Battlefield Diplomacy and Empire-building in the Indo-Pacific World during the Seven Years’ War

Abstract

In 1762, at the height of the Seven Years’ War, Britain’s Royal Navy and East India Company mobilised a motley army of Europeans, South Asians, and Africans and invaded Manila, the capital of Spain’s Asian Empire. The Black Legend blinded the British to the complexities of the real balance of power in the Philippines. The Spanish colonial government quickly raised militias of Spaniards, Mexicans, Chinese mestizos, and indigenous Filipinos who ultimately defeated the British. The loyalties of the soldiers of many nations who converged in Manila could not be taken for granted. This article examines the ongoing bargaining that took place between imperial officials and soldiers, revealing the crucial role that negotiation played in eighteenth-century empire building beyond the Atlantic. War transformed fighting men of many nations into important historical actors who determined the outcome of the Seven Years’ War in the Indo-Pacific world.

In late September 1762, at the height of the Seven Years’ War, a combined Royal Navy and East India Company fleet with an army of 1,700 men invaded Manila. The Spanish colony was completely unprepared for this attack, being unaware that Britain and Spain were at war until British battleships entered Manila Bay with guns blazing. ¹ The walled centre of the city known as Intramuros fell to the invaders after two weeks of heavy shelling and fighting. The raising of the British flag over the “the metropolis and capital of the Philippine Islands” could have signalled the end of Spain’s Asian empire. ² Yet Simón de Anda y Salazar, a senior Basque official in Manila’s colonial government, refused to surrender. As the British held captive Manila’s Archbishop Rojo, who was also the interim governor of the Philippines, Anda fled to the town of Bacolor, declared himself governor of the islands, and vowed to restore the ‘pearl of the orient’ to Spain.

For the next nineteen months, Anda used Bacolor as a base to raise a vast, loyalist army that brutally supressed two major indigenous rebellions sparked by Spain’s temporary loss of its capital, and waged guerrilla warfare against the British, effectively containing them in Intramuros and the nearby fort at Cavite. Catholic priests enthusiastically encouraged their parishioners to join Anda’s campaign to eject the Protestant heretics from the islands. There were frequent, bloody skirmishes between Spanish and British forces. The familiar, dense tropical forests provided cover for Anda’s troops to shoot arrows and bullets at enemy patrols and maintain dominance over the roadways and waterways that traversed Manila’s hinterland, and hence access to rice, wheat, and cattle. In the hot summer of 1763, major battles broke out at Bulucán and Malinta, but the foundry Anda built at Bacolor supplied his soldiers with sufficient artillery to push the British back to Manila. The war formally ended when news of the peace treaty that returned the Philippines to Spain reached the colony in April 1764. However, so far as those on the ground on in Manila were concerned, the Treaty of Paris was a formality that confirmed what was obvious to all: the British were defeated, and Spain’s Asian empire was far more resilient than the masterminds of the invasion had ever anticipated.

It is inaccurate to describe the armies that converged in the Philippines in 1762–64 as “British” and “Spanish”; these were composite bodies with porous boundaries that were frequently transgressed. The motley “British” army that attacked and occupied Manila was mobilised from Madras (present-day Chennai), which made it fundamentally different from the British armies that saw action in the Atlantic world at this time. No more than a third of these soldiers were Englishmen. The army incorporated approximately three hundred French and other European soldiers who had become prisoners of war at Pondicherry when the British captured the French colony in Southern India in 1761. It also included a contingent of Coffreys (Africans) who most likely travelled to Southern India via the slave trade that thrived between Portuguese Mozambique and Goa. More than 600 soldiers were South Asian sepoys. The British brought an additional 100 South Asian lascars to Manila to perform the heavy labour of war, including transporting supplies from ship to shore to battlefield, and burying the dead. ³ Anda’s “Spanish” army was similarly diverse, combining thousands of indios (indigenous Filipinos), chinos (Chinese), and mestizos, hundreds of Mexican convict-soldiers, as well as Spaniards born in Spain and the Philippines who were always in the minority. Troops defecting from the British forces also bolstered Anda’s ranks. In May 1763, senior East India Company officials in Manila estimated Anda had mobilised 12,000 people against the invaders. ⁴

In this article I argue that British and Spanish military leaders could not take for granted the loyalty of their respective multi-ethnic armies. Analysing published collections of British and Spanish primary sources, in addition to original British and Spanish manuscripts, I show that Simón de Anda and Dawsonne Drake, the East India Company servant who became the first British governor of Manila, were obliged to bargain with soldiers and forge alliances with local communities to sustain this war for sovereignty over the Philippines. This business of coalition building transformed ordinary soldiers into important historical actors who came to influence the outcome of the Seven Years’ War in Asia. The dynamics of battlefield diplomacy ultimately favoured Anda and ensured the survival of Spanish colonial rule in the Philippines.

