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[Assistant] The men and women who lived through the period often referred to it as simply the late troubles and left it at that.


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[Assistant] It started as a conflict over whether the political system should be reformed, descended into civil war, sparking a totally unexpected revolutionary period in the late 1640s and early 1650s that saw the king executed, monarchy abolished, and a written constitution introduced for the first time.


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[Assistant] But then the storm passed and by 1660 the monarchy was restored and most of the recent innovation swept away. So what do we call it?


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[Assistant] Every possible label, the Great Rebellion, the English Revolution, the English Civil Wars, the Wars in the Three Kingdoms, fails to capture some essential element of this story.


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[Assistant] Since I am primarily interested in the revolutionary aspects of the period, I am going to use English Revolution as shorthand.


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[Assistant] And I know that this is problematic, not the least of which because, you know, Scotland and Ireland.


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[Assistant] So if you want to yell at me about calling it the English Revolution, please email me at revolutionspodcast at gmail dot com.


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[Assistant] But just so you know, no, I am not a Marxist or some unreconstructed wig. I'm just a guy interested in the revolutionary aspects of the period who is going to be talking a lot about the English revolutionary aspects of the period.


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[Assistant] In broad terms, historians interested in explaining revolutions tend to break down into two loose camps.


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[Assistant] One camp argues that revolutions erupt when slowly building tensions and the socio-economic system finally break.


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[Assistant] While the other camp argues that it has far more to do with the calculations and miscalculations of individual historical actors.


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[Assistant] The former is criticized for building very nice looking theoretical models and then highlighting anything that proves the model and ignoring anything that doesn't.


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[Assistant] While the latter is criticized for essentially arguing that nothing was amiss until the moment rebellion, civil war, and violent social upheaval spontaneously consumed the entire nation.


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[Assistant] Neither of these interpretations alone, at least to me, is satisfactory.


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[Assistant] Long-term social forces set the parameters for action, but they do not dictate the results. Individual choices dictate the results, but always within the bounds of those long-term social parameters.


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[Assistant] With this show covering a series of distinct time periods that are thematically linked, but otherwise wildly disconnected,


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[Assistant] When I make the transition from one revolution to the next, I'm going to have to pause and recalibrate.


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[Assistant] Specifically, I'm going to have to pause and recalibrate for four weeks.


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[Assistant] I've thought a lot about this, and I just don't see any good way to get around it.


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[Assistant] So each revolution will run its allotted 12 to 15 episodes. And then I'm gonna go dark for a month while I get ready for the next batch. So, 12 weeks on, 4 weeks off. Sound good? Good.


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[Assistant] I apologize in advance if I butcher any pronunciation. It's bound to happen. Email me when it does. Please don't just leave me hanging. The show lives at revolutionspodcast.com.


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[Assistant] The young prince spent a sickly childhood overshadowed by his dashing older brother Henry Frederick and his vibrant older sister Elizabeth, both of whom thrived in the public spotlight.


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[Assistant] A spotlight that got quite a bit brighter in 1603, when Queen Elizabeth died and James VI of Scotland became James I of England, uniting the British crowns for the first time in history.


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[Assistant] Charles, meanwhile, grew to be a reserved and solitary young man, ill at ease with the loose commotion of his father's court.


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[Assistant] But that was alright. As the second son, he could afford to fade into the background.


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[Assistant] But then in late 1612, 18-year-old Prince Henry died, and all of a sudden Charles became heir to the throne.


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[Assistant] Acutely aware of the responsibilities he now faced, he did his best to prepare for the monumental job that lay ahead. He read, he studied, he thought deeply.


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[Assistant] But he lacked the air of authority that came so naturally to his father and elder siblings.


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[Assistant] England was the largest and wealthiest of these kingdoms. Her five million souls dwarfed the million or so living in Scotland and two million living in Ireland.


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[Assistant] The English population was primarily rural and coastal, and they spent their days farming, shepherding, fishing, and mining.


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[Assistant] The economy was mostly insular, with the primary export being undied wool, and that export mostly headed straight to Dutch merchants on the other side of the channel.


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[Assistant] There were small regional cities scattered across England, Norwich in the east, York in the north, and Bristol in the west, but they all held barely 10,000 people.


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[Assistant] When you talked about the city, you meant the city, London.


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[Assistant] When Charles ascended to the throne, London held somewhere north of 300,000 people.


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[Assistant] It was the political capital, the conduit for all trade and the cultural heart of England.


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[Assistant] Up to the north, Scotland, the ancestral home of the Stuarts, was divided by the classic line between the Highland North and the Lowland South, which served not only as the major geographic divide, but also the major cultural, linguistic, political, and religious divide.


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[Assistant] In rough terms, the Lowlanders were more Anglo-centric, settled, and critically in terms of what's about to happen, pretty radically Protestant.


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[Assistant] The Highlanders, meanwhile, were fiercely independent, spoke Gaelic, and remained Catholic.


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[Assistant] The largest city in Scotland was the capital, Edinburgh, which in the mid 1600s was about the same size as York, Norwich, and Bristol.


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[Assistant] Scotland had long been dominated by her neighbor to the south, but it is important to note that at this point, even with King James VI of Scotland becoming King James I of England, we are still dealing with two separate countries, not a single unified polity.


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[Assistant] Ireland, meanwhile, was not an equal monarchy to England the way that Scotland was. It was instead a dependency claimed by England since the 1540s.


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[Assistant] By the time of Charles' ascension, Ireland was composed of three main groups. The Old Irish, Celtic, Gaelic, and Catholic.


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[Assistant] The Old English, descendants of Anglo-Norman settlers who had come over during the Middle Ages, and who formed the ruling aristocracy, and for the most part remained Catholic after the Reformation. And then finally there was the New English.


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[Assistant] Settlers who would come over on plantation schemes in the last century.


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[Assistant] They were uniformly Protestant and represented a threat both to the Old English and the Old Irish.


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[Assistant] The English, especially the New English, took the Old Irish as some weird race of subhumans, and the goal of royal administrators was to civilize them, that is, turn them into Protestants, without it costing the Exchequer too much money, because the English Exchequer, as we're about to see, is kind of a mess.


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[Assistant] One of the first things Charles did after ascending to the throne was to call a parliament.


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[Assistant] Not only was he just getting started with his own reign, but war with Catholic Spain was brewing, and that meant the new king needed to get his financial house in order.


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[Assistant] And calling a parliament was the only way to get his financial house in order.


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[Assistant] The institution of parliament had grown out of medieval great councils, meetings of the leading nobles and clergymen designed to make sure everyone was on the same page when it came to royal policies, and by policies I of course mean taxation.


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[Assistant] These great councils morphed into proto-parliaments around about the Magna Carta and were basically called whenever the king needed money.


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[Assistant] By the 1300s, Parliament was divided into its familiar two branches, the Upper House of Lords, composed of the peers and bishops, an exclusive little club of 120 or so during the Stuart era,


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[Assistant] And the Lower House of Commons, composed of the Knights, lesser gentry, and professional classes. A less exclusive club of 400 or so members.


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[Assistant] Now it is critical to remember that parliament, even with the commons, was by no means a body that represented the people.


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[Assistant] Franchise was restricted, membership even more so.


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[Assistant] But it did represent the only thing that was important for it to represent at the time, namely these were the guys with the money.


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[Assistant] Initially, getting the stamp of approval from the men who controlled the wealth of the nation was a savvy political and economic expedient.


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[Assistant] But by the time Charles took office, parliamentary approval of new taxes was more than just an expedient.


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[Assistant] It was settled law that parliament must approve new taxes, or they were illegal.


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[Assistant] As we will see, the kind of litigious Englishmen who milled around Westminster took this right very, very seriously.


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[Assistant] So when the king or queen needed money for something, war being that most typical of some things, they would call a parliament and ask it to approve a subsidy or two.


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[Assistant] These subsidies took the form of a wealth tax, and after a little bit of wrangling the monarch usually got what they asked for.


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[Assistant] But unfortunately for the stewards, one of the ways Queen Elizabeth had courted favor was by keeping regular taxes ridiculously low and the subsidy requests to a minimum.


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[Assistant] It's not that she was a big spender, quite the opposite, but unfortunately that unwillingness to spend was yet another problem for the stewards.


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[Assistant] King James inherited a kingdom with minimal revenue streams, lots of debt, and a boatload of projects that needed funding.


