Juan Perez Villamil

Juan Gregorio Felipe Ramón Pérez de Villamil y Paredes (Puerto de Vega, Principality of Asturias, May 1, 1754 - Madrid, February 20, 1824) an absolutist politician during the reign of Carlos IV and Ferdinand VII. He stands out for having been the instigator and intellectual author of the famous Bando de Independencia or Bando de los mayores de Móstoles , which has transcended historically as the document that started the War of Independence.

Biography

He was born on May 1, 1754 in Santa Marina de Puerto de Vega, a village belonging to the Asturian council of Navia (Asturias), being his parents Agustín Pérez de Villamil and Francisca Cayetana de Paredes. Although the same year he was born he lost his father.

He studied thanks to a pious work in his native village –founded by Pompeyo Pérez in 1759-, of which his uncle was patron, Juan Antonio Paredes, parish priest of Santa Marina and his tutor; he continued later -with the protection of his father's friends and relatives, the Méndez Vigos- at the University of Oviedo, where he graduated with a bachelor's degree in Canons and Laws on June 30, 1770. Between December of that year and August of 1773 He completed an internship in the office of Felipe Canga Argüelles. He later settled in Madrid, being admitted in 1773 to the Practical Board of Jurisprudence of that city, where he practiced as a lawyer, dispatching orders and judicial processes. He obtained his degree on May 6, 1775, being titled lawyer of the royal councils. The following year he joined the Madrid Bar Association as a lawyer.

He married María de la Vega Ordóñez on December 13, 1780 in the Madrid parish of San Sebastián. He lived with her in the San Millán suburb of said capital city.

Since October 1781, he was a prominent member of the Agriculture class of the Sociedad Económica Matritense de Amigos del País, which was directed by the famous Pedro Rodríguez de Campomanes.

In 1787 he was appointed prosecutor of the Royal Court of Palma de Mallorca, a position he held until 1796; the following year he was given the position of mayor of Casa y Corte and in 1798, when Jovellanos was minister, he was appointed regent of the Royal Audience of Oviedo, although he would not take office, since he immediately accepted the magistracy of robed prosecutor of the Council War Supreme. By decree of December 4, 1799, he was invested as a pensioner knight of the Royal Order of Carlos III, having demonstrated his nobility and purity of blood.

Assigned to the party or palatial clique of the infant cardinal Luis María de Borbón, he carried out his greatest legal-political activity as a robed prosecutor of the Supreme War Council, a job he agreed to shortly after joining that Supreme Council, and in which he ceased in 1807 to move on to occupy the important responsibilities of General Auditor and secretary of the Council of the Admiralty, although this last position never came to exercise; These appointments demonstrate the trust that the worthy Manuel Godoy placed in him.

On April 1, 1803, he had entered the Royal Academy of History as an honorary individual, at the proposal of its director, Francisco Martínez Marina; academy that appointed him a supernumerary academic on the 22nd of that month, of which he became censor in 1805 and director for a three-year term, by appointment made on November 27, 1807; on November 13, 1804, he had also been admitted as an honorary academic at the Royal Spanish Academy. The San Fernando Fine Arts Institute also named him an honorary member. His academic work as a historian and jurist is evident, since he wrote several legal, historical, etc. works.

He was one of many enlightened Asturians who rose to the highest posts in the state government, first under the protective wake of the famous Campomanes, but later making his way with his own effort and worth, with which he became a politician of great relevance in his time, who was described by his peers as a learned, upright, energetic and shrewd man.

At that time he owned numerous properties in Móstoles, which his wife had inherited from her father: a manor house on Calle de Navalcarnero (renamed after this character since 1868) to which he used to retire frequently; an orchard attached to it, another house on the same street and another in the Plaza del Pradillo; in addition to thirty rustic farms. His age was 54 years old on that date.

Mostoles

On the night of May 1 to 2, 1808, he was appointed, along with two other jurists and three lieutenant generals, by decree of the Supreme Government Junta, member of the clandestine Substitution Junta, organized by the Junta de Government to replace it in case it was undone by the French; According to the Count of Toreno, Villamil was chosen to replace Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos (released in Majorca but not yet incorporated into the Peninsula). That board was not constituted as events precipitated.