Although Asia remains marginalised in most recent histories of the Seven Years’ War, several discrete studies of the British invasion and occupation of Manila have been published in the past two centuries. ⁵ These are essentially a series of popular, nationalist narratives rather than critical, scholarly studies. Since 1764, Anglo histories have promoted the fiction that the British faced little resistance in the Philippines, and that the islands were returned to Spain in error at the negotiations of the Treaty of Paris. ⁶ Spanish historiography celebrates Anda’s heroic campaign against the British while understating the agency of the thousands of men who elected to fight with him against the invaders. ⁷ A third wave of anticolonial scholarship explores the indigenous uprisings that erupted during the occupation, interpreting these as protonationalist movements while downplaying the fact that Spain’s indigenous allies helped thwart this challenge to Spanish rule. ⁸

This article presents a revisionist interpretation of the war. The British invasion and occupation of Manila should be understood as part of the larger process of accelerated European expansion into the Indo-Pacific world in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, or the Age of Revolutions. In this era Manila was central to the defence of Spain’s interests across the “Spanish lake,” including new colonies founded along the Californian coast. ⁹ The British Crown and the East India Company considered the conquest of Manila a key step in their shared, long-term plan to establish a permanent British colony in the Philippine Islands, and to further extend what historians have called the “Second” British Empire. This article thus offers new insight into the messy, contested process of empire building in Asia, highlighting the roles subalterns played in this process. ¹⁰

Figure 1 Map of the Philippine Islands.

Competing for the fidelity of fighting men

Many of the men the British deployed to Manila were skilled soldiers experienced in the art of war and equipped with specialised knowledge of artillery, especially in handling cannon. ¹¹ They were highly valuable assets on the battlefield and Anda and Drake competed for their labour. The leaders of the British forces in Manila believed these soldiers’ loyalties could be bought: as Captain Thomas Backhouse remarked, “I never saw a soldier but what would rather have one dollar in hand than forty in them to any agent upon earth.” ¹² Accordingly they offered troops various material incentives to fight with the British rather than against them. In January 1763, the Manila Council satisfied sepoys’ demands to receive their pay in advance, recognising that “the consequence that may attend the non-payment of the troops may be very fatal.” Two months later, the Council granted a general pay rise to “soldiers, sepoys and lascars,” and increased European soldiers’ daily alcohol ration. Council minutes noted it was “highly necessary to allow [the troops] all possible indulgencies, in order to prevent any murmurings or application to return to the [Coromandel] Coast.” ¹³

Simón de Anda worked hard to persuade enemy soldiers to defect to his army. In May 1763 he sent word to those stationed at “the little fort at Pasig” that he was preparing to attack with “five hundred good Spanish soldiers with the French Company consisting of 50 men, six thousand Pampangoes (sic), and thirty Malabares, and six pieces of Cannon.” He invited the troops to defect and “deliver up the garrison guns [and] ammunition” to the Spanish army for a considerable fifteen-dollar reward. In the same month, the Manila Council recorded that Anda was tempting defectors with the “considerable sum” of “no less than 100 Dollars per man besides paying for their arms.” ¹⁴

Anda consistently offered soldiers more silver than the British were willing or able to. This was possible because he succeeded in smuggling into his camp the huge silver trove from the galleon ship, the Filipino, that arrived in the Philippines from Mexico in mid-1763. ¹⁵ Significantly, Anda also offered freedom to defectors. He promised that fighting men would not be forcibly pressed into the Spanish army as was the custom of war. Rather, each man could choose to remain in the Philippines and join Spanish military forces where they would be handsomely compensated with double the wages they received from the Royal Navy or East India Company, or they could travel to Mexico “or any other place that you think proper.” ¹⁶

The combination of silver and liberty enticed many fighting men to abandon British battalions and join Anda’s cause. French soldiers fled to the Spanish army en masse as soon as they arrived in the Philippines. Rumours spread that an entire French garrison stole themselves away from the British camp in the dead of night disguised in women’s clothes. ¹⁷ Drake was forced to place his remaining French troops under lock and key on prison ships anchored in Manila Bay to halt the flow of these highly skilled soldiers into enemy ranks. ¹⁸ Drake assumed that religion and the encouragement of Catholic priests influenced the French soldiers’ defection: “as they are most of the Romish Religion, the Friars would by degrees have carried off the whole.” ¹⁹

The published records of the meetings between Drake and his Manila Council of advisors are full of references to sepoys running away to Anda’s camp and marching into battle against their former British commanders. ²⁰ In fact large numbers of these South Asian soldiers remained active in Spain’s military in Manila long after the Seven Years’ War came to an end. In 1766 the Spanish Governor of the Philippines José Antonio Raón Gutiérrez reported “blacks, sipayes (sepoys), and malabares (Malabaris)” were numerous in the colony’s standing army. ²¹ In the late 1770s the Spanish colonial government formally established the Compañia de Malabares (Malabar Company) in which approximately one hundred South Asian soldiers were enlisted. ²²

Several English soldiers and artillerymen who defected to the Spanish in Manila also remained employed in the Spanish colony’s army for many years after the war. Although only six Englishmen were counted among the 1,228 men who formed the King’s Infantry Regiment in Manila in 1767, these foreigners occupied quite senior positions. The Plymouth-born “Enrrique Wilson” and the Scott “Carlos Murray” both served as lieutenants in this regiment in 1769. ²³ These ordinary soldiers shored up Spanish sovereignty in the Philippines by contributing to the military campaign to eject the British from Manila in 1762–64, and by supporting subsequent reforms that radically reorganised and dramatically expanded Spain’s military in the Philippines in defence against the expanding British empire in the Indo-Pacific world. ²⁴

