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It is many years since an attempt has been made in England to deal with the general history of the Peninsular War. Several interesting and valuable diaries or memoirs of officers who took part in the great struggle have been published of late, but no writer of the present generation has dared to grapple with the details of the whole of the seven years of campaigning that lie between the Dos Mayo and Toulouse. Napier’s splendid work has held the field for sixty years. Meanwhile an enormous bulk of valuable material has been accumulating in English, French, and Spanish, which has practically remained unutilized. Papers, public and private, are accessible whose existence was not suspected in the ’thirties; an infinite number of autobiographies and reminiscences which have seen the light after fifty or sixty years of repose in some forgotten drawer, have served to fill up many gaps in our knowledge. At least one formal history of the first importance, that of General Arteche y Moro, has been published. I fancy that its eleven volumes are practically unknown in England, yet it is almost as valuable as Tore?o’s Guerra de la Independencia in enabling us to understand the purely Spanish side of the war.
I trust therefore that it will not be considered presumptuous for one who has been working for some ten or fifteen years at the original sources to endeavour to summarize in print the results of his investigations; for I believe that even the reader who has already devoted a good deal of attention to the Peninsular War will find a considerable amount of new matter in these pages.
My resolve to take in hand a general history of the struggle was largely influenced by the passing into the hands of All Souls College of the papers of one of its most distinguished fellows, the diplomatist Sir Charles Vaughan. Not only had Vaughan unique opportunities for observing the early years of the Peninsular War, but he turned them to the best account, and placed all his observations on record. I suppose that there was seldom a man who had a greater love for collecting and filing information. His papers contain not only his own diaries and correspondence, but an infinite number of notes made for him by Spanish friends on points which he desired to master, and a vast bulk of pamphlets, proclamations, newspapers, and tables of statistics, carefully bound together in bundles, which (as far as I can see) have not been opened between the day of his death and that on which they passed, by a legacy from his last surviving relative, into the possession of his old college. Vaughan landed at Corunna in September, 1808, in company with Charles Stuart, the first English emissary to the Central Junta. He rode with Stuart to Madrid and Aranjuez, noting everything that he saw, from Roman inscriptions to the views of local Alcaldes and priests on the politics of the day. He contrived to interview many persons of importance—for example, he heard from Cuesta’s own lips of his treasonable plot to overthrow the Junta, and he secured a long conversation with Casta?os as to the Capitulation of Baylen, from which I have extracted some wholly new facts as to that event. He then went to Aragon, where he stayed three weeks in the company of the Captain-General Joseph Palafox. Not only did he cross-question Palafox as to all the details of his famous defence of Saragossa, but he induced San Genis (the colonel who conducted the engineering side of the operations) to write him a memorandum, twelve pages long, as to the character and system of his work. Vaughan accompanied Palafox to the front in November, but left the Army of Aragon a day before the battle of Tudela. Hearing of the disaster from the fugitives of Casta?os’s army, he resolved to take the news to Madrid. Riding hard for the capital, he crossed the front of Ney’s cavalry at Agreda, but escaped them and came safely through. On arriving at Madrid he was given dispatches for Sir John Moore, and carried them to Salamanca. It was the news which he brought that induced the British general to order his abortive retreat on Portugal. Moore entrusted to him not only his dispatch to Sir David Baird, bidding him retire into Galicia, but letters for Lord Castlereagh, which needed instant conveyance to London. Accordingly Vaughan rode with headlong speed to Baird at Astorga, and from Astorga to Corunna, which he reached eleven days after his start from Tudela. From thence he took ship to England and brought the news of the Spanish disasters to the British Ministry.
Vaughan remained some time in England before returning to Spain, but he did not waste his time. Not only did he write a short account of the siege of Saragossa, which had a great vogue at the moment, but he collected new information from an unexpected source. General Lefebvre-Desnouettes, the besieger of Saragossa, arrived as a prisoner in England. Vaughan promptly went to Cheltenham, where the Frenchman was living on parole, and had a long conversation with him as to the details of the siege, which he carefully compared with the narrative of Palafox. Probably no other person ever had such opportunities for collecting first-hand information as to that famous leaguer. It will please those who love the romantic side of history, to know that Vaughan was introduced by Palafox to Agostina, the famous ‘Maid of Saragossa,’ and heard the tale of her exploit from the Captain-General less than three months after it had occurred. The doubts of Napier and others as to her existence are completely dissipated by the diary of this much-travelled Fellow of All Souls College.
Vaughan returned to Spain ere 1809 was out, and served under various English ambassadors at Seville and Cadiz for the greater part of the war. His papers and collections for the later years of the struggle are almost as full and interesting as those for 1808 which I have utilized in this volume.
I have worked at the Record Office on the British official papers of the first years of the war, especially noting all the passages which are omitted in the printed dispatches of Moore and other British generals. The suppressed paragraphs (always placed within brackets marked with a pencil) contain a good deal of useful matter, mainly criticisms on individuals which it would not have been wise to publish at the time. There are a considerable number of intercepted French dispatches in the collection, and a certain amount of correspondence with the Spaniards which contains facts and figures generally unknown. Among the most interesting are the letters of General Leith, who was attached to the head quarters of Blake; in them I found by far the best account of the operations of the Army of Galicia in Oct.-Nov., 1808, which I have come upon.
As to printed sources of information, I have read all the Parliamentary papers of 1808-9, and the whole file of the Madrid Gazette, as well as many scores of memoirs and diaries, French, English, and Spanish. I think that no important English or French book has escaped me; but I must confess that some of the Spanish works quoted by General Arteche proved unprocurable, both in London and Paris. The British Museum Library is by no means strong in this department; it is even short of obvious authorities, such as the monographs of St. Cyr and of Cabanes on the War in Catalonia. The memoirs of the Peninsular veterans on both sides often require very cautious handling; some cannot be trusted for anything that did not happen under the author’s eye. Others were written so long after the events which they record, that they are not even to be relied upon for facts which must have been under his actual observation. For example, General Marbot claims that he brought to Bayonne the dispatch from Murat informing Napoleon of the insurrection of Madrid on May 2, and gives details as to the way in which the Emperor received the news. But it is absolutely certain, both from the text of Murat’s letter and from Napoleon’s answer to it, that the document was carried and delivered by a Captain Hannecourt. The aged Marbot’s memory had played him false. There are worse cases, where an eye-witness, writing within a short time of the events which he describes, gives a version which he must have known to be incorrect, for the glorification of himself or some friend. Thiébault and Le Noble are bad offenders in this respect: Thiébault’s account of some of the incidents in Portugal and of the combat of Aldea del Ponte, Le Noble’s narrative of Corunna, seem to be deliberately falsified. I have found one English authority who falls under the same suspicion. But on both sides the majority of the mistakes come either from writers who describe that which did not pass under their own eyes, or from aged narrators who wrote their story twenty, thirty, or forty years after the war was over. Their diaries written at the time are often invaluable correctives to their memoirs or monographs composed after an interval; e.g. Foy’s rough diary lately published by Girod de l’Ain contains some testimonials to Wellington and the British army very much more handsomely expressed than anything which the General wrote in his formal history of the early campaigns of 1808.
I hope to insert in my second volume a bibliography of all the works useful for the first two years of the war. The inordinate size to which my first volume has swelled has made it impossible to include in it a list of authorities, which covers a good many pages.
It will be noticed that my Appendices include several extensive tables, giving the organization of the French and Spanish armies in 1808. For part of them I am indebted to General Arteche’s work; but the larger half has been constructed at great cost of time and labour from scattered contemporary papers—from returns to be found in the most varied places (some of the most important Spanish ones survive only in the Record Office or in Vaughan’s papers, others only in the Madrid Gazette). No one, so far as I know, had hitherto endeavoured to construct the complete table of the Spanish army in October, or of that of the exact composition of Napoleon’s ‘grand army’ in the same month. I hope my Appendices therefore may be found of some use.
More than one friend has asked me during the last few months whether it is worth while to rewrite the history of the Peninsular War when Napier’s great work is everywhere accessible. I can only reply that I no more dream of superseding the immortal six volumes of that grand old soldier, than Dr. S. R. Gardiner dreamed of superseding Clarendon’s History of the Great Rebellion when he started to write the later volumes of his account of the reign of Charles I. The books of Napier and Clarendon must remain as all-important contemporary narratives, written by men who saw clearly one aspect of the events which they describe; in each the personal element counts for much, and the political and individual sympathies and enmities of the historian have coloured his whole work. No one would think of going to Clarendon for an unprejudiced account of the character and career of Oliver Cromwell. But I do not think that it is generally realized that it is just as unsafe to go to Napier for an account of the aims and undertakings of the Spanish Juntas, or the Tory governments of 1808-14. As a narrator of the incidents of war he is unrivalled: no one who has ever read them can forget his soul-stirring descriptions of the charge of the Fusilier brigade at Albuera, of the assault on the Great Breach at Badajoz, or the storming of Soult’s positions on the Rhune. These and a hundred other eloquent passages will survive for ever as masterpieces of vigorous English prose.
But when he wanders off into politics, English or Spanish, Napier is a less trustworthy guide. All his views are coloured by the fact that he was a bitter enemy of the Tories of his own day. The kinsman not only of Charles James Fox, but of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, he could never look with unprejudiced eyes on their political opponents. Canning and Spencer Perceval were in his ideas men capable of any folly, any gratuitous perversity. Castlereagh’s splendid services to England are ignored: it would be impossible to discover from the pages of the Peninsular War that this was the man who picked out Wellington for the command in Spain, and kept him there in spite of all manner of opposition. Nor is this all: Napier was also one of those strange Englishmen who, notwithstanding all the evidence that lay before them, believed that Napoleon Bonaparte was a beneficent character, thwarted in his designs for the regeneration of Europe by the obstinate and narrow-minded opposition of the British Government. In his preface, he goes so far as to say that the Tories fought the Emperor not because he was the dangerous enemy of the British Empire, but because he was the champion of Democracy, and they the champions of caste and privilege. When the tidings of Napoleon’s death at St. Helena reached him (as readers of his Life will remember), he cast himself down on his sofa and wept for three hours! Hence it was that, in dealing with the Tory ministries, he is ever a captious and unkind critic, while for the Emperor he displays a respect that seems very strange in an enthusiastic friend of political liberty. Every one who has read the first chapters of his great work must see that Bonaparte gets off with slight reproof for his monstrous act of treachery at Bayonne, and for the even more disgusting months of hypocritical friendship that had preceded it. While pouring scorn on Charles IV and Ferdinand VII, the silly father and the rebellious son, whose quarrels were the Emperor’s opportunity, Napier forgets to rise to the proper point of indignation in dealing with the false friend who betrayed them. He almost writes as if there were some excuse for the crimes of robbery and kidnapping, if the victim were an imbecile or a bigot, or an undutiful son. The prejudice in favour of the Emperor goes so far that he even endeavours to justify obvious political and military mistakes in his conduct of the Peninsular War, by throwing all the blame on the way in which his marshals executed his orders, and neglecting to point out that the orders themselves were impracticable.
On the other hand, Napier was just as over-hard to the Spaniards as he was over-lenient to Bonaparte. He was one of those old Peninsular officers who could never dismiss the memory of some of the things that he had seen or heard. The cruelties of the Guerillas, the disgraceful panic on the eve of Talavera, the idiotic pride and obstinacy of Cuesta, the cowardice of Imaz and La Pe?a, prejudiced him against all their countrymen. The turgid eloquence of Spanish proclamations, followed by the prosaic incapacity of Spanish performance, sickened him. He always accepts the French rather than the Spanish version of a story, forgetting that Bonaparte and his official writers were authorities quite as unworthy of implicit credence as their opponents. In dealing with individual Spaniards—we may take for example Joseph Palafox, or the unfortunate Daoiz and Velarde—he is unjust to the extreme of cruelty. His astounding libel on La Romana’s army, I have had occasion to notice in some detail on page 416 of this work. He invariably exaggerates Spanish defeats, and minimizes Spanish successes. He is reckless in the statements which he gives as to their numbers in battle, or their losses in defeat. Evidently he did not take the trouble to consult the elaborate collection of morning-states of armies and other official documents which the Spanish War Office published several years before he wrote his first volume. All his figures are borrowed from the haphazard guesses of the French marshals. This may seem strong language to use concerning so great an author, but minute investigation seems to prove that nearly every statement of Napier’s concerning a battle in which the Spaniards were engaged is drawn from some French source. The Spaniards’ version is ignored. In his indignation at the arrogance and obstinacy with which they often hampered his hero Wellington, he refuses to look at the extenuating circumstances which often explain, or even excuse, their conduct. After reading his narrative, one should turn to Arguelles or Tore?o or Arteche, peruse their defence of their countrymen, and then make one’s ultimate decision as to facts. Every student of the Peninsular War, in short, must read Napier: but he must not think that, when the reading is finished, he has mastered the whole meaning and importance of the great struggle.
The topographical details of most of my maps are drawn from the splendid Atlas published by the Spanish War Office during the last twenty years. But the details of the placing of the troops are my own. I have been particularly careful in the maps of Vimiero and Corunna to indicate the position of every battalion, French or English.
I am in duty bound to acknowledge the very kind assistance of three helpers in the construction of this volume. The first compiled the Index, after grappling with the whole of the proofs. The second, Mr. C. E. Doble, furnished me with a great number of suggestions as to revision, which I have adopted. The third, Mr. C. T. Atkinson, of Exeter College, placed at my disposition his wide knowledge of British regimental history, and put me in the way of obtaining many details as to the organization of Wellesley’s and Moore’s armies. I am infinitely obliged to all three.
C. OMAN.
All Souls College,
March 31, 1902.
‘I am not the heir of Louis XIV, I am the heir of Charlemagne,’ wrote Napoleon, in one of those moments of epigrammatic self-revelation which are so precious to the students of the most interesting epoch and the most interesting personality of modern history. There are historians who have sought for the origins of the Peninsular War far back in the eternal and inevitable conflict between democracy and privilege: there are others who—accepting the Emperor’s own version of the facts—have represented it as a fortuitous development arising from his plan of forcing the Continental System upon every state in Europe. To us it seems that the moment beyond which we need not search backward was that in which Bonaparte formulated to himself the idea that he was not the successor of the greatest of the Bourbons, but of the founder of the Holy Roman Empire. It is a different thing to claim to be the first of European monarchs, and to claim to be the king of kings. Louis XIV had wide-reaching ambitions for himself and for his family: but it was from his not very deep or accurate knowledge of Charlemagne that Napoleon had derived his idea of a single imperial power bestriding Europe, of a monarch whose writ ran alike at Paris and at Mainz, at Milan and at Hamburg, at Rome and at Barcelona, and whose vassal-princes brought him the tribute of all the lands of the Oder, the Elbe, and the middle Danube.
