By thus cutting off the patriots of the north from their comrades in the south, it threatened both with destruction of their liberty.
Again fortune intervened from abroad, this time directly from Spain itself.

Ferdinand VII, who had gathered an army of twenty thousand men at Cadiz, was ready to deliver a crushing blow at the colonies when in January, 1890, a mutiny among the troops and revolution throughout the country entirely frustrated the plan.

But although that reactionary monarch was compelled to accept the Constitution of 1819, the Spanish liberals were unwilling to concede to their fellows in America anything more substantial than representation in the Cortes.

Independence they would not tolerate.

On the other hand, the example of the mother country in arms against its King in the name of liberty could not fail to give heart to the cause of liberation in the provinces oversea and to hasten its achievement.
The first important efforts to profit by this situation were made by the patriots in Chile.