SECTION I: CHAPTER III THE CONQUEST OF PORTUGAL

There is certainly no example in history of a kingdom conquered in so few days and with such small trouble as was Portugal in 1807. That a nation of three million souls, which in earlier days had repeatedly defended itself with success against numbers far greater than those now employed against it, should yield without firing a single shot was astonishing. It is a testimony not only to the timidity of the Portuguese Government, but to the numbing power of Napoleon’s name.

The force destined by the Treaty of Fontainebleau for the invasion of Portugal consisted of Junot’s ‘Army of the Gironde,’ 25,000 strong, and of three auxiliary Spanish corps amounting in all to about the same numbers. Of these one, coming from Galicia[31], was to strike at Oporto and the Lower Douro; another, from Badajoz[32], was to take the fortress of Elvas, the southern bulwark of Portugal, and then to march on Lisbon by the left bank of the Tagus. These were flanking operations: the main blow at the Portuguese capital was to be dealt by Junot himself, strengthened by a third Spanish force[33]; they were to concentrate at Salamanca and Ciudad Rodrigo, and make for Lisbon by the high-road that passes by Almeida and Coimbra.

The Army of the Gironde crossed the Bidassoa on October 18: by the 12th of November it had arrived at Salamanca, having covered 300 miles in twenty-five days—very leisurely marching at the rate of twelve miles a day. The Spaniards would not have been pleased to know that, by Napoleon’s orders, engineer officers were secretly taking sketches of every fortified place and defile that the army passed, and preparing reports as to the resources of all the towns of Old Castile and Leon. This was one of the many signs of the[p. 27] Emperor’s ultimate designs. On the 12th of November, in consequence we cannot doubt of the outbreak of the troubles of October 27 at the Spanish court, Junot suddenly received new orders, telling him to hurry. He was informed that every day which intervened before his arrival at Lisbon was time granted to the Portuguese in which to prepare resistance,—possibly also time in which England, who had plenty of troops in the Mediterranean, might make up her mind to send military aid to her old ally. Junot was directed to quicken his pace, and to strike before the enemy could mature plans of defence.

For this reason he was told to change his route. The Emperor had originally intended to invade the country over the usual line of attack from Spain, by Almeida and Coimbra, which Masséna was to take three years later, in 1810. But when the events at the Escurial showed that a crisis was impending in Spain, Napoleon changed his mind: there was the fortress of Almeida in the way, which might offer resistance and cause delay, and beyond were nearly 200 miles of difficult mountain roads. Looking at his maps, Napoleon saw that there was a much shorter way to Lisbon by another route, down the Tagus. From Alcantara, the Spanish frontier town on that river, to Lisbon is only 120 miles, and there is no fortress on the way. The maps could not show the Emperor that this road was for half of its length a series of rocky defiles through an almost unpeopled wilderness.