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[Assistant] So the early Stuart period is plagued with financial difficulties because everyone had been conditioned by the tutors to expect tax payments that were hilariously out of date.


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[Assistant] The nobility, for example, was being assessed at rates a century old that took no account of the 600% inflation over the same period.


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[Assistant] So when the stewards started trying to bring a little sanity to the system, there was this terrible gap between what was politically possible and what was economically necessary.


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[Assistant] By which I mean that when parliament thought that it was being generous, its subsidies still weren't even coming close to meeting the financial needs of the state.


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[Assistant] Now it was customary that in the first parliament of a new reign, the king would be voted something called tonnage and poundage for life.


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[Assistant] Simply put, tonnage and poundage was a collection of import-export duties that the king would use to finance the routine organs of government.


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[Assistant] Granting it for life meant that no matter what, the king would have an independent financial base from which to run his administration.


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[Assistant] It was traditional, it was expected, it was a respectful little tip of the cap.


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[Assistant] The first parliament of Charles' reign, however, got together in May 1625 and decided to vote him tonnage and poundage for one year only.


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[Assistant] The historical consensus appears to be that this unprecedented stinginess was simply a maneuver to get the young king to agree to some much-needed reforms, but Charles took it as a slap in the face.


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[Assistant] So it's fair to say that relations between Charles and his parliaments got off on the wrong foot right away.


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[Assistant] Parliament followed up on this insult to Charles' royal dignity with a second one, when they started openly attacking George Villiers, the first Duke of Buckingham. Okay, stay with me.


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[Assistant] Buckingham had been rapidly elevated up the peerage after the charismatic young man had caught the eye of King James the decade before.


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[Assistant] He was created Duke of Buckingham in 1623, right about the time he was jumping ship from the deteriorating old King James to the rising young Prince Charles.


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[Assistant] The bond between Duke and Prince had been sealed during an impulsive and ill-fated trip to Wu the Infanta of Spain in 1623.


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[Assistant] The reckless wooing of the Catholic princess had failed spectacularly to the great rejoicing of Protestant England, but it had cemented Buckingham as one of the few men Charles called friend.


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[Assistant] Handsome and self-assured, Buckingham provided a crutch for Charles to lean on as he made the transition from prince to king.


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[Assistant] But bucking himself regard was not only infuriating to his rivals, it was usually a delusion.


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[Assistant] He had managed to convince both himself and the stewards that he was a wizard of finance, diplomacy and war.


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[Assistant] But everyone else thought that he was a corrupt blunderer who was going to bring the kingdom to ruin.


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[Assistant] But Charles had very few men he called friend, and none that he trusted more than Buckingham.


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[Assistant] The Tonnage and Poundage vote had put him on edge. The attacks on Buckingham pushed him over. And in August 1625, he dissolved parliament. As was absolutely his legal right.


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[Assistant] Dissolving parliament may have been emotionally satisfying, but it did nothing to set the royal finances in order. So in 1626, Charles called for a new parliament.


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[Assistant] But this time, he made sure that the most outspoken MPs from the last session were appointed sheriffs of their various counties so that they were ineligible to sit again.


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[Assistant] But the maneuver had little effect, and the new parliament picked up right where the last one had left off.


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[Assistant] They voted the King for subsidies, but kept the bill locked in committee while they renewed their complaints against Buckingham.


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[Assistant] The parliament of 1626 then started harping on another point near and dear to everyone's heart. Religion.


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[Assistant] Martin Luther kicked off the Protestant Reformation about a hundred years before Charles became king. The Reformation hit England a few years later when Henry VIII decided that he wanted to divorce his wife and marry his mistress.


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[Assistant] In 1534, the Church of England, with the King as its supreme head, was formally separated from the Catholic Church.


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[Assistant] After Henry died, there was a tug of war between Protestants and Catholics during the reigns of Edward VI and Mary I.


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[Assistant] And then when Elizabeth became Queen, the Protestants established permanent ascendancy, but not without compromise.


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[Assistant] In 1559, the so-called Elizabethan settlement established the Church of England's independence from Rome and laid out its formal structure. But because the settlement was just that, a settlement,


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[Assistant] The Church of England wound up maintaining a semi-Catholic form, with 26 bishops and two archbishops.


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[Assistant] The real key to the settlement, however, was the gap between dogma and discipline.


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[Assistant] Elizabeth wanted religious peace, and so she was never much interested in pursuing rigid uniformity.


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[Assistant] Within reason, parishes could decide for themselves what form they wanted their worship to take.


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[Assistant] Meanwhile, up in Scotland, the Reformation followed a different course.


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[Assistant] In England, everything had been funneled through the crown. The king was the supreme governor, the bishops and clergy were used to reinforce the authority of the monarchy, and so on.


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[Assistant] But the Scottish Reformation had been opposed by the Catholic Monarchy.


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[Assistant] So it was not imposed from the inside out, but rather from the outside in.


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[Assistant] Kings and bishops were not defenders of the Reformation, but rather its arch-enemies.


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[Assistant] After Mary, Queen of Scots, was forced to abdicate, her infant son, James, Charles's father, was crowned king.


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[Assistant] But during his minority reign, the Protestant nobles who had overthrown Mary pursued Reformation to the hilt, establishing what became known as Presbyterianism, which massively decentralized the church's structure, put power in the hands of lay elders, and abolished episcopacy, that is, the bishops.


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[Assistant] When James emerged from his minority in the 1580s, he moved to reinstate the bishops, a move usually seen as an attempt to align the Scottish Reformed Church with the Church of England in anticipation of Elizabeth's call to be her heir, which finally came on her deathbed in 1603. Okay, yes, you might have to listen to this episode again, but I promise this is all really important.


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[Assistant] Back in England, the combination of loose discipline, and the example of the Scottish Church, allowed for the growth of a godly movement that contemporaries derisively labeled Puritanism.


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[Assistant] The Puritans, they did not call themselves that, were not united of mind or purpose, but they did hold some general principles in common.


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[Assistant] They were mostly Calvinists and believed that the Reformation was thus far a deed half done.


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[Assistant] They were rigid, austere, convinced that only a select community would find salvation, and believed in a literal reading of the scriptures.


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[Assistant] It was a movement that spread to all socioeconomic classes, but its emphasis on private Bible study obviously meant that literacy was generally a prerequisite.


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[Assistant] The Puritans abhorred the loose morality and corruption of the Episcopal hierarchy, with its lazy ministers and corrupt bishops growing fat on forced tithes from their ill-served parishioners.


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[Assistant] They were never aiming to overthrow the Church of England or set up a rival church. Such would have been unthinkable in the 17th century, when it was taken as axiomatic that a kingdom could only function with one church.


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[Assistant] They simply wanted to see the reformation through to its logical conclusion.


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[Assistant] But the issue facing the parliament of 1626 was not just a rivalry between Puritans and moderate Anglicans, another word that didn't exist yet, it was between Puritans and Armenians. Okay, so what the hell is an Armenian?


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[Assistant] Well, they took their name from a Dutch theologian who went by the Latinized name Arminius.


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[Assistant] Unlike the Puritans who looked at the Reformation and thought, hey, this doesn't go far enough, our Minions looked at the Reformation and thought, well, how do we pull back from this?


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[Assistant] They were emphatically Protestant, but danced as close to the edge of Roman Catholicism as you could get without falling in.


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[Assistant] They loved the fancy ceremonies, they rejected Calvin's rigid theories of predestination.


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[Assistant] There were other differences, but what they added up to was a doctrine that to a Puritan basically rejected everything that they thought distinguished them from the evil Roman Catholics in the first place.


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[Assistant] Unfortunately for the Puritans, Charles seemed inclined to favor an Armenian outlook, which developed due to his close association with Bishop William Laud. William Laud. He is important. Laud was an angry little man. Literally, he was short and had a raging temper, who seemed to stand for everything the Puritans hated.


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[Assistant] Shortly before Charles became king, Lot had become Buckingham's personal chaplain, and through Buckingham, had caught the future king's ear.


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[Assistant] It turned out that he and the king saw eye to eye on the kind of ceremonial formalities and strong institutional hierarchies that the Puritans despised as creeping potpourri.


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[Assistant] Politically, Laud was a staunch defender of the king's prerogatives, and happily lectured both of Charles's first two parliaments that their sole duty was to vote the king whatever money he asked for and then go home. Laud was deeply unpopular.


