“Of Experience, Zeal, and Selflessness”: Military Officers as Viceroys in Early Eighteenth Century Spanish America

On February 18, 1724, field marshal Antonio Manso Maldonado arrived in New Granada as the president, governor, and captain-general of the New Kingdom. He had been appointed to this position on December 4, 1723, because both the crown and the Chamber of the Indies thought it would be best executed by a military officer. Manso Maldonado could boast more than 30 years of military service, proven loyalty, and administrative experience, much of it during the first reign of Felipe V. After joining the royal armies as a private, Manso Maldonado rose steadily through the ranks, fighting the Moors in Ceuta and the French in the wars of the late seventeenth century. During the War of the Spanish Succession, he served at the orders of the militant bishop of Murcia and last viceroy of Valencia, Luis Belluga, who praised Manso’s valor directly to the king.¹ Most important perhaps, at the end of the War of the Spanish Succession and upon the occupation of Catalonia by Bourbon forces, Manso Maldonado had served as teniente de rey in Gerona (1716–1719) and Barcelona (1719–1723), witnessing first-hand the implementation of the Nueva Planta² and the enforcement of royal authority over the rebellious principality.³

Although he modestly expressed doubts that these previous appointments qualified him in any way to exercise the political government of the New Kingdom,⁴ to the crown they seemed an ideal preparation for his new appointment, so much so that other men of Manso Maldonado’s background were appointed to high government office in the Indies at the time. Manso was one of five men appointed between 1722 and 1723 who constituted the first wave of administrators of military background to arrive in the Indies. Appointed shortly before Manso and sailing with the same fleet, field marshals Luis de Aponte⁵ and Manuel Alderete⁶ were to serve respectively as governors of Cartagena and Tierra Firme, while lieutenant-general José de Armendáriz y Perurena, first marquis of Castelfuerte, was destined for the viceregency of Peru.⁷ The fifth man, appointed in April 1722, was captain-general Juan de Acuña y Bejarano, first marquis of Casafuerte, designated viceroy of New Spain.

Although historians have rarely noted them, the similarities between Casafuerte and Castelfuerte went well beyond the names of their marquesados. Both were military men who had participated actively and extensively in the War of Succession; both were knights in the Order of Santiago and had received their titles of nobility explicitly as reward for their military services; both were single at the time of their appointments as viceroys; and both served their viceregencies for more than ten years.⁸ As I will argue, this was no coincidence. The two men came to represent a new breed of Spanish American viceroy, similar in many ways to the provincial captains-general introduced to the peninsula in the wake of the War of the Spanish Succession. With few exceptions, their successors too would come from a similar background; through the rest of the eighteenth century, the crown sought to appoint to its high offices men whose loyalty, personal dependence on the king, and experience promised they would become reliable administrators and efficient executors of royal commands.

The new viceroys differed significantly from those appointed under the Habsburgs and during most of Felipe V’s first reign. The historiography has long recognized the Bourbon tendency to appoint military officers as administrators for the Americas; but given the turbulent nature of the eighteenth century and the constant threat of foreign attacks on the ill-defended Indies, historians have associated the appointment of military viceroys first and foremost with the defense of Spain’s possessions. Some authors have mentioned the connection between executive effectiveness and military discipline, one increasingly in vogue during the 1700s,⁹ but rarely have they pointed out the links and correlations between the appointments of military officers to governmental offices in the Americas and the governmental appointments that had recently been made in peninsular Spain. As we shall...