There is no need for us to trace back the growth of Napoleon’s conception of himself as the successor of Charlemagne beyond the winter of 1805-6, the moment when victorious at Austerlitz and master for the first time of Central Europe, he began to put into execution his grandiose scheme for enfeoffing all the realms of the Continent as vassal states of the French Empire. He had extorted from Francis of Austria the renunciation of his meagre and time-worn rights as head of the Holy Roman Empire, because he intended to replace the ancient shadow by a new reality. The idea that he might be Emperor of Europe and not merely Emperor of the French was already developed, though Prussia still needed to be chastised, and Russia to be checked and turned back on to the ways of the East. It was after Austerlitz but before Jena that the foundations of the Confederation of the Rhine were laid, and that the Emperor took in hand the erection of that series of subject realms under princes of his own house, which was to culminate in the new kingdom of Spain ruled by ‘Joseph Napoleon the First.’ By the summer of 1806 the system was already well developed: the first modest experiment, the planting out of his sister Eliza and her insignificant husband in the duchy of Lucca and Piombino was now twelve months old. There had followed the gift of the old Bourbon kingdom of Naples to Joseph Bonaparte in February, 1806, and the transformation of the Batavian Republic into Louis Bonaparte’s kingdom of Holland in June. The Emperor’s brother-in-law, Joachim Murat, had been made Grand-Duke of Berg in March, his sister, Pauline, Duchess of Guastalla in the same month. It cannot be doubted that his eye was already roving all round Europe, marking out every region in which the system of feudatory states could be further extended.
At the ill-governed realms of Spain and Portugal it is certain that he must have taken a specially long glance. He had against the house of the Bourbons the grudge that men always feel against those whom they have injured. He knew that they could never forgive the disappointed hopes of 1799, nor the murder of the Duc d’Enghien, however much they might disguise their sentiments by base servility. What their real feelings were might be guessed from the treacherous conduct of their kinsmen of Naples, whom he had just expelled from the Continent. The Bourbons of Spain were at this moment the most subservient and the most ill-used of his allies. Under the imbecile guidance of his favourite Godoy, Charles IV had consistently held to the league with France since 1795, and had thereby brought down untold calamities upon his realm. Nevertheless Napoleon was profoundly dissatisfied with him as an ally. The seventy-two million francs of subsidies which he was annually wringing from his impoverished neighbour seemed to him a trifle. The chief gain that he had hoped to secure, when he goaded Spain into war with England in 1804, had been the assistance of her fleet, by whose aid he had intended to gain the control of the narrow seas, and to dominate the Channel long enough to enable him to launch his projected invasion against the shores of Kent and Sussex. But the Spanish navy, always more formidable on paper than in battle, had proved a broken reed. The flower of its vessels had been destroyed at Trafalgar. There only remained in 1806 a few ships rotting in harbour at Cadiz, Cartagena, and Ferrol, unable even to concentrate on account of the strictness of Collingwood’s blockade. Napoleon was angry at his ally’s impotence, and was already reflecting that in hands more able and energetic than those of Charles IV Spain might give aid of a very different kind. In after years men remembered that as early as 1805 he had muttered to his confidants that a Bourbon on the Spanish throne was a tiresome neighbour—too weak as an ally, yet dangerous as a possible enemy. For in spite of all the subservience of Charles IV the Emperor believed, and believed quite rightly, that a Bourbon prince must in his heart loathe the unnatural alliance with the child of the Revolution. But in 1806 Bonaparte had an impending war with Prussia on his hands, and there was no leisure for interfering in the affairs of the Peninsula. Spain, he thought, could wait, and it is improbable that he had formulated in his brain any definite plan for dealing with her.
The determining factor in his subsequent action was undoubtedly supplied in the autumn of 1806 by the conduct of the Spanish government during the campaign of Jena. There was a moment, just before that decisive battle had been fought, during which European public opinion was expecting a check to the French arms. The military prestige of Prussia was still very great, and it was well known that Russia had not been able to put forth her full strength at Austerlitz. Combined it was believed that they would be too much for Napoleon. While this idea was still current, the Spanish king, or rather his favourite Godoy, put forth a strange proclamation which showed how slight was the bond of allegiance that united them to France, and how hollow their much vaunted loyalty to the emperor. It was an impassioned appeal to the people of Spain to take arms en masse, and to help the government with liberal gifts of men, horses and money. ‘Come,’ it said, ‘dear fellow countrymen, come and swear loyalty beneath the banners of the most benevolent of sovereigns.’ The God of Victories was to smile on a people which helped itself, and a happy and enduring peace was to be the result of a vigorous effort. It might have been pleaded in defence of Charles IV that all this was very vague, and that the anonymous enemy who was to be crushed might be England. But unfortunately for this interpretation, three whole sentences of the document are filled with demands for horses and an instant increase in the cavalry arm of the Spanish military establishment. It could hardly be urged with seriousness that horsemen were intended to be employed against the English fleet. And of naval armaments there was not one word in the proclamation.
This document was issued on Oct. 5, 1806: not long after there arrived in Madrid the news of the battle of Jena and the capture of Berlin. The Prince of the Peace was thunderstruck at the non-fulfilment of his expectations and the complete triumph of Napoleon. He hastened to countermand his armaments, and to shower letters of explanation and apology on the Emperor, pointing out that his respected ally could not possibly have been the ‘enemy’ referred to in the proclamation. That document had reached Napoleon on the very battle-field of Jena, and had caused a violent paroxysm of rage in the august reader. But, having Russia still to fight, he repressed his wrath for a moment, affecting to regard as satisfactory Godoy’s servile letters of explanation. Yet we can hardly doubt that this was the moment at which he made up his mind that the House of Bourbon must cease to reign in Spain. He must have reflected on the danger that southern France had escaped; a hundred thousand Spaniards might have marched on Bordeaux or Toulouse at the moment of Jena, and there would have been no army whatever on the unguarded frontier of the Pyrenees to hold them in check. Supposing that Jena had been deferred a month, or that no decisive battle at all had been fought in the first stage of the struggle with Prussia, it was clear that Godoy would have committed himself to open war. A stab in the back, even if dealt with no better weapon than the disorganized Spanish army, must have deranged all Napoleon’s plans, and forced him to turn southward the reserves destined to feed the ‘Grand Army.’ It was clear that such a condition of affairs must never be allowed to recur, and we should naturally expect to find that, the moment the war of 1806-7 was ended, Napoleon would turn against Spain, either to dethrone Charles IV, or at least to demand the dismissal from office of Godoy. He acknowledged this himself at St. Helena: the right thing to have done, as he then conceded, would have been to declare open war on Spain immediately after Tilsit.
After eight years of experience of Bonaparte as an ally, the rulers of Spain ought to have known that his silence during the campaigns of Eylau and Friedland boded them no good. But his present intentions escaped them, and they hastened to atone for the proclamation of Oct. 5 by a servile obedience to all the orders which he sent them. The most important of these was the command to mobilize and send to the Baltic 15,000 of their best troops . This was promptly done, the depleted battalions and squadrons being raised to war-strength, by drafts of men and horses which disorganized dozens of the corps that remained at home. The reason alleged, the fear of Swedish and English descents on the rear of the Grand Army, was plausible, but there can be no doubt that the real purpose was to deprive Spain of a considerable part, and that the most efficient, of her disposable forces. If Godoy could have listened to the interviews of Napoleon and Alexander of Russia at Tilsit, he would have been terrified at the offhand way in which the Emperor suggested to the Czar that the Balearic Isles should be taken from Spain and given to Ferdinand of Naples, if the latter would consent to cede Sicily to Joseph Napoleon. To despoil his allies was quite in the usual style of Bonaparte—Godoy cannot have forgotten the lot of Trinidad and Ceylon—but he had not before proposed to tear from Spain, not a distant colony, but an ancient province of the Aragonese crown. The project was enshrined in the ‘secret and supplementary’ clauses of the Treaty of Tilsit, which Napoleon wished to conceal till the times were ripe.
It was only when Bonaparte had returned to France from his long campaign in Poland that the affairs of the Iberian Peninsula began to come seriously to the front. The Emperor arrived in Paris at the end of July, 1807, and this was the moment at which he might have been expected to produce the rod, for the chastisement which the rulers of Spain had merited by their foolish proclamation of the preceding year. But no sign of any such intention was displayed: it is true that early in August French troops in considerable numbers began to muster at Bayonne, but Bonaparte openly declared that they were destined to be used, not against Spain, but against Portugal. One of the articles of the Peace of Tilsit had been to the effect that Sweden and Portugal, the last powers in Europe which had not submitted to the Continental System, should be compelled—if necessary by force—to adhere to it, and to exclude the commerce of England from their ports. It was natural that now, as in 1801, a French contingent should be sent to aid Spain in bringing pressure to bear on her smaller neighbour. With this idea Godoy and his master persisted in the voluntary blindness to the signs of the times which they had so long been cultivating. They gave their ambassador in Lisbon orders to act in all things in strict conjunction with his French colleague.
On August 12, therefore, the representatives of Spain and France delivered to John, the Prince-Regent of Portugal (his mother, Queen Maria, was insane), almost identical notes, in which they declared that they should ask for their passports and leave Lisbon, unless by the first of September the Regent had declared war on England, joined his fleet to that of the allied powers, confiscated all British goods in his harbours, and arrested all British subjects within the bounds of his kingdom. The prince, a timid and incapable person, whose only wish was to preserve his neutrality, answered that he was ready to break off diplomatic relations with England, and to close his ports against British ships, but that the seizure of the persons and property of the British merchants, without any previous declaration of war, would be contrary to the rules of international law and morality. For a moment he hoped that this half-measure would satisfy Napoleon, that he might submit to the Continental System without actually being compelled to declare war on Great Britain. But when dispatches had been interchanged between the French minister Rayneval and his master at Paris, the answer came that the Regent’s offer was insufficient, and that the representatives of France and Spain were ordered to quit Lisbon at once. This they did on September 30, but without issuing any formal declaration of war.
On October 18, the French army, which had been concentrating at Bayonne since the beginning of August, under the harmless name of the ‘Corps of Observation of the Gironde,’ crossed the Bidassoa at Irun and entered Spain. It had been placed under the orders of Junot, one of Napoleon’s most active and vigorous officers, but not a great strategist after the style of Masséna, Soult, or Davoust. He was a good fighting-man, but a mediocre general. The reason that he received the appointment was that he had already some knowledge of Portugal, from having held the post of ambassador at Lisbon in 1805. He had been promised a duchy and a marshal’s baton if his mission was carried out to his master’s complete satisfaction.
It is clear that from the first Napoleon had intended that Portugal should refuse the ignominious orders which he had given to the Prince-Regent. If he had only been wishing to complete the extension of the Continental System over all Southern Europe, the form of obedience which had been offered him by the Portuguese government would have been amply sufficient. But he was aiming at annexation, and not at the mere assertion of his suzerainty over Portugal. The fact that he began to mass troops at Bayonne before he commenced to threaten the Regent is sufficient proof of his intentions. An army was not needed to coerce the Portuguese: for it was incredible that in the then condition of European affairs they would dare to risk war with France and Spain by adhering too stiffly to the cause of England. The Regent was timid and his submission was certain; but Napoleon took care to dictate the terms that he offered in such an offensive form that the Portuguese government would be tempted to beg for changes of detail, though it sorrowfully accepted the necessity of conceding the main point—war with England and the acceptance of the Continental System. The Prince-Regent, as might have been expected, made a feeble attempt to haggle over the more ignominious details, and then Napoleon withdrew his ambassador and let loose his armies.
Shortly after Junot had crossed the Bidassoa there was signed at Fontainebleau the celebrated secret treaty which marks the second stage of the Emperor’s designs against the Peninsula. It was drawn up by Duroc, Napoleon’s marshal of the palace, and Eugenio Izquierdo, the agent of Godoy. For the official ambassador of Spain in Paris, the Prince of Masserano, was not taken into the confidence of his master. All delicate matters were conducted by the favourite’s private representative, an obscure but astute personage, the director of the Botanical Gardens at Madrid, whose position was legitimized by a royal sign-manual giving him powers to treat as a plenipotentiary with France. ‘Manuel is your protector: do what he tells you, and by serving him you serve me,’ the old king had said, when giving him his commission.
The Treaty of Fontainebleau is a strange document, whose main purpose, at a first glance, seems to be the glorification of Godoy. It is composed of fourteen articles, the most important of which contain the details of a projected dismemberment of Portugal. The country was to be cut up into three parts. Oporto and the northern province of Entre-Douro-e-Minho were to become the ‘Kingdom of Northern Lusitania,’ and to be ceded to a Bourbon, the young King of Etruria, whom Napoleon was just evicting from his pleasant abode at Florence. All Southern Portugal, the large province of Alemtejo and the coast region of Algarve, was to be given as an independent principality to Godoy, under the title of ‘Prince of the Algarves’. The rest of Portugal, Lisbon and the provinces of Beira, Estremadura and Tras-os-Montes were to be sequestrated till the conclusion of a general peace, and meanwhile were to be governed and administered by the French. Ultimately they were to be restored, or not restored, to the house of Braganza according as the high contracting parties might determine.
Instead therefore of receiving punishment for his escapade in the autumn of 1806, Godoy was to be made by Napoleon a sovereign prince! But Spain, as apart from the favourite, got small profit from this extraordinary treaty: Charles IV might take, within the next three years, the pompous title of ‘Emperor of the Two Americas,’ and was to be given some share of the transmarine possessions of Portugal—which meanwhile (treaties or no) would inevitably fall into the hands of Great Britain, who held the command of the seas, while Napoleon did not.