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[Assistant] But he wasn't yet the most despised man in the kingdom. That title was still reserved for Buckingham, whom parliament once again tried to impeach.


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[Assistant] This time harping on the embarrassingly inept assault he had just led on the Spanish port of Cádiz, which turned out to be less an assault and more of a his men getting drunk and then refusing to fight.


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[Assistant] So in June 1626, Charles dissolved his second parliament in a row.


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[Assistant] But by dissolving parliament, Charles abandoned the four subsidies that had been buried in committee, and he had still not been granted tonnage and poundage.


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[Assistant] Buckingham, brilliant diplomacist that he was, somehow then managed to get England into a war with France to go along with its war against Spain, a move that would have been catastrophic had not France and Spain both been too distracted with real problems to worry about the English.


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[Assistant] But whatever the attitude of France and Spain, England was taking these wars seriously. Except oh yeaah, Charles was operating without any money to pay for any of it.


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[Assistant] This ruffled some feathers, but most let it pass since they had been paying tonnage and poundage to their kings and queens forever.


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[Assistant] But then, Charles also started issuing what have become known as forced loans. Which are exactly what they sound like.


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[Assistant] He, or most likely Buckingham, came up with a number they thought some individual peer or county ought to produce to keep the crown solvent, and then they simply demanded it.


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[Assistant] And the irritation was compounded by Buckingham taking the money, using it to botch a naval assault in support of French Protestants besieged at La Rochelle, and losing half his men.


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[Assistant] But even still, given the circumstances, most people complied and paid what the crown said they owed.


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[Assistant] But a few resisted, citing any number of precedents in common law that what the king was doing was illegal.


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[Assistant] Charles responded by locking up those who refused to pay.


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[Assistant] The issue of forced loans came to a head the next year, when Five Nights, imprisoned for their refusal to pay, sued for a writ of habeas corpus.


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[Assistant] The subsequent case, creatively dubbed the Five Nights case, wound up hinging not on the right of the king to issue forced loans, but on his right to imprison by his own special command.


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[Assistant] The judges found that Charles did indeed have wide discretion to imprison, but it was a pyrrhic victory for the king.


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[Assistant] He got his extra parliamentary revenue and he could lock up people as he saw fit.


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[Assistant] But his subjects were rapidly losing faith in him as a king they could trust.


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[Assistant] By 1628, it was clear that Parliament and the King were going to have to come to some sort of understanding.


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[Assistant] So Charles agreed to call another session and keep it sitting until it could complete its business as long as they refrained from attacking Buckingham.


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[Assistant] The disgruntled MPs who assembled for Charles' third parliament did indeed refrain from attacking Buckingham, but they let fly on everything else that had been bugging them. Forced loans, forced billeting, arbitrary imprisonment, the Five Nights in particular, martial law in general,


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[Assistant] A back and forth with Charles over his conduct resulted in parliament passing the famous petition of right.


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[Assistant] In form, the petition of right was a declaration not of new rights parliament was inventing, but of rights Englishmen already enjoyed.


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[Assistant] Specifically, that non-parliamentary taxation was illegal.


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[Assistant] Due process of law must always be observed, habeas corpus must always be granted, and soldiers could not be billeted without consent.


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[Assistant] Charles accepted the petition of right with the proviso that he would observe it within the bounds of settled law.


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[Assistant] Parliament side and voted the King five subsidies.


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[Assistant] For the first time since Charles had become king, a session of parliament was seen through to its conclusion.


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[Assistant] Charles was evidently satisfied enough by their conduct that he invited them back for a second session after the new year.


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[Assistant] In the meantime, however, one of the major sources of tension between King and Parliament was removed from the picture.


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[Assistant] In August 1628, the Duke of Buckingham was stabbed to death by a disgruntled officer, angry at being passed over for promotion.


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[Assistant] This, you would think, would mark the dawning of a new era of political peace.


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[Assistant] The king had a parliamentary approved revenue stream, the petition of right had been accepted, the hated Buckingham was dead, but it was not to be.


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[Assistant] The next session of parliament wound up being the last Charles would call for 11 years.


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[Assistant] The last you would have ever called if he had had his way, but, well, you probably shouldn't have tried to impose the Book of Common Prayer on the Scots then, huh?


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[Assistant] Instead of reconciliation, the assassination of Buckingham embittered Charles while the emboldened MPs decided to press for further reforms.


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[Assistant] They decided to raise the old issue of tonnage and poundage, which they had still not officially granted.


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[Assistant] They also got back on the horse about encroaching Arminianism, and started for the first time making links between Charles' arbitrary taxes and his support for crypto-Catholics in the Church of England.


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[Assistant] Weary of the carping MPs, Charles decided to once again dissolve parliament.


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[Assistant] But a group of agitated members decided that with Charles once again pulling the plug early, it was time for a demonstration.


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[Assistant] When the last session met, the speaker took his place and was about to rise to formally dissolve the body when he found himself literally held down in his chair until the House was able to officially register its disapproval of Charles's illegal collection of tonnage and poundage and the whole Arminian establishment that seemed to be destroying the Church of England.


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[Assistant] Charles was not amused, and when the Speaker was finally allowed to dissolve Parliament, the hostile MPs were locked up and then left to rot.


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[Assistant] Thus began the personal rule of King Charles I.


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[Assistant] Next week, we will delve into the era of personal rule and the running battle over the means of royal financing and the fate of the Church of England.


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[Assistant] We will also start rolling out some of the key figures who will dominate the coming showdown between King and Parliament.


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[Assistant] Some of them are, some of them are unquestionably weird. It's not offensive. Thank you, cancel Dan. You'll see. Yeah, he just said their culture's weird.


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[Assistant] Well, it's definitely a sad boy. Uh, but whether or not it's a Teddy Fresh reference or it's just referring to having fresh breath.


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[Assistant] But why is it like brown? It's like dark brown under it.


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[Assistant] Yeah, I don't know, it's weird. It kinda looks like a piece of- like he blew his nose and left a little tissue there.


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[Assistant] Okay, shout out to Sid though, we love him. Sid, reach out and send us that b-roll. Ohhhh. We need that.


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[Assistant] They, they a few years ago opened a, a news division that's sort of separate from their like clickbait articles and stuff. Right. And we're trying to get a more legit reputation, but, um, I don't think it was very successful and it seems like they've slid back into just kind of, uh, yeah.


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[Assistant] What do you mean your pizza thing? The fact that-


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[Assistant] It's the pizza thing that if somebody mentions pizza around you, you...


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[Assistant] I like all those ingredients, but together it's just weird. I don't know. I have, I've tried it.


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[Assistant] Uh, about 40 minutes. Yea, what was the deal with Drakeball? He, I, I don't know. Drakeball.


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[Assistant] People are coming from Washington to present us with, you know, strangers are coming.


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[Assistant] From the Department of Justice Public Integrity Section or something. And saying here, this is an affidavit about, uh, you know, whether or not you have leaked and you must fill it out and you must sign it.


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[Assistant] My confidence in his integrity has not been shaken. In fact, it has been strengthened by his courageous conduct and his ability.


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[Assistant] You acknowledge that you had fear at this time, but after you left office, did you ever go to the federal government to get a permit for a handgun? Yes. Why did you get that handgun and what period was this? I think it was immediately after I left office. I got it because I


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[Assistant] Did you vote for Agnew? Certainly did. What do you think of him now? I think it's very unfortunate. The man seems to be railroaded or something. I don't know if this is all fact that a lot of insinuation is being brought up.


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[Assistant] Evidently, he would prefer a different kind of television reporting, one that would be subservient to whatever political group happens to be in authority at the time. Those who might feel momentary agreement with his remarks should think carefully about whether that kind of television news is what they want.


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[Assistant] This week's episode is brought to you by Away. Away was founded by two friends from New York who found themselves at JFK with dead phones, delayed flights, and a bright idea. Luggage with power.


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[Assistant] Thus, the away carry-on was born. After asking thousands of people how they pack, why they travel, and what bugs them most about their luggage, they designed a bag that solved a few old problems, like sticky wheels, and a few new ones too, like dead cell phones.


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[Assistant] Away uses high quality materials while offering a much lower price compared to other brands by cutting out the middleman and selling directly to you. You can choose from nine colors and four sizes. The carry-on, the bigger carry-on, the medium and the large.


