6. Tales of Secret Service (5)
The Exposure and Execution of a French Spy
Nevertheless Canning persisted, and only varied his directions by advising the Baron to take an English ship for Lisbon, and make for Seville, where the Junta was said to be reassembling after its flight from Aranjuez. Intending, probably, to disappear in Lisbon, and find his way somehow to the French, Guttierez sailed thither in December, and arrived on January 1, 1809.
His first action was to visit Mr. Villiers, the English Minister, to show him Canning’s passport, and to explain his intentions with regard to America. By an extraordinary chance the Spanish Minister at Lisbon, Don Pascuel Tenorio, was shown into the room while the “Baron” was explaining his views to Mr. Villiers. Hearing a Spaniard talking about America to the British Minister, he conceived that some sort of intrigue was going on between the British and the colonists. Since the Buenos Aires Expedition of 1807, this idea was always in the heads of Spanish statesmen. Accordingly he resolved to “pump” this mysterious gentleman, and invited him to come home and dine with him. The Baron tried to get off, but was taken away nolens volens by Tenorio, who (as he says) “plied him with the rich wines of Portugal”, and got him to talk rather freely.
What he said and did not say, what he knew and did not know, seemed so suspicious to the Minister that he resolved to find out more about him. The Baron was followed, without his knowledge, by two of the Minister’s secret agents, one of whom had been at Bayonne and recognized him. This man (rather incautiously) dropped into a café to which the stranger had betaken himself, and suddenly saluted him by the name of Guttierez as an old friend. The Baron showed great confusion, denied that he owned any such name, and bolted out of the café. Running straight to his lodgings, he gave out that he had to go to Oporto to find a cousin whom he was expecting to meet there, and made off with his young friend in a hastily hired carriage, though he had no passports for Oporto, but only a British and a Spanish one for Seville.
Meanwhile the Spanish Minister had gone to the Portuguese police, and denounced Guttierez as a dangerous and well-known French agent. Acting very promptly, the chief of the Lisbon Secret Service sent after him a party of his police cavalry, who caught the carriage six leagues out on the Oporto road and arrested its occupants.
In the Lisbon central prison both Guttierez and Goioechea were subjected to a sort of “third degree” interrogation both by Tenorio and by the Portuguese Chief of Police. Several persons having identified him as an agent well known in the French service at Bayonne, he could not deny his identity, and finally broke down, and began making promises of having many revelations to discover, if harsh measures were not applied to him. However, the Portuguese Government extradited him to the Spanish authorities, and he was removed to Seville in January 1809.
There he and his companion were kept for three months, subjected to constant interrogations, and his papers were examined. The counterfeit seal of Ferdinand VII made in London had been used largely upon them. A précis of the proceedings was sent to the British Foreign Office, as it was acknowledged that Canning had acted with scrupulous correctness with regard to allowing the “Baron” to communicate with America, and had insisted on referring everything to the Central Junta. The famous royal letter to the Viceroy of Mexico turned out to be a defaitist document: Ferdinand was made to say in it that he hoped that the Viceroy would do everything to prevent a breach between the home country and the colonies, even to the extent of acknowledging the new King at Madrid. Anything was better than that Mexico should fall into the hands of the English. There was a “royal decree” with the false seal at the bottom of it, establishing a council of regency for Mexico composed of Francophils—Azanza, ex-Viceroy of Mexico, but now a tool of Joseph Bonaparte, had supplied the names—and a forged passport from Admiral Apodaca to pass the bearer to Mexico, copied from the real passport which the Admiral had given him for Seville. All the documents were in the clerkly hand of the young Juan Enrique Goioechea—the Baron himself was not a neat penman.
Among odd confidences extracted from the chief prisoner were several interesting and correct facts—such as that Talleyrand (whom he had seen several times) had endeavoured to dissuade Napoleon from his abominable Spanish venture, and that the whole course of events had not fallen out as originally planned by the Emperor, who had been forced to change all details owing to the Aranjuez revolution of March 1808, and the unexpected proclamation of Ferdinand as King. He also mentioned that Maret, the Minister of State, had showed him a letter to President Jefferson at Washington, advising him to see that Great Britain did not seize Mexico or the Spanish West Indies, and trying to persuade him that war between the United States and the British was inevitable.
All these revelations, however genuine, did not avail to save the lives of the adventurers. Both Guttierez and Goioechea were “garotted” in front of the Central Prison of Seville on April 15, 1809.
George Jackson, the secretary of Frere, the British Envoy at Seville, writes in his diary next day: “We had yesterday a spectacle which attracted thousands from near and far—the execution of the Friar who edited the Bayonne Gazette. He had been to England applying to Mr. Canning for passports for America. He was suspected, it appears, and on his arrival at Lisbon was arrested and brought to Seville. It is said that he made very important disclosures.”
I have seen no other allusion to the affair, and the story is probably new to English readers, though Spaniards got to know of it by the Marquis de Villa Urrutia’s interesting article in the Revista de Archivos of 1909.
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