It is incredible that Bonaparte ever seriously intended to carry out the terms of the Treaty of Fontainebleau: they were not even to be divulged (as Article XIV stipulated) till it was his pleasure. Godoy had deserved badly of him, and the Emperor was never forgiving. The favourite’s whole position and character (as we shall presently show) were so odious and disgraceful, that it would have required an even greater cynicism than Napoleon possessed, to overthrow an ancient and respectable kingdom in order to make him a sovereign prince. To pose perpetually as the regenerator of Europe, and her guardian against the sordid schemes of Britain, and then to employ as one’s agent for regeneration the corrupt and venal favourite of the wicked old Queen of Spain, would have been too absurd. Napoleon’s keen intelligence would have repudiated the idea, even in the state of growing autolatry into which he was already lapsing in the year 1807. What profit could there be in giving a kingdom to a false friend, already convicted of secret disloyalty, incapable, disreputable, and universally detested?
But if we apply another meaning to the Treaty of Fontainebleau we get a very different light upon it. If we adopt the hypothesis that Bonaparte’s real aim was to obtain an excuse for marching French armies into Spain without exciting suspicion, all its provisions become intelligible. ‘This Prince of the Peace,’ he said in one of his confidential moments, ‘this mayor of the palace, is loathed by the nation; he is the rascal who will himself open for me the gates of Spain.’ The phantom principality that was dangled before Godoy’s eyes was only designed to attract his attention while the armies of France were being poured across the Pyrenees. It is doubtful whether the Emperor intended the project of the ‘Principality of the Algarves’ to become generally known. If he did, it must have been with the intention of making the favourite more odious than he already was to patriotic Spaniards, at the moment when he and his master were about to be brushed away by a sweep of the imperial arm. That Napoleon was already in October preparing other armies beside that of Junot, and that he purposed to overrun Spain when the time was ripe, is shown in the Treaty itself. Annexed to it is a convention regulating the details of the invasion of Portugal: the sixth clause of this paper mentions that it was the emperor’s intention to concentrate 40,000 more troops at Bayonne—in case Great Britain should threaten an armed descent on Portugal—and that this force would be ready to cross the Pyrenees by November 20. Napoleon sent not 40,000 but 100,000 men, and pushed them into Spain, though no English invasion of Portugal had taken place, or even been projected. After this is it possible to believe for a moment in his good faith, or to think that the Treaty of Fontainebleau was anything more than a snare?
Those who could best judge what was at the back of the emperor’s mind, such as Talleyrand and Fouché, penetrated his designs long before the treaty of Fontainebleau had been signed. Talleyrand declares in his memoirs that the reason for which he was deprived of the portfolio of Foreign Affairs in August, 1807, was that he had disliked the scheme of invading Spain in a treacherous fashion, and warned his master against it. No improbability is added to this allegation by the fact that Napoleon at St. Helena repeatedly stated that Talleyrand had first thought of the idea, and had recommended it to him ‘while at the same time contriving to set an opinion abroad that he was opposed to the design.’ On the other hand, we are not convinced of the Prince of Benevento’s innocence merely by the fact that he wrote in his autobiography that he was a strenuous opponent of the plan. He says that the emperor broached the whole scheme to him the moment that he returned from Tilsit, asseverating that he would never again expose himself to the danger of a stab in the back at some moment when he might be busy in Central Europe. He himself, he adds, combated the project by every possible argument, but could not move his master an inch from his purpose. This is probably true; but we believe it not because Talleyrand wrote it down—his bills require the endorsement of some backer of a less tarnished reputation—but because the whole of the Spanish episode is executed in the true Napoleonesque manner. Its scientific mixture of force and fraud is clearly the work of the same hand that managed the details of the fall of the Venetian Republic, and of the dethroning of Pope Pius VII. It is impossible to ascribe the plot to any other author.
Junot’s army was nearing the Portuguese frontier, and the reserve at Bayonne was already beginning to assemble—it was now styled ‘the Second Corps of Observation of the Gironde’—when a series of startling events took place at the Spanish Court. On October 27, the very day that the treaty of Fontainebleau was signed, Ferdinand, Prince of the Asturias, was seized by his father and thrown into confinement, on a charge of high treason, of having plotted to dethrone or even to murder his aged parent. This astonishing development in the situation need not be laid to Napoleon’s charge. There have been historians who think that he deliberately stirred up the whole series of family quarrels at Madrid: but all the materials for trouble were there already, and the shape which they took was not particularly favourable to the Emperor’s present designs. They sprang from the inevitable revolt against the predominance of Godoy, which had long been due.
The mere fact that an incapable upstart like Godoy had been able to control the foreign and internal policy of Spain ever since 1792 is a sufficient evidence of the miserable state of the country. He was a mere court favourite of the worst class: to compare him to Buckingham would be far too flattering—and even Piers Gaveston had a pretty wit and no mean skill as a man-at-arms, though he was also a vain ostentatious fool. After a few years, we may remember, the one met the dagger and the other the axe, with the full approval of English public opinion. But Godoy went on flourishing like the green bay-tree, for sixteen years, decked with titles and offices and laden with plunder, with no other support than the queen’s unconcealed partiality for him, and the idiotic old king’s desire to have trouble taken off his hands. Every thinking man in Spain hated the favourite as the outward and visible sign of corruption in high places. Every patriot saw that the would-be statesman who made himself the adulator first of Barras and then of Bonaparte, and played cat’s-paw to each of them, to the ultimate ruin and bankruptcy of the realm, ought to be removed. Yet there was no sign of any movement against him, save obscure plots in the household of the Prince Royal. But for the interference of Napoleon in the affairs of Spain, it is possible that the Prince of the Peace might have enjoyed many years more of power. Such is the price which nations pay for handing over their bodies to autocratic monarchy and their souls to three centuries of training under the Inquisition.
It is perhaps necessary to gain some detailed idea of the unpleasant family party at Madrid. King Charles IV was now a man of sixty years of age: he was so entirely simple and helpless that it is hardly an exaggeration to say that his weakness bordered on imbecility. His elder brother, Don Philip, was so clearly wanting in intellect that he had to be placed in confinement and excluded from the throne. It might occur to us that it would have been well for Spain if Charles had followed him to the asylum, if we had not to remember that the crown would then have fallen to Ferdinand of Naples, who if more intelligent was also more morally worthless than his brother. Till the age of forty Charles had been entirely suppressed and kept in tutelage by an autocratic father: when he came to the throne he never developed any will or mind of his own, and remained the tool and servant of those about him. He may be described as a good-natured and benevolent imbecile: he was not cruel or malicious or licentious, or given to extravagant fancies. His one pronounced taste was hunting: if he could get away from his ministers to some country palace, and go out all day with his dogs, his gun, and his gamekeepers, he was perfectly happy. His brother of Naples, it will be remembered, had precisely the same hobby. Of any other tastes, save a slight interest in some of the minor handicrafts, which he shared with his cousin Louis XVI, we find no trace in the old king. He was very ugly, not with the fierce clever ugliness of his father Charles III, but in an imbecile fashion, with a frightfully receding forehead, a big nose, and a retreating jaw generally set in a harmless grin. He did not understand business or politics, but was quite capable of getting through speeches and ceremonies when properly primed and prompted beforehand. Even his private letters were managed for him by his wife and his favourite. He had just enough brains to be proud of his position as king, and to resent anything that he regarded as an attack on his dignity—such as the mention of old constitutional rights and privileges, or any allusion to a Cortes. He liked, in fact, to feel himself and to be called an absolute king, though he wished to hand over all the duties and worries of kingship to his wife and his chosen servants. Quite contrary to Spanish usage, he often associated Maria Luisa’s name with his own in State documents, and in popular diction they were often called ‘los Reyes,’ ‘the Kings,’ as Ferdinand and Isabella had been three hundred years before.
The Queen was about the most unfit person in Europe to be placed on the throne at the side of such an imbecile husband. She was his first cousin, the daughter of his uncle Don Philip, Duke of Parma—Bourbon on the mother’s side also, for she was the child of the daughter of Louis XV of France. Maria Luisa was self-confident, flighty, reckless, and utterly destitute of conscience of any sort. Her celebrated portrait by Goya gives us at once an idea of the woman, bold, shameless, pleasure-loving, and as corrupt as Southern court morality allows—which is saying a good deal. She had from the first taken the measure of her imbecile husband: she dominated him by her superior force of will, made him her mere mouthpiece, and practically ruled the realm, turning him out to hunt while she managed ministers and ambassadors.
For the last twenty years her scandalous partiality for Don Manuel Godoy had been public property. When Charles IV came to the throne Godoy was a mere private in the bodyguard—a sort of ornamental corps of gentlemen-at-arms. He was son of a decayed noble family, a big handsome showy young man of twenty-one—barely able to read and write, say his detractors—but a good singer and musician. Within four years after he caught the Queen’s eye he was a grandee of Spain, a duke, and prime minister! He was married to a royal princess, the Infanta Teresa, a cousin of the King, a mésalliance unparalleled in the whole history of the house of Bourbon. Three years later, to commemorate his part in concluding the disgraceful peace of Basle, he was given the odd title of ‘Prince of the Peace,’ ‘Principe de la Paz’: no Spanish subject had ever before been decorated with any title higher than that of duke. In 1808 he was a man of forty, beginning to get a little plump and bald after so many years of good (or evil) living, but still a fine personable figure. He had stowed away enormous riches, not only from the gifts of the King and Queen, but by the sale of offices and commissions, the taking of all sorts of illicit percentages, and (perhaps the worst symptom of all) by colossal speculations on the stock exchange. A French ambassador recorded the fact that he had to keep the treaty of peace of 1802 quiet for three days after it was signed, in order that Godoy might complete his purchases ‘for a rise’ before the news got about. Godoy was corrupt and licentious, but not cruel or even tyrannical: though profoundly ignorant, he had the vanity to pose as a patron of art and science. His foible was to be hailed as a universal benefactor, and as the introducer of modern civilization into Spain. He endeavoured to popularize the practice of vaccination, waged a mild and intermittent war with the Inquisition, and (a most astonishing piece of courage) tried to suppress the custom of bull-fighting. The last two acts were by far the most creditable items that can be put down to his account: unfortunately they were also precisely those which appealed least to the populace of Spain. Godoy was a notable collector of pictures and antiquities, and had a certain liking for, and skill in, music. When this has been said, there is nothing more to put down in his favour. Fifteen years of power had so turned his head that for a long time he had been taking himself quite seriously, and his ambition had grown so monstrous that, not contented with his alliance by marriage with the royal house, he was dreaming of becoming a sovereign prince. The bait by which Napoleon finally drew him into the trap, the promise that he should be given the Algarves and Alemtejo, was not the Corsican’s own invention. It had been an old idea of Godoy’s which he broached to his ally early in 1806, only to receive a severe rebuff. Hence came the joy with which he finally saw it take shape in the treaty of Fontainebleau. When such schemes were running in his head, we can perfectly well credit the accusation which Prince Ferdinand brought against him, of having intended to change the succession to the crown of Spain, by a coup d’état on the death of Charles IV. The man had grown capable of any outburst of pride and ambition. Meanwhile he continued to govern Spain by his hold over the imbecile and gouty old king and his worthless wife, who was now far over fifty, but as besotted on her favourite as ever. It was his weary lot to be always in attendance on them. They could hardly let him out of their sight. Tore?o relates a ridiculous story that, when Napoleon invited them to dinner on the first night of their unhappy visit to Bayonne, he did not ask the Prince of the Peace to the royal table. Charles was so unhappy and uncomfortable that he could not settle down to his meal till the emperor had sent for Godoy, and found a place for him near his master and mistress.
The fourth individual with whose personality it is necessary to be acquainted when studying the court of Spain in 1808 is the heir to the throne, Ferdinand, Prince of the Asturias. Little was known of him, for his parents and Godoy had carefully excluded him from political life. But when a prince is getting on for thirty, and his father has begun to show signs of failing health, it is impossible that eyes should not be turned on him from all quarters. Ferdinand was not an imbecile like his father, nor a scandalous person like his mother; but (though Spain knew it not) he was coward and a cur. With such parents he had naturally been brought up very badly. He was ignominiously excluded from all public business, and kept in absolute ignorance of all subjects on which a prince should have some knowledge: history, military science, modern politics, foreign languages, were all sealed books to him. He had been educated, so far as he was trained at all, by a clever and ambitious priest, Juan Escoiquiz, a canon of Toledo. An obscure churchman was not the best tutor for a future sovereign: he could not instruct the prince in the more necessary arts of governance, but he seems to have taught him dissimulation and superstition. For Ferdinand was pious with a grovelling sort of piety, which made him carry about strings of relics, spend much of his time in church ceremonies, and (as rumour said) take to embroidering petticoats for his favourite image of the Virgin in his old age.
Portrait illustration
MARIA LUISA
REYNA DE ESPA?A.
The prince had one healthy sentiment, a deep hatred for Godoy, who had from his earliest youth excluded him from his proper place in the court and the state. But he was too timid to resent the favourite’s influence by anything but sulky rudeness. If he had chosen, he could at once have put himself at the head of the powerful body of persons whom the favourite had disobliged or offended. His few intimate friends, and above all his tutor Escoiquiz, were always spurring him on to take some active measures against the Prince of the Peace. But Ferdinand was too indolent and too cautious to move, though he was in his secret heart convinced that his enemy was plotting his destruction, and intended to exclude him from the throne at his father’s death.
To give a fair idea of the education, character, and brains of this miserable prince it is only necessary to quote a couple of his letters. The first was written in November, 1807, when he had been imprisoned by his father for carrying on the famous secret correspondence with Napoleon. It runs as follows:—
Dear Papa,
I have done wrong: I have sinned against your majesty, both as king and as father; but I have repented, and I now offer your majesty the most humble obedience. I ought to have done nothing without your majesty’s knowledge; but I was caught unawares. I have given up the names of the guilty persons, and I beg your majesty to pardon me for having lied to you the other night, and to allow your grateful son to kiss your royal feet.
(Signed) Fernando.
San Lorenzo (The Escurial), Nov. 5, 1807.
It is doubtful whether the childish whining, the base betrayal of his unfortunate accomplices, or the slavish tone of the confession forms the most striking point in this epistle.
