Lessons from a liberal swashbuckler

EVEN by the standards of an extraordinary age, it was a remarkable life. Francisco de Miranda, who was born in Venezuela in 1750 and died in a Spanish prison 200 years ago this month, was a soldier, statesman, student of military affairs and philosophy, womaniser and bon vivant. Above all, he was a peerless networker and self-appointed leader in the cause of independence for South America from Spanish rule. The populist rulers of present-day Venezuela claim Miranda as a forebear, but his hurly-burly life is a rebuke to their illiberalism.

He met everyone who was anyone in the Atlantic world in the age of revolution: Washington, Jefferson and Hamilton; Tom Paine and Lafayette; Pitt and Wellington; Napoleon and Catherine the Great of Russia; Joseph Haydn and Edward Gibbon; Jeremy Bentham and Lady Hester Stanhope. He counted several of them as friends and protectors. A man of the Enlightenment, he could converse in five languages as well as read Latin and Greek. His library of 6,000 books in the house in Fitzrovia, London, that was the closest he came to a home was one of the largest of the age. He was, as Karen Racine, a recent biographer, puts it, “an international celebrity, a must-have guest at any liberal host’s dinner party”.