Partisans, bandits, adventurers and commissioners

Juan Downie's history

Abstract

This article presents the personal history of John Downie, a Scottish commissary in the Peninsular Army of the Duke of Wellington who had previously fought in Venezuela with Francisco de Miranda, who became a Spanish general and ended his life in 1825 as a champion of absolutism, the importance of this story lying, first, in the example which it provides us of the importance of adventurism in the Napoleonic epoch, and, second, of the manifest deficiencies of nineteenth-century Spanish liberalism.