Orders were therefore sent to Junot to transfer his base of operations from Salamanca to Alcantara, and to march down the Tagus. The Spaniards (according to their orders) had collected the magazines for feeding Junot’s force at Salamanca and Ciudad Rodrigo. But for that Napoleon cared little. He wrote that the army must take the shortest road at all costs, whatever the difficulty of getting supplies. ‘I will not have the march of the army delayed for a single day,’ he added; ‘20,000 men can feed themselves anywhere, even in a desert.’ It was indeed a desert that Junot was ordered to cross: the hill-road from Ciudad Rodrigo to Alcantara, which hugs the Portuguese frontier, has hardly a village on it; it crosses ridge after ridge, ravine after ravine. In November the rains had just set in, and every torrent was full. Over this stony wilderness, by the Pass of Perales, the French army rushed in five days, but at the cost of dreadful privations. When it reached Alcantara half the horses had perished of cold, all the[p. 28] guns but six had been left behind, stranded at various points on the road, and of the infantry more than a quarter was missing—the famished men having scattered in all directions to find food. If there had been a Portuguese force watching Alcantara, Junot must have waited for many days to get his army together again, all the more so because every cartridge that his men were carrying had been spoiled by the wet. But there were no enemies near; Junot found at the great Tagus bridge only a few Spanish battalions and guns on the way to join his army. Confiscating their munitions to fill his men’s pouches, and their food to provide them with two days’ rations, Junot rushed on again upon the 19th of November. He found, to his surprise, that there was no road suitable for wheeled traffic along the Tagus valley, but only a poor track running along the foot of the mountains to Castello Branco, the sole Portuguese town in this part of the frontier. The march from Alcantara to Abrantes proved even more trying than that from Ciudad Rodrigo to Alcantara. It was through a treeless wilderness of grey granite, seamed with countless ravines. The rain continued, the torrents were even fuller than before, the country even more desolate than the Spanish side of the border. It was only after terrible sufferings that the head of the column reached Abrantes on November 23: the rear trailed in on the 26th. All the guns except four Spanish pieces of horse artillery had fallen behind: the cavalry was practically dismounted. Half the infantry was marauding off the road, or resting dead-beat in the few poor villages that it had passed. If there had been even 5,000 Portuguese troops at Abrantes the French would have been brought to a stop. But instead of hostile battalions, Junot found there only an anxious diplomatist, named Barreto, sent by the Prince-Regent to stop his advance by offers of servile submission to the Emperor and proffers of tribute. Reassured as to the possibility that the Portuguese might have been intending armed resistance, Junot now took a most hazardous step. Choosing the least disorganized companies of every regiment, he made up four battalions of picked men, and pushed on again for Lisbon, now only seventy-five miles distant. This time he had neither a gun nor a horseman left, but he struggled forward, and on the 30th of November entered the Portuguese capital at the head of 1,500 weary soldiers, all that had been able to endure to the end. They limped in utterly exhausted, their clothes in rags, and their cartridges so soaked through that they[p. 29] could not have fired a shot had they been attacked. If the mob of Lisbon had fallen on them with sticks and stones, the starving invaders must have been driven out of the city. But nothing of the kind happened, and Junot was able to install himself as governor of Portugal without having to strike a blow. It was ten days before the last of the stragglers came up from the rear, and even more before the artillery appeared and the cavalry began to remount itself with confiscated horses. Meanwhile the Portuguese were digesting the fact that they had allowed 1,500 famished, half-armed men to seize their capital.

While Junot had been rushing on from Salamanca to Alcantara, and from Alcantara to Abrantes, Lisbon had been the scene of much pitiful commotion. The Prince-Regent had long refused to believe that Napoleon really intended to dethrone him, and had been still occupying himself with futile schemes for propitiating the Emperor. Of his courtiers and generals, hardly one counselled resistance: there was no talk of mobilizing the dilapidated army of some 30,000 men which the country was supposed to possess, or of calling out the militia which had done such good service in earlier wars with Spain and France. Prince John contented himself with declaring war on England on the twentieth of October, and with garrisoning the coast batteries which protect Lisbon against attacks from the sea. Of these signs of obedience he sent reports to Napoleon: on the eighth of November he seized the persons of the few English merchants who still remained in Portugal; the majority had wisely absconded in October. At the same time he let the British Government know that he was at heart their friend, and only driven by brute force to his present course: he even permitted their ambassador, Lord Strangford, to linger in Lisbon.

In a few days the Regent began to see that Napoleon was inexorable: his ambassador from Paris was sent back to him, and reported that he had passed on the way the army of Junot marching by Burgos on Salamanca. Presently an English fleet under Sir Sydney Smith, the hero of Acre, appeared at the mouth of the Tagus, and declared Lisbon in a state of blockade—the natural reply to the Regent’s declaration of war and seizure of English residents. Other reasons existed for the blockade: there had lately arrived in the Tagus a Russian squadron on its homeward way from the Mediterranean. The Czar Alexander was at this time Napoleon’s eager ally, and had just declared war on England;[p. 30] it seemed wise to keep an eye on these ships, whose arrival appeared to synchronize in a most suspicious way with the approach of Junot. Moreover there was the Portuguese fleet to be considered: if the Prince-Regent intended to hand it over to the French, it would have to be dealt with in the same way as the Danish fleet had been treated a few months before.