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[Assistant] All the suitcases are made with premium German polycarbonate, unrivaled in strength and impact resistance, and also very lightweight. The interior features a patent-pending compression system, which is very helpful for overpackers. It also has four 360° spinner wheels, which guarantee a smooth ride.


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[Assistant] Now both sizes of the carry-on are also able to charge all cell phones, tablets, e-readers, and anything else powered by a USB cord. A single charge of the WEI carry-on will charge your iPhone five times.


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[Assistant] There's also a 100-day free trial. You can live with it, travel with it, Instagram it, and if at any point you decide it's not for you, you can return it for a full refund, no questions asked. There's also a lifetime warranty, so if anything breaks, they will fix it or replace it for you, for life.


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[Assistant] Now I remain very happy with my Away Travel Bag, and to hint at future cool things to come, for those of you who do in fact listen to these advertisements, I will probably be using it when I return home to the United States for another little mini book tour when the paperback version of The Storm Before the Storm comes out in October of 2018.


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[Assistant] So when you are done with this episode, get $20 off a suitcase and visit awaytravel.com slash revolutions and use the promo code revolutions during checkout. That again, awaytravel.com slash revolutions and use the promo code revolutions.


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[Assistant] Last week, we did a broad survey of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. And as we approached the end of the episode, and approached the abdications of Bayon, we noted that there was a lot of discontentment, resentment, and anger among all classes and castes about the state of the Viceroyalty of New Spain.


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[Assistant] Well today we are going to take all that discontentment, resentment and anger and use it to blow up the Viceroyalty of New Spain and turn it into independent Mexico.


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[Assistant] Now this is going to be a necessarily truncated version of events. We are going to do in one single episode what it took more than 20 episodes for me to do down in South America, but we have places to go and things to see.


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[Assistant] In the 20th century. So let's just go ahead and knock this sucker out.


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[Assistant] Now fortunately for us, I spent a lot of time in episode 5.6 describing the crucial events back in Spain that led to the abdications of Bayon and the collapse of the Bourbon monarchy in 1808.


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[Assistant] But just a briefly review. As in other major cities in both Spain and the Americas, the capture of the Bourbon Monarchy led to a movement to create provisional ruling juntas made up of local notables until the crisis passed.


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[Assistant] So the Criollo leaders in New Spain pressured the viceroy to go along with a plan to convene an assembly of the best families in New Spain, and, for the first time in a century, allow Criollo voices into government.


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[Assistant] Now surprisingly, the viceroy was prepared to go along with this plan, which freaked out the conservative peninsulari leaders in the city, who, not implausibly, saw such a junta as the first step towards independence.


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[Assistant] So in September of 1808, the conservative leaders staged a coup. They arrested the viceroy and his principal Creole allies and installed an 80-year-old general as the new viceroy.


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[Assistant] As chaos reigned back in Europe and rebellions exploded all over South America, the conservatives in Mexico City were mostly successful at holding revolution at bay in New Spain for the next two years. The 80-year-old general was replaced by the Archbishop of Mexico City, who had been in on the coup the previous year,


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[Assistant] The Archbishop would then stay in office until he was replaced in September of 1810 by a career army officer named Francisco Javier Vargas, who had spent the previous two years distinguishing himself in the Peninsular War, and he was now being sent across the Atlantic to make sure Spain held on to its American possessions.


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[Assistant] Vargas had the good fortune to arrive in Mexico City after a very long journey on September the 14th, 1810, literally the day before the long-forestalled revolution exploded.


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[Assistant] Now that revolution exploded in one particular part of New Spain. The Bahio.


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[Assistant] The Bahio is that wider region north of Mexico City that was rich in silver. It had become the heart of the Bourbon push to revitalize the economy of New Spain.


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[Assistant] And as we discussed last week, wealthy peninsulares in Criollo were encouraged to make major investments to increase the amount of silver that was being mined, as well as enlarge and diversify the haciendas that supported them.


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[Assistant] What followed in the Bahio was a century-long economic boom that lasted from about 1700 to about 1800. This mining boom caused a massive influx of migrants into the region, men who were looking for work, either in the mines or on the Oceandas.


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[Assistant] But unfortunately, there was a reason that this area had never been heavily settled before this. The land wasn't that great, and it was susceptible to repeated droughts.


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[Assistant] Near the end of the 1700s, there were simply too many mouths to feed and famine became a recurrent problem, especially during major droughts in 1777, 1792, and 1799.


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[Assistant] Tenant and small farmers were hit particularly hard during these times, and they were just squeezed out by the larger Oceanda. So by 1800, nearly every independent operator had been turned into a mere wage laborer.


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[Assistant] The region would also find itself in trouble every time a mine would shut down or there would be a flood that wrecked equipment or a vein was tapped dry.


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[Assistant] This would lead to slashed wages, reduced hours, and mass layoffs. In those times, you would wind up with a lot of young men just sort of hanging around.


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[Assistant] Which, as we know, going back to the very first episodes of the Revolutions podcast is never a good thing.


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[Assistant] These recurrent problems could be absorbed as long as the mining boom went on and workers could eventually find new jobs. But after 1800, the mining economy went into a decade-long slump that actually saw silver output not just slow down, but actually decline year over year.


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[Assistant] Now this slump was partly the result of simply running into the limits of expansion.


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[Assistant] But it was also impacted by events back in Europe, where the French Revolutionary Wars are now moving on into the Napoleonic Wars.


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[Assistant] The global economic uncertainty combined with natural declines and output to create cycles of layoff and famine and displacement among the population of the Bahio that now had nowhere else to go. This is the place they called home.


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[Assistant] And it wasn't just the wage workers who were being hit hard, manufacturers, local suppliers, traders, shopkeepers, they were all pummeled by this prolonged recession.


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[Assistant] And all of them started to rally around the idea that sinister peninsular agents and absentee landlords in Mexico City were at least partly to blame for this economic crisis.


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[Assistant] But even the absentee landlords in Mexico City were getting pretty furious thanks to the very provocative act of consolidation that had been decreed by the Spanish government in 1804.


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[Assistant] The idea here was to more fully control the national wealth by ordering the Catholic Church to deposit all of their riches with the Crown, who would then pay the Church an annual dividend on their deposit.


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[Assistant] The problem was that in New Spain the Church had acted as the principal mortgage lender for all of these huge investments that the Bourbons had been encouraging.


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[Assistant] The act of consolidation meant that the church was now going to call in all these loans, and some of them were on 20 or 30 year terms. This would cause nothing less than financial ruin for major mine owners, osadatos, and large merchants.


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[Assistant] So by the beginning of 1808, you had a pyramid of anger building from the peasant farmers and wage workers and indigenous villagers all the way up to the richest Creole landlords. And all of them were coming around on the idea that there was something deeply rotten about the Viceroyal Government.


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[Assistant] After news arrived in the Bahio of the abdications of Bayon, grumbling turned into active planning to break away from Spain and declare independence.


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[Assistant] The center of this brewing conspiracy in the Bahia was the city of Queretaro, where the mayor, Miguel Dominguez, and his wife, Josefa Ortiz de Dominguez, were both active sympathizers.


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[Assistant] Meeting under the cover of liberal society gatherings, they brought together lawyers, priests, businessmen, and army officers. And these disaffected men and women would share their grievances, and then they would start to share their plans.


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[Assistant] Among this group was Ignacio Allende, uh, captain in the cavalry who came from a prominent local family currently being hit hard by the economic recession.


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[Assistant] And these guys looked at the example of the United States for inspiration.


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[Assistant] They wanted political and economic independence from Europe. And they wanted the commercial wealth and power that would surely come with that independence.


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[Assistant] They supported equality insofar as they were angry that Creole like themselves were barred from serving in government, but they also admired the fact that the founding fathers of the United States were able to prosecute a political revolution while holding the forces of social revolution at bay.


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[Assistant] But there were among these conspirators, those who had more expansive and ambitious plans and who drew their inspiration not from the American Revolution but from the French Revolution.


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[Assistant] They wanted to overturn the caste system. They wanted to dump the aristocracy. They wanted to usher in social justice. They wanted to break up the haciendas and the church land and distribute them equitably to the people. They wanted to abolish slavery and any vestiges of indigenous tribal tribute.


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[Assistant] Which brings us to the man in the room who wanted all of that and more, Father Hidalgo.


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[Assistant] Miguel Hidalgo y Castilla was born in 1753. He was the criollo son of a prominent and well-respected family, though his father was a hacienda manager rather than a major landlord, so the family wasn't at the very top of the caste system, which actually influenced Hidalgo's outlook on life.


