoing struggles in Spanish America and Greece. Similarly, the South American boys at Hazelwood drew obvious comparisons between their parents’ victories in America and the struggles of their fellow students from Greece. Lines dedicated to “the sweet, wild shore of my birth” were signed by “A South American.” Antonio Rodríguez provided detailed analyses of the political revolution in La Plata in which despots were characterized as those who “opposed the progress of useful knowledge” and in which the author offered thanks to his British hosts to whom “we and all the world are indebted” because they have held out the lamp of liberty to other nations.Footnote ⁷⁸

In 1827, the Guatemalan brothers received the sad news of their father's death. After some years abroad, Miguel García Granados remembered that “the desire to return to my country was great.” But the youth had spent his formative years in a foreign environment and clearly had absorbed the values of English aristocratic constitutionalism. As president of his country, he championed a conservative style of government that he declared was “necessary to maintain the peace, harmony and order in a house, comparable in a certain way to the constitutional monarchs in the modern English system who rule but do not govern, and who are, nevertheless, useful and even necessary.Footnote ⁷⁹ His fellow Guatemalan Mariano Aycinena, whose family had extensive business relationships with English companies, shared a similar inclination: “In 1821, and I say this in all frankness, I did not believe the republican system was applicable in my country. My opinion in favor of a moderate monarchy was founded in the excellence of that form of government, praised as the best by the same wisest republicans of antiquity, by modern writers, and whose goodness has been proven by the practical example of England.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Just as it did for their fathers, so too did their extended residence in England affect the ways in which these Spanish American boys understood the workings of political culture and the nature of Romantic patriotism.

Patriotic Professionals at Universities and Medical Schools

England had just two universities in this period, the great medieval institutions of Oxford and Cambridge.Footnote ⁸¹ Because all students were subject to religious tests, neither seems to have had much of a foreign or Catholic presence in the early decades of the nineteenth century; apart from a few Russian princes and some wealthy Americans, their halls remained populated by scions of proper British society and the occasional scholarship boy studying to become a vicar.Footnote ⁸² The same is not true of higher education in Scotland, which was home to a surprisingly diverse and cosmopolitan student body. Despite the fragmentary and incomplete nature of the early records one can identify at least 50 students of obvious Luso-Hispanic ethnicity who attended Edinburgh University between 1790 and 1834.Footnote ⁸³ Of these young men, 37 were enrolled in the institution's renowned medical school and 13 took degrees in literature. By far the greatest number came from Portuguese-speaking regions: Brazil (occasionally sub-identified as Santos, Rio de Janeiro, Pernambuco, and Bahia), Oporto, Lisbon, and the islands of Madeira and Fayal.Footnote ⁸⁴ In 1815, there was a medical student from Caracas and by the late 1820s, there were three students from Buenos Aires and two Peruvians registered in the literature course. This was not an insignificant foreign population in a yearly class size of between 500 and 600 students.

Edinburgh University offered an education that was among the best in Europe.Footnote ⁸⁵ Its philosophers were reasonable and humane. Its humanities professors included positive discussions of other faiths, including praise for the Koran. Its pedagogical practices for medical training were both practical and modern. Lectures were given in vernacular English, not Latin, covering subjects in a logical way that moved from general principles to specific application, followed by time for students to work through examples or solve related problems on their own.Footnote ⁸⁶ This model was transferred to the American universities of Yale, Columbia, and Pennsylvania and eventually became standard practice in the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁸⁷ The Latin American students, though, benefited not just from the strong academic training they received but also from the generally cosmopolitan outlook and the personal connections they made there. For example, in 1791, Clemente Lorenzo Monteyro, Antônio Cardoso Monteiro, and Jacinto Jozé Vieira were in the same medical class as Mungo Park, the Scottish traveler and botanist best known for being the first European to reach the Niger River, who published his exploits as Travels in the Interior of Africa (1799). Also in the early 1790s, Brazilians Domingo Felis dos Santos and Jozé Avellino Barboza took their degrees alongside Francisco Solano Constâncio, later famous as Dr. Constancio, a Portuguese radical who was forced out of Edinburgh for supporting the French Revolution and went on to become a vocal proponent of public vaccination, a philologist, a diplomat, a historian of Brazil, and a writer of fiery political tracts.Footnote ⁸⁸