Silver was not the only factor soldiers considered when deciding fight or take flight. Fighting men were not completely free agents; military discipline imposed a very real constraint upon soldiers’ agency. In wartime traitors were punished with death. Stories circulated that Anda hanged anyone he captured carrying rupees, the currency in which the British paid troops and collaborators. ²⁵ In August 1763 the British arrested Francisco de la Cruz, who they described as “a Malay,” for encouraging two sepoys to defect to Anda’s army. De la Cruz allegedly promised the men 100 dollars each if they accompanied him to the Spanish stronghold in Bacolor, and an additional allowance of 100 dollars per month if they would stay and join the loyalist forces. In light of the “frequent desertions, and the town and suburbs swarming with these seducers,” Drake and his advisors deemed it necessary to make an example of De la Cruz. They sentenced him to be marched across the city of Manila, “through the suburbs of Santa Cruz … causing his crime to be published at the corner of every street, until he reaches Quiapo, and that he there be hanged … to deter others from following his example.” Soldiers who witnessed such morbid spectacles surely took the risk of recapture and punishment into account when negotiating the price of defection. ²⁶

Honour may have also inspired soldiers to remain loyal to their commanders. The Subadar Bim Naique, the South Asian soldier who testified against De la Cruz, was granted twenty-five dollars and “a handsome sword” as a reward for his service to the British Crown and the East India Company. Both of these prizes were “publically presented to the Subadar on the Parade, before all the troops in the name of the Honourable Company, as a mark of their approbation of his conduct, and their confidence in his fidelity.” ²⁷

Mexican soldiers were another group of fighting men represented in Anda’s army. Several hundred of these soldiers would have been present in Manila and the greater Philippines archipelago when the British invaded the capital, as Mexico provided Manila with an annual allotment of silver and soldiers to support the administration and defence of the colony until the early nineteenth century. Stephanie Mawson and Eva Mehl’s respective studies of these soldiers show that the majority were mestizos (mixed race) and forzados (convicts) sentenced to complete terms of penal servitude on the frontier of the Spanish Empire. ²⁸ Forzados had typically been convicted of property crimes such as highway robbery, or were “vagabonds, idlers and other men of ‘evil dispositions’ who were deemed unsuitable for integration into society in New Spain.” ²⁹ This scholarship draws attention to the problems inherent in a convict army. Mawson argues that in the seventeenth century, forzados “were engaged in an almost constant mutiny against the system that judicially relegated them to forced labour. Return migration, violence, disobedience and mutiny were constant and persistent problems associated with every phase of the forzado system.” ³⁰

Neither Mawson nor Mehl interrogate the actions and experiences of the forzados during the British occupation of Manila, as the crisis falls outside of the time frames of their respective studies. Nonetheless, their analysis would lead us to assume that these disorderly colonial workers might desert ranks whenever the opportunity to do so arose, and would not have been enthusiastic recruits to Anda’s army.

Yet Spanish and British sources do not indicate that forzados flocked to the British or ran away in significant numbers. On the contrary, the Manila Consultations present compelling evidence that these soldiers mobilised against the British in Anda’s army. Guachinagoes, the term the British used to refer to these mestizo soldiers, frequently appear in the Manila Council’s lists of prisoners of war. For example, the British captured “one Guachinangoe”, along with “one French deserter, one Spaniard … and Indians” in January 1763. ³¹ Captain Sleigh estimated that “Spanish” forces that warded off his attack on the town of Matolos on 22 January 1763 numbered “400 men” and included “three Padres [Catholic priests], the Alcalde [mayor], a great many Guachinangoes with an officer with them and two Frenchmen.” ³² In February, Admiral Cornish even ordered the transportation of “331 Guatchinangoe prisoners” to Madras. ³³ There is frustratingly little written about the fate of these prisoners in the Manila Consultations, and their fate is ultimately unknown. However, what is clear is that the British did not trust these soldiers to fight with them.

This evidence challenges our assumptions about the bonds that tied Mexican convict soldiers to the Spanish Crown. Despite their “cultures of disobedience and criminality,” most of these men seemingly proved loyal during a crisis that threatened to destroy Spain’s Asian empire. ³⁴ It is impossible to know with certainty why convict soldiers supported Anda’s campaign against the British. The most discontented forzados probably appreciated that the risks of defection to the unfamiliar British were high when compared to the known evils of Spanish colonial rule. It is plausible that these men chose to support the Spanish simply because waging war with Anda was more lucrative than fighting against him. Some men may have anticipated that the crown would reward their loyalty with a shortened sentence and the right to return home to their families in New Spain. It is also possible that a common Catholic faith united these soldiers behind Anda in the face of a Protestant enemy. Surely further clues to decoding forzados’ actions are buried in the colonial archive that is today scattered across multiple countries and continents.