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[Assistant] He grew up on the periphery of New Spain. He interacted with Mestizo and indigenous workers. He learned native languages and customs and knew how these people lived and worked.


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[Assistant] The family was rich enough, though, that Miguel got a top flight education, and after entering seminary, he graduated in 1773 with a degree in both philosophy and theology.


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[Assistant] By this point, Hidalgo had displayed a brightness and intelligence that was both promising and concerning when he was spoken of in the higher ranks of the church.


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[Assistant] Now the Inquisition was still alive and well, and on patrol for seditious and heretical ideas, but as a priest specializing in theology and philosophy, Hidalgo was one of the select few who was legally allowed to read the latest Enlightenment tracts, tracts everyone else was forbidden to even possess. Now ostensibly, this is so the ideas could be refuted.


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[Assistant] But it's pretty clear Hidalgo was doing more spreading of these ideas than he was refuting them.


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[Assistant] This led to problems with higher-ups, and in 1792 Hidalgo lost his position at the college, partly for altering the curriculum, and partly after being accused of financial improprieties.


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[Assistant] He was shuffled around from post to post until his brother who was also a priest died in 1802.


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[Assistant] Hidalgo took over his brother's responsibilities in the city of... Dolores.


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[Assistant] Hidalgo was never much interested in the tending to souls part of his job, so he handed most of those responsibilities off to a subordinate, and he focused his attention on business pursuits, on intellectual investigations and philanthropic activities.


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[Assistant] As a secular priest, Hidalgo had never taken the vow of poverty, so he owned three Asiendas himself and was quite adept at turning a profit.


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[Assistant] But as a member of the clergy, he had taken a vow of chastity, though that did not stop him from maintaining several long-term relationships and fathering at least seven children.


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[Assistant] Now by now, he had developed strongly heretical beliefs, both political and religious. He'd also opposed the absolute monarchy, and he despised ignorant superstition.


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[Assistant] But, most acutely, he developed a real sense of egalitarian goodwill.


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[Assistant] Though he had no interest in tending to his flock by delivering a weekly mass or hearing confession,


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[Assistant] He did tend to his flock by actively encouraging economic prosperity and social equality for the people of Dolores. He introduced new crops and techniques to the area with the ultimate intention of making the land more profitable and the villagers earning a measure of independent self respect.


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[Assistant] Now, this was mostly tolerated by the authorities until Hidalgo started showing them how to grow grapes and olives, crops that were specifically prohibited so as not to compete with monopoly imports from Spain.


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[Assistant] So on top of these economic and social reforms, Hidalgo also became a big advocate for political reform.


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[Assistant] Though until the moment that he kickstarted the revolution, he was really just one conspirator among many.


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[Assistant] He was not yet THE leader that he would be seen as later.


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[Assistant] So by the fall of 1810, these revolutionary discussions have created a political alliance composed of minor political officials, army officers, lawyers, factory owners, shopkeepers, and like Hidalgo, priests,


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[Assistant] Who believed that they could probably mobilize the displaced peasants and unemployed mine workers and villagers angry about land usurpation into a force that could collectively seize control of New Spain.


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[Assistant] They were far enough along in their planning that they even set a date for their revolution. A date would be in December of 1810, and they had sent agents up to the United States to secure munitions and financial support for this coming revolution.


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[Assistant] But this plan was upended in September of 1810, when Josefa Dominguez learned that they had been discovered. Government agents came and alerted her husband that they were onto a major cabal of revolutionaries, not realizing that she herself, Josefa, the wife of the mayor, was in particular deeply involved in this conspiracy.


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[Assistant] So Josefa managed to get a messenger up to Dolores to warn Hidalgo and the other leaders who were with him.


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[Assistant] Not bothering to think things through too much, Hidalgo ordered the church bells rung to gather his congregation.


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[Assistant] Those who did gather after midnight in the wee hours of September the 16th, 1810 were treated to an impassioned speech by a doggo calling for them to join in a mass popular revolt.


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[Assistant] This is easily the most famous speech in Mexican history. It's called the Crito de Dolores, or the Cry of Dolores.


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[Assistant] Unfortunately, however, the speech was not recorded word for word, so we just know the gist of what Hidalgo said. But basically, he called on them to overthrow 300 years of oppression, to reclaim the land that had been stolen from them, to destroy the evil politicians and bad government who ruled over them.


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[Assistant] God and history were now calling on the people to play their part. And they must play their part.


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[Assistant] The cry of Dolores landed with an electric bang, and the next morning, Hidalgo gave a repeat performance near the market with similar energetic results. Men and women who had been holding long, simmering resentments were finally being told it's okay to go crazy.


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[Assistant] Soon, 600 to 800 volunteers joined what had once been a very small conspiracy.


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[Assistant] With Hidalgo now clearly the face of the rebellion, they all march together out of Dolores in the direction of the regional capital of Guanajuato.


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[Assistant] Once sparked, revolutionary fire in the Bahio spread rapidly.


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[Assistant] Whatever village or town Hidalgo's army passed through, and it was becoming Hidalgo's army, even though Hidalgo had no military experience whatsoever,


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[Assistant] They picked up new recruits and attacked Peninsulares and their property. When they captured the city of Salaya on September the 21st, they were 5,000 strong. A week later as they approached Guanajuato, they were reportedly 30,000 strong.


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[Assistant] They were not trained at all and they had no real weapons. We're talking sticks and rocks and machetes.


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[Assistant] What they had, though, was a belief that they were engaged in some kind of messianic uprising that would expel sacrilegious peninsulares. A lot of them believed that they were fighting for the king against his bad counselors. They had no idea, actually, that they were engaged in a movement for independence.


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[Assistant] So the rebels carried hastily made banners that spoke to this message that Hidalgo and the other leaders were focused on. It was long live religion, long live America, death to bad government.


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[Assistant] They adopted as their symbol our most holy mother of Guadalupe.


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[Assistant] And yes, I know I botched it last week. I said Guadalupe, not Guadalupe. Blame that on the three and a half years I lived in Austin. Anyway, when they all got to Guanajuato, the small circle of Peninsularia administrators and the Criollo allies that they still had barricaded themselves inside a granary. And they held out for two days.


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[Assistant] But eventually, the crush of the rebels was simply too great.


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[Assistant] Grainery was stormed and over 500 people were killed, including women and children.


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[Assistant] Now this massacre caused problems in the rebel leadership, because this is not what the more elite Criollo rebels had signed up for. Peasants massacring their social superiors? That is not what we are supposed to be doing.


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[Assistant] But after so bloodily taking Guanajuato, the army kept marching and it kept growing.


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[Assistant] They were now widely seen as totally out of control. They were feeding themselves by forced requisitioning or stripping fields clean for food.


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[Assistant] By now, most other Criollo in New Spain were siding with the viceregal authorities.


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[Assistant] Yes, they had their resentments, and yes, they wanted independence, but this seemed like just a mob of barbaric peasants. And in the midst of all this, Hidalgo issued his first Emancipation Proclamation forbidding slavery in independent Mexico.


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[Assistant] And though, as I said, slavery wasn't a huge thing in New Spain.


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[Assistant] Slaves were used as household staff in prominent families, mostly as status symbols. So the threat to the social order represented by Hidalgo's army was very real and very frightening.


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[Assistant] Meanwhile, in Mexico City, the new viceroy, Javier Vargas, who had been on the job for exactly one day before the revolution broke out, was now trying to scramble a defense of the city.


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[Assistant] The viceregal forces had not been very well run these past few hundred years. They were not very well organized, and they were dispersed way away from the capital anyway.


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[Assistant] So, Vargas could only muster a couple of thousand men to go out and try to do anything about this flood of humanity, now sixty, maybe eighty thousand people strong.


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[Assistant] The largest force that could be mustered on the Viceroyal side was just a couple of thousand men. I've seen numbers as low as 1200 and as high as 7000.


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[Assistant] But they rode out to meet Hidalgo's army and at Monte de las Cruces on October the 30th, 1810, the rebels and the viceregal forces met in battle.


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[Assistant] The Rebels took heavy casualties. They were, as I said, not well trained or armed.


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[Assistant] The Viceroyal forces retreated back to Mexico City, and the road to the capital was now wide open.


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[Assistant] So that brings us to the most consequential and controversial moment of the whole struggle for Mexican independence. Father Hidalgo appears to have flinched.