But the second document that we have to quote gives an even worse idea of Ferdinand. Several years after he had been imprisoned by Napoleon at Valen?ay, a desperate attempt was made to deliver him. Baron Colli, a daring Austrian officer, entered France, amid a thousand dangers, with a scheme for delivering the prince: he hoped to get him to the coast, and to an English frigate, by means of false passports and relays of swift horses. The unfortunate adventurer was caught and thrown into a dungeon at Vincennes. After the plot had miscarried Ferdinand wrote as follows to his jailor:—
‘An unknown person got in here in disguise and proposed to Se?or Amezaga, my master of the horse and steward, to carry me off from Valen?ay, asking him to pass on some papers, which he had brought, to my hands, and to aid in carrying out this horrible undertaking. My honour, my repose, and the good opinion due to my principles might all have been compromised, if Se?or Amezaga had not given proof of his devotion to His Imperial Majesty and to myself, by revealing everything to me at once. I write immediately to give information of the matter, and take this opportunity of showing anew my inviolable fidelity to the Emperor Napoleon, and the horror that I feel at this infernal project, whose author, I hope, may be chastised according to his deserts.’
It is not surprising to find that the man who was capable of writing this letter also wrote more than once to congratulate Joseph Bonaparte on his victories over the ‘rebels’ in Spain.
It had been clear for some time that the bitter hatred which the Prince Royal bore to Godoy, and the fear which the favourite felt at the prospect of his enemy’s accession to the throne, would lead to some explosion ere long. If Ferdinand had been a man of ordinary ability and determination he could probably have organized a coup d’état to get rid of the favourite, without much trouble. But he was so slow and timid that, in spite of all the exhortations of his partisans, he never did more than copy out two letters to his father which Escoiquiz drafted for him. He never screwed up his courage to the point of sending them, or personally delivering them into his father’s hands. They were rhetorical compositions, setting forth the moral and political turpitude of Godoy, and warning the King that his favourite was guilty of designs on the throne. If Charles IV had been given them, he probably could not have made out half the meaning, and would have handed them over for interpretation to the trusty Manuel himself. The only other move which the prince was induced to make was to draw out a warrant appointing his friend and confidant, the Duke of Infantado, Captain-General of New Castile. It was to be used if the old king, who was then labouring under one of his attacks of gout, should chance to be carried off by it. The charge of Madrid, and of the troops in its vicinity, was to be consigned to one whom Ferdinand could trust, so that Godoy might be check-mated.
But the Prince of the Asturias took one other step in the autumn of 1807 which was destined to bring matters to a head. It occurred to him that instead of incurring the risks of conspiracy at home he would do better to apply for aid to his father’s all-powerful ally. If Napoleon took up his cause, and promised him protection, he would be safe against all the machinations of the Prince of the Peace: for a frank and undisguised terror of the Emperor was the mainspring of Godoy’s foreign and domestic policy. Ferdinand thought that he had a sure method of enlisting Bonaparte’s benevolence: he was at this moment the most eligible parti in Europe: he had lost his first wife, a daughter of his uncle of Naples, and being childless was bound to marry again. By offering to accept a spouse of the Emperor’s choice he would give such a guarantee of future loyalty and obedience that his patron (who was quite aware of Godoy’s real feelings towards France) would withdraw all his support from the favourite and transfer it to himself. Acting under the advice of Escoiquiz, with whom he was always in secret communication, Ferdinand first sounded the French ambassador at Madrid, the Marquis de Beauharnais, a brother-in-law of the Empress Josephine. Escoiquiz saw the ambassador, who displayed much pleasure at his proposals, and urged him to encourage the prince to proceed with his plan. The fact was that the diplomatist saw profit to his own family in the scheme: for in default of eligible damsels of the house of Bonaparte, it was probable that the lady whom the Emperor might choose as Queen of Spain would be one of his own relatives—some Beauharnais or Tascher—a niece or cousin of the Empress. A wife for the hereditary prince of Baden had been already chosen from among them in the preceding year.
When therefore Escoiquiz broached the matter to the ambassador in June, 1807, the latter only asked that he should be given full assurance that the Prince of the Asturias would carry out his design. No private interview could be managed between them in the existing state of Spanish court etiquette, and with the spies of Godoy lurking in every corner. But by a prearranged code of signals Ferdinand certified to Beauharnais, at one of the royal levées, that he had given all his confidence to Escoiquiz, and that the latter was really acting in his name. The ambassador therefore undertook to transmit to his master at Paris any document which the prince might entrust to him. Hence there came to be written the celebrated letter of October 11, 1807, in which Ferdinand implored the pity of ‘the hero sent by providence to save Europe from anarchy, to strengthen tottering thrones, and to give to the nations peace and felicity.’ His father, he said, was surrounded by malignant and astute intriguers who had estranged him from his son. But one word from Paris would suffice to discomfit such persons, and to open the eyes of his loved parents to the just grievances of their child. As a token of amity and protection he ventured to ask Bonaparte for the hand of some lady of his august house. He does not seem to have had any particular one in his eye, as the demand is made in the most general terms. The choice would really have lain between the eldest daughter of Lucien Bonaparte, who was then (as usual) on strained terms with his brother, and one of the numerous kinswomen of the Empress Josephine.
Godoy was so well served by his numerous spies that the news of the letter addressed to Bonaparte was soon conveyed to him. He resolved to take advantage to the full of the mistake which the prince had made in opening a correspondence with a foreign power behind the back of his father. He contrived an odious scene. He induced the old king to make a sudden descent on his son’s apartments on the night of October 27, with an armed guard at his back, to accuse him publicly of aiming at dethroning or even murdering his parents, and to throw him into solitary confinement. Ferdinand’s papers were sequestrated, but there was found among them nothing of importance except the two documents denouncing Godoy, which the prince had composed or copied out under the direction of his adviser Escoiquiz, and a cypher code which was discovered to have belonged to the prince’s late wife, and to have been used by her in her private letters to her mother, the Queen of Naples.
There was absolutely nothing that proved any intention on the part of Ferdinand to commit himself to overt treason, though plenty to show his deep discontent, and his hatred for the Prince of the Peace. The only act that an honest critic could call disloyal was the attempt to open up a correspondence with Napoleon. But Godoy thought that he had found his opportunity of crushing the heir to the throne, and even of removing him from the succession. He caused Charles IV to publish an extraordinary manifesto to his subjects, in which he was made to speak as follows:—
‘God, who watches over all creation, does not permit the success of atrocious designs against an innocent victim. His omnipotence has just delivered me from an incredible catastrophe. My people, my faithful subjects, know my Christian life, my regular conduct: they all love me and give me constant proof of their veneration, the reward due to a parent who loves his children. I was living in perfect confidence, when an unknown hand delated to me the most enormous and incredible plot, hatched in my own palace against my person. The preservation of my life, which has been already several times in danger, should have been the special charge of the heir to my throne, but blinded, and estranged from all those Christian principles in which my paternal care and love have reared him, he has given his consent to a plot to dethrone me. Taking in hand the investigation of the matter, I surprised him in his apartments and found in his hands the cypher which he used to communicate with his evil counsellors. I have thrown several of these criminals into prison, and have put my son under arrest in his own abode. This necessary punishment adds another sorrow to the many which already afflict me; but as it is the most painful of all, it is also the most necessary of all to carry out. Meanwhile I publish the facts: I do not hide from my subjects the grief that I feel—which can only be lessened by the proofs of loyalty which I know that they will display’ .
Charles was therefore made to charge his son with a deliberate plot to dethrone him, and even to hint that his life had been in danger. The only possible reason for the formulating of this most unjustifiable accusation must have been that Godoy thought that he might now dare to sweep away the Prince of the Asturias from his path by imprisonment or exile. There can be no other explanation for the washing in public of so much of the dirty linen of the palace. Ferdinand, by his craven conduct, did his best to help his enemy’s designs: in abject fear he delated to the King the names of Escoiquiz and his other confidants, the dukes of Infantado and San Carlos. He gave full particulars of his attempt to communicate with Napoleon, and of all his correspondence with his partisans—even acknowledging that he had given Infantado that undated commission as Captain-General of New Castile, to come into effect when he himself should become king, which we have already had occasion to mention. This act, it must be owned, was a little unseemly, but if it had really borne the sinister meaning that Godoy chose to put upon it, we may guess that Ferdinand would never have divulged it. In addition the prince wrote the disgusting letter of supplication to his father which has been already quoted, owning that ‘he had lied the other night,’ and asking leave to kiss his majesty’s royal feet. It is beyond dispute that this epistle, with another similar one to the Queen, was written after a stormy interview with Godoy. The favourite had been allowed by his master and mistress to visit Ferdinand in prison, and to bully him into writing these documents, which (as he hoped) would ruin the prince’s reputation for ever with every man of heart and honour. Godoy was wrong here: what struck the public mind far more than the prince’s craven tone was the unseemliness of publishing to the world his miserable letters. That a prince royal of Spain should have been terrified by an upstart charlatan like Godoy into writing such words maddened all who read them.
Napoleon was delighted to see the royal family of Spain putting itself in such an odious light. He only intervened on a side issue by sending peremptory orders that in any proceedings taken against the Prince of the Asturias no mention was to be made of himself or of his ambassador, i.e. the matter of the secret appeal to France (the one thing for which Ferdinand could be justly blamed) was not to be allowed to transpire. It was probably this communication from Paris which saved Ferdinand from experiencing the full consequences of Godoy’s wrath. If any public trial took place, it was certain that either Ferdinand or some of his friends would speak of the French intrigue, and if the story came out Napoleon would be angry. The mere thought of this possibility so worked upon the favourite that he suddenly resolved to stop the impeachment of the prince. In return for his humiliating prayers for mercy he was given a sort of ungracious pardon. ‘The voice of nature,’ so ran the turgid proclamation which Godoy dictated to the old king, ‘disarms the hand of vengeance; I forgive my son, and will restore him to my good graces when his conduct shall have proved him a truly reformed character.’ Ferdinand was left dishonoured and humiliated: he had been accused of intended parricide, made to betray his friends and to confess plots which he had never formed, and then pardoned. Godoy hoped that he was so ruined in the eyes of the Spanish people, and (what was more important) in the eyes of Napoleon, that there would be no more trouble with him, a supposition in which he grievously erred. After a decent interval the prince’s fellow conspirators, Escoiquiz and Infantado, were acquitted of high treason by the court before which they had been sent, and allowed to go free. Of the dreadful accusations made in the Proclamation of Oct. 30 nothing more was heard.
The whole of the ‘Affair of the Escurial,’ as the arrest, imprisonment, and forgiveness of Ferdinand came to be called, took place between the twenty-seventh of October and the fifth of November, dates at which it is pretty certain that Napoleon’s unscrupulous designs against the royal house of Spain had long been matured. The open quarrel of the imbecile father and the cowardly son only helped him in his plans, by making more manifest than ever the deplorable state of the Spanish court. It served as a useful plea to justify acts of aggression which must have been planned many months before. If it had never taken place, it is still certain that Napoleon would have found some other plea for sweeping out the worthless house of Bourbon from the Peninsula. He had begun to collect armies at the roots of the Pyrenees, without any obvious military necessity, some weeks before Ferdinand was arrested. When that simple fact is taken into consideration we see at once the hollowness of his plea, elaborated during his exile at St. Helena, that it was the disgraceful explosion of family hatred in the Spanish royal house that first suggested to him the idea of removing the whole generation of Bourbons, and giving Spain a new king and a new dynasty.
It may perhaps be worth while to give, for what it is worth, a story which I find in the Vaughan Papers concerning the causes of the final quarrel between Godoy and the Prince of the Asturias, ending in the arrest of the latter and the whole ‘Affair of the Escurial.’ Among Vaughan’s large collection of miscellaneous papers is a long document addressed to him by one of his Spanish friends, purporting to give the secret history of the rupture; the narrative is said by the author to have been obtained from the mouth of the minister Caballero, who would certainly have had the best means of gaining court intelligence in October, 1807. The tale runs as follows: ‘The Queen had for many years been accustomed to make secret visits to Godoy’s palace under cover of the dark, escorted only by a lady-in-waiting and a single body-servant. The sentinels round the palace had been designedly so placed that none of them covered the postern door by which her majesty was accustomed to pass in and out. One night in the autumn of 1807 the whole system of the palace-guards was suddenly changed without the Queen’s knowledge, and when she returned from her excursion she ran into the arms of a corporal’s guard placed in front of the privy entrance. The men, fortunately for Maria Luisa, did not recognize the three muffled figures who fell into their clutches, and allowed them to buy their way in for an onza d’oro, or gold twenty-dollar piece. But when Godoy and the Queen talked the matter over, and found that King Charles had ordered the inconvenient alterations in the sentinels, they came to the conclusion that Ferdinand had deliberately induced his father to change the posts of the guard, with the object either of stopping his mother’s exits or of making a public scandal by causing her to be arrested at this strange place and hour. The Prince chanced to have had a private conversation with his father on the previous day, and this might well have been its result.’ In high wrath, the story proceeds, the Queen and the favourite resolved to crush Ferdinand at once, and to get him excluded from the succession. They chose the very inadequate excuse of the letter of the Prince to Napoleon, of which they had perfect cognizance from the very moment of its being written. But, we are assured, they were quite wrong in their suspicions, the originator of the movement of the sentries, which had so disconcerted them, having been Baron Versage, the newly appointed colonel of the Walloon Guards. He had got the King’s leave to rearrange the watching of the palace, and going round it had spied the private door, which he had blocked with a new picquet, quite unaware of the purpose for which it had been used for so many years. This Versage, it will be remembered, served under Palafox, and was killed in Aragon during the first year of the war. I should imagine the whole tale to be an ingenious fiction, in spite of the name of Caballero cited in its support: of that personage Napoleon wrote ‘il a une très mauvaise réputation; c’est tout dire que de dire qu’il était l’homme de confiance de la Reine.’ But the story was current in Spain very soon after the alleged adventure took place.
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, was to strike at Oporto and the Lower Douro; another, from Badajoz, 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; 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 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 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 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; 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 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 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.
THE FRENCH AGGRESSION IN SPAIN: ABDICATION OF CHARLES IV
The ‘Affair of the Escurial’ added some complications to the situation of affairs in Spain from Napoleon’s point of view. But there was nothing in it to make him alter the plans which he was at this moment carrying out: if the Bourbons were to be evicted from Spain, it made the task somewhat easier to find that the heir to the throne was now in deep disgrace. It would be possible to urge that by his parricidal plots he had forfeited any rights to the kingdom which he had hitherto possessed. In dealing with the politics of Spain he might for the future be disregarded, and there would be no one to take into consideration save the King and Queen and Godoy. All three were, as the Emperor knew, profoundly unpopular: if anything had been needed to make the nation more discontented, it was the late scandalous events at the Escurial. Nothing could be more convenient than that the favourite and his sovereigns should sink yet further into the abyss of unpopularity.