Chinos: bargaining with the ‘other’

In the mid-eighteenth century, Manila was the only city in the Spanish empire with a large Chinese population. In 1762 approximately 7,000 Chinese lived in the Parián, Manila’s Chinese quarter, located just outside of the city walls. Many voices condemned the Chinese for collaborating with the invaders in the aftermath of the British invasion and occupation of the city. In June 1764, Simón de Anda wrote a letter to Charles III in which he accused this community of being traitors as well as godless heathens, and recommended that all Chinese be expelled from the Philippines. The king followed Anda’s advice, and the royal expulsion order arrived in Manila in 1767. A reported 2,460 Chinese were rounded up and forcibly removed from the Philippines between 1767 and 1772. Approximately 3,000 others fled the islands under the threat of violence before the expulsion was officially decreed. ³⁵

The expulsion has lent legitimacy to the simplistic “Chinese as traitors” narrative that has characterised Anglo and Spanish historiographies of the British occupation of Manila since the early nineteenth century. In his 1803 History of the Philippine Islands, the Augustinian priest and historian Joaquín Martínez de Zúñiga asserted that “from the moment [the British] took possession of Manila, these Chinese gave them every aid and accompanied them in all their expeditions.” ³⁶ Shirley Fish uncritically reproduced Zúñiga’s analysis of the role of the Chinese in the British occupation of Manila in her 2003 study of this event. ³⁷ Yet British and Spanish records of the occupation indicate Chinese responses to the British invasion were far more complex than historians have acknowledged.

To be sure, there were many Chinese who aided the British in significant ways. Chinese soldiers were quickly integrated into the multi-ethnic British forces mobilised to fight against Anda’s rebel army. The British Captain Richard Bishop reported to the Manila Council that he employed fifty armed Chinese as sentinels in the fort of Cavite. ³⁸ Spanish witnesses believed between 1,500 and 2,000 Chinese and Chinese mestizos joined the estimated 400 European and 300 sepoys who attacked royalist forces at Bulucán in April 1763. ³⁹ As well as serving as soldiers, Chinese volunteers supported the British as local guides. Expert mariners made it possible for the invaders to navigate the rivers, estuaries, and coasts of the Philippines: Captain Backhouse had a Chinese pilot “who behaved like an angel.” ⁴⁰ Chinese guides also helped the invaders traverse overland routes. The Spanish Augustinian missionary Agustín Maria de Castro y Amuedo claimed that the aides who helped the British army to discover Anda’s outpost at Bulucán “were all Chinese or mestizos, traitors to the motherland.” ⁴¹ The British also employed Chinese workers to remove the large copper bells hanging in church towers throughout the city and its hinterland to prevent Anda’s soldiers from seizing them to smelt and manufacture shot. ⁴² “Without the Chinese,” Anda said, “the English are not men.” ⁴³

But not all the Chinese were Anda’s enemies. For as long as the occupation endured, Anda refused to accept Chinese disloyalty to Spain as inevitable. In May 1763, public notices printed in Castilian and Chinese and signed by Anda appeared in the urban neighbourhood of Santa Cruz, which had a large Chinese and Chinese mestizo population. In the name of the king these notices announced a general pardon for Chinese who remained in the area, on the condition that they register their presence and refrain from taking up arms against Spaniards or assisting the invaders in any other way. ⁴⁴ Large numbers of Chinese and Chinese mestizos responded positively to Anda’s request for assistance. A recent study by Buschmann, Slack, and Tueller reveals that Antonio Tuazon, the rich and powerful Chinese merchant and captain of the guild of (Chinese) mestizos of Binondo, used his own resources to raise 1,500 Chinese and Chinese mestizo soldiers into a militia that fought alongside Anda. ⁴⁵ This case reminds us that the occupation created a unique opportunity for Manila’s ethnically-diverse elites to demonstrate their fidelity to Spain, which they surely expected the king would reward once peace was restored.

British assumptions of Chinese disloyalty to the Spanish enabled them to be effective double-agents. It was not until mid-1763 that British captains began to realise the “Chinese are employed as spies.” ⁴⁶ Captain Backhouse captured the “Chinese mestizo” Juan de la Cruz in possession of an incriminating commission signed by Don Josef Pedro del Busto, a prominent general in Simon de Anda’s army, and with a “list of soldiers … locked in his chest.” De la Cruz had allegedly escorted to a village just outside of Manila a group of ten or twelve Chinese who all had commissions from Anda “to act as Spies upon all occasions.” Cruz’s cooperation with the Spaniards cost him his life. Backhouse insisted on “hanging this Villain, and every other Commissary that I can catch,” in order to discourage other Chinese from working to undermine the British campaign.

Of course there were alternatives to siding with Anda or Drake. British and Spanish sources demonstrate numerous Manileños profiteered from the invasion without supporting either side. British officers frequently complained about Chinese shopkeepers in the Parián getting rich from swapping Spanish silver coins for rupees at unfair exchange rates. Captain Backhouse also accused the Chinese of doctoring specie; they manufactured “bad barillas, rupees or dollars” which they passed on to soldiers, but “refused to take again the moment after issued from their hands. This truth is very notorious.” ⁴⁷ An inability to trust the Chinese eventually led the British to attempt to segregate the city’s Chinese population. In December 1763, the Manila Council “signed a proclamation ordering all the inhabitants of Santa Cruz,” to relocate to the Parián where they could be placed under surveillance. ⁴⁸ In emulating a policy that Spanish colonial governments had enforced in the capital since the late sixteenth century, the British implicitly recognised the failure of their efforts to be embraced by Manileños as liberators. ⁴⁹

