In 1822 the Mexican nation was still in its swaddling clothes. Its birth had hardly cost a pang; but its infancy, its childhood, and its youth, were to be attended with a series of convulsions, the fruits of the vicious seeds sown in the conception of the new State. By the _pronunciamiento_ of a part of a regiment of the King's Creole troops the connection between Spain and Mexico was severed forever, and the colonel of these troops became the Emperor of Mexico. In this revolution the nation acquiesced, and thus discovered to the soldiery their unlimited power when their arms are turned against their own government. From that time onward Mexico, like every other country where the Spanish language is spoken, became the victim of her own soldiery. This liberation of Mexico was by no means the result of the outburst of national patriotism, but the consequence of the utter incapacity of Spain longer to hold the reins of her colonial governments. She indeed sent out a new vice-king to Mexico after the breaking out of the insurrection; but the best that he could do was to sanction what had been done by a treaty at Cordova, in which it was stipulated that Iturbide and the new viceroy, O'Donoghue, should be associated with others in a regency, until Spain should send out one of the Spanish Bourbon princes to occupy the imperial throne of Mexico.
The Spanish parliament refused to sanction the treaty of Cordova; O'Donoghue died, and Iturbide was left in possession of executive power, without a defined office, while an insane opposition sprung up against him in the new Congress which he had called together. This unlooked-for opposition soon convinced him that the tearing away of a nation from its traditional ideas was like the letting out of waters, and that he must either ride upon the wave or be overborne by the tempest. A resolution of Congress, to take from him the command of the army, brought matters to a crisis. Accordingly, on the night of the 18th of March, 1821, he caused himself to be proclaimed Emperor by his partisans; and the next day this new revolutionary act was confirmed by Congress, under the intimidation of military force, and the nation again acquiesced.