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that the Inquisition, which had been abolished by Joseph Bonaparte,
was reinstated. Scarcely a month passed without new evidence of the
king's commitment to archaic ritual and oppressive policy. His behavior
was all the more reckless because of the deep division that had devel-
oped in the army between modernizers and reactionaries. Even before
the French invasion a significant number of officers in the technical
branches, such as artillery and engineering, had come from middle-
class, progressive backgrounds. During the struggle to expel Bonaparte
many volunteers had joined the ranks, bringing with them attitudes
and experiences entirely outside the traditional professional sphere.
Necessity and imprudence led Ferdinand to retain many of these out-
siders in the officer corps. The inevitable result was a sequence of con-
spiracies, with at least one major military plot to overthrow the
government being discovered each year between 1815 and 1820.
The tensions within the army were particularly ominous, given the
monarch's determination to regain control over the colonies. From
Mexico City to Buenos Aires the nationalism that had been simmering
among Spain's American subjects since the mid-18th century surged up
in the aftermath of the French invasion. Local administrations, claiming
to be loyal to Ferdinand VII and insisting that they were protecting his
dominions against the Bonapartist usurper, pursued their own agendas.
When the king resumed his throne in Madrid, he soon found protesta-
tions of loyalty replaced by demands for autonomy. Here again Ferdi-
nand and his advisers would accept nothing short of the reestablishment
of absolute sovereignty. Had Spanish conservatives been able to negoti-
ate some form of compromise in the individual territories, a relation-
ship mutually beneficial to Spain and the Americas might have evolved.
Instead, the king demanded total submission, the colonies proclaimed
their independence, and a decade of war followed. The mounting of
transatlantic military expeditions proved a tremendous strain on Spain's
material and human resources. Spaniards, barely recovered from their
own liberation struggle, now found themselves conscripted to repress
the liberation movements overseas. Many of them lacked any real sym-
pathy with the inhabitants of those distant lands yet were reluctant to
face death by bullet or tropical disease in a meaningless conflict.
In 1820 military discontent and the rising toll of the colonial wars
combined to generate a mutiny among soldiers at Cádiz who were
about to embark for South America. Their commander, Colonel Rafael
del Riego, led them on a march toward Madrid that was joined by other
rebellious units. The insurrection turned into a successful revolution,
as the mutineers joined with liberal politicians to install a reformist
government, with Riego as minister of war. Ferdinand VII was permitted
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