SECTION IV: CHAPTER V

THE FRENCH EVACUATE PORTUGAL

The Convention of Cintra being once signed, the difficulties which were bound to arise from the unwisdom of some of its articles were not long in showing themselves. Indeed the first fortnight of September turned out to be a very critical time.

The Portuguese authorities were furious: Dalrymple found the greatest trouble in preventing the insurgents of the Alemtejo, who had gathered opposite the mouth of the Tagus under the Conde de Castro Marim[261], from attacking the French detachments in the forts on the left bank. Their commander protested against the Convention, and actually appealed to Admiral Cotton to repudiate it: fortunately he was content to confine his opposition to words. But there was much more trouble at Elvas: the Junta of Estremadura did not object to the settlement, and liberated the French prisoners who were in its hands, according to the proposal in the eighteenth article. But Galluzzo, the Captain-General of that province, showed himself much more disobliging. He refused to call off the troops under his lieutenant De Arce, who were beleaguering Elvas, and behaved in the most dictatorial manner within Portuguese territory, raising not only requisitions of food but contributions of money. He even seized, at Campo Mayor, the military chest of the Portuguese general Leite, who commanded the wrecks of the force that had been beaten at Evora by Loison in July[262]. His detestable behaviour had the good effect of throwing the natives of the country on the English side, and Leite welcomed the arrival of troops from Lisbon, which enabled him to protest with effect against the misdoings and plunderings of the Spaniards. De Arce’s troops were doing no real good: they only maintained[p. 280] a distant and futile bombardment of the citadel of La Lippe, in which the garrison of Elvas had taken refuge. The French commandant, Girod de Novillars, laughed their efforts to scorn, and refused to listen to the proposals for a capitulation which they kept pressing upon him. In spite of orders from the Junta of Seville, bidding him abandon the siege and march for Madrid with his army, Galluzzo persisted in his ridiculous proceedings till nearly the end of September. It was only when Dalrymple moved up to the neighbourhood first the 20th Regiment, and then two whole brigades under Sir John Hope, that the Captain-General drew off his men and retired into Spanish territory [September 25]. Then Girod and his garrison, which was mainly composed of the 4th Swiss Regiment, were able to march to Lisbon under British escort and embark for France. They did not sail till October 9, so long had Galluzzo’s freaks delayed them.

The garrison of Almeida departed about the same time: they had maintained themselves without difficulty against the Portuguese insurgents, but duly yielded up the place on the arrival of British troops. They were marched down to Oporto under an escort of 200 men, a force so weak that it nearly led to a disaster. For the mob of Oporto, under the pretext that church plate and other public plunder was being carried off by the French, fell upon them as they were embarking and nearly made an end of them. It required all the exertions of the escort, the Bishop of Oporto, and Sir Robert Wilson—who was then on the spot organizing his well-known ‘Lusitanian Legion’—to prevent the populace from boarding the transports and slaying the whole of the French battalion. The baggage of the departing troops was seized and plundered, and they barely succeeded in escaping with their lives[263].