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[Assistant] Rather than pushing on to Mexico City, Hidalgo ordered the army to halt and retreat west towards Guadalajara.


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[Assistant] There has never, to my knowledge, been a definitive explanation for why he decided to do this.


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[Assistant] Allende, for example, was pulling his hair out trying to get Hidalgo to listen to reason. He was saying we have to go take the capital now before the viceregal forces can regroup. But Hidalgo stubbornly refused. So the army halted and retreated.


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[Assistant] And the most common speculation is that having witnessed the behavior of the rebel army for the past few weeks, that Hidalgo believed storming into Mexico City would simply be the beginning of mass slaughter and destruction.


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[Assistant] And the war for independence, which might have been won right there and then.


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[Assistant] The retreat had an immediate impact on the revolution.


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[Assistant] Peasant rebellions run on momentum, and Hidalgo had just killed the momentum.


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[Assistant] Soon the numbers in the army were down to forty thousand, possibly half of what they had claimed just maybe a week earlier.


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[Assistant] Then the leadership started to splinter, with different leaders leading different groups in different directions. Hidalgo himself wound up in Guadalajara with only about 7,000 men.


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[Assistant] Upon arrival though, he attempted to start up a provisional revolutionary government with himself as the self-proclaimed autocrat.


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[Assistant] He set up a little ministry with his personal secretary, a guy named Ignacio Lopez-Rayon, he's gonna be important here in a second, as Secretary of State.


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[Assistant] But as Allende predicted, the pause in the action allowed the viceregal forces to regroup.


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[Assistant] Certainly, it allowed the best and most vigorous general in the viceregal army, named Felix Maria Calleja.


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[Assistant] But Idogo himself was busy trying to recapture the momentum. The area around Guadalajara had faced many of the same difficulties as the Bahio, and so though the initial rush of volunteers had mostly been killed or deserted, Idogo found many new recruits to the cause, and soon he was leading a force tens of thousands strong again.


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[Assistant] But this rebellion came to an abrupt end just after New Year's in 1811.


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[Assistant] In early January, Kaeya came with his 6,000 men, and he approached Hidalgo's position at the bridge on the Caledrone River.


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[Assistant] On January the 17th, 1811, the two sides met in battle, and though the rebels still had a massive numerical advantage, this time they were broken to pieces.


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[Assistant] Taiei's men were way better armed and way more disciplined, and an explosion of a grenade inside the ranks of Idago's army caused so much fear and confusion that the battle quickly turned into a rout.


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[Assistant] In the wake of this debacle, the leadership of the rebellion gathered and decided to strip Hidalgo of his military responsibilities. He would be kept on as a figurehead and a political leader, but he would have nothing more to do with the tactics and strategy involved in actually running a war, which were all transferred over to Allende.


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[Assistant] Now, had he had the time, Allende had a plan to pursue a campaign built around a more compact but better trained army rather than these huge mobs of reckless peasants that Hidalgo had gathered. But Allende never really got the chance to do anything.


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[Assistant] Decided to abandon their position in central Mexico and make their way to the far north. If they could make it to the United States, they might find allies and guns and money. I mean, that's what they had been after before the cry of Dolores had prematurely set the revolution in motion. So they headed north. But they never got to the United States.


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[Assistant] A disgruntled rebel, I believe annoyed that he had been passed over for a promotion, decided to betray his former comrades.


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[Assistant] When the party reached the wells of Bahan in the state of Kohila,


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[Assistant] The traitor alerted the viceroyal authorities and all the rebel leaders were arrested.


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[Assistant] Allende and Aldama and most of the rest of the party were executed on June the 26th, 1811.


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[Assistant] And they were shot in the back to purposefully dishonor them.


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[Assistant] Father Hidalgo, meanwhile, was defrocked, found guilty, and executed separately on July 30, 1811.


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[Assistant] The heads of the rebel leaders were then cut off and posted on the walls of Guanajuato as a warning to anybody contemplating anything like this ever again.


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[Assistant] Down in Mexico City, everyone could breathe a little bit easier. The war for Mexican independence was now over.


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[Assistant] That secretary of state, Ignacio Lopez-Rayon, had not been with the party heading north. He had instead stayed behind in the south with a force of about 3,500 men.


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[Assistant] When he heard that Hidalgo and the others had been captured, he pointed this small army south. And between March and July 1811, he fought a series of skirmishes and battles and defeated the viceregal forces almost every time he faced them.


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[Assistant] And then, down in south-central Mexico, Rayon opened a whole new front in the war. The original rebellion had erupted from the Bahio.


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[Assistant] The war would now be carried on in the South, in what is today the Mexican states of Morelos and Guerrera.


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[Assistant] Which of course weren't called that yet, because the men who gave them those names are only just now emerging onto the scene.


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[Assistant] Jose Maria Morelos was born in 1765 in the Bahia. Specifically, in a city that was then called Valladolid, but which is today called Morelia. Because, well, Jose Maria Morelos was born there in 1765.


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[Assistant] Though he was classified as Criollo on his birth record, Morelos was probably a mestizo, and his family was of pretty modest means. His father was a carpenter, and Morelos himself started working as a mule tier before transitioning into being a tenant farmer.


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[Assistant] But he was pretty smart, and apparently wanted to better himself, so in 1789 he went off to the local college, which just so happened to be the Colegio de San Nicolás Obispo, where Father Hidalgo taught, and was about to become dean.


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[Assistant] Morelos graduated and was ordained as a priest, though, like Hidalgo, he was a secular priest and not bound by any law of poverty. But, also like Hidalgo, he was bound by a vow of chastity, which he ignored, engaging in several long-term relationships that produced a couple of children.


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[Assistant] Morelos then spent the next decade and a half in mostly prosperous obscurity, but when he learned in October of 1810 that his old schoolmaster had launched a rebellion, Morelos was inspired to join.


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[Assistant] Now it's clear he was steeped in the same enlightenment ideas as Hidalgo. Morelos was a straight-up Republican. He hated the racial caste system. He was an abolitionist. He advocated justice for the peasants and for the redistribution of land from rich to poor. Especially believing in breaking up and parceling out church lands.


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[Assistant] After joining the rebellion in October of 1810, Morelos displayed an intuitive knack for soldiering in. He was a natural and charismatic leader.


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[Assistant] When all the original leaders of the revolution were executed in the summer of 1811, Morelos moved south and gathered up a small army of loyal rebels. This small army, never more than five or six thousand men at any given time, would spend the next four years driving the viceregal forces out of south central Mexico.


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[Assistant] Joining Morelos's force is the other guy we need to bring into this. And that's 31 year old Vicente Correro.


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[Assistant] Born in 1782, about a hundred miles inland from Acapulco, Guerrero was the son of a mestizo father and a mulatto mother.


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[Assistant] Guerrero was a dark-skinned mix of all the ethnic groups of New Spain. His father was a mule-tier, and Guerrero spent his youth working his father's mule trains, traveling all over the Viceroyalty and picking up new ideas and contacts wherever he went.


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[Assistant] For obvious reasons, he too wound up hating the caste system and believed that the entire vice regal apparatus was simply one giant exercise in tyranny.


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[Assistant] Now Guerrero did not join Hidalgo's army, but when Morelos moved south and started recruiting, Guerrero was one of the first to join up. And he would soon prove to be one of the most reliable officers in Morelos's army,


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[Assistant] And as we will see in a moment, it will ultimately be Guerrero, not Morelos, who will be the one marching triumphantly into Mexico City at the end of the war.


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[Assistant] With scattered armies of rebels now operating successfully in the south, Ignacio Lopez-Rayon did his best to bring some kind of central coordination to the very uncoordinated campaigns being waged.


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[Assistant] So in August of 1811, Réon invited Morelos and a few other prominent leaders to join what would be called the Junta de Sitacuaro, named after the city where they first met and which I almost certainly just mispronounced.


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[Assistant] Morelos agreed that a central rebel committee was a good idea, but he never actually met with the junta himself. He only ever sent a subordinate to represent him.


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[Assistant] This huntup was pretty ineffective anyway, and during the duration of their existence, most commanders in the field, most of the time, just sort of did whatever they wanted. Morelos certainly did.


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[Assistant] It was hard to argue with his success because over the next few years, he was uniformly successful. Morelos fought an endless series of skirmishes and battles and sieges and counter sieges that allowed the rebels to claim de facto political control over much of south central Mexico.


