The real Zorro was an Irishman

The real Zorro was an Irishman

The real Zorro was an Irishman - William Lamport (1615-1659) whose extraordinary true life adventures were even stranger than fiction.

Son of a wealthy County Wexford merchant, he became a Mexican legend and was burned at the stake by the Mexican Inquisition after a 17-year imprisonment.

He wrote the first Proclamation of Independence in Mexico, where he is today honored with a statue and a school named after him.

Lambert was a child prodigy and was sent by his family to be privately educated in London, where at 13 he was arrested for publishing seditious pamphlets.

Following a mysterious escape he was captured by pirates, with whom he served for two years and fought for the French at the Siege of La Rochelle (1628).

By twenty-five he was a protégé of Spain's Count-Duke of Olivares, had traveled most of Europe, and boasted proficiency in fourteen languages and a curriculum vitae that included episodes as a pamphleteer, engineer and military tactician.

He may also have played a pivotal part in altering the course of European history at the Battle of Nördlingen (1634).

He was sent to Mexico as a spy after a scandalous affair with a young noblewoman at the Spanish court. He was arrested by the Inquisition in 1642 for plotting a rebellion, the stated aims of which were to introduce land reforms, abolish slavery and establish an independent Mexican state.

On Christmas night 1650, he escaped in a manner so brilliant that it was rumored he had been assisted by demons. The pamphlets he posted throughout the city as he fled made him a local legend and inspired the works of several Mexican novelists and playwrights, one of which appears to have played a part in the creation of Johnston McCully's Zorro.

Lambert was arrested in 1652 when found in the bed of the wife of the Spanish Viceroy of Mexico. He was sentenced to 7 years imprisonment, at the end of which he was turned over to the Inquisition to be burnt at the stake as a heretic.

He was tied to the stake in Mexico City in 1659, but as the bundles of brush and wood were lit, he undid the ropes that bound him and strangled himself before the flames could reach him.

Lamport's Proclamation of Independence won for him the reputation of a forerunner of Mexican independence, and a statue commissioned in his honor stands in the vestibule of Mexico City's Column of Independence.