Napoleon therefore went steadily on with his plans for pushing more and more French troops into Spain, with the object of occupying all the main strategical points in the kingdom. The only doubtful point in his schemes is whether he ultimately proposed to seize on the persons of the royal family, or whether he intended by a series of threatening acts to scare them off to Mexico, as he had already scared the Prince of Portugal off to Rio de Janeiro. It is on the whole probable that he leaned to the latter plan. Every week the attitude of the French armies became more aggressive, and the language of their master more haughty and sinister. The tone in which he had forbidden the court of Spain to allow any mention of himself or his ambassador to appear, during the trial of Prince Ferdinand and his fellow conspirators, had been menacing in the highest degree. After the occupation of Portugal no further allusion had been made to the project for proclaiming Godoy Prince of the Algarves. His name was never mentioned either to the Portuguese or to the officers of Junot. The favourite soon saw that he had been duped, but was too terrified to complain.
But it was the constant influx into Spain of French troops which contributed in the most serious way to frighten the Spanish court. Junot had entered Lisbon on Nov. 30, and the news that he had mastered the place without firing a shot had reached the Emperor early in December. But long before, on the twenty-second of November, the French reserves, hitherto known as the ‘Second Corps of Observation of the Gironde,’ which had been collected at Bayonne in November, crossed the Spanish frontier. They consisted of 25,000 men—nearly all recently levied conscripts—under General Dupont. The treaty of Fontainebleau had contained a clause providing that, if the English tried to defend Portugal by landing troops, Napoleon might send 40,000 men to aid Junot after giving due notice to the King of Spain. Instead of waiting to hear how the first corps had fared, or apprising his ally of his intention to dispatch Dupont’s corps across the frontier, the Emperor merely ordered it to cross the Bidassoa without sending any information to Madrid. The fact was that whether the preliminary condition stated in the treaty, an English descent on Portugal, did or did not take place, Bonaparte was determined to carry out his design. A month later the Spaniards heard, to their growing alarm, that yet a third army corps had come across the border: this was the ‘Corps of Observation of the Ocean Coast,’ which had been hastily organized under Marshal Moncey at Bordeaux, and pushed on to Bayonne when Dupont’s troops moved forward. It was 30,000 strong, but mainly composed of conscript battalions of the levy of 1808, which had been raised by anticipation in the previous spring, while the Russian war was still in progress. On the eighth of January this army began to pass the Pyrenees, occupying all the chief towns of Biscay and Navarre, while Dupont’s divisions pressed on and cantoned themselves in Burgos, Valladolid, and the other chief cities of Old Castile. They made no further advance towards Portugal, where Junot clearly did not require their aid.
The Spanish government was terror-stricken at the unexpected appearance of more than 60,000 French troops on the road to Madrid. If anything more was required to cause suspicion, it was the news that still more ‘corps of observation’ were being formed at Bordeaux and Poitiers. What legitimate reason could there possibly be for the direction of such masses of troops on Northern Spain? But any thought of resistance was far from the mind of Godoy and the King. Their first plan was to propitiate Napoleon by making the same request which had brought the Prince of the Asturias into such trouble in October—that the hand of a princess of the house of Bonaparte might be granted to the heir of the Spanish throne. The Emperor was making an ostentatious tour in Italy while his forces were overrunning the provinces of his ally—as if the occupation of Castile and Biscay were no affair of his. His most important act in November was to evict from Florence the ruling sovereign, the King of Etruria, and the Regent, his mother, thus annexing the last surviving Bourbon state save Spain to the French crown. He wrote polite but meaningless letters to Madrid, making no allusion to the boon asked by Charles IV. The fact was that Napoleon could now treat Ferdinand as ‘damaged goods’; he was, by his father’s own avowal, no more than a pardoned parricide, and it suited the policy of the Emperor to regard him as a convicted criminal who had played away his rights of succession. If Napoleon visited his brother Lucien at Mantua, it was not (as was thought at the time) with any real intention of persuading him to give his daughter to the craven suitor offered her, but in order to tempt her father to accept the crown of Portugal—even perhaps that of Spain. But Lucien, who always refused to fall in with Napoleon’s family policy, showed no gratitude for the offer of a thorny throne in the Iberian Peninsula, and not without reason, for one of the details of the bargain was to be that he should divorce a wife to whom he was fondly attached.
It was only after returning from Italy in January that the Emperor deigned to answer the King of Spain’s letter, now two months old, in precise terms. He did not object to the principle of the alliance, but doubted if he could give any daughter of his house to ‘a son dishonoured by his own father’s declaration.’ This reply was not very reassuring to Godoy and his master, and worse was to follow. In the end of January the Moniteur, which the Emperor always used as a means for ventilating schemes which were before long to take shape in fact, began a systematic course of abusing the Prince of the Peace as a bad minister and a false friend. More troops kept pouring across the Pyrenees without any ostensible reason, and now it was not only at the western passes that they began to appear, but also on the eastern roads which lead from Roussillon into Catalonia and Valencia. These provinces are so remote from Portugal that it was clear that the army which was collecting opposite them could not be destined for Lisbon. But on February 10, 1808, 14,000 men, half French, half Italians, under General Duhesme, began to drift into Catalonia and to work their way down towards its capital—Barcelona. A side-light on the meaning of this development was given by Izquierdo, Godoy’s agent at Paris, who now kept sending his master very disquieting reports. French ministers had begun to sound him as to the way in which Spain would take a proposal for the cession to France of Catalonia and part of Biscay, in return for Central Portugal. King Charles would probably be asked ere long to give up these ancient and loyal provinces, and to do so would mean the outbreak of a revolution all over Spain.
In the middle of February Napoleon finally threw off the mask, and frankly displayed himself as a robber in his ally’s abode. On the sixteenth of the month began that infamous seizure by surprise of the Spanish frontier fortresses, which would pass for the most odious act of the Emperor’s whole career, if the kidnapping at Bayonne were not to follow. The movement started at Pampeluna: French troops were quartered in the lower town, while a Spanish garrison held, as was natural, the citadel. One cold morning a large party of French soldiers congregated about the gate of the fortress, without arms, and pretended to be amusing themselves with snowballing, while waiting for a distribution of rations. At a given signal many of them, as if beaten in the mock contest, rushed in at the gate, pursued by the rest. The first men knocked down the unsuspecting sentinels, and seized the muskets of the guard stacked in the arms-racks of the guard-room. Then a company of grenadiers, who had been hidden in a neighbouring house, suddenly ran in at the gate, followed by a whole battalion which had been at drill a few hundred yards away. The Spanish garrison, taken utterly by surprise and unarmed, were hustled out of their quarters and turned into the town.
A high-spirited prince would have declared war at once, whatever the odds against him, on receiving such an insulting blow. But this was not to be expected from persons like Godoy and Charles IV. Accordingly they exposed themselves to the continuation of these odious tricks. On February 29 General Lecchi, the officer commanding the French troops which were passing through Barcelona, ordered a review of his division before, as he said, its approaching departure for the south. After some evolutions he marched it through the city, and past the gate of the citadel; when this point was reached, he suddenly bade the leading company wheel to the left and enter the fortress. Before the Spaniards understood what was happening, several thousand of their allies were inside the place, and by the evening the rightful owners, who carried their opposition no further than noisy protestations, had been evicted. A few days later the two remaining frontier fortresses of Spain, San Sebastian, at the Atlantic end of the Pyrenees, and Figueras, at the great pass along the Mediterranean coast, suffered the same fate: the former place was surrendered by its governor when threatened with an actual assault, which orders from Madrid forbade him to resist . Figueras, on the other hand, was seized by a coup de main, similar to that at Pampeluna; 200 French soldiers, having obtained entrance within the walls on a futile pretext, suddenly seized the gates and admitted a whole regiment, which turned out the Spanish garrison . It would be hard, if not impossible, to find in the whole of modern history any incident approaching, in cynical effrontery and mean cunning, to these first hostile acts of the French on the territory of their allies. The net result was to leave the two chief fortresses, on each of the main entries into Spain from France, completely in the power of the Emperor.
Godoy and his employers were driven into wild alarm by these acts of open hostility. The favourite, in his memoirs, tells us that he thought, for a moment, of responding by a declaration of war, but that the old king replied that Napoleon could not be intending treachery, because he had just sent him twelve fine coach-horses and several polite letters. In face of his master’s reluctance, he tells us that he temporized for some days more. The story is highly improbable: Charles had no will save Godoy’s, and would have done whatever he was told. It is much more likely that the reluctance to take a bold resolve was the favourite’s own. When the French troops still continued to draw nearer to Madrid, Godoy could only bethink himself of a plan for absconding. He proposed to the King and Queen that they should leave Madrid and take refuge in Seville, in order to place themselves as far as possible from the French armies. Behind this move was a scheme for a much longer voyage. It seems that he proposed that the court should follow the example of the Regent of Portugal, and fly to America. At Mexico or Buenos Ayres they would at least be safe from Bonaparte. To protect the first stage of the flight, the troops in Portugal were directed to slip away from Junot and mass in Estremadura. The garrison of Madrid was drawn to Aranjuez, the palace where the court lay in February and March, and was to act as its escort to Seville. It is certain that nothing would have suited Napoleon’s plans better than that Charles IV should abscond and leave his throne derelict: it would have given the maximum of advantage with the minimum of odium. It is possible that the Emperor was working precisely with the object of frightening Godoy into flight. If so his scheme was foiled, because he forgot that he had to deal not only with the contemptible court, but with the suspicious and revengeful Spanish nation. In March the people intervened, and their outbreak put quite a different face upon affairs.
Meanwhile the Emperor was launching a new figure upon the stage. On February 26 his brother-in-law, Joachim Murat, the new Grand-Duke of Berg, appeared at Bayonne with the title of ‘Lieutenant of the Emperor,’ and a commission to take command of all the French forces in Spain. On March 10 he crossed the Bidassoa and assumed possession of his post. Murat’s character is well known: it was not very complicated. He was a headstrong, unscrupulous soldier, with a genius for heading a cavalry charge on a large scale, and an unbounded ambition. He was at present meditating on thrones and kingdoms: Berg seemed a small thing to this son of a Gascon innkeeper, and ever since his brothers-in-law Joseph, Louis, and Jerome Bonaparte had become kings, he was determined to climb up to be their equal. It has frequently been asserted that Murat was at this moment dreaming of the Spanish crown: he was certainly aware that the Emperor was plotting against the Bourbons, and the military movements which he had been directed to carry out were sufficient in themselves to indicate more or less his brother-in-law’s intentions. Yet on the whole it is probable that he had not received more than half-confidences from his august relative. His dispatches are full of murmurs that he was being kept in the dark, and that he could not act with full confidence for want of explicit directions. Napoleon had certainly promised him promotion, if the Spanish affair came to a successful end: but it is probable that Murat understood that he was not to be rewarded with the crown of Charles IV. Perhaps Portugal, or Holland, or Naples (if one of the Emperor’s brothers should pass on to Madrid) was spoken of as his reward. Certainly there was enough at stake to make him eager to carry out whatever Bonaparte ordered. In his cheerful self-confidence he imagined himself quite capable of playing the part of a Machiavelli, and of edging the old king out of the country by threats and hints. But if grape-shot was required, he was equally ready to administer an unsparing dose. With a kingdom in view he could be utterly unscrupulous.
On March 13 Murat arrived at Burgos, and issued a strange proclamation bidding his army ‘treat the estimable Spanish nation as friends, for the Emperor sought only the good and happiness of Spain.’ The curious phrase could only suggest that unless he gave this warning, his troops would have treated their allies as enemies. The scandalous pillage committed by many regiments during February and March quite justified the suspicion.
The approach of Murat scared Godoy into immediate action, all the more because a new corps d’armée, more than 30,000 strong, under Marshal Bessières, was already commencing to cross the Pyrenees, bringing up the total of French troops in the Peninsula to more than 100,000 men. He ordered the departure of the King and his escort, the Madrid garrison, for Seville on March 18. This brought matters to a head: it was regarded as the commencement of the projected flight to America, of which rumours were already floating round the court and capital. A despotic government, which never takes the people into its confidence, must always expect to have its actions interpreted in the most unfavourable light. Except Godoy’s personal adherents, there was not a soul in Madrid who did not believe that the favourite was acting in collusion with Napoleon, and deliberately betraying his sovereign and his country. It was by his consent, they thought, that the French had crossed the Pyrenees, had seized Pampeluna and Barcelona, and were now marching on the capital. They were far from imagining that of all the persons in the game he was the greatest dupe, and that the recent developments of Napoleon’s policy had reduced him to despair. It was correct enough to attribute the present miserable situation of the realm to Godoy’s policy, but only because his servility to Bonaparte had tempted the latter to see how far he could go, and because his maladministration had brought the army so low that it was no longer capable of defending the fatherland. Men did well to be angry with the Prince of the Peace, but they should have cursed him as a timid, incompetent fool, not as a deliberate traitor. But upstarts who guide the policy of a great realm for their private profit must naturally expect to be misrepresented, and there can be no doubt that the Spaniards judged Godoy to be a willing helper in the ruin of his master and his country.
Aranjuez, ordinarily a quiet little place, was now crowded with the hangers-on of the court, the garrison of Madrid, and a throng of anxious and distraught inhabitants of the capital: some had come out to avoid the advancing French, some to learn the latest news of the King’s intentions, others with the deliberate intention of attacking the favourite. Among the latter were the few friends of the Prince of the Asturias, and a much greater number who sympathized with his unhappy lot and had not gauged his miserable disposition. It is probable that as things stood it was really the best move to send the King to Seville, or even to America, and to commence open resistance to the French when the royal person should be in safety. But the crowd could see nothing but deliberate treason in the proposal: they waited only for the confirmation of the news of the departure of the court before breaking out into violence.