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[Assistant] In November of 1812, Morelos captured Oaxaca City, which is a very big deal, and then in April of 1813, he delivered the even more dramatic blow. He captured the port of Acapulco.


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[Assistant] By the summer of 1813, there was a justifiable belief among the rebels that they were on their way to slowly but surely squeezing the viceroyalty of New Spain right off the map.


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[Assistant] Morelos' success led to the second big attempt to unify the rebellion.


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[Assistant] Under Morelos's auspices, delegates from various revolutionary factions gathered in Chupancingo in September of 1813 for a congress that was called, you guessed it, the Congress of Chupancingo.


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[Assistant] This congress was tasked with a dual mandate to declare independence and to draft a new constitution.


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[Assistant] To help guide their deliberations, Morelos presented them with what he dubbed the sentiments of the nation.


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[Assistant] Popular sovereignty rather than the divine right of kings, the division of political power, regular democratic elections, the rule of law, and the end to all distinctions, privileges, and burdens wrapped up in the caste system.


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[Assistant] Having delivered these sentiments, Morelos went back to war, and the Congress deliberated, finally producing in November of 1813 both the solemn Declaration of Independence of Northern America and a new Constitution for that independent North America.


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[Assistant] That was now, not necessarily for the first time, but certainly for the first official time, being called Mexico.


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[Assistant] But the solemn declaration and the new constitution were dead on arrival. Because almost as soon as they were promulgated at the end of 1813, the tide started to turn against the rebellion and against Marelos.


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[Assistant] General Kaiea was promoted to viceroy, and the point man for the counterinsurgency in the south became a Creole career army officer named Augustin de Iturbide.


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[Assistant] Now at this point, Iturbide was already known as the Iron Dragon, and he had a reputation for being totally committed to the ruthless extermination of this rebellion, and also having the skill to exterminate it.


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[Assistant] Morelos, meanwhile, was trying to wage his own offensive campaigns, defend territories that he had already liberated, and protect this new civilian congress.


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[Assistant] Morelos started to lose ground on all fronts through 1814 and 1815, and the Congress was bounced from city to city, never able to stay in one place for long.


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[Assistant] Then, in November of 1814, Morelos was leading his men in a minor skirmish to buy the civilian congress time to get away once again, when he was captured.


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[Assistant] The now-imprisoned Morelos was convicted of every civil and religious crime known to man, and he was executed on December 22, 1815.


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[Assistant] Morelos's most capable subordinate, Vicente Guerrero, took over as commander in chief of the rebel forces.


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[Assistant] But these forces dwindled by the day. The victories of the viceregal armies and the death of Morelos were major blows to rebel morale.


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[Assistant] The civilian congress attempted to exert its central authority, but they were simply ignored by the remaining commanders in the field, and the congress wound up simply disbanding, taking their solemn declaration of independence and their enlightened constitution with them into the dustbin of history.


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[Assistant] The line between rebel army and bandit gang was now getting blurred into irrelevance. And the difference between a guerilla campaign and just robbing and pillaging ceased to have any real functional meaning.


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[Assistant] Meanwhile, events back in Europe had taken what you might call a major turn. In 1815, remember, Napoleon has finally been defeated, and the Bourbon King, Ferdinand VII, the desired one, was finally returned to the Spanish throne.


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[Assistant] This watershed of peace and restoration in Old Spain, coupled with the death of Raelos and the near disbanding of the rebellion in New Spain,


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[Assistant] Really made it feel like the Spanish Empire was going to continue intact in perpetuity.


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[Assistant] To change with these new times, the restored monarchy appointed a new viceroy, this time a career naval officer named Juan Ruiz de Apodaca.


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[Assistant] He arrived in Mexico City in September of 1816, and he represented a real change in strategy.


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[Assistant] Plenty of complaints had filtered back across the Atlantic that the harsh tactics, the scorched earth campaigning, the summary execution of prisoners, had prolonged the rebellion rather than hastened its demise.


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[Assistant] So Appodaka came in with a lighter touch. He offered amnesty to all rebels who laid down their arms. Those who remained under arms but were captured were not to just be summarily executed.


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[Assistant] Something resembling the rule of law was going to be restored.


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[Assistant] And after more than five years of fighting, and the monarchy and viceregal structure now seemingly stronger than ever, almost everyone took the viceroy up on his clemency.


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[Assistant] By the end of 1817, only Vicente Guerrero and a small army of hardcore patriots refused to come in from the cold, maintaining a small force of loyal rebels up in the mountains of what is called today, for reasons you could probably guess, the Mexican state of Guerrero.


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[Assistant] And they kept refusing right through 1820, when news came over from Spain that changed everything overnight. News that turned Guerrero from pathetic dead-ender into a prophetic legend. The last man brave enough and committed enough to have maintained the flame of liberty through a long and dark night. And what was this magically transformative event? Why, the mutiny of Cádiz, of course.


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[Assistant] This is when the restored Bourbon monarchy was going to make a fresh play to restore complete control over the American part of the Spanish Empire. And they mustered tens of thousands of soldiers in the port of Cádiz for a major expedition across the Atlantic.


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[Assistant] But instead of sailing for America, this expedition mutinied under the direction of liberal officers, who then ran a rebellion all the way back to Madrid that forced King Ferdinand to adopt the liberal constitution of 1812.


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[Assistant] As you'll recall from our episodes on South America, this mutiny meant no more reinforcements for the royalist forces in the Americas, and from that point on, Belivar and his gang were able to run the table. While up in New Spain, there's an additional twist.


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[Assistant] Namely, that conservative Criollo, and even a lot of peninsulari, who had been steadfastly opposed to independence, now abruptly changed their minds. They were afraid that the new liberal leadership in Spain would undermine the authority of the Church, undermine their traditional systems of power, and break up the largest states.


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[Assistant] So almost overnight, the conservative leadership of New Spain, army officers, high church officials, and major landowners switched sides.


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[Assistant] Now the man who embodied this switch more than anyone else is of course, Augustin de Iturbide.


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[Assistant] Iturbide had spent ten years of his life relentlessly fighting the rebellion.


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[Assistant] He had joined the army as a teenager and had actually fought in the very first battle at Monte de los Cruces. That's how long he has been fighting rebels.


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[Assistant] And Iturbide was also the kind of conservative Criollo that high vice regal officials loved. He was devoutly religious, he believed in the caste system and the role of social hierarchy, and he was dedicated in his defense of private property rights.


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[Assistant] He had risen steadily through the ranks and, as I said, was the principal opponent of Morelos from about 1813 to 1815. But though the viceregal officials tended to love him,


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[Assistant] He was still barred from rising too high in the ranks because Iturbide was a criollo, and resentment over this blocked ambition, combined with resentment over getting temporarily booted from the army amidst charges of embezzlement and extortion after 1815, led Iturbide to develop a more independent spirit.


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[Assistant] But he still had plenty of friends in high places who got him his old job back in the army, and in 1820, with the very last remnants of Vicente Guerrero's guerrillas on the verge of a long overdue extinction, Viceroy Apodaca put Iturbide in charge of what was meant to be the very last campaign of this now decade-long war.


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[Assistant] And Interbite's campaign in 1820 would in fact be the final campaign. Just not the way the Viceroy thought.


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[Assistant] So as I just said, after news that the king had been forced to accept the liberal constitution of 1812, murmurs raced through conservative household and through the officer's quarters of New Spain, and Interbite realized he had a chance to have it all.


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[Assistant] He believed in nearly every part of the viceregal social and economic apparatus. And now that apparatus was threatened because a bunch of damn liberals had gotten a hold of the king back in Spain.


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[Assistant] But the only bit Iturbide did not agree with was the unjust treatment of Criollo like himself.


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[Assistant] So if he became the leader of a new independence movement, he could possibly maintain most of the existing social order by actually breaking with Spain.


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[Assistant] He found plenty of support inside the officer corps, and when he went out on campaign to quote unquote confront Guerrero, Eterbide was almost certainly already in contact with the rebel leader about forming an alliance with the simple shared goal of independence from Spain.


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[Assistant] Now what followed is one of those war and politics makes extremely strange bedfellows. You've got the dark-skinned lower-class die-hard rebel Guerrero accepting an alliance with the white royalist who had ordered the execution of many of Guerrero's friends and comrades.


