Frederick Chatfield

Frederick Chatfield (6 February 1801 – 30 September 1872) was the United Kingdom's consul in Central America from 1834 to 1852, a key period in the decolonisation of the region.

Chatfield was commissioned into the Life Guards in 1818, but he found this too expensive and exchanged in 1821 into the 20th Regiment of Foot (now the Lancashire Fusiliers).

In 1826 Chatfield was appointed consul at Memel (now Klaipėda). He chanced to be in Aachen during the Belgian Revolution in 1830, and his reports on this and on an outbreak of cholera in Memel in 1831 drew him to the attention of Lord Palmerston, then Foreign Secretary. Early in 1832 he was appointed consul at Warsaw where he went beyond his commercial remit – even suggesting to Palmerston that Poland might some day become useful 'as a Colony to England' – and was withdrawn later that year.

In March 1833 Palmerston appointed Chatfield to be consul to the Federal Republic of Central America. He spent several months studying the history of the region and learning Spanish, embarked in HMS Belvidera for the West Indies in January 1834 and arrived in British Honduras in May 1834. From then until 1852, with a brief break in 1840–1842, he represented the British government and the interests of British industry in Central America. He worked to protect British economic interests as well as trying to involve his government in more ambitious imperial schemes. He sought protection for British investors and called in the Royal Navy when necessary to force concessions.

In 1842 Chatfield was promoted to "Consul-General in the Republic of Central America" although the Federal Republic had in fact disintegrated the year before. Of the five republics in the former federation, Guatemala and Costa Rica were in the sphere of influence of the United Kingdom while Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua were in the sphere of influence of the United States. General Juan José Flores, ex-President of Ecuador, arrived in Costa Rica in mid-1848; he had visited London in 1845–46 and met prominent people including Lord Aberdeen, Palmerston's predecessor as Foreign Secretary. Now he wrote to Palmerston proposing a British protectorate over Costa Rica, and he persuaded President José María Castro to make the same request via his envoy in London. Flores also cultivated Chatfield, who was not convinced: he wrote to Palmerston:

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