Meanwhile, long before the garrisons of Elvas and Almeida had been brought down to the coast, Junot and the main body of his army had departed. The commander-in-chief himself had sailed on September 13, the first division of his army on the fifteenth, the rest between that day and the thirtieth. The last weeks of the French occupation of Lisbon had been most uncomfortable for all parties concerned. The populace was seething with discontent,[p. 281] assassinating isolated soldiers, and threatening a general rising. The French were under arms day and night, with cannon trained down every street and square. Unpopular officers, such as Loison, could not stir from their quarters without a large escort. Sullen at their defeat, and still more angry at having to abandon the heaps of plunder which they had amassed, the French were in a most disobliging mood in their dealings with the Portuguese, and in a less degree with the English. The main source of irritation was the very necessary measures which had to be taken for searching the baggage of the departing army. A commission had been formed, consisting of Kellermann on the one side and General Beresford and Lord Proby on the other, to settle in all disputed cases what was military equipment and legitimate personal property, and what was not. The English commissioners discovered the most astounding hoards of miscellaneous goods among the bags and boxes of the invaders[264]. The conduct of most of the French officers, from the commander-in-chief downwards, was most disgraceful. A few examples may suffice: Junot, by the twenty-first article of the Convention, had been granted leave to send a single officer to France with news for the Emperor. This officer, his aide-de-camp Lagrave, took with him for his general’s private profit the most valuable set of books in the Royal Library of Lisbon, fourteen volumes of a manuscript Bible of the fifteenth century, illustrated with miniatures by the best Florentine artists—a gift to King Emanuel from one of the Renaissance popes. Junot’s widow afterwards sold it to the French government for 85,000 francs. Lagrave, having started before the commissioners had begun to work, got off with his boxes unsearched. But other interesting items were discovered in the baggage of the Duke of Abrantes—one was ￡5,000 worth of indigo in fifty-three large chests, another was a quantity of valuable specimens of natural history from the public museum. General Delaborde was found to be in possession of a large collection of sacred pictures which had adorned Lisbon churches. Scattered through the baggage of many officers was a quantity of church plate—apparently part of the property seized[p. 282] to pay the war contributions which Napoleon had imposed on Portugal: but it had in some mysterious way passed from public into private possession[265]. In the military chest were gold bars to the value of 1,000,000 francs which had come from the same source, but the paymaster-general tried to get them out of the country without paying the numerous accounts owed by his department to private individuals in Lisbon. They were not discharged till this individual, one Thonnellier, had been put under arrest, and threatened with detention after the rest of the army should have sailed[266]. Another most scandalous proceeding discovered by the commissioners was that Junot, after the signature of the Convention, had broken open the Deposito Publico, the chest of the Supreme Court of Lisbon, which contained moneys whose rightful ownership was in dispute between private litigants. He took from it coin to the value of ￡25,000, which was only wrung out of him with the greatest difficulty. Even after a vast amount had been recovered, the French sailed with a military chest containing pay for three months ahead for the whole army, though they had entered Portugal penniless. For a general picture of their behaviour it may suffice to quote the report of the British commissioners. ‘The conduct of the French has been marked by the most shameful disregard of honour and probity, publicly evincing their intention of departing with their booty, and leaving acknowledged debts unpaid. Finally they only paid what they were obliged to disgorge.... Unmindful of every tie of honour or justice, the French army has taken away a considerable sum in its military chest, still leaving its debts unpaid to a very large amount[267].’

It was no wonder that the resentment of the Portuguese was so great that the last French who embarked could only get away under the protection of British bayonets, and that many of those who straggled or lingered too long in remote corners of the town lost their lives. The wild fury of the Lisbon mob surprised the British officers who were charged with the embarkation[268]: they[p. 283] knew little of what had been going on in the capital for the last nine months, and could not understand the mad rage displayed against the garrison.

But finally the last French bayonet disappeared from the streets of Lisbon, and the populace, with no object left on which to vent their fury, turned to illuminations, feasts, and the childish delights of fireworks. They did not show themselves ungrateful to the army of liberation; all the British officers who have described the first weeks after the evacuation of Lisbon, bear witness to the enthusiasm with which they were received, and the good feeling displayed by their allies[269]. It was only in the highest Portuguese quarters that dissatisfaction was rampant: the Bishop of Oporto, General Freire, and the Monteiro Mor, had all suffered what they considered an insult, when their consent was not asked to the Convention of Cintra, and made no secret of their anger against Dalrymple. But it does not seem that their feelings affected any large section of the people.