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[Assistant] But Iturbide offered Guerrero the army and political support necessary to carry out the project of independence. And Guerrero gave Iturbide the credibility he needed to tap the power of the people, not just a narrow slice of Criollo elite.


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[Assistant] So, after secret correspondence that basically acted as feeling each other out,


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[Assistant] Iturbide and Guerrero met at the town of Iuala, where they fashioned the very simple basis of their alliance.


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[Assistant] First, the Catholic Church would be supreme and inviolable.


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[Assistant] Second, the country would accept nothing less than absolute independence. And third, there would be social equality. The formal caste system would be abolished.


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[Assistant] The three guarantees offered something for everyone, and it was broad enough and light enough on details that everyone could see in it what they wanted.


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[Assistant] Then, on a more concrete level, the two leaders merged their armies, and Guerrero agreed to recognize Iturbide as supreme commander-in-chief.


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[Assistant] With the so-called Army of the Three Guarantees now united against the viceroyalty, the endgame of Mexican independence had arrived.


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[Assistant] Now coincidentally enough, in July of 1821, a new supreme political representative from Spain arrived to replace Viceroy Apodaca.


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[Assistant] Now I'm not going to bother telling you this guy's name, but just know that because he was sent by a liberal government, they were dropping the rank of viceroy. And instead, he was simply dubbed the jefe politico of New Spain.


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[Assistant] He was there to make sure that New Spain stayed loyal to Old Spain.


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[Assistant] But as soon as he showed up, it was obvious to him that the whole nation, every peasant and landlord, black, white, indigenous, mestizo, all of them supported the army of the three guarantees, and all of them seemed to think that independence would be coming any day now.


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[Assistant] So this jefe politico concluded that whatever his orders were, that it would be fruitless, possibly even personally suicidal, to try to hold the country for old Spain.


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[Assistant] So he immediately opened up negotiations with Interbite to secure a peaceful settlement.


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[Assistant] And on August the 24th, 1821, not six weeks after this guy's arrival, the two leaders signed the Treaty of Cordova that recognized the basic framework of the Plan Ihuava and promised no resistance when the army of the Three Guarantees approached Mexico City.


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[Assistant] And the next day, the leaders of that army issued a new and this time really enforceable


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[Assistant] Next week, we will pick up with the legacy of independence. It should come as no surprise that the Revolutionary Alliance was very quickly broken, and Vicente Guerrero went into revolt against Iturbide, who was by then styling himself Emperor Augustine I.


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[Assistant] Then we're gonna barrel through the next 50 years of Mexican history, which was defined by a running struggle between conservative and liberal leaders, with constant rebellions and civil wars and secession movements cropping up everywhere, like the one, for example, in Texas.


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[Assistant] We will also deal with Mexico's increasingly subordinate dealings with major foreign powers who were looking to dominate and divide the country. And throughout the 19th century, that meant France, of course, but also principally the United States.


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[Assistant] This week's episode of Dude Soup is brought to you by ExpressVPN. Protect your online privacy today at ExpressVPN.com slash RTTV.


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[Assistant] John Smith is a big proponent of Mint Mobile, he saves anywhere from $40 to $60 a month


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[Assistant] And keep your same phone number along with all your existing contacts.


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[Assistant] I learned that dogs cannot, they cannot create dream meat, if that makes any sense. All they can do is just dream of something that happened to them. But when dogs have nightmares, they're dreaming about past trauma.


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[Assistant] This week's episode of Dude Soup is brought to you by ExpressVPN. Protect your online privacy today at ExpressVPN.com slash RTTV. Welcome to a Merry Christmas Eve episode of the podcast.


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[Assistant] They might learn a lot about you today, especially in terms of your viewpoints or some stories, because what we're doing today on the show...


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[Assistant] Um, due to obvious pandemic restrictions, we can't really crowd around a fireplace and drink eggnog together and share stories like we usually would.


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[Assistant] But instead we're just visited by the, uh, insatiable thought-provoking users of AskReddit.


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[Assistant] And if you're, before we start the questions, if you're listening to the podcast.


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[Assistant] Uh, we might occasionally commentate because James is playing the tourist.


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[Assistant] So years ago when we did Dude Soup, we would have someone always playing a game, especially before we had a set. It was just, you know, a little bit of something to have that was.


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[Assistant] But then we moved to Set and it sort of became a distraction, uhm, or a complication.


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[Assistant] And so we, we lost the, the gameplay, but recently I was like,


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[Assistant] I don't know, it's just kind of like an extra little thing. Maybe, maybe you're not 100% into the podcast, but you enjoy watching somebody play a game.


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[Assistant] Uhm, but yeaah, uhm, so I picked some questions that I thought you guys might be into.


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[Assistant] But I can also find some more. My first question is topical, uhm, which is, you live completely alone.


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[Assistant] On Christmas night, you wake up to find presents in your living room. What do you do?


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[Assistant] Would you have the moment where you stop and think maybe this is someone in my life who's trying to surprise me, like a loved one?


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[Assistant] Okay, well. Anyway. Alright, here's the next question.


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[Assistant] This one person says, watch streaming was just a dream back then and even the lowest quality video took days to download. You had a hidden folder of pictures and if you were lucky you had a color printer to print them out.


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[Assistant] Oh, always an artist. You could sell those paintings, paintings now?


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[Assistant] Just at the basketball parties. What?


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[Assistant] Dinosaurs have been cloned, brought back to life. This is the only place you can see them. I would pay for the two day trip.


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[Assistant] Thinking of my personal finances, or what I assume could be my personal finances at the time. Anywhere from $10,000 to $15,000. That was my ballpark.


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[Assistant] This is the ticket. It's the, my entry to the park, my board and the flight. It's everything.


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[Assistant] There's a whole endeavor that goes into this, flying people in, it's an island.


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[Assistant] Because you don't, you don't find wonder in the natural world. That's why. Like I do.


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[Assistant] Year in the year. Next, next ask a question that Lindsay can get in on here. Okay.


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[Assistant] Anyways, back to conversation. Uh, Ryan, do you expect him to take these then and there that night?


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[Assistant] Next question. Here we go. Uh, girls. I'm sorry. Yes. Girls with super long acrylic nails. How do you wipe your butt without hurting yourself?


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[Assistant] Ryan, do you, are you looking for a woman that just has really really long nails?


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[Assistant] Well here's a more uplifting question. What is your favorite small way to spread positivity?


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[Assistant] It is, and I think that's really considerate of you, cause like, a lot of people like, just don't really consider other people's time.


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[Assistant] And I like, I try to always be like punctual for stuff cause I'm like, this person is giving their time to do this. Yeah.


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[Assistant] You know, I wanna, I wanna be considerate of that. Yeah.


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[Assistant] Well, uh, more questions to come, but first a word from our sponsor.


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[Assistant] You know those times when you're getting hangry and you wanna eat but you want burgers?


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[User] Please transcribe this text

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[Assistant] On your first order when you download the DoorDash app in the App Store, enter code DUDESOUP.


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[Assistant] Don't forget, that's code DUDESOUP. Five dollars off your first order with DoorDash. Guys, what does your ideal heaven or afterlife look like?


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[Assistant] So uh, here's the thing is, I think about what Lindsay's talking about, but from a scientific perspective of, but we are all just atoms.


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[Assistant] To the ground. Light me a blaze. Make me a tree. Yeah. Grip it and rip it. I'm a tree now. Uhm. Turn me into mushrooms.


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[Assistant] BJ Novak from The Office, he has an essay that he wrote, which is kind of about that, where like every night in heaven you can go see some other- Elvis is performing.


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[Assistant] What will become more popular this Christmas because of coronavirus?


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[Assistant] Yeah, the top comment in Reddit is great, which is hand sanitizer is a gift.


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[Assistant] Yeah, I hope so. I think just like doing stuff because everyone's staying home doing like you may have put in.


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[Assistant] Christmas light scenes in their yards, their house will be decorated more than they usually decorate because they're compensating for the fact that they're not going somewhere or seeing people.


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[Assistant] You gotta have a certain, certain slice of like, that kinda comedic cynicism.


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[Assistant] Uhm, where like, if I'm gonna make a joke to you that's gonna be a little bit darker or...


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[Assistant] Conversely, Lindsay isn't super into movies, but she is into TV, which is the new movie.


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[Assistant] Uhm, what phrase from a movie, show, cartoon, etc. have you incorporated into your life?


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[Assistant] Knowing you, that is very Ryan mantra.