Portrait illustration
DON MANUEL GODOY
PRINCE OF THE PEACE
AT THE AGE OF 25
On the night of the seventeenth of March Godoy was actually commencing the evacuation of Aranjuez, by sending off his most precious possession, the too-celebrated Donna Josepha Tudo, under cover of the dark. The party which was escorting her fell into the midst of a knot of midnight loiterers, who were watching the palace. There was a scuffle, a pistol was fired, and as if by a prearranged plan crowds poured out into the streets. The cry went round that Godoy was carrying off the King and Queen, and a general rush was made to his house. There were guards before it, but they refused to fire on the mob, of which no small proportion was composed of soldiers who had broken out of their barracks without leave. In a moment the doors were battered down and the assailants poured into the mansion, hunting for the favourite. They could not find him, and in their disappointment smashed all his works of art, and burnt his magnificent furniture. Then they flocked to the palace, in which they suspected that he had taken refuge, calling for his head. The King and Queen, in deadly terror, besought their ill-used son to save them, by propitiating the mob, who would listen to his voice if to no other. Then came the hour of Ferdinand’s triumph; stepping out on to the balcony, he announced to the crowd that the King was much displeased with the Prince of the Peace, and had determined to dismiss him from office. The throng at once dispersed with loud cheers.
Next morning, in fact, a royal decree was issued, declaring Godoy relieved of all his posts and duties and banished from the court. Without the favourite at their elbow Charles and his queen seemed perfectly helpless. The proclamation was received at first with satisfaction, but the people still hung about the palace and kept calling for the King, who had to come out several times and salute them. It began to look like a scene from the beginning of the French Revolution. There was already much talk in the crowd of the benefit that would ensue to Spain if the Prince of the Asturias, with whose sufferings every one had sympathized, were to be entrusted with some part in the governance of the realm. His partisans openly spoke of the abdication of the old king as a desirable possibility.
Next day the rioting commenced again, owing to the reappearance of Godoy. He had lain concealed for thirty-six hours beneath a heap of mats, in a hiding-place contrived under the rafters of his mansion; but hunger at last drove him out, and, when he thought that the coast was clear, he slipped down and tried to get away. In spite of his mantle and slouched hat he was recognized almost at once, and would have been pulled to pieces by the crowd if he had not been saved by a detachment of the royal guard, who carried him off a prisoner to the palace. The news that he was trapped brought thousands of rioters under the royal windows, shouting for his instant trial and execution. The imbecile King could not be convinced that he was himself safe, and the Queen, who usually displayed more courage, seemed paralysed by her fears for Godoy even more than for herself. This was the lucky hour of the Prince of the Asturias; urged on by his secret advisers, he suggested abdication to his father, promising that he would disperse the mob and save the favourite’s life. The silly old man accepted the proposal with alacrity, and drew up a short document of twelve lines, to the effect ‘that his many bodily infirmities made it hard for him to support any longer the heavy weight of the administration of the realm, and that he had decided to remove to some more temperate clime, there to enjoy the peace of private life. After serious deliberation he had resolved to abdicate in favour of his natural heir, and wished that Don Ferdinand should at once be received as king in all the provinces of the Spanish crown. That this free and spontaneous abdication should be immediately published was to be the duty of the Council of Castile.’
THE TREACHERY AT BAYONNE
The news of the abdication of Charles IV was received with universal joy. The rioters of Aranjuez dispersed after saluting the new sovereign, and allowed Godoy to be taken off, without further trouble, to the castle of Villaviciosa. Madrid, though Murat was now almost at its gates, gave itself up to feasts and processions, after having first sacked the palaces of the Prince of the Peace and some of his unpopular relations and partisans. Completely ignorant of the personal character of Ferdinand VII, the Spaniards attributed to him all the virtues and graces, and blindly expected the commencement of a golden age—as if the son of Charles IV and Maria Luisa was likely to be a genius and a hero.
Looking at the general situation of affairs, there can be no doubt that the wisest course for the young king to have taken would have been to concentrate his army, put his person in safety, and ask Napoleon to speak out and formulate his intentions. Instead of taking this, the only manly course, Ferdinand resolved to throw himself on the Emperor’s mercy, as if the fall of Godoy had been Napoleon’s object, and not the conquest of Spain. Although Murat had actually arrived at Madrid on March 23, with a great body of cavalry and 20,000 foot, the King entered the city next day and practically put himself in the hands of the invader. He wrote a fulsome letter to Napoleon assuring him of his devotion, and begging once more for the hand of a princess of his house.
His reception in Madrid by the French ought to have undeceived him at once. The ambassador Beauharnais, alone among the foreign ministers, refrained from acknowledging him as king. Murat was equally recalcitrant, and moreover most rude and disobliging in his language and behaviour. The fact was that the Grand-Duke had supposed that he was entering Madrid in order to chase out Godoy and rule in his stead. The popular explosion which had swept away the favourite and the old king, and substituted for them a young and popular monarch, had foiled his design. He did not know how Bonaparte would take the new situation, and meanwhile was surly and discourteous. But he was determined that there should at least be grounds provided for a breach with Ferdinand, if the Emperor should resolve to go on with his original plan.
Accordingly, he not only refused to acknowledge the new king’s title, but hastened to put himself in secret communication with the dethroned sovereigns. They were only too eager to meet him halfway, and Maria Luisa especially was half-mad with rage at her son’s success. At first she and her husband thought of nothing but escaping from Spain: they begged Murat to pass on to the Emperor letters in which they asked to be permitted to buy a little estate in France, where they might enjoy his protection during their declining years. But they begged also that ‘the poor Prince of the Peace, who lies in a dungeon covered with wounds and contusions and in danger of death,’ might be saved and allowed to join them, ‘so that we may all live together in some healthy spot far from intrigues and state business.’
Murat saw that the angry old queen might be utilized to discredit her son, and promised to send on everything to Napoleon. At the first word of encouragement given by the Grand-Duke’s agent, De Monthion, Maria Luisa began to cover many sheets with abuse of her son. ‘He is false to the core: he has no natural affection: he is hard-hearted and nowise inclined to clemency. He has been directed by villains and will do anything that ambition suggests: he makes promises, but does not always keep them.’ Again she writes:—‘From my son we have nothing to expect but outrages and persecution. He has commenced by forgery, and he will go on manufacturing evidence to prove that the Prince of the Peace—that innocent and affectionate friend of the Emperor, the Duke of Berg, and every Frenchman!—may appear a criminal in the eyes of the Spanish people and of Napoleon himself. Do not believe a word that he says, for our enemies have the power and means to make any falsehood seem true.’ In another letter she says that the riots of Aranjuez were no genuine explosion of popular wrath, but a deliberate plot got up by her son, who spent countless sums on debauching the soldiery and importing ruffians from Madrid. He gave the signal for the outburst himself by putting a lamp in his window at a fixed hour—and so forth.
Finding the Queen in this state of mind, Murat saw his way to dealing a deadly blow at Ferdinand: with his counsel and consent Charles IV was induced to draw up and send to Bonaparte a formal protest against his abdication. He was made to declare that his resignation had not been voluntary, but imposed on him by force and threats. And so he ‘throws himself into the arms of the great monarch who has been his ally, and puts himself at his disposition wholly and for every purpose.’ This document placed in Napoleon’s hands the precise weapon which he required to crush King Ferdinand. If the Emperor chose to take it seriously, he could declare the new monarch a usurper—almost a parricide—the legality of whose accession had been vitiated by force and fraud.
As a matter of fact Bonaparte’s mind had long been made up. The revolution of Aranjuez had been a surprise and a disappointment to him: his designs against Spain were made infinitely more difficult of realization thereby. While he had only the weak and unpopular government of Godoy and Charles IV to deal with, he had fancied that the game was in his hands. It had been more than probable that the Prince of the Peace would take fright, and carry off the King and Queen to America—in which case he would, as it were, find Spain left derelict. If, however, the emigration did not take place, and it became necessary to lay hands on Charles and his favourite, Napoleon calculated that the Spaniards would be more pleased to be rid of Godoy than angry to see force employed against him. He was so profoundly ignorant of the character of the nation, that he imagined that a few high-sounding proclamations and promises of liberal reforms would induce them to accept from his hands any new sovereign whom he chose to nominate. It was clear that the accession of a young and popular king would make matters far more difficult. It was no longer possible to pose as the deliverer of Spain from the shameful predominance of Godoy. Any move against Ferdinand must bear the character of an open assault on the national independence of the kingdom.
But Bonaparte had gone too far to recede: he had not moved 100,000 men across the Pyrenees, and seized Pampeluna and Barcelona, merely in order that his troops might assist at the coronation ceremonies of another Bourbon king. In spite of all difficulties he was resolved to persevere in his iniquitous plan. He would not recognize the new monarch, but would sweep him away, and put in his place some member of his own family. But his chosen instrument was not to be Murat, but one of the Bonapartes. He knew too well the Duke of Berg’s restless spirit and overweening ambition to trust him with so great a charge as Spain. And he was right—with only Naples at his back Joachim was powerful enough to do his master grave harm in 1814. The tool was to be one of his own brothers. It was on the night of March 26 that the news of the abdication of Charles IV reached him: on the morning of the twenty-seventh he wrote to Amsterdam offering Louis Bonaparte the chance of exchanging the Dutch for the Spanish crown. The proposal was made in the most casual form—‘You say that the climate of Holland does not suit you. Besides the country is too thoroughly ruined to rise again. Give me a categorical answer: if I nominate you King of Spain will you take the offer; can I count on you?’ Louis very wisely refused the proffered crown: but his weaker brother Joseph, tired of Naples and its brigands, made no scruples when the same proposal was laid before him.
This letter to Louis of Holland having been written on the first news of the events at Aranjuez, and four days before Murat began to send in his own plans and the letters of protest from the King and Queen of Spain, it is clear that the Emperor had never any intention of recognizing Ferdinand, and was only playing with him during the month that followed. It was not in mere caution that Beauharnais, the ambassador, and Murat, the military representative, of France, were bidden never to address the new sovereign as king but as Prince of the Asturias, and to act as if Charles IV were still legally reigning until they should have specific directions from Paris.
This state of semi-suspended relations lasted for a fortnight, from Ferdinand’s arrival in Madrid on March 24, down to his departure from it on April 10. They were very uncomfortable weeks for the new king, who grew more alarmed as each day passed without a letter from Paris ratifying his title, while French troops continued to pour into Madrid till some 35,000 were assembled in it and its suburbs.
A very few days after his accession Ferdinand was informed that it was probable that Napoleon was intending a visit to Madrid, and was at any rate coming as far as Bayonne. He immediately sent off his eldest brother Don Carlos (the hero of the unhappy wars of 1833-40) to compliment his patron, and if necessary to receive him at the frontier . Two days later there appeared in Madrid a new French emissary, General Savary—afterwards Duke of Rovigo—who purported to come as Bonaparte’s harbinger, charged with the duty of preparing Madrid for his arrival. He carried the farce so far that he asked for a palace for the Emperor’s residence, produced trunks of his private luggage, and began to refurnish the apartments granted him. That he bore secret orders for Murat we know from the latter’s dispatches, but this was only half his task. Napoleon had confided to him verbal instructions to lure Ferdinand to come out to meet him in the north of Spain, among the French armies massed in Biscay and Navarre—if possible even to get him to Bayonne on French soil. In his St. Helena memoirs Napoleon denies this, and Savary in his autobiography also states that he did not act the part of tempter or make any promises to the young king: the journey to Bayonne, he says, was a silly inspiration of Ferdinand’s own. But neither Bonaparte nor Savary are witnesses whom one would believe on their most solemn oath. The former we know well: the latter had been one of the persons most implicated in the shocking murder of the Duc d’Enghien. When we find the Spanish witnesses, who conversed with Savary during his short stay in Madrid, agreeing that the general promised that Napoleon would recognize Ferdinand as king, give him an imperial princess as wife, and take him into favour, we need not doubt them. It is not disputed that Savary, unlike Murat and Beauharnais, regularly addressed his victim by the royal title, and it is certain that he started in his company and acted as his keeper during the journey. The move that he at first proposed was not a long one: the general said that according to his advices the Emperor must be due at Burgos on April 13: it would be time enough to start to meet him on the tenth. Burgos lies well inside the frontiers of Castile, and if it was packed with French troops, so was Madrid: one place was no more dangerous than the other.
Exactly how far the perjuries of Savary went, or how far he was apprised of his master’s final intentions, we cannot tell, but it is certain that on April 10 he set out from Madrid in the King’s company: with them went Escoiquiz, Ferdinand’s clerical confidant, Cevallos the minister of foreign affairs, and half a dozen dukes and marquises chosen from among the King’s old partisans. To administer affairs in his absence Ferdinand nominated a ‘Junta’ or council of regency, with his uncle Don Antonio, a simple and very silly old man, at its head.
On reaching Burgos, on April 12, the party found masses of French troops but no signs of Napoleon. Savary appeared vexed, said that his calculation must have been wrong, and got the King to go forward two more stages, as far as Vittoria, at the southern foot of the Pyrenees . Here Ferdinand received a note from his brother Don Carlos, whom he had sent ahead, saying that Bonaparte had been lingering at Bordeaux, and was not expected at Bayonne till the fifteenth. Ferdinand, always timid and suspicious, was getting restive: he had nothing on paper to assure him of Napoleon’s intentions, and began to suspect Savary’s blandishments. The latter doubted for a moment whether he should not have the court seized by the French garrison of Vittoria, but finally resolved to endeavour to get a letter from his master, which would suffice to lure Ferdinand across the frontier. He was entrusted with a petition of the same cast that Napoleon had been in the habit of receiving from his would-be client, full of servile loyalty and demands for the much-desired Bonaparte princess.
The four days during which Savary was absent, while the royal party remained at Vittoria, were a period of harassing doubt to Ferdinand. He was visited by all manner of persons who besought him not to go on, and especially by Spaniards lately arrived from Paris, who detailed all the disquieting rumours which they had heard at the French court. Some besought him to disguise himself and escape by night from the 4,000 troops of the Imperial Guard who garrisoned Vittoria. Others pointed out that the Spanish troops in Bilbao, which was still unoccupied by the French, might be brought down by cross-roads, and assume charge of the king’s person halfway between Vittoria and the frontier, in spite of the 600 French cavalry which escorted the cavalcade. Guarded by his own men Ferdinand might retire into the hills of Biscay. But to adopt either of the courses proposed to him would have compelled the King to come to an open breach with Bonaparte, and for this he had not sufficient courage, as long as there was the slightest chance of getting safely through his troubles by mere servility.
