William Lamport (1610-1659)
(Enrique Alciati, 1910.
Monumento a la Independencia,
Lamport, William [Guillén Lombardo] (1610-1659), author of an early declaration of
Mexican independence and self-proclaimed 'King of New Spain',
was born in
Wexford Town, County Wexford, Ireland, around the year 1610. He is more popularly known in
and Latin America
by his Spanish alias 'Don Guillén Lombardo de Guzmán'. His
parents, Richard Lamport and Alonsa Sutton, were both of Old
English descent. William had at least one sibling, John Lamport.
William's family claimed relations to local nobility, but by
trade they were merchants - and at times, pirates. Like many Old
English in the late sixteenth century, William's family saw
their traditional autonomy and their Catholic religion
threatened by renewed English efforts to subjugate Ireland. His grandfather, Patrick Lamport, was among those who decided
to align with the Gaelic chiefs' wars against Tudor
colonisation. Lamport's ships aided Don Juan de Águila's
Spanish expeditionary force that disembarked at Kinsale in 1600,
and for years afterwards he was a known threat to English
shipping off southern Ireland. Finally apprehended in 1617,
Patrick was executed on the personal orders of James I. About
four years after the execution, his grandsons William and John
left Wexford, entrusted to churchmen who schooled them.
After a few years studying at
a Jesuit school in
Dublin, William began university studies in
England at Gresham College. There he studied Greek and Mathematics. He soon fled the
country, however, after publishing a treatise denouncing King
James I. As he escaped to France, a company of pirates near Saint-Malo
captured him. He spent several years with them and fought with
them in the siege of La Rochelle as mercenaries for the French. Eventually escaping the band of
pirates in Bordeaux, he made his way toward the Irish exile community in
La Coruña, Galicia, Spain. There William hispanicised his name to 'Don Guillén Lombardo'
and entered the Irish exile community school in Santiago, the Colegio de Niños Nobles. He won the attention and support
of Irish and Spanish nobles after he converted his former pirate
band to Catholicism and loyalty to the Spanish monarchy at the
of Deán. He received a scholarship to study at the Colegio de
Irlandeses in Salamanca, and two years later, King Philip IV's
principal minister, the Conde Duque de Olivares, placed him in
the select Colegio de San Lorenzo del Escorial - a training
ground for the elite servants of the monarchy.
This educational background
allowed William to rise into a select group of educated Irish
exiles who served in the Spanish ecclesiastical and imperial
administration. He proved to be a loyal servant to powerful
patrons, who led the Spanish monarchy's war efforts in Europe. He fought at the battle of Nördlingen (1634), and led Irish
soldiers at the siege of Fuenterrabía (1638). A unique record
of William's military and diplomatic service survives in
pictorial form. While serving in Brussels in the mid-1630s under the King's representative, Jean-Charles
della Faille, the famed painter Anton Van Dyck - or at least one
of his students - made a preliminary drawing for a portrait of Don Guillén. The portrait itself was never completed; the
drawing is now housed at a museum in Budapest, Hungary. William appears dressed as a student under his coat of arms,
presenting a lengthy piece of writing to della Faille.
Returning to Madrid, William apparently served in diplomatic and espionage missions
for the effective head of Spanish government, the Conde Duque de
Olivares, particularly in Catalonia. While it is difficult to corroborate these claims, a published
panegyric in honour of the Conde Duque de Olivares authored by
William provides some indication that William became an hechura,
or protégé, of the Conde Duque. At this time he also publicly
appropriated the Conde Duque de Olivares' principal last name, Guzmán, thus becoming 'Don Guillén Lombardo de Guzmán.'
In 1639, William became
involved in an Irish rebel scheme to seek Spanish support at
Court for a reconquest of Ireland. An Irish mercenary recruiter named Gilbert Nugent, known in
as Don Fulgencio Nugencio, arrived in Madrid and stayed with William. Nugent operated secretly with William's
assistance at Court. Their request pleaded for 100 ships, 8,000
Spanish soldiers, arms for 50,000 rebels, and 1.5 million pesos
in exchange for 'three types of tribute' that the Irish would
pay to the Spanish Monarchy after victory. The Conde Duque de
Olivares and his secretary Don Martín de Axpe dismissed the
request as 'ridiculous.' Nevertheless, they offered the exiles
some logistical assistance in Northern Spanish ports. William,
with the title of Maestro
de Campo, or field-commander, was appointed to assist the
During this period in Madrid, William courted a woman named Doña Ana de Cano y Leyva.
Evidence on her origins is contradictory, some suggesting that
she was a noblewoman, others claiming that she was a Portuguese converso,
- a descendent of forcibly-converted Iberian Jews. It is also
unclear as to whether they contracted matrimony - some evidence
points to scandal surrounding their unwed cohabitation. Ana
became pregnant with his child around 1639 - 1640. Fleeing
either a scandalous affair with this noblewoman or an unwanted
marriage, William sailed on the Indies fleet bound for Mexico from Cádiz on 21 April 1640.
William travelled to the
Viceroyalty of New Spain (present-day Mexico and parts of North and
Central America) in privilege, on the same ship as the newly-imported viceroy,
the Marqués de Villena. William later claimed that he travelled
to Mexico with a special appointment from the Conde Duque de Olivares to
spy on his behalf on the social situation in Mexico. There is some reason to lend credibility to this claim: In
early 1640, the Conde Duque received a message from the sitting
viceroy that the criollos,
or Mexican-born descendants of Spanish conquerors and settlers,
were on the verge of revolting against Spanish authority.
