An Irish Rebel in New Spain

In the seventeenth century, Irish nobles, soldiers, and scholars fled English colonization and made new lives in the Spanish empire. Among the most colorful of these “wild geese,” as they are evocatively called in Irish history, was William Lamport: a scholar-soldier from Wexford who was arrested in 1642 by the Mexican Inquisition for plotting to overthrow Spanish rule, abolish slavery, and have himself crowned king of an independent Mexico. Lamport's life threaded through several milieus in the seventeenth-century Atlantic world: the halls of El Escorial, the battlefields of Flanders, networks of Irish exiles in Europe, and the multicultural metropolis of Mexico City.Lamport has long fascinated scholars and storytellers because his life generated a rare resource for a marginal individual in his century: a voluminous and captivating paper trail. Lamport was imprisoned for a full 17 years by the Mexican Inquisition and thus had a lengthy trial record, and constables confiscated a chest of his personal papers. Delving into these records, it is not hard to be captivated by Lamport's witty boasts, midnight jailbreaks, or acerbic replies to inquisitors whose knowledge of theology was inferior to his own. Yet the sheer accessibility and entertainment of Lamport's biography has suppressed more serious engagement with his ideas and scholarly work, which are just as abundant as his exploits and blarney. Andrea Martínez Baracs, in An Irish Rebel in New Spain, addresses this lacuna and provides a finely curated selection of Lamport's writings, translated into English by Hank Heifetz. Published in the Latin American Originals series by Pennsylvania State University Press, An Irish Rebel in New Spain holds up Lamport's writings as a mirror on seventeenth-century politics.To allow readers to understand the contexts surrounding the texts in this volume, Martínez Baracs provides a deeply researched biographical introduction. From Lamport's brief childhood in Ireland to his struggles against the inquisitors in Mexico who sentenced him to death, Martínez Baracs offers new insights from archival findings. Martínez Baracs navigates around the many Lamports that have surfaced: the sincere rebel, the impostor, the pathological liar, and the errant courtier, among others. Martínez Baracs delivers a convincing portrait of Lamport as a “humanist fighter” (p. 38). In her introduction and notes to the texts, Martínez Baracs grounds Lamport's political struggles in his vast erudition and scholarship.The selection of texts in this volume does justice to the richness and breadth of Lamport's writing and thought. We catch a glimpse of Lamport's efforts to secure Spanish support for an Irish reconquest of their island, which he framed in a clear anticolonial discourse. Lamport's denunciations of inquisitorial abuses and corruption are evident in a proclamation that he pasted on walls around Mexico City. Readers also have the opportunity to read Lamport's “Regio Salterio,” a collection of psalms that he scrawled on bedsheets in the inquisitorial jail. The stanzas reveal Lamport's revolutionary thinking. “Tell me,” he asked from his cell in the early 1650s about the exploitation and sale of enslaved Africans, “why do you buy and sell men as if they were beasts? . . . Why, against the law of God, do you buy Ethiopians and not wish to be bought by them?” (p. 107). This radicalism is most evident in Lamport's 1642 proclamation of New Spain's independence, which outlines a broad plan to abolish slavery and forced labor, open New Spain to trade with all nations, and recognize that sovereign power rested in Indigenous populations, “since the realm is theirs” (p. 63). In this future society, race would mean nothing next to one's acts. There was, of course, a catch: Lamport also expected that the newly liberated people of Mexico would recognize his efforts and talents, as well as his (entirely invented) royal bloodline, and that they would freely elect him king in gratitude.If there is anything that is missing in this volume, it is perhaps Lamport's penchant for extravagance. Those already familiar with Lamport's tale might find this restraint surprising. The Irishman's efforts to establish legitimacy to become the king of Mexico, which involved spinning a delightful yarn that he was the illegitimate brother of King Felipe IV of Spain due to dalliances that Felipe III had had with his beautiful Irish mother, were by no means an isolated occurrence. Lamport drew on the powers of peyote—acquired from a seller in the Zócalo—as he penned his independence proclamation, he once boasted that he could fly aguardiente overnight from Ireland to Mexico, and he timed his ambitions according to astrology. While many of Lamport's biographers fell enthralled to such charms, Martínez Baracs, quite laudably, has made a convincing argument for rigorously contextualizing his ideas. This is Martínez Baracs's great contribution. By making Lamport's texts accessible, this masterful volume makes it possible for students of colonial Mexico, the early modern Irish diaspora, and radical politics in the Atlantic world to cast a cold eye on this brilliant and misunderstood intellect and rebel

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