Lord Strangford retired on board Sydney Smith’s flagship, the Hibernia, and from thence continued to exchange notes with the miserable Portuguese Government. The Regent was still hesitating between sending still more abject proposals of submission to Bonaparte, and the only other alternative, that of getting on board his fleet and crossing the Atlantic to the great Portuguese colony in Brazil. The news that Junot had reached Alcantara only confused him still more; he could not make up his mind to leave his comfortable palace at Mafra, his gardens, and the countless chapels and shrines in which his soul delighted, in order to dare the unaccustomed horrors of the deep. On the other hand, he feared that, if he stayed, he might ere long find himself a prisoner of state in some obscure French castle. At last his mind was made up for him from without: Lord Strangford on the twenty-fifth of November received a copy of the Paris Moniteur of the thirteenth of October, in which appeared a proclamation in the true Napoleonesque vein, announcing that ‘the house of Braganza had ceased to reign in Europe.’ The celerity with which the paper had been passed on from Paris to London and from London to Lisbon was most fortunate, as it was just not too late for the prince to fly, though far too late for him to think of defending himself. Junot was already at Abrantes, but during the four days which he spent between that place and Lisbon the die was cast. Abandoning his wonted indecision, the Regent hurried on shipboard his treasure, his state papers, his insane mother, his young family, and all the hangers-on of his court. The whole fleet, fifteen men-of-war, was crowded with official refugees and their belongings. More than twenty merchant vessels were hastily manned and freighted with other inhabitants of Lisbon, who determined to fly with their prince: merchants and nobles alike preferred the voyage to Rio de Janeiro to facing the dreaded French. On the twenty-ninth of November the whole convoy passed out of the mouth of the Tagus and set sail for the West. When he toiled in on the thirtieth, Junot[p. 31] found the birds flown, and took possession of the dismantled city.

Junot’s Spanish auxiliaries were, as might have been expected from the national character and the deplorable state of the government, much slower than their French allies. Solano and the southern army did not enter Portugal till the second of December, three days after Lisbon had fallen. Taranco and the Galician corps only reached Oporto on the thirteenth of December. To neither of them was any opposition offered: the sole show of national feeling which they met was that the Governor of Valenza closed his gates, and would not admit the Spaniards till he heard that Lisbon was in the enemy’s hands, and that the Prince-Regent had abandoned the country.

Junot at first made some attempt to render himself popular and to keep his troops in good discipline. But it was impossible to conciliate the Portuguese: when they saw the exhausted condition and comparatively small numbers of the army that had overrun their realm, they were filled with rage to think that no attempt had been made to strike a blow to save its independence. When, on the thirteenth of December, Junot made a great show out of the ceremony of hauling down the Portuguese flag and of hoisting the tricolour on the public buildings of the metropolis, there broke out a fierce riot, which had to be dispersed with a cavalry charge. But this was the work of the mob: both the civil and the military authorities showed a servile obedience to Junot’s orders, and no one of importance stood forward to head the crowd.

The first precautionary measure of the French general was to dissolve the Portuguese army. He ordered the discharge of all men with less than one and more than six years’ service, dissolved the old regimental cadres, and reorganized the 6,000 or 7,000 men left into nine new corps, which were soon ordered out of the realm. Ultimately they were sent to the Baltic, and remained garrisoned in Northern Germany for some years. At the time of the Russian War of 1812 there were still enough of these unhappy exiles left to constitute three strong regiments. Nearly all of them perished in the snow during the retreat from Moscow.

Further endeavour to make French rule popular in Portugal was soon rendered impossible by orders from Paris. The Emperor’s mandate not only bade Junot confiscate and realize all the property of the 15,000 persons, small and great, who had fled to Brazil with[p. 32] the Prince-Regent; it also commanded him to raise a fine of 100,000,000 francs, four millions of our money, from the little kingdom. But the emigrants had carried away nearly half the coined money in Portugal, and the rest had been hidden, leaving nothing but coppers and depreciated paper money visible in circulation. With the best will in the world Junot found it difficult to begin to collect even the nucleus of the required sum. The heavy taxes and imposts which he levied had no small effect in adding to the discontent of the people, but their total did little more than pay for the maintenance of the invaders. Meanwhile the troops behaved with the usual licence of a French army in a conquered country, and repeatedly provoked sanguinary brawls with the peasantry. Military executions of persons who had resisted requisitions by force began as early as January, 1808. Nothing was wanting to prepare an insurrection but leaders: of their appearance there was no sign; the most spirited members of the upper classes had gone off with the Regent. Those who had remained were the miserable bureaucrats which despotic governments always breed. They were ready to serve the stranger if they could keep their posts and places. A discreditable proportion of the old state servants acquiesced in the new government. The Patriarch of Lisbon issued a fulsome address in praise of Napoleon. The members of the provisional government which the Regent had nominated on his departure mostly submitted to Junot. There was little difficulty found in collecting a deputation, imposing by its numbers and by the names of some of its personnel, which travelled to Bayonne, to compliment Bonaparte and request him to grant some definite form of government to Portugal. The Emperor treated them in a very offhand way, asked them if they would like to be annexed to Spain, and on their indignant repudiation of that proposal, sent them off with a few platitudes to the effect that the lot of a nation depends upon itself, and that his eye was upon them. But this interview only took place in April, 1808, when events in Spain were assuming a very different aspect from that which they displayed at the moment of Junot’s first seizure of Lisbon.