These transatlantic connections served them well in their future careers. Barboza, for example, returned home to join the faculty of the Colégio Médico-Cirúrgico of Bahia to develop similar standards and training practices.Footnote ⁸⁹ Marciano José Pereira Ribeiro published the medical pamphlet Tentamen physica medica inauguralis de natura tam creatrice quam destructrice rerum (1812); he then became a deputy in the first provincial legislature of Rio Grande do Sul and was briefly its president during a turbulent period in the mid 1830s. Ignacio Joseph d’Araújo Vieira spent two years at the University of Glasgow studying philosophy, rhetoric, and logic before relocating to Edinburgh and completing a master of arts in literature in 1814.Footnote ⁹⁰ Luiz Ernesto da Carvalho Paes d’Andrade, surely the son of Manuel C. Paes de Andrade, the exiled leader of the 1817 Pernambucan Revolt, studied medicine in Edinburgh from 1829 to 1834. In their future careers, they benefited from their foreign residential experience and their firsthand knowledge of the way things were done elsewhere.

Along with their formal academic training, the Latin American youths not only had an extended experience in a foreign culture, language, and climate, but they also associated with boys from other countries and with future British leaders. For example, in the early 1790s, Henry Brougham was at Edinburgh taking his law degree; he later co-founded the Whig periodical The Edinburgh Review and became both a member of Parliament and a lawyer for liberal causes including the abolition of slavery and the reform of the education and the prison systems. Fellow students included the great romantic novelist Walter Scott, Joel R. Poinsett (later a US envoy to South America in the 1810s and Mexico in the 1820s), Henry Herbert Southey (later physician to the Portuguese embassy in London and younger brother of the Lake Poet and noted Lusophile Romantic poet-historian Robert Southey), and the naval officer and travel writer Basil Hall. In the 1810s and 1820s, the student body became even more diverse with the arrival of Sultan Katte-Ghery from the Caucasus and Crimea, P. Zohrah from Constantinople, and youths from Goa, Germany, France, and Italy. Also notable was the small contingent of Poles who studied literature in the early 1820s: Count Andrzej Artur Zamoyski, the future agronomist and proponent of steam travel, his cousin Prince Czartoryski of the famous nationalist clan that led a patriotic uprising against Russia in 1830, Gothard Sobieski, and J. Lobachevsky (who was surely related to the mathematician Nikolai Lobachevsky). This sort of foreign residential experience among nationalists, liberals, and reformers from other countries helped consolidate a world view that understood progress as a transnational phenomenon, habituated the Latin American boys to a toleration of difference, and socialized them into seeing themselves as part of a cosmopolitan vanguard with a particular responsibility to modernize their countries.

Among the Spanish Americans who attended the University of Edinburgh, the two most prominent were medical students who went on to have very distinguished and influential careers in their home countries. José María Vargas was already an accomplished doctor and patriot when he fled to safety abroad at the end of 1813 to escape the royalist reaction in Venezuela.Footnote ⁹¹ He arrived in Edinburgh in February 1814 and settled down to a diligent though impoverished life as a student of medicine, specializing in obstetrics, anatomy, and surgery.Footnote ⁹² Vargas quickly sought to establish working connections with some of the most important scientific institutions in Britain. He presented a paper at the Royal Society of Edinburgh on February 9, 1816, and was granted membership in the Royal Society in London the next month. He and Laurenço Jozé Moniz from Madeira attended the Royal Society's meeting on November 7, 1816, as guests of the wealthy Scottish antiquarian and scientist William Archibald Cadell.Footnote ⁹³ Vargas was admitted to the Royal College of Surgeons the same month. Some authors also claim that he was accredited as a surgeon by the Royal Society of Medicine in Edinburgh, a title upheld by the Royal College of Surgeons and subsequently recognized upon his return to public life and practice in Venezuela in the 1820s.Footnote ⁹⁴

Vargas had established his credentials as a patriot who had suffered imprisonment and exile during the wars of Independence and, as his generation of like-minded leaders assumed the reins of power, he achieved several prominent positions. As a professor of anatomy, he introduced techniques learned in Edinburgh for autopsies and cadaver studies and founded a medical society much like the one he had joined while abroad. In 1827, Bolívar appointed Vargas as rector of Venezuela's university and gave him the task of overhauling the old colonial institution, transforming it away from its pontifical, scholastic roots and into its modern form as the Central University of Venezuela. He also took a great and active interest in reforming education at all levels, including an effort to buy Francisco de Miranda's book collection at a London auction so that it might serve as the nucleus of a national library. Vargas was briefly president of the country in the turbulent year 1835–36; his brief tenure has been described as a time of moderate civic progressivism, sort of a South American Whig approach.Footnote ⁹⁵