As a member of the newly created Junta de Sustitución, he had to be aware of the political situation in the country. When the French general Murat, quartered with his troops in Madrid, asked the Governing Board for permission to transfer the last members of the Royal Family to Bayonne (April 30, 1808), Villamil left Madrid and settled in his home of Móstoles, expectant before the events. However, on the afternoon of May 2, news reached the town of what had happened in the capital; Esteban Fernández de León, an acquaintance of his and also a high-ranking State official (he was a former mayor of the Army and of the Treasury of Caracas), appeared in Móstoles accompanied by his family and several soldiers and confirmed the riot that had occurred in Madrid. It is very probable that, in addition, he gave Villamil the decree by which he had been appointed a member of the aforementioned Board, since he was absent from that meeting. Esteban himself persuaded him to promote a notice, urging the authorities of other towns and regions to help Madrid with troops and civilian volunteers; Villamil, as an experienced jurist that he was, determined that the most opportune thing to do was to give the notice through an official letter, which had to be signed by the mayors of the town of Móstoles. Villamil and Fernández de León met with said mayors, Andrés Torrejón and Simón Hernández, and persuaded them to sign an edict, improvised by Villamil himself, announcing what had happened in Madrid and calling for armed relief in that city. The Andalusian Pedro Serrano, who was accompanying Fernández de León, offered to take the side on post, along the Extremadura highway, to Badajoz (where he would arrive on the 4th).

During the period between the end of the reign of Carlos III and the beginning of his son Carlos IV, Villamil had shown himself to be decidedly prone to the enlightened reformism that the first of the two monarchs displayed; now, in 1808, as there were two parallel governments in Spain –that of José I and that of the provincial Supreme Councils-, the Asturian aligned himself with the political thesis of historical constitutionalism, tempered in nature and based on tradition. Villamil is credited with the publication, in August of that year, of a little book of half a hundred pages, titled Letter on the way to establish the Regency Council of the Kingdom, in accordance with our Constitution, where he expounded and extensively argued his thesis policy.

French Occupation

During those months of 1808 Villamil remained in Madrid and presided over the sessions of the Royal Academy of History, which he directed; he was present at those of May 20 and 27, June 17, July 1, August 19, September 9 and 16; however, starting on November 18 and also on December 1, he appeared absent; the sessions had a hiatus of two years and in the first one that followed, on March 1, 1811, the position of director already appeared vacant, since Villamil had been dismissed from the post on November 27, 1810 -when his corresponding three-year term had expired-, that remained vacant due to the lack of sufficient numeraries for the election.

Villamil did not flee Madrid, like many others, before Napoleon entered the city in early December. On February 25, 1809, King José I promulgated a decree that forced civil or military officials who had not sworn an oath of fidelity and obedience to him, to do so in writing within three days. In all probability Villamil refused to take such an oath, as he had done a few months before; he and other state officials who acted in the same way were removed from their posts by a decree published a month later, on March 29. For this reason, and surely also because of his work in the Royal Academy of History and for having written the Letter on the way to establish the Regency Council of the Kingdom, he would be arrested on May 22 of that year and deported to France; he was transferred first to Bayonne and then to Orthez, in the French department of the Pyrénées-Atlantiques, where he remained confined for two years. From there he wrote several Representations to Fernando VII, which obtained the silent response.

In February 1811, the Sociedad Económica Matritense de Amigos del País, of which Villamil was a member, asked the Emperor Napoleon –through the Spanish Ministry of the Interior and the French Police Ministry- for his release, so that he could continue the translation and a monumental edition of the work De re rústica, by the Hispano-Roman agronomist Columela, which had begun a few years earlier. Two or three months later he received the expected freedom, moving under certain French surveillance to Alicante, where he fled along with three companions and joined the patriot resistance.

In Cadiz

He reappeared the following year in Cádiz, according to the Count of Toreno, who had a very different mindset -as a consequence of his exile in France-, since he was opposed to the constitutional reforms and expressed his support for the old monarchy. On February 19, 1812, he was appointed State Counselor, upon being rehabilitated as prosecutor of the Council of War; two days later he wrote to the Regency of the Realm accepting the post, which he took possession of on 17 April. A little later, he requested a six-month license from said Regency to return to his homeland, which was granted on May 13, although he resigned some time later, since by Decree of the Cortes he was appointed on September 25, after a vote, member of the III Regency, replacing the resigned count of La Bisbal –the famous Quintillo-.

The increasingly inflexible position of the Liberals increased the rumors about Villamil's absolutist and anti-constitutional convictions, although he was not situated in such extreme, since he was closer to the Enlightenment theses of Jovellanism, which advocated endowing the nation of a moderate Constitution that would assume the historical precepts of national governance (monarchical system, estate society, bicameralism, etc.). These rumors earned him the enmity of many representatives of the Cortes, of a radical liberal tendency, who contributed to establishing the cliché of an absolutist Villamil, which would haunt him for the rest of his life. This character did not change his political ideology during the war, as has been said so much, because in reality he always stuck to a specific doctrine.