William's mission, he claimed, was to spy on elite criollos
in Mexico City and report all rumours and evidence directly to his patron in
In Mexico City, William established relations with the Escribano Mayor (chief clerk) of the Mexico City government, Don Fernando Carrillo. Carrillo was a prominent
elite criollo, who had
been involved in recent protests against Spanish tax and revenue
policies. William tutored Carrillo's son, Sebastián Carrillo,
and rented a room in their home. Through the Carrillo family,
William became acquainted with local criollo
politics - indeed it appears that he became embroiled in a criollo
conspiracy against Viceroy Villena led by the Bishop of Puebla,
Juan de Palafox y Mendoza. William aided the overthrow by sending a long report to
Madrid denouncing the actions of the viceroy. As a result, the Conde
Duque de Olivares dispatched a secret order to Bishop Palafox
that authorised his takeover of the government. With troops in
tow, the Bishop deposed Viceroy Villena in June 1642.
William sought a post in the
Bishop-Viceroy's new regime, but to no avail. In the summer of
1642 he met an indigenous petitioner who had come to the
Carrillo household seeking legal advice, named Don Ignacio.
William began to meet frequently with Don Ignacio and assisted
him in preparing a legal brief denouncing abuses against
indigenous workers in the mines of Taxco. On one occasion, the two consulted the future through peyote (Central American cactus containing mescaline, used as a
psychotropic sacramental drug) and Don Ignacio predicted that
William would lead a rebellion in New Spain and that the miners
of Taxco would support his movement. This prediction, combined with
William's sense of self-importance and his uncertain future in
the turbulent politics of Mexico City, coalesced into his plan for Mexican independence in the summer
Increasingly secluded, William
drew up a plan that sought full sovereignty for Mexico and broad social change in this colony wrought by deep ethnic
and class divisions. His tactical plan included the formation of
a militia composed of indigenous rebels, enslaved African
people, and disgruntled criollo militiamen. After assuming control of the government of New
Spain, William would call for general assemblies in all the
plazas across New Spain. There, all parts of society - Spanish, indigenous, and African
- would proclaim him 'our liberator, our Emperor and King of New Spain'. There would follow a period of radical social reforms:
Freedom would be granted to all those slaves who co-operated
with the rebellion, co-operative indigenous towns would be
relieved of repartimientos
(forced labour drafts) and tributes, and free trade would be
established with Europe and China. With Mexican silver now remaining in Mexico, instead of being
sent to Spain in the form of taxes and the quinto
or 'royal fifth' rights to all silver deposits, William believed
that this New World sovereign power would rise to prominence
among the nations of the world. Finally, William's regime would
not be an absolute monarchy; he proposed a limited monarchy,
with himself 'or whoever the people choose', as a king who would
rule in consultation with an active parliament.
Rumours surrounding William's
plan eventually landed him in trouble. In October 1642, he was
jailed by the Mexican Inquisition. He was charged with heresy,
principally linked to his use of peyote
(his independence plan, representing a crime of treason, would
have fallen under the civil law). During his seventeen-year
incarceration, he resisted the Inquisitors' logic with wit and
intelligence. Those years in prison have left us with several
extensive treatises, a memoir, and a collection of 900 Latin
psalms which he wrote on his bed-sheets. He made a vain attempt
to escape in 1651. During his last years in solitary
confinement, he slipped into insanity. Lamport was sentenced to
be executed in the Auto de
Fé, or public execution by the Inquisition, in 1659.
Defiant to the end, he managed to hang himself on the stage
before the executioner reached him, robbing the Inquisition of
his own death. Thereafter, his body was burned on a pyre.
Since his death, William
Lamport has occasionally appeared in history and myth. Mexican
historians in the nineteenth century debated over the place that
he should occupy in the history of Mexican independence
struggles. More recently some speculation has emerged as to
whether William's life could be the source of the 'Zorro' myth.
In his historical context as an Irish exile, William was a
privileged yet marginal observer of Mexican society. His remedy
for his adopted society, with its promise of freedom on a new
sovereign soil, continues to intrigue historians both as a
possibility and as a mirage.
Ryan Dominic Crewe
- González-Obregón, Luis. Rebeliones
indígenas y precursores de la independencia mexicana en los
siglos XVI, XVII, y XVIII (Mexico City, 1906).
- Méndez Plancarte, Gabriel.
'Don Guillén de Lamport y su "Regio salterio": ms.
latino inédito de 1655,' in Ábside, vol. 12, nos. 2
& 3 (1948). [Transcription and translation into Spanish of
selected psalms composed by Lamport in prison.]
- Meza González, Javier. El
laberinto de la mentira: Guillén de Lamporte y la Inquisición
(Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana - Xochimilco,
- Riva Palacio, Vicente. Memorias
de un impostor: Don Guillén de Lampart, Rey de México
(Mexico City: Porrúa, most recent edition 1976).
[Nineteenth-century novel based on Lamport's years in Mexico.]
- Ronan, Gerard. The
Irish Zorro: The Extraordinary Adventures of William Lamport
(1610 - 1659) (Dingle: Blackwood, 2004).
- Troncarelli, Fabio. La
spada e la croce (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 1999).
- ——. "I leoni del mare. I Lamport di Ballycrennegan, pirati e patrioti," in
Enrique García Hernán, Miguel Angel de Bunes, Oscar Recio
Morales, Bernardo J. García García eds., Irlanda
y la Monarquía Hispánica: Kinsale 1601 - 2001. Guerra, Política,
Exilio y Religión (Madrid: CSIC, 2003), pp. 295-311.