With the early nineteenth century came the stirring of a people long crushed into impotence. The mother country was in the throes of a great war against the foreign invader. Deserted and abandoned by its Spanish sovereign, and ruled, where it was ruled at all by civilians, by a body of self-elected revolutionary doctrinaires, the colonists of the various Viceroyalties of America promptly shook themselves free from the nerveless grasp that had held them so long. A demand for an immense sum of money beyond that which had voluntarily been sent by Mexico to aid the mother country against Napoleon was refused in 1810, and a few months afterwards the long gathering storm burst. The man who first formulated the Mexican cry for freedom was a priest, one Miguel Hidalgo. He had already organised a widespread revolutionary propaganda, and on September 16, 1810, the Viceregal authorities precipitated matters by suppressing one of the clubs, at Queretaro, in which the independence of the country was advocated. Hidalgo at once called his followers to arms, and under the sacred banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico, led some 50,000 ardent patriots through the country towards the capital that had once been Montezuma's. Subduing all the land he crossed, Hidalgo finally met the royal troops on the 30th of October and completely routed them. Then the rebel army gradually fell to pieces in consequence of unskilful management, and at a subsequent battle in January, 1811, was entirely defeated, Hidalgo and his lieutenant being shortly afterwards captured and shot. But the fire thus lit could never again be entirely extinguished. For years the intermittent struggle went on under another priest, Morelos, a true national Mexican hero who was betrayed to the Spaniards in 1815, and punished first by the Inquisition as a heretic and afterwards shot as a traitor to the King of Spain. The sun of the Spanish domination of Mexico set in blood, for the wretched reactionary Ferdinand VII. was on the throne of the mother country, determined if he could to terrorise Spanish America into obedience as he had done Spain itself. His eagerness to do so defeated itself. A large army, collected at Cadiz for the purpose of crushing Mexico into obedience, revolted against the despot, and then the Mexican patriots, under Iturbide, practically dominated their country. The new Spanish Hibernian Viceroy, O'Dontroju, could but bend his head to the storm, and in September, 1821, signed a treaty with the insurgents by which Mexico was acknowledged to be an independent constitutional monarchy under the Spanish king, Ferdinand VII.