On March 8, 1813, said Regency was terminated, and it was led by the Infante Cardinal and Archbishop of Toledo, Luis María de Borbón, along with Gabriel Císcar and Pedro Agar. In the last months of that year, the Cortes moved to Madrid together with the members of the Regency, since the capital was already free of French troops. When the throne of Spain was returned to Ferdinand VII on December 11, 1813, when the Cortes resumed its activity in January of the following year, the official position was established, which was reaffirmed in the constitutional principles; The royalist or absolutist faction –the so-called serviles by the liberals-, now led by Villamil, General Castaños and the Infanta Carlota, conspired to abort that decision, favoring a failed coup.

When Ferdinand VII returned to Spain, on April 16, many of the deputies to Cortes with an absolutist tendency appeared to receive him in Valencia, and among them Villamil, who was very resentful of the dominant tendencies in the chamber; those presented to the monarch a manifesto ironically baptized by his detractors as Manifesto of the Persians, which was signed by 69 deputies; It has been maintained that this letter was written by Pedro Gómez Labrador together with Villamil, although the co-authorship of the one at hand is currently ruled out, although he did sign it, showing his agreement with the content of that manifesto, of an absolutist nature, which advocated the return to the estate society, the trade union organization and the return of all their assets and rights to the Church and religious orders, thus rejecting all the work of the Cortes of Cádiz and the liberal regime.

However, Villamil was the author, along with Miguel de Lardizábal, of the decree that the returned monarch promulgated on May 4, 1814, which annulled the Constitution of 1812 and all the resolutions of the liberal courts, restoring absolutism, although expressing the intention to convene legitimate Cortes, according to jurisdiction and custom of the Spanish nation. As payment for his efforts for his person, the king appointed Villamil, on May 4, Secretary of the Council of State, and in November he granted him the Secretariat of the Universal Office of Finance - that is, he appointed him Minister of Finance. Treasury-, although he only held office for about three months, as he was abruptly dismissed on February 2, 1815.

Shortly before, he had been appointed academic of the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Honorary and Merit Member of the Sociedad Económica Matritense, and on November 10, 1814, Academician of the Real de la Lengua.

His brief stint in the conflictive Ministry of Finance earned him the mocking nickname Curandero de la Hacienda; During the following years Villamil would be postponed to the most absolute political ostracism, being dismissed in October 1815 as secretary of the Council of State, although he assumed the representation in the Court of the Economic Society of Friends of the Country of Oviedo, which kept him as perpetual director. from 1816 to 1820, despite his implacable banishment to Plasencia shortly after ceasing as State Councilor, where he remained for a year, and his habitual retirement to Móstoles in subsequent years.

In 1819, he requested permission from the Council of Castilla to donate part of his farms and properties in Móstoles to the University of Oviedo, with the aim of creating a chair called Fundamentals of Our True Roman Catholic Religion, which was not launched until his death, due to the political difficulties of the Liberal Triennium. Precisely at that time the political forgetfulness of him was accentuated, due to the enmity that the exalted liberals who came to power had for him. After the irruption of the French army called Cien mil hijos de San Luis, and obtained the triumph of Fernando VII, Villamil was rehabilitated in his honors and recovered his dignity as State Councilor -by royal decree of December 23, 1823- and president of the Board for the Promotion of the Wealth of the Kingdom – a position he initially held on January 5, 1815-, although he did not manage to assume this last job, when he died on February 20, 1824, at the age of 69, in Madrid, where he had returned by permission that the king granted him on November 26, 1822. He was buried on the 25th in the parish church of San Sebastián. The University of Oviedo, having him as one of his benefactors, dedicated a solemn funeral service and a memorial stone to him.

He was also in possession of the Decoration of the Lis

He appears as a literary character, during his time as Minister of Finance, in Memories of a Courtier of 1815, a novel belonging to the National Episodes by Benito Pérez Galdós.

Orders and Jobs

Orders

• Knight of the Order of Charles III, December 4, 1799.
• Decorated with the Lis decoration.

Jobs

• Honorary State Counselor.
• President of the Treasury Board.
• Regent of the Royal Audience of Asturias.
• Academician of the Royal Spanish Academy, November 10, 1814
• Director of the Royal Academy of History.
• Academician of the Royal Academy of History, in 1805.
• Academic supernumerary of the Royal Academy of History, April 22, 1803.
• Honorary academic of the Royal Academy of History, April 1, 1803.
• Honorary academic of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando.

Bibliography and archives consulted

He is resurrected on 2/31/2119