Indian conquistadors

“The Black Legend,” or the view of the Spanish Empire as particularly depraved, detested by imperial subjects, and in a long period of decline after 1700 influenced British battlefield diplomacy in the Philippines. ⁵⁰ Royal Navy and East India Company officials assumed that indios suffered great abuses under Spanish colonial rule and would welcome the British as liberators. This idea was made explicit in the East India Company’s secret January 1762 proposal to invade Manila, which noted “[t]he animosity of the natives against the Spaniards will, it may reasonably supposed, induce them rather to forward than obstruct” the British conquest of the islands. ⁵¹ Accordingly, one of Dawsonne Drake’s first moves as British governor of the colony was to attempt to negotiate a kind of capitulation agreement with the indios who lived in the city and its hinterland. Drake prepared and distributed manifestos written in Spanish and Tagalog that promised indigenous peoples who swore loyalty to George III would “be treated in every respect as his Britannick Majesty’s Subjects” and freed from servitude and the burden of tribute. The manifestos also assured indigenous peoples that they would be free to continue to practice Catholicism. ⁵² Yet such olive branches generally failed to achieve the desired results.

Indigenous people’s responses to the British invasion and occupation of Manila quickly disrupted romantic Anglo notions of empire by invitation. ⁵³ During the siege British officers were surprised they could not persuade “the natives” to help build the batteries that would eventually destroy Manila’s walls “though all means were used to encourage them to come in.” ⁵⁴ They were taken aback by the hundreds of indigenous soldiers who rushed to defend the Spanish government. General William Draper, commander of the British land forces in Manila, recalled how the indios, “although armed chiefly with bows, arrows, and lances … advanced up to the very muzzles of our pieces … and died like wild beasts, gnawing their bayonets.” ⁵⁵ The engineer Captain William Stevenson noted constant attacks from “the natives … kept us in continual alarms.” They murdered “seamen straggling from their quarters” and slaughtered sleeping British troops camping in the Bagumbayan church just outside the city walls. ⁵⁶ In January Stevenson insisted that his soldiers required protection from the “treachery of the Indian Inhabitants who are very numerous … their fidelity [can]not much to be depended on.” ⁵⁷

Simon de Anda’s army—the unexpected loyalist resistance—essentially trapped the British forces in Manila’s walled citadel. The Augustinian Priest Fray Maria Castro recalled that the English “were more like prisoners in a presidio of the Catholic King than victorious soldiers.” ⁵⁸ Drake had the same impression. In 1767 he described the hopelessness of the Manila offensive in a private letter penned to his brother-in law Admiral George Pocock;

As the enemy increased in Riches and numbers so did our fear & Danger. And I may well say that for 18 Months we were in a manner besieged by our unjust & unreasonable Enemies. Their Barbarities shocked human nature, murdering in all corners, cutting off & harassing those that dared to fetch us Provisions; so that we were obliged to send out Parties to fight for our Subsistence. ⁵⁹

Understanding why indigenous peoples acted to preserve Spanish sovereignty requires recognising that indios were not a homogenous group in the Philippines. The fact that six major languages—Bikol, Ibang, Ilokano, Pangasinan, Kapampangan, and Tagalog—were spoken in the island of Luzon alone gives some indication of the diversity of indigenous peoples who inhabited the region most affected by the Seven Years’ War in the Pacific. ⁶⁰ The majority of the indios who joined Anda’s army were Pampangans, or Kapampangan-speaking natives of Pampanga Province. While Tagalog troops were also numerous in the “Spanish” forces, it was the Pampangans proved to be the Spanish empire’s staunchest allies during the British occupation of Manila. In 1762, Anda established his government-in-exile in the Pampangan pueblo of Bacolor because of its people’s loyalty to the Spanish crown. ⁶¹ After the war, the king of Spain issued a Real Cédula (royal order) that acknowledged the “outstanding services of the Indians of the Pampanga Province” during the occupation. ⁶²

The alliance between the Spaniards and the Pampangans was forged long before the Seven Years’ War began. This coalition can be traced back to 1594 when Pampangans helped Spaniards defend Manila from the attack of the Chinese pirate Limahong. ⁶³ As the Tlaxcalans had been in Mexico, the Pampangans were the “Indian Conquistadors” of Spain’s Asian empire. ⁶⁴ In the late seventeenth century, Pampangans participated alongside Spanish and Mexican soldiers in the military and spiritual conquest of the Mariana Islands. Many of the Pampangan soldiers deployed to the Marianas were also accompanied by their families; the Spaniards expected that these colonists would conduct themselves as model indios whom the newly conquered Chamorros could imitate. ⁶⁵ In the eighteenth century, Pampangans collaborated with the Spanish to suppress indigenous uprisings that periodically erupted closer to Manila. For example, Pampangan soldiers were deployed alongside Spanish troops to put down uprisings in four indigenous pueblos in 1721. ⁶⁶ Pampangan soldiers were fully integrated into Spain’s Pacific network of presidios (forts) by 1740, and frequently accounted for half of all soldiers deployed at each outpost. ⁶⁷ This evidence testifies to the great trust Spanish military leaders placed in their indigenous allies, whom they made responsible for cannons and fortifications, the core components of Spain’s system of imperial defence in the archipelago.