The French army embarked for its native soil still 25,747 strong. It had entered Portugal in the previous November with a strength of nearly 25,000, and had received during the spring of 1808 some 4,500 recruits: in the month of May, before hostilities began, its full force had been 26,594[270]. Of this total 20,090 were under arms at the moment that the Convention was signed, 3,522 were in hospital, sick or wounded: 916 were prisoners in the hands of the English or the Portuguese. There remain, therefore, some 4,500 men to be accounted for: these, however, were not all dead. More than 500 had deserted and taken service with the British before the embarkation: they came, almost without exception, from the ranks of the three foreign battalions which had been serving with Junot, the 1st Hanoverians and the 2nd and 4th Swiss[271]. As the total force of these corps had been only 2,548, it is clear that about one man in five deserted. This was natural in the case of the Germans, who were old subjects of George III, and most unwilling recruits to the French army, but the equally well-marked defection[p. 284] of the Swiss is very notable. Most of the latter were enlisted for the 5th Battalion of the 60th Rifles, while the Hanoverians joined their countrymen in the ranks of the King’s German Legion[272]. The real deficit, then, in Junot’s army was about 4,000 men: this represents the total loss of life by the fights of Roli?a and Vimiero, by the numerous combats with the Portuguese, by the stragglers cut off during the forced marches of July and August, and by the ordinary mortality in hospital. It must be considered on the whole a very moderate casualty list: Junot’s corps, when it re-entered Spain to serve once more under the Emperor, was still 22,000 strong. It would have been even a trifle higher in numbers if a transport carrying two companies of the 86th Regiment had not foundered at sea, with the loss of every man on board.

It is necessary to give some account of the fate of Siniavin’s Russian squadron, before dismissing the topic of the evacuation of Portugal. The admiral, as we have already had occasion to state, had steadfastly refused to throw in his lot with Junot and to join in the Convention of Cintra. He preferred to make an agreement of his own with Sir Charles Cotton. It was a simple document of two articles: the first provided that the nine sail of the line and one frigate, which formed the Russian fleet, should be given up, sent to England, and ‘held as a deposit’ by his Britannic majesty, to be restored within six months of a peace between Great Britain and Russia. The second was to the effect that Siniavin, his officers and crews, should be sent back to Russia on English ships without being in any way considered prisoners of war, or debarred from further service.

Admiral Cotton, it is clear, regarded the ships as important and the crews as worthy of small attention. It was profitable to Great Britain to keep down the number of vessels in the power of Napoleon, though now that the Danish fleet was captured, and the Spanish fleet transferred to the other side of the balance, there could be no longer any immediate danger of the French taking the offensive at sea. The easy terms of release granted to the personnel of the Russian squadron suggest that the British admiral had determined to reward its commander for his persistent refusal to help Junot. It almost appears that Cotton looked upon Siniavin[p. 285] as a secret friend, and treated him accordingly. Milder terms could hardly have been devised, for the moment that the harbour-forts of Lisbon were surrendered to the British, the Russians must obviously be made prisoners, since they could not get out of the river. It is probable that the two admirals thoroughly understood each other’s mind, and that the Russian was undisguisedly pleased at the disaster of his detested French allies.

The most pressing necessity in Portugal, after the French had departed, was the construction of a new national government, for it was clear that the Supreme Junta at Oporto represented in reality only the northern provinces of the realm, and could not be accepted—as its president, the Bishop, suggested—as a permanent and legitimate executive for the whole kingdom. Constitutionally speaking, if one may use such a phrase when dealing with a country like Portugal, the only body which possessed a clear title of authority was the Council of Regency, which Prince John had nominated nine months before, on the eve of his departure for Brazil. But this council had long ceased to act; its members were dispersed; several had compromised themselves by submitting to the French and taking office under Junot; and its composition gave no promise of vigorous action for the future. If a choice must be made between the Junta at Oporto, which was active and patriotic, though perhaps too much given up to self-assertion and intrigue, and the effete old Regency, there could be no doubt that the former possessed more claims to the confidence of the Portuguese nation and its English allies. But it was not necessary to adopt either alternative in full: Wellesley, who had already got a firm grip upon the outlines of Portuguese politics, advised Dalrymple to invite the old Regency, with the exception of those members who had compromised themselves with the French, to reassemble, and to bring pressure upon them to co-opt to the vacant places the Bishop of Oporto and the other prominent members of the Junta. This proposal would have secured legality of form (since the old Regency would theoretically have continued to exist), while introducing new and vigorous elements of undoubted patriotism into the body[273]. But Dalrymple preferred to reinstate, by a proclamation of his own, those members of the Regency who had never[p. 286] wavered in their allegiance to Prince John [Sept. 18]. He called upon all public bodies and officials in the realm to obey this reconstituted executive. Here was an undoubted mistake; it was wounding to Portuguese pride to see the central governing body of the kingdom created by the edict of an English general: Dalrymple should surely have allowed the Regents to apprise the nation, by a proclamation of their own, that they had resumed their former functions. However, they fell in with Wellesley’s plans so far as to co-opt the Bishop of Oporto as a colleague, though refusing any places to the rest of his Junta. The whole body now consisted of three original members, the Conde de Castro Marim (otherwise known as the Monteiro Mor), Francisco Da Cunha, and Xavier de Noronha, of two persons chosen from a list of possible substitutes, which the Prince-Regent had left behind, Joam de Mendon?a and General Miguel Forjas Coutinho, and of two co-opted members, the Bishop and the Conde das Minas, an old nobleman who had shown a very determined spirit in resisting Junot during the days of his power.

