PROLOGUE
Andrés Novales was a captain of the Spanish Army who was born in Manila on the 12th of June, 1800. Hailed from a mestizo background, he became a cadet at the age of nine and was promoted to the rank of lieutenant five years later. In the midst of Napoleonic wars, he sought his superiors' consent to sent him to mainland Spain to fought alongside his colleagues in the Spanish Army. His dedication to the military was evident despite his demotion to an ordinary soldier once he was finally allowed by his superior to go to Madrid; he returned to the Philippines as a captain. However, his background was the subject of discrimination and other forms of injustice that he and other mestizos had suffered from their peninsular superiors and colleagues.
While he was in exile in the Mindanao fighting the pirates, the younger Novales concocted a plan that would surprise the colonial authorities in Intramuros, the center of Spanish colonial power in Asia; the said plan included the storming of the gates of the Walled City, in which include the famed citadel Fort Santiago, kill the two men who perpetrated the ongoing discrimination against the mestizo public officials and military personnel: Governor-General Juan Antonio Martínez and his deputy/predecessor Mariano Fernández de Folgueras, and proclaim the independence of the whole Philippine archipelago from the Spanish yoke. It was indeed evident that intellectuals such as Count Luis Rodríguez Varela, also an exile, participated in concocting the plan of the young mestizo captain of the Spanish Army.
Two and a half weeks before the actual revolt, Andrés secretly returned to Manila using a forged identity (Salvador Pastrana de Asis), he immediately went to his elder brother Mariano in order to convince the latter to join him in his fight against colonial tyranny. Because of his loyalty to Spain, the elder Novales was at first hesitant to accept his younger brother's offer; he suddenly changed his mind when Andrés promised his elder brother that he would become the Captain General of his army once his revolt was successful. In fact, the elder Novales has suggested that he would tell the troops that stationed in Fort Santiago not to shoot the rebels and let the gates of the citadel open, and he indeed later secretly told the Fort Santiago troops on the night of the 25th of May 1823, exactly a week before the planned rebellion. The explanation, Mariano Novales has explicitly told his soldiers, was "additional supplies" from Spain would be arrived directly at Fort Santiago, and added that the soldiers should be careful when they've been asked by their superiors, especially the peninsulares.
Simultaneously, Novales' sergeants across the country has recruited 800 men as soldiers, most of them native Filipinos; they were trained in both conventional and guerrilla training, as explicitly instructed by the Captain to his sergeants before they've start recruiting; his reason was that the rebellion could be spread across the country from Manila once the colonial government was overthrown and replaced by a Junta Provisional led by Novales.
A few days later, Count Luis Rodríguez Varela and other prominent
mestizo personalities secretly returned to Manila using a ship hired on the orders of Novales himself; they've pretended that they would bring the exiles to the city of Iloilo in the town of Panay. Upon their arrival in the capital on the night of the 28th of May, they were greeted by Novales and some of his sergeants.