Why did Pampangans elect to develop and maintain this extended coalition with the Spanish in the Philippines? John Leddy Phelan argued this alliance was a rational response to the geopolitical hazards both groups confronted. In the seventeenth century the Pampangans benefited from the protection Spaniards provided against the “fierce Sambals who periodically terrorised the fertile [Pampanga] valley.” ⁶⁸ While not ruling out the strategic military advantages of the Pampangan-Spanish alliance, I suggest this relationship was strengthened by a common Catholic faith.

From the beginning, the Spanish conceived of the British invasion and occupation of Manila as a holy war. When the British began bombarding the city walls, Archbishop Rojo told Manileños he had “seen the angel of the Lord, sent forth from the Almighty, to destroy the army of the heretics before their city, like the host of Sennacherib” ⁶⁹ Pampangans were among the first indigenous converts to Catholicism in the Philippines. Pampangan women became beatas (pious laywomen) and young men trained as priests in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By 1903, Pampanga would boast more churches than any other province in the Philippines. ⁷⁰ It is likely that many of the Pampangans who joined Anda’s army were persuaded by the merits of the mission to eradicate Protestants from their homeland.

For all of the Pamapangans and other indios who joined Anda’s army, their Catholic faith and relationships with the regular clergy proved a solid foundation for their fidelity to Spain during an acute imperial crisis. At the beginning of the occupation Anda expressed his confidence in the clergy’s power to persuade their flocks to fight against the Protestant invaders. In a letter to Archbishop Rojo written on the 8 October 1763, Anda emphasised that “the natives venerate their parish priests, ministers, and missionaries” with “respect and love.” He rationalised that the indios’ devotion to priests, combined with the clergy’s “greater knowledge of the nature, customs, and civilization of the natives, can maintain them and incite them to the defence of the country against the English enemy.” ⁷¹ It seems that Anda expected priests to perform the role of intermediaries, bargaining directly with indigenous parishioners to win their support for the Spanish campaign.

All evidence points to the clergy’s compliance with Anda’s wishes. As the historian Roberto Blanco Andrés has suggested, the power of the church in Philippines society extended far beyond its economic resources. Priests were the “bastions” of Spanish domination in the islands. The clergy dissuaded their parishioners from collaborating with the British and actively encouraged them to participate in the Spanish resistance. ⁷² In May 1763, for example, Captain Backhouse arrested several priests he caught supporting Anda’s army red-handed. Backhouse told Drake he was initially persuaded by one Padre Montero’s apparent willingness to cooperate with the British when they marched into the pueblo of Lipa where Montero was prior. Montero “made a show of service, by promises and some other appearances.” But he proved to be a “false trumpet.” The prior had allegedly threatened to cut out the tongues of traitors who collaborated with the enemy. He also had gunpowder stashed away in the convent, which Backhouse assumed was for Anda’s army. ⁷³ Padre Montero was not an anomaly. The British arrested at least eight Augustinian missionaries, including Padre Esteban, for “endeavouring to seduce a man to desertion” from British forces. Drake decided against executing priests to avoid “greatly irritating the minds of the people.” Death penalties were reduced to fines and imprisonment. ⁷⁴

The clergy were not only whispering words of encouragement into parishioners’ ears. Augustinians and Dominicans promoted the active participation of indios in Spanish forces by actively participating in Anda’s army themselves. The Augustinian friar Agustin Maria de Castro y Amuedo’s vivid account of the bloody battle between the British and Spanish forces at Bulucán celebrates the heroic efforts of priests who not only dug trenches and transported guns, but effectively became soldiers. Castro recalls how Friar Agustin de San Antonio valiantly mounted a horse with his sword in hand and broke through enemy lines, implying that the priest-warrior slew a few enemy soldiers before he himself was killed. Of course the historian should recognise that Castro’s narrative might exaggerate the good works he and his fellow Augustinians carried out in service of their God and king, however much British sources substantiate Castro’s testimony. ⁷⁵ Yet British officers observed “The Augustine Friars … appeared in Arms, contrary to their ecclesiastical functions thereby occasioning the effusion of much Human Blood.” ⁷⁶ It seems that devout indigenous people were more willing to fight with Anda when they could do so alongside their parish priests.

The invading army’s systematic pillaging of churches and convents offended and alienated potential indigenous allies. Drake recognised this problem and attempted to protect select sacred objects in order to gain local support. In March 1763, the Manila Council ordered Captain Backhouse to return the “Malay virgin and black Jesus” his men removed from the Augustinian Convent at Guadalupe. ⁷⁷ Backhouse reported that the community staged an elaborate celebration to welcome home the revered icon. He described how “the Virgin Mary … was carried away in great state and procession, she was accompanied by a thousand people at least in canoes and boats finely decorated.” Backhouse himself “accompanied our Holy Mother till I saw her safe Lodged in the Church without Arms or attendance.” He was confident the restoration of the icon “had good effect, & numbers of the Malays men and women came to Pasig the same night to return thanks for the Honour I had done and the Confidence I had placed in them.” ⁷⁸ However the majority of sacred objects the invaders stole were never given back to their communities, creating distress and anger among a deeply religious people, and strengthening their ties to Anda.