On the reconstitution of the Regency the Junta of Oporto, with more self-denial than had been expected, dissolved itself. The minor juntas in the Algarve, the Alemtejo, and the Tras-os-Montes followed its example, and Portugal was once more in possession of a single executive, whose authority was freely recognized throughout the kingdom. Unfortunately it turned out to be slow, timid, and divided into cliques which were always at variance with each other.

We have already seen that owing to various causes of delay, of which Galluzzo’s preposterous proceedings at Elvas were the most prominent, the last French troops did not quit Portugal till September had expired, and that Junot himself and the main body of his army had only begun to leave on the fifteenth of that month. It would have been impossible for Dalrymple to advance into Spain till the French had left Lisbon, however urgently his presence might have been required. But it would perhaps have proved feasible to push forward towards the Spanish frontier a considerable part of his army, and to make preparations for the movement of the whole towards Madrid or Salamanca as soon as the evacuation should be complete. Dalrymple, however, was as leisurely as the generals of the old days before the Revolutionary War. He kept his troops cantoned about Lisbon, only pushing forward two brigades towards Elvas in order to bring Galluzzo to[p. 287] reason, and dispatching the 6th Regiment as a garrison to Almeida. He seems to have been quite as much interested in the administration of Portugal as in the further prosecution of the war in Spain. We find him much busied in the reconstruction of the Portuguese government and army, reviewing and rearming the Spanish division of Caraffa before shipping it off to Catalonia [Sept. 22], and spending a great deal of time over the redistribution into brigades and divisions of his army, which had now swelled to something like 35,000 men, by the arrival of Moore’s force and certain regiments from Madeira, Gibraltar, and England. He was also engaged in endeavours to organize a proper commissariat for this large body of men, a hard task, for every brigade arrived in the same state of destitution as to means of transport as had those which landed with Wellesley at Mondego Bay on the first of August. But in all his actions there was evident a want of vigour and of purposeful resource, which was very distressing to those of his subordinates who were anxious for a rapid and decisive advance towards the main theatre of war in Spain.