Similarly, Miguel Aréstegui was a promising student from Buenos Aires who received a scholarship from the government to advance his training abroad.Footnote ⁹⁶ The Argentine legation paid his bills and monitored his progress regularly, reporting back to Buenos Aires that their investment in the boy was being taken seriously and he was applying himself to his studies on the country's behalf. In 1827, Aréstegui wrote to Eustâquio Torres, a subsecretary in Argentina's London legation, describing his strong sense of “discharging my duties as they correspond to the expectations of my país” and assuring Torres that “my honor and gratitude make me exert all manner of sacrifice” to that end. He was working diligently and aiming to graduate on schedule the next year and feeling intensely the “separation from my patria.” The diplomats made inquiries through private channels, likely Edinburgh's Parish Robertson family which was heavily involved in South American trade and mining ventures, and reported approval of “the conduct and application of this youth.” Aréstegui did indeed complete his thesis the next year, a treatise on kidneys and urine function titled “De Calculorum Urinae Formatione Curaque Medica.”Footnote ⁹⁷ He returned home and became one of the driving forces in public medicine in Argentina, for example, as chair of a commission charged with handling a cholera outbreak in 1832.Footnote ⁹⁸

Many Youths, Many Experiences

There were dozens of other Latin American youths who passed through Great Britain during these four momentous decades. Patchy records mean that not all their experiences can be reconstructed, but a general sense of the diversity of children who spent some of their formative years in Great Britain can be obtained. For example, children of important textile and mining families in Mexico and Peru came to England to study its engineers’ new techniques. Esteban Antuñano was an entrepreneur from Puebla who studied in England and later introduced the hydraulic machinery of Lancashire cotton mills to his own factories.Footnote ⁹⁹ Two Central Americans received technical training at the same time. In 1827, José María and Mariano Montealegre came to England with the Cornish mining engineer Richard Trevethick and the sponsorship of the Colombian Mining Association.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The boys began their studies at “a well-known Gents’ boarding academy” run by William Gittens at Lauderdale House in Highgate, a suburb of London.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Eventually they moved on to do university work in Aberdeen and then medical studies at Edinburgh in the mid 1830s. José María Montealegre was a prominent scientist, an advocate of public health initiatives whose time in Britain colored the rest of his professional life. He was active in the operation of the Anglo-Costarricense Bank and rose to become president of Costa Rica from 1859 to 1863.

Other children came with their parents who had been exiled from Brazil or Spanish America during the wars, or who served in an early diplomatic capacity. Some were the product of marriages with British women. Francisco de Miranda had two sons, Leandro and Francisco with his Yorkshire-born wife Sarah Andrews. They were raised by their mother in Bloomsbury and seem to have had the patronage of many of their father's prominent supporters, including James Mill, Chancellor of the Exchequer Nicholas Vansittart, and journalists who introduced Leandro to their profession before he went to Colombia to start a newspaper in 1823. Jeremy Bentham provided a recommendation for young Leandro in which he noted that by “the kindness of an old friend of his father’s, Lady Esther Stanhope, . . . he has had the advantage of passing on the continent of Europe in different countries, and has even set foot in Asia, at Sidon I think he said it was; or at any rate at some point in Palestine where he passed some time with this singular patroness of his.”Footnote ¹⁰² Andrés Bello had eight children in London with his two British wives, Mary Ann Boyland (d. 1821) and Elizabeth Dunn. Much of their lives revolved around the church in their mainly Catholic, immigrant Somers Town parish, St. Aloysius. Bello was said to have been so poor that he would take his children to the British Museum during winter so they could sit by the fireplace.Footnote ¹⁰³ Not all Latin American children experienced such penury. In the 1820s, Colombian minister plenipotentiary Francisco Antonio Zea lodged his wife and daughter in a Bath spa for some time.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In May 1832, the daughter and son of Mexican minister Manuel Eduardo Gorostiza attended Their Majesties’ Ball in honor of Princess Victoria's birthday.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Vicente Ballivián wrote Claudio y Helena, often described as the first Bolivian novel, while staying with Vicente Pazos Kanki and studying literature as a teenager in London.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ He was much influenced by the tremendous reading culture of the city and its burgeoning Romantic movement.