The confiscation and destruction of private property further increased the willingness of indios to support Anda’s campaign to defeat the British. British soldiers frequently stole cattle from indigenous pueblos. ⁷⁹ Moreover, the British pursued a scorched-earth policy in smaller towns and agricultural regions surrounding the capital, burning villages to the ground to eliminate places where enemy armies could hide or congregate. ⁸⁰ Violence by “British” forces against indios was the norm in 1762–64: as Backhouse quite poetically observed, “War in her mildest dress is too severe where the innocent fall in her way”. ⁸¹

“Throwing Off the Spanish Yoke”

The British invasion and occupation of Manila interrupted 191 years of unbroken Spanish control of the city. Spain’s loss of its capital in the Philippines created an unprecedented opportunity for a range of imperial subjects to contest the Spanish colonial regime with the aid of the British. The Manila Council’s battlefield diplomacy succeeded in establishing alliances with multiple local actors who were opposed to Spanish colonial rule.

The Sultan of Sulu, Azim ud-Din, and his son Muhammad Israel were prisoners of the Spanish government in Manila when the British invaded. Years earlier, the sultan had been an ally of the Spanish. In 1737 he brokered a peace treaty with the Spanish government that ended the hostilities in the southern Philippines archipelago and permitted Catholic missionaries to work in his lands. In 1749, after he survived an assassination attempt, Azim ud-Din converted to Catholicism and travelled to Manila with his son and heir to seek protection from the Spanish colonial government. The interim Governor of the Philippines, Bishop Juan de Arechederra, was happy to oblige and staged an elaborate “public entry” to officially welcome these important converts to the capital. However relations between the sultan and the Spanish broke down shortly thereafter when colonial officials began to suspect that Aim ud-Din was scheming to betray Spain’s Asian empire, leading to the sultan and his son’s imprisonment in the capital. ⁸²

If there was one person who truly welcomed the British into Manila as liberators it was Azim ud-Din. An alliance between the sultan and the British had actually been in the making for some time before the occupation began. While in captivity in Manila, the sultan managed to maintain secret communication with friends in the Sulu Sultanate as well as British agents. In November 1761, he even signed a trade agreement with his brother, Sultan Bantilan, and the East India Company. ⁸³ During the British occupation of Manila, Azim ud-Din and his son entered into another mutual defence and trade treaty with the East India Company. The treaty granted the Company the right to “erect Forts or Factories” in Jolo, the capital of the Sulu Sultanate, and its dependent territories. The East India Company escorted Azim ud-Din and his son to Jolo in 1763. To kick-start a healthy trading relationship between the two parties, the Company also “advanced to Prince Israel the sum of 1,000 Dollars” that he was to repay “in the goods of his Country.” ⁸⁴ Although it falls outside of the parameters of this article, it is noteworthy that the sultan’s relationship with the British continued into the early nineteenth century, underscoring the enduring British goal of establishing a colony in the Philippine Islands. ⁸⁵

Two major indigenous rebellions broke out in northern Luzon after Manila fell to the British. Diego Silang led an armed uprising in the Ilocos Province in the northwest of Luzon, and Juan De la Cruz Palaris headed a revolt in Pangasinan Province, situated immediately south of Ilocos. Thousands of indigenous people mobilised behind Silang and Palaris between 1762 and 1764. These violent rebellions demanded radical reforms to the colonial order in the Philippines. In December 1762, when Silang and a mob of 2,000 armed indios protested at the residence of the Spanish alcalde at Vigan, the capital of the Ilocos Province, they demanded the abolition of tribute and forced labour. ⁸⁶ They also demanded the replacement of the alcalde and the principalia (indigenous and mestizo elites) who facilitated the exploitation of indigenous people. ⁸⁷

The Palaris rebellion erupted in the Binalatongan pueblo in Pangasinan Province also in late 1762, when indios refused to pay the annual tribute and demanded earlier tribute payments be refunded. Local priests tried to negotiate a peaceful solution to the crisis and offered to suspend the collection of tribute as long as the British occupied Manila. The rebels rejected this compromise. Juan De la Cruz Palaris ordered all Spaniards to abandon the province, including Spanish priests. Most missionaries were subsequently forced to flee the province as the rebels torched churches and convents. ⁸⁸ The Palaris rebellion spread like wildfire across Pangasinan. At its peak in December 1763, an estimated 10,000 indigenous people assembled in the pueblo of San Carlos and insisted their demands be met. The mob set fire to a Dominican church and convent, underscoring their collective anger towards a disliked priest, if not a marked, anti-clergy agenda.

Shrewdly exploiting inter-imperial rivalry, Diego Silang attempted to bargain with British and Spanish officials in order to meet his objectives. In 1762 he wrote to Anda, declaring that his desire to remove the corrupt principalia from power did not undermine his loyalty to the King of Spain or his commitment to defeating the British. ⁸⁹ Silang simultaneously pursued an alliance with the invaders. ⁹⁰ In May he wrote to a letter to the Manila Council in which he recognised George III “as my king and master,” provided that the Ilocanos were released from tribute and allowed to continue practicing their religion. Silang was clearly aware of the olive branch manifestos the British had circulated in the early stages of the occupation. He was a wise negotiator; he sent the council a gift of “twelve loaves of sugar, twelve baskets of Calamy (sticky rice), and 200 cakes or balls of Chocolate,” to demonstrate the genuineness of his promises and the tangible benefits that would accrue to the British from an alliance. The British enthusiastically accepted Silang’s offer. Soon after receiving his letter and gift, the Manila Council dispatched to Illocos fifty soldiers (twenty Europeans and thirty sepoys), with weapons and ammunition, under the command of Lieutenant Russell to support Silang against Anda’s troops who had mobilised to put down the rebellion. ⁹¹