No one felt this more clearly than Wellesley, whose views as to his commander’s competence had never changed since that hour on the morning of August 22, when Dalrymple had refused to march on Mafra, and had decided to delay his advance till the advent of Moore. Since then he had offered his advice on several points, and had almost always seen it refused. Dealing with the disputed details of the Convention of Cintra, he had spoken in favour of meeting the French demands with high-handed decision: hence he was vexed by Dalrymple’s tendency towards weakness and compromise. One of his special grievances was that he had been ordered to sign the armistice of August 22 as representing the British army, although he had privately protested against its details[274]. His unofficial letters home during the first half of September are full of bitter remarks on the weakness of the policy that had been adopted, and the many faults of the Convention[275]. Seeing that warlike operations appeared[p. 288] likely to be postponed for an indefinite time, he at last asked and obtained leave to return to England, after declining in somewhat acid terms an offer made to him by Dalrymple that he should go to Madrid, to concert a plan for combined operations with Casta?os and the other Spanish generals. ‘In order to be able to perform the important part allotted to him,’ he wrote, ‘the person sent should possess the confidence of those who employ him, and be acquainted with their plans, the means by which they hope to carry them into execution, and those by which they intend to enable the Spanish nation to execute that which will be proposed to them. I certainly cannot consider myself as possessing these advantages[276].’ Wellesley also refused another and a less tempting offer of a mission to the Asturias, for the purpose of seeing what facilities that province would offer as the base of operations for a British army. He was not a ‘draftsman,’ he wrote, or a ‘topographical engineer,’ and he could not pretend to describe in writing the character of such a region. In short he was set on going home, and would not turn from his purpose. But before leaving Portugal he wrote two remarkable letters. One was to Sir John Moore, the third in command of the army, telling him that he regarded him as the right person to take charge of the British forces in the Peninsula, and would use every effort with the ministers to get the post secured to him. ‘It is quite impossible that we can go on as we are now constituted: the commander-in-chief must be changed, and the country and the army naturally turn their eyes to you as their commander[277].’ The second and longer was a letter to his patron Castlereagh, in which he laid down his views as to the general state of the war in Spain, and the way in which the British army could be best employed. It is a wonderful document, as he foretells in it all the disasters that were about to befall the Spaniards from their reckless self-confidence. The only real fighting-force that they possessed was, he said, the army of Casta?os: the rest, with the possible exception of Blake’s Galicians, were ‘armies of peasantry,’ which could not be relied upon to meet the French in the field. Though they might on some occasions fight with success[p. 289] in their own mountains, ‘yet in others a thousand French with cavalry and artillery will disperse thousands of them.’ They would not, and indeed could not, leave their native provinces, and no officer could calculate upon them for the carrying out of a great combined operation. How then could the British army of Portugal be best employed to aid such allies? The only efficient plan, Wellesley concludes, would be to place it upon the flank and rear of any French advance to Madrid, by moving it up to the valley of the Douro, and basing it upon Asturias and Galicia. Posted in the kingdom of Leon, with its ports of supply at Gihon, Corunna, and Ferrol, it should co-operate with Blake, and hang upon the right flank of the French army which was forming upon the line of the Ebro. The result would be to prevent the invaders from moving forward, even perhaps (here Wellesley erred from ignorance of the enemy’s numbers) to oblige them to retire towards their own frontier. But Bonaparte could, unless occupied by the affairs of Central Europe, increase his armies in Spain to any extent. The moment that he heard of an English force in the field, he would consider its destruction as his first object, and so multiply his numbers in the Peninsula that the British commander would have to give back. ‘There must be a line of retreat open, and that retreat must be the sea.’ Accordingly, Sir Arthur recommended that the Asturias should be made the ultimate base, and the transports and stores sent to its port of Gihon[278].

This letter was different in its general character from the other reports which Castlereagh was receiving: most of the correspondents of the Secretary for War could write of nothing but the enthusiastic patriotism of the Spaniards and their enormous resources: they spoke of the French as a dispirited remnant, ready[p. 290] to fly, at the first attack, behind the line of the Pyrenees. It is therefore greatly to the credit of Castlereagh that he did not hesitate to pin his faith upon Wellesley’s intelligence, and to order the execution of the very plan that he recommended. It was practically carried out in the great campaign of Sir John Moore, after the collapse of the Spanish armies had justified every word that Sir Arthur had written about them.

Wellesley sailed from Lisbon on September 20, and reached Plymouth on October 4. On his arrival in England he was met with news of a very mixed character. On the one hand he was rejoiced to hear that both Dalrymple and Burrard had been recalled, and that Sir John Moore had been placed in command of the British forces in the Peninsula. He wrote at once to the latter, to say that there could be no greater satisfaction than to serve under his orders, and that he would return at once to Spain to join him: ‘he would forward with zeal every wish’ of his new commander[279]. It was also most gratifying to Wellesley to know that the dispatch of September 25, by which Moore was given the command of the army of Portugal, directed him to move into Northern Spain and base himself upon the Asturias and Galicia, the very plan which formed the main thesis of the document that we have been discussing. There can be no doubt that Castlereagh had recognized the strategical and political verities that were embodied in Wellesley’s letter, and had resolved to adopt the line therein recommended.