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During Admiral Thomas Cochrane’s demolition of imperial Spain’s naval presence in the Pacific during the revolutionary wars for Spanish South America, all the raids were carried out by his marines under a young officer called William Miller. He came from nowhere – one of three sons of a baker in a small village in Kent, with no family influence, money, or even secondary education – but, following his service as a teenaged soldier in Wellington’s Peninsular War, went on to have a meteoric rise in the armies that liberated the nations of Chile and Peru.
Inspired by some South Americans’ wish to leave Spain’s colonial empire, Miller went not to join Simón Bolívar in the north (as did many demobilised European soldiers), but to the south, to José de San Martín in Argentina and Chile. By the time of Ayacucho in 1824, the large battle that ended Spanish rule in South America, there were seven generals in the royalist Spanish army and five on the patriot side. Eleven of these generals were Hispanic; Miller was the only foreigner.
Miller was passionately anti-imperialist, anti-slavery, and unusually kind to ordinary people and peasant farmers due to his own humble origins. He was highly regarded by all the leaders of independence and popular with his men and fellow officers, and when he died decades after the battles in which he made his name he was buried in the Pantheon of founding fathers of Peru.
William (or Guillermo, as he is known in South America) Miller is well recognised and loved particularly in modern Peru, but also across the swathe of nations liberated from Spanish rule during this period.