On April 18 Savary reappeared with the expected communication from Bayonne. It was certainly one of the strangest epistles that one sovereign ever wrote to another, and one of the most characteristic products of Napoleon’s pen. It was addressed to the Prince of the Asturias, not to the King of Spain, which was an ominous preface. But on the other hand the Emperor distinctly stated that ‘he wished to conciliate his friend in every way, and to find occasion to give him proofs of his affection and perfect esteem.’ He added that ‘the marriage of your royal highness to a French princess seems conformable to the interests of my people, and likely to forge new links of union between myself and the house of Bourbon.’ The core of the whole was the explicit statement that ‘if the abdication of King Charles was spontaneous, and not forced on him by the riot at Aranjuez, I shall have no difficulty in recognizing your royal highness as King of Spain. On these details I wish to converse with your royal highness.’ This was a double-edged saying: Napoleon had in his pocket Charles’s protest, complaining that the abdication had been forced upon him by fears for his personal safety: but Ferdinand was not aware of the fact; indeed he so little realized his parent’s state of mind that he had written to him before quitting Madrid in the most friendly terms. If he had fathomed the meaning of Napoleon’s carefully constructed sentence, he would have fled for his life to the mountains.
These were the main clauses of Napoleon’s letter, but they are embedded in a quantity of turgid verbiage, in which we are only uncertain whether the hypocrisy or the bad taste is the more offensive. ‘How perilous is it for kings to permit their subjects to seek justice for themselves by deeds of blood! I pray God that your royal highness may not experience this for yourself some day! It is not for the interest of Spain that the Prince of the Peace should be hunted down: he is allied by marriage to the royal house and has governed the realm for many years. He has no friends now: but if your royal highness were to fall into similar disgrace you would have no more friends than he. You cannot touch him without touching your parents. You have no rights to the crown save those which your mother has transmitted to you: if in trying the Prince you smirch her honour, you are destroying your own rights. You have no power to bring him to judgement: his evil deeds are hidden behind the throne.... O wretched Humanity! Weakness, and Error, such is our device! But all can be hushed up: turn the Prince out of Spain, and I will give him an asylum in France.’
In the next paragraph Napoleon tells Ferdinand that he should never have written to him in the preceding autumn without his father’s knowledge—‘in that your royal highness was culpable; but I flatter myself that I contributed by my remonstrances in securing a happy end to the affair of the Escurial.’ Finally Ferdinand might assure himself that he should have from his ally precisely the same treatment that his father had always experienced—which again is a double-edged saying, if we take into consideration the history of the relations of Charles IV and France.
The King and his confidant Escoiquiz read and reread this curious document without coming to any certain conclusion: probably they thought (as would any one else who did not know the Emperor thoroughly) that the meeting at Bayonne would open with a scolding, and end with some tiresome concessions, but that Ferdinand’s title would be recognized. Savary’s commentary was reassuring: Spanish witnesses say that he exclaimed ‘I am ready to have my head taken off if, within a quarter of an hour of your majesty’s arrival at Bayonne, the Emperor has not saluted you as King of Spain and the Indies.... The whole negotiation will not take three days, and your majesty will be back in Spain in a moment.’
On April 19, therefore, the royal party set out amid the groans of the populace of Vittoria, who tried to hold back the horses, and to cut the traces of the King’s coach: on the twentieth they reached Bayonne. Napoleon entertained them at dinner, but would not talk politics: after the meal they were sent home to the not very spacious or magnificent lodgings prepared for them. An hour later the shameless Savary presented himself at the door, with the astounding message that the Emperor had thought matters over, and had come to the conclusion that the best thing for Spain would be that the house of Bourbon should cease to reign, and that a French prince should take their place. A prompt acquiescence in the bargain should be rewarded by the gift of the kingdom of Etruria, which had just been taken from Ferdinand’s widowed sister and her young son.
The possibility of such an outrage had never occurred to the young king and his counsellors: when something of the kind had been suggested to them at Vittoria, they had cried out that it was insulting to the honour of the greatest hero of the age to dream that he could be plotting treachery. And now, too late, they learnt the stuff of which heroes were made. Even with Savary’s words ringing in their ears, they could not believe that they had heard aright. It must be some mere threat intended to frighten them before negotiations began: probably it meant that Spain would have to cede some American colonies or some Catalonian frontier districts. Next morning, therefore, Ferdinand sent his minister Cevallos to plead his cause: Napoleon refused to bargain or compromise: he wanted nothing, he said, but a prompt resignation of his rights by the Prince of the Asturias: there was nothing left to haggle about. It was gradually borne in upon Ferdinand that the Emperor meant what he had said. But though timid he was obstinate, and nothing like an abdication could be got out of him. He merely continued to send to Napoleon one agent after another—first the minister Cevallos, then his tutor and confidant Escoiquiz, then Don Pedro Labrador, a councillor of state, all charged with professions of his great readiness to do anything, short of resigning the Spanish throne, which might satisfy his captor. Cevallos and Escoiquiz have left long narratives of their fruitless embassies. That of the latter is especially interesting: he was admitted to a long conference with Bonaparte, in which he plied every argument to induce him to leave Ferdinand on the throne, after marrying him to a French princess and exacting from him every possible guarantee of fidelity. The Emperor was ready to listen to every remonstrance, but would not move from his projects. He laughed at the idea that Spain would rise in arms, and give him trouble. ‘Countries full of monks, like yours,’ he said, ‘are easy to subjugate. There may be some riots, but the Spaniards will quiet down when they see that I offer them the integrity of the boundaries of the monarchy, a liberal constitution, and the preservation of their religion and their national customs.’
When such were Napoleon’s ideas it was useless to argue with him. But Ferdinand refused to understand this, and kept reiterating all sorts of impracticable offers of concession and subservience, while refusing to do the one thing which the Emperor required of him. Napoleon, much irritated at the refusal of such a poor creature to bow to his will, has left a sketch of him during these trying days. ‘The Prince of the Asturias,’ he wrote, ‘is very stupid, very malicious, a very great hater of France.... He is a thoroughly uninteresting person, so dull that I cannot get a word out of him. Whatever one says to him he makes no reply. Whether I scold him, or whether I coax him, his face never moves. After studying him you can sum him up in a single word—he is a sulky fellow.’
As Ferdinand would not budge, Bonaparte had now to bring his second device to the front. With the old king’s protest before him, the Emperor could say that Charles IV had never abdicated in any real sense of the word. He had been made to sign a resignation ‘with a pistol levelled at his head,’ as a leading article in the Moniteur duly set forth. Such a document was, of course, worth nothing: therefore Charles was still King of Spain, and might sign that surrender of his rights which Ferdinand denied. Napoleon promptly sent for the old king and queen, who arrived under a French escort on April 30, ten days after their son’s captivity began. At Bayonne they rejoined their dearly-loved Godoy, whom Murat had extorted from the Junta of Regency, under cover of a consent sent by Ferdinand to Napoleon from Vittoria two days before he crossed the frontier.
Charles IV arrived in a state of lachrymose collapse, sank on Napoleon’s breast and called him his true friend and his only support. ‘I really do not know whether it is his position or the circumstances, but he looks like a good honest old man,’ commented the Emperor. ‘The Queen has her past written on her face—that is enough to define her. As to the Prince of the Peace, he looked like a prize bull, with a dash of Count Daru about him.’ Godoy and the Queen had only one thought, to avenge themselves on Ferdinand: after what had taken place they could never go back to rule in Spain, so they cared little what happened to the country. As to the King, his wife and his favourite pulled the strings, and he gesticulated in the fashion that they desired. The Emperor treated them with an ostentatious politeness which he had always refused to the new king: at the first banquet that he gave them occurred the absurd scene (already mentioned by us), in which Charles refused to sit down to table till Godoy had been found and put near him.
Two days after their arrival Napoleon compelled Ferdinand to appear before his parents: he himself was also present. The interview commenced by King Charles ordering his son to sign a complete and absolute renunciation of the Spanish throne. Bonaparte then threw in a few threatening words: but Ferdinand, still unmoved, made a steady refusal. At this the old king rose from his chair—he was half-crippled with rheumatism—and tried to strike his son with his cane, while the Queen burst in with a stream of abuse worthy of a fishwife. Napoleon, horrified at the odious scene, according to his own narrative of it, hurried Ferdinand, ‘who looked scared,’ out of the room.
The same night , Ferdinand’s advisers bethought them of a new and ingenious move—we need not ascribe it to his own brains, which were surely incapable of the device. He wrote to King Charles to the effect that he had always regarded the abdication at Aranjuez as free and unconstrained, but that if it had not been so, he was ready to lay down his crown again and hand it back to his father. But the ceremony must be done in an open and honourable way at Madrid, before the Cortes. If his parent personally resumed the reins of power, he bowed to his authority: but if his age and infirmities induced him to name a regent, that regent should be his eldest son.
This proposal did not suit the Emperor at all, so he dictated to the old king a long letter, in which the Napoleonesque phraseology peeps out in a score of places. Charles refuses all terms, says that his son’s conduct had ‘placed a barrier of bronze between him and the Spanish throne,’ and concludes that ‘only the Emperor can save Spain, and he himself would do nothing that might stir up the fire of discord among his loved vassals or bring misery on them’ . Ferdinand replied with an equally long letter justifying at large all his conduct of the past year .
When things stood at this point there arrived from Madrid the news of the bloody events of the second of May, which we have to relate in the next chapter. This brought Napoleon up to striking point, and once more he intervened in his own person. He sent for Ferdinand, and in the presence of his parents accused him of having stirred up the riot in the capital, and informed him that if he did not sign an abdication and an acknowledgement of his father as the only true king by twelve that night ‘he should be dealt with as a traitor and rebel.’ This is Napoleon’s own version, but Spanish witnesses say that the words used were that ‘he must choose between abdication and death.’
To any one who remembered the fate of the Duc d’Enghien such a phrase was more than an idle threat. It brought the stubborn Ferdinand to his knees at last. That evening he wrote out a simple and straightforward form of abdication—‘without any motive, save that I limited my former proposal for resignation by certain proper conditions, your majesty has thought fit to insult me in the presence of my mother and the Emperor. I have been abused in the most humiliating terms: I have been told that unless I make an unconditional resignation I and my companions shall be treated as criminals guilty of conspiracy. Under such circumstances I make the renunciation which your majesty commands, that the government of Spain may return to the condition in which it was on March 19 last, the day on which your majesty spontaneously laid down your crown in my favour’ .
Ferdinand having abdicated, Napoleon at once produced a treaty which King Charles had ratified on the previous day, twenty-four hours before his son gave in. By it the old man ‘resigned all his rights to the throne of Spain and the Indies to the Emperor Napoleon, the only person who in the present state of affairs can re-establish order.’ He only annexed two conditions: ‘(1) that there should be no partition of the Spanish monarchy; (2) that the Roman Catholic religion should be the only one recognized in Spain: there should, according to the existing practice, be no toleration for any of the reformed religions, much less for infidels.’ If anything is wanting to make the silly old man odious, it is the final touch of bigotry in his abdication. The rest of the document consists of a recital of the pensions and estates in France conferred by the Emperor on his dupe in return for the abdication. It took five days more to extort from Don Ferdinand a formal cession of his ultimate rights, as Prince of the Asturias, to the succession to the throne. It was signed on May 10, and purported to give him in return a palace in France and a large annual revenue. But he was really put under close surveillance at Talleyrand’s estate of Valen?ay, along with his brother Don Carlos, and never allowed to go beyond its bounds. The Emperor’s letter of instructions to Talleyrand is worth quoting for its cynical brutality. He wrote to his ex-minister, who was much disgusted with the invidious duty put upon him: ‘Let the princes be received without any show, but yet respectably, and try to keep them amused. If you chance to have a theatre at Valen?ay there would be no harm in importing some actors now and then. You may bring over Mme de Talleyrand , and four or five ladies in attendance on her. If the prince should fall in love with some pretty girl among them, there would be no harm in it, especially if you are quite sure of her. The prince must not be allowed to take any false step, but must be amused and occupied. I ought, for political safety, to put him in Bitche or some other fortress-prison: but as he placed himself into my clutches of his own free will, and as everything in Spain is going on as I desire, I have resolved merely to place him in a country house where he can amuse himself under strict surveillance.... Your mission is really a very honourable one—to take in three illustrious guests and keep them amused is a task which should suit a Frenchman and a personage of your rank.’ Napoleon afterwards owned that he was framing what he called ‘a practical joke’ on Talleyrand, by billeting the Spaniards on him. The Prince of Benevento had wished to make no appearance in the matter, and the Emperor revenged himself by implicating him in it as the jailor of his captives. Talleyrand’s anger may be imagined, and estimated by his after conduct.
At Valen?ay the unfortunate Ferdinand was destined to remain for nearly six years, not amusing himself at all according to Napoleon’s ideas of amusement, but employed in a great many church services, a little partridge shooting, and (so his unwilling jailor tells us) the spoiling of much paper, not with the pen but with the scissors; for he developed a childish passion for clipping out paper patterns and bestowing them on every one that he met. One could pardon him everything if he had not spoilt his attitude as victim and martyr by occasionally sending adulatory letters to the Emperor, and even to his own supplanter, Joseph Bonaparte the new King of Spain.
THE SECOND OF MAY: OUTBREAK OF THE SPANISH INSURRECTION
When King Ferdinand had taken his departure to Bayonne, the position of Murat in Madrid became very delicate. He might expect to hear at any moment, since the Emperor’s plans were more or less known to him, either that the Spanish king had been made a prisoner, or that he had taken the alarm, escaped from his escort, and fled into the mountains. In either case trouble at Madrid was very probable, though there was no serious military danger to be feared, for of Spanish troops there were only 3,000 in the city, while some 35,000 French were encamped in or about it. But there might be a moment of confusion if the Junta of Regency should take violent measures on hearing of the King’s fate, or the populace of Madrid (and this was much more likely) burst into rioting.