There is no evidence that Palaris or other leaders of the Pangasinan rebellion reached out to the British as Silang did, although the British certainly attempted to organise a coalition with these rebels too. When the Manila Council “received advice that the Province of Pangasinan had revolted from Senor Anda” in March 1763, it promptly resolved to dispatch “a letter to the Governor and Chiefs of the province, offering them our Friendship and Protection, promising to assist them as much as in our Power and to secure them the free exercise of their religion with an open commerce.” ⁹²

In the absence of a response, the British issued another proposal to the Pangasinan rebels in May 1763. “If you will continue to oppose these evil Designs of the Malecontents,” the term they used to describe Anda and his army, “we will enter into an Alliance with you and when our ships which are shortly expected arrive we will send you such an assistance as with troops of your Province and Illocos will enable us (with Gods Blessing) to crush Mr. Anda and his faction. You shall enjoy every liberty you can hope or expect.” ⁹³ We do not know if any leaders of the uprising in Pangasinan ever received this correspondence. If they did, they apparently chose to ignore British invitations to form a united front against Anda’s army. The thousands of indios who rose up against the Spanish in Pangasinan were not desirous of liberation by the British.

If the British occupation of Manila created a space for indigenous people to rise up in rebellion, it also provided the Spanish colonial regime with an opportunity to destroy this challenge to its legitimacy and authority. In addition to fighting against the British, Simón de Anda’s army waged war against the “domestic” threats to Spain’s Asian empire. Just as the clergy played a decisive role in the formation of an army to fight against the British, they influenced loyal indios’ decisions to participate in the violent campaign to supress the Silang and Palaris rebellions. Diego Silang complained that the Augustinians “have pursued us as if we were wild boars, [and] neither has our submission, nor laying down our arms and crying for mercy availed us in the least for a further security.” ⁹⁴ The indio Miguel Bicus killed Silang in early June of 1763, doing so with the blessing of Bishop Fray Bernardo de Ustáriz. ⁹⁵ When Silang’s widow Gabriela Estrada continued to lead the rebellion in Ilocos after his death, the Augustinians raised an army of between 8,000 and 9,000 indigenous soldiers that continued to engage in battles and skirmishes against the rebels. The rebellion in Illocos was finally put down when Estrada and more than ninety other rebels were captured and hanged in late September 1763. ⁹⁶

The Dominicans played a crucial role in the suppression of the Palaris revolt. Fray Pedro Ire attempted to mediate a general pardon of the Pangasinan rebels on Anda’s behalf. In February 1763. He urged the Pangasinans to be obedient and loyal to royal authority, because “God commands it.” ⁹⁷ Fray Andrés Meléndez, the priest at Lingayen, the capital of Pangasinan, refused to minister to his parishioners until they agreed to accept a Spanish alcalde in their city and withdraw their support from Palaris. The Dominicans also took it upon themselves to gather 4,000 pledges from indios in Pangasinan to fight with Anda’s forces against the rebels. ⁹⁸ In these ways the missionary order contributed to the erosion of support for the Palaris’ rebellion, which effectively ended in early 1764, long before Palaris himself was finally captured and executed in 1765.

The defeat of these two great rebellions bolstered Spanish rule over the Philippines. The extremely violent and ultimately successful suppression of these uprisings ushered in a long peace between indigenous peoples and the Spanish colonial government in northern Luzon. The gallows constructed in the Pangasinan town of Malasiqui to hang the rebels who joined the Palaris rebellion stood for two decades as a conspicuous reminder of the fate of those who dared to challenge Spanish colonial rule. ⁹⁹ Another major indigenous uprising would not emerge in Luzon until 1807. ¹⁰⁰

Conclusion

The unfurling tentacles of European empires into the Indo-Pacific world was a complex process negotiated on the ground in Manila and other sites on the periphery of rival European colonies. The Royal Navy and East India Company’s joint campaign to conquer the capital of the Philippines, an important stage in the formation of the Second British Empire, hinged on preserving the fidelity of their own motley army mobilised from Madras and creating coalitions with the Spain’s enemies within its Asian empire. The bargains British officials brokered with the soldiers they brought from India fell short of stopping many of them from defecting to Simón de Anda’s army. Although the invaders forged friendships with the Sultan of Sulu, the rebel Diego Silang, and sections of Manila’s large Chinese community, they failed to win over the hearts and minds of the majority of indios.

The Black Legend blinded the British to the complexities of the real balance of power in the Philippines. Simón de Anda better understood the relationships that bound imperial subjects to the Spanish monarchy, particularly the importance of a shared Catholic faith. With the clergy’s crucial support and mountains of silver at his disposal, Anda motivated thousands of men from diverse parts of Asia and beyond to fight to restore Spanish sovereignty over the Philippines. It was the actions of these ordinary soldiers that ultimately prevented the British from tightening their grip on Manila and seizing control of the country beyond the walled centre of the city. Spain’s indigenous allies eventually defeated not only the British invaders, but also the indigenous peoples who rose up in rebellion in Ilocos and Pangasinan, thereby shoring up a colonial regime that endured until the end of the nineteenth century.