From the tenth of April, the day of the King’s departure for the north, down to the twenty-ninth there was no serious cause for apprehension. The people were no doubt restless: they could not understand why the French lingered in Madrid instead of marching on Portugal or Gibraltar, according to their expressed intention. Rumours of all kinds, some of which hit off fairly well the true projects of Bonaparte, were current. Murat’s conduct was not calculated to reassure observers; he gave himself the airs of a military governor, rather than those of an officer engaged in conducting an allied army through friendly territory. Some of his acts gave terrible offence, such as that of insisting that the sword of Francis I, taken at Pavia in 1525, the pride for three centuries of the royal armoury, should be given up to him. His call on the Junta for the surrender of the Prince of the Peace, whom he forwarded under French escort to Bayonne, could not fail to be unpopular. But the first real signs of danger were not seen till the twenty-second of April, when Murat, in obedience to his master, intended to publish the protest of Charles IV against his abdication. It was to be presented to the Junta in the form of a letter to its president, Don Antonio. Meanwhile French agents were set to print it: their Spanish underlings stole and circulated some of the proofs. Their appearance raised a mob, for the name of Charles IV could only suggest the reappearance of Godoy. An angry crowd broke into the printing office, destroyed the presses, and hunted away the Frenchmen. Murat at once made a great matter of the affair, and began to threaten the Junta. ‘The army which he commanded could not without dishonouring itself allow disorders to arise: there must be no more anarchy in Spain. He was not going to allow the corrupt tools of the English government to stir up troubles.’ The Junta replied with rather more spirit than might have been expected, asked why an army of 35,000 French troops had now lingered more than a month around the capital, and expressed an opinion that the riot was but an explosion of loyalty to Ferdinand. But they undertook to deal severely with factious persons, and to discourage even harmless assemblies like that of the twenty-second.
Meanwhile Murat wrote to the Emperor that it was absurd that he could not yet establish a police of his own in Madrid, that he could not print what he pleased, and that he had to negotiate with the Junta when he wished his orders published, instead of being able to issue them on his own authority. He was answered in a style which must have surprised him. Napoleon was ashamed, he said, of a general who, with 50,000 men at his back, asked for things instead of taking them. His letters to the Junta were servile; he should simply assume possession of the reins of power, and act for himself. If the canaille stirred, let it be shot down. Murat could only reply that ‘if he had not yet scattered rioters by a blast of grape, it was only because there were no mobs to shoot: his imperial majesty’s rebuke had stunned him “like a tile falling on his head” by its unmerited severity.’
Within three days of this letter there was to be plenty of grape-shot, enough to satisfy both Emperor and Grand-Duke. They probably had the revolt of Cairo and the 13th Vendémiaire in their mind, and were both under the impression that a good émeute pitilessly crushed by artillery was the best basis of a new régime.
On the night of April 29 the first clear and accurate account of what was happening at Bayonne arrived at Madrid. Napoleon had intercepted all the letters which Don Ferdinand had tried to smuggle out of his prison. He read them with grave disapproval, for his guest had not scrupled to use the expression ‘the cursed French,’ and had hinted at the propriety of resistance. He had not yet been cowed by the threat of a rebel’s death. But on the twenty-third one of the Spaniards at Bayonne succeeded in escaping in disguise, crossed the mountains by a lonely track, and reached Pampeluna, whence he posted to Madrid. This was a certain Navarrese magistrate named Ibarnavarro, to whom Ferdinand had given a verbal message to explain Napoleon’s plans and conduct to the Junta, and to inform them that he would never give in to this vile mixture of force and fraud. He could not send them any definite instructions, not knowing the exact state of affairs at Madrid, and a premature stroke might imperil the life of himself, his brother, and his companions: let them beware therefore of showing their warlike intentions till preparations had been fully made to shake off the yoke of the oppressor.
This message Ibarnavarro delivered on the night of April 29-30 to the Junta, who had summoned in to hear it a number of judges and other magnates of the city. Next morning, of course, the information, in a more or less garbled shape, spread all round Madrid: there were foolish rumours that the Biscayans had already taken arms, and that 30,000 of them were marching on Bayonne to save the King, as also that certain of the coast towns had invited the English to land. On the thirtieth leaflets, both written and printed, were being secretly circulated round the city, setting forth the unhappy condition of the King, and bidding his subjects not to forget Numancia. It is astonishing that riots did not break out at once, considering the growing excitement of the people, and the habitual insolence of the French soldiery. But leaders were wanting, and in especial the Junta of Regency and its imbecile old president made no move whatever, on the pretext, apparently, that any commotion might imperil the lives of Napoleon’s prisoners.
It was Murat himself who brought matters to a head next day, by ordering the Junta to put into his hands the remaining members of the royal family, Ferdinand’s youngest brother Don Francisco, a boy of sixteen, and his sister the widowed and exiled Queen of Etruria, with her children. Only Don Antonio, the incapable president of the Junta, and the Archbishop of Toledo, the King’s second-cousin, were to be left behind: the rest were to be sent to Bayonne. Knowing what had happened to Don Ferdinand and Don Carlos, the people were horrified at the news; but they trusted that the Regency would refuse its leave. To its eternal disgrace that body did nothing: it did not even try to smuggle away the young Don Francisco before Murat should arrest him.
Map of Madrid
Enlarge Madrid in 1808.
On the morning, therefore, of May 2 the streets were filled with people, and the palace gates in especial were beset by an excited mob. It was soon seen that the news was true, for the Queen of Etruria appeared and started for the north with all her numerous family. She was unpopular for having sided with her mother and Godoy against Don Ferdinand, and was allowed to depart undisturbed. But when the carriage that was to bear off Don Francisco was brought up, and one of Murat’s aides-de-camp appeared at the door to take charge of the young prince, the rage of the crowd burst all bounds. The French officer was stoned, and saved with difficulty by a patrol: the coach was torn to pieces. Murat had not been unprepared for something of the kind: the battalion on guard at his palace was at once turned out, and fired a dozen volleys into the unarmed mob, which fled devious, leaving scores of dead and wounded on the ground.
The Grand-Duke thought that the matter was over, but it had but just begun. At the noise of the firing the excited citizens flocked into the streets armed with whatever came to hand, pistols, blunderbusses, fowling-pieces, many only with the long Spanish knife. They fell upon, and slew, a certain number of isolated French soldiers, armed and unarmed, who were off duty and wandering round the town, but they also made a fierce attack on Murat’s guard. Of course they could do little against troops armed and in order: in the first hour of the fight there were only about 1,000 men at the Grand-Duke’s disposal, but this small force held its own without much loss, though eight or ten thousand angry insurgents fell upon them. But within seventy minutes the French army from the suburban camps came pouring into the city, brigade after brigade. After this the struggle was little more than a massacre: many of the insurgents took refuge in houses, and maintained a fierce but futile resistance for some time; but the majority were swept away in a few minutes by cavalry charges. Only at one point did the fight assume a serious shape. Almost the entire body of the Spanish garrison of Madrid refrained from taking any part in the rising: without the orders of the Junta the chiefs refused to move, and the men waited in vain for the orders of their officers. But at the Artillery Park two captains, Daoiz and Velarde, threw open the gates to the rioters, allowed them to seize some hundreds of muskets, and when the first French column appeared ran out three guns and opened upon it with grape. Though aided by no more than forty soldiers, and perhaps 500 civilians, they beat off two assaults, and only succumbed to a third. Daoiz was bayonetted, Velarde shot dead, and their men perished with them; but they had poured three volleys of grape into a street packed with the enemy, and caused the only serious losses which the French suffered that day.
The whole struggle had occupied not more than four hours: when it was over Murat issued an ‘order of the day,’ sentencing all prisoners taken with arms in their hands, all persons discovered with arms concealed in their houses, and all distributors of seditious leaflets, ‘the agents of the English government,’ to be shot. It seems that at least a hundred persons were executed under this edict, many of them innocent bystanders who had taken no part in the fighting. Next morning Murat withdrew his Draconian decree, and no further fusillades took place. It is impossible, in the conflict of authorities, to arrive at any clear estimate of the numbers slain on each side on May 2. Probably Tore?o is not far out when he estimates the whole at something over a thousand. Of these four-fifths must have been Spaniards, for the French only lost heavily at the arsenal: the number of isolated soldiers murdered in the streets at the first outbreak of the riot does not seem to have been very large.
Many French authors have called the rising a deliberate and preconcerted conspiracy to massacre the French garrison. On the other hand Spanish writers have asserted that Murat had arranged everything so as to cause a riot, in order that he might have the chance of administering a ‘whiff of grape-shot,’ after his master’s plan. But it is clear that both are making unfounded accusations: if the insurrection had been premeditated, the Spanish soldiery would have been implicated in it, for nothing would have been easier than to stir them up. Yet of the whole 3,000 only forty ran out to help the insurgents. Moreover, the mob would have been found armed at the first commencement of trouble, which it certainly was not. On the other hand, if Murat had been organizing a massacre, he would not have been caught with no more than two squadrons of cavalry and five or six companies of infantry under his hand. These might have been cut to pieces before the troops from outside could come to their help. He had been expecting riots, and was prepared to deal with them, but was surprised by a serious insurrection on a larger scale than he had foreseen, and at a moment when he was not ready.
For a few days after May 2, Murat at Madrid and his master at Bayonne were both living in a sort of fools’ paradise, imagining that ‘the affairs of Spain were going off wonderfully well,’ and that ‘the party of Ferdinand had been crushed by the prompt suppression of its conspiracy.’ The Grand-Duke had the simplicity or the effrontery to issue a proclamation in which he said ‘that every good Spaniard had groaned at the sight of such disorders,’ and another in which the insurrection was attributed to ‘the machinations of our common enemy, i.e. the British government.’ On May 4 Don Antonio laid down the presidency of the Junta without a word of regret, and went off to Bayonne, having first borrowed 25,000 francs from Murat. The latter, by virtue of a decree issued by Charles IV, then assumed the presidency of the Junta of Regency. The rest of the members of that ignoble body easily sank into his servile instruments, though they had at last received a secret note smuggled out from Bayonne, in which Ferdinand (the day before his abdication) told them to regard his removal into the interior of France as a declaration of war, and to call the nation to arms. To this they paid no attention, while they pretended to take the document of resignation, which Bonaparte had forced him to sign, as an authentic and spontaneous expression of his will. The fact is that twenty years of Godoy had thoroughly demoralized the bureaucracy and the court of Spain: if the country’s will had not found better exponents than her ministers and officials, Napoleon might have done what he pleased with the Peninsula.
At present his sole interest seems to have lain in settling the details of his brother Joseph’s election to the Spanish throne. Ferdinand’s final resignation of all his rights having been signed on May 10, the field was open for his successor. The Emperor thought that some sort of deputation to represent the Spanish nation ought to be got together, in order that his brother might not seem to receive the crown from his own hands only. Murat was first set to work to terrorize the Junta of Regency, and the ‘Council of Castile,’ a body which practically occupied much the same position as the English Privy Council. At his dictation the Junta yielded, but with an ill grace, and sent petitions to Bayonne asking for a new monarch, and suggesting (as desired) that the person chosen might be Joseph Bonaparte, King of Naples . Murat had just been informed that as all had gone well with the Emperor’s plans he should have his reward: he might make his choice between the thrones of Naples and of Portugal. He wisely chose the former, where the rough work of subjection had already been done by his predecessor.
But resolved to get together something like a representative body which might vote away the liberty of Spain, Napoleon nominated, in the Madrid Gazette of May 24, 150 persons who were to go to Bayonne and there ask him to grant them a king. He named a most miscellaneous crowd—ministers, bishops, judges, municipal officers of Madrid, dukes and counts, the heads of the religious orders, the Grand Inquisitor and some of his colleagues, and six well-known Americans who were to speak for the colonies. To the eternal disgrace of the ruling classes of Spain, no less than ninety-one of the nominees were base enough to obey the orders given them, to go to Bayonne, and there to crave as a boon that the weak and incompetent Joseph Bonaparte might be set to govern their unhappy country, under the auspices of his brother the hero and regenerator. Long before the degrading farce was complete, the whole country was in arms behind them, and they knew themselves for traitors. The election of King Joseph I was only taken in hand on June 15, while twenty days before the north and south of Spain had risen in arms in the name of the captive Ferdinand VII.
It took a week for the news of the insurrection of May 2 to spread round Spain: in the public mouth it of course assumed the shape of a massacre deliberately planned by Murat. It was not till some days later that the full details of the events at Bayonne got abroad. But ever since the surprise of the frontier fortresses in February and March, intelligent men all over the country had been suspecting that some gross act of treachery was likely to be the outcome of the French invasion. Yet in most of the districts of Spain there was a gap of some days between the arrival of the news of the King’s captivity and the first outbreak of popular indignation. The fact was that the people were waiting for the lawful and constituted authorities to take action, and did not move of themselves till it was certain that no initiative was to be expected from those in high places. But Spain was a country which had long been governed on despotic lines; and its official chiefs, whether the nominees of Godoy or of the knot of intriguers who had just won their way to power under Ferdinand, were not the men to lead a war of national independence. Many were mere adventurers, who had risen to preferment by flattering the late favourite. Others were typical bureaucrats, whose only concern was to accept as legitimate whatever orders reached them from Madrid: provided those orders were couched in the proper form and written on the right paper, they did not look to see whether the signature at the bottom was that of Godoy or of the Infante Don Antonio, or of Murat. Others again were courtiers who owed their position to their great names, and not to any personal ability. It is this fact that accounts for the fortnight or even three weeks of torpor that followed the events of the second and sixth of May. Murat’s orders during that space travelled over the country, and most of the captains-general and other authorities seemed inclined to obey them. Yet they were orders which should have stirred up instant disobedience; the Mediterranean squadron was to be sent to Toulon, where (if it did not get taken on the way by the British) it would fall into the hands of Napoleon. A large detachment of the depleted regular army was to sail for Buenos Ayres, with the probable prospect of finding itself ere long on the hulks at Portsmouth, instead of on the shores of the Rio de la Plata. The Swiss regiments in Spanish pay were directed to be transferred to the French establishment, and to take the oath to Napoleon. All this could have no object save that of diminishing the fighting power of the country.
The first province where the people plucked up courage to act without their officials, and to declare war on France in spite of the dreadful odds against them, was the remote and inaccessible principality of the Asturias, pressed in between the Bay of Biscay and the Cantabrian hills. Riots began at its capital, Oviedo, as early as the first arrival of the news from Madrid on May 9, when Murat’s edicts were torn down in spite of the feeble resistance of the commander of the garrison and some of the magistrates. The Asturias was one of the few provinces of Spain which still preserved vestiges of its mediaeval representative institutions. It had a ‘Junta General,’ a kind of local ‘estates,’ which chanced to be in session at the time of the crisis. Being composed of local magnates and citizens, and not of officials and bureaucrats, this body was sufficiently in touch with public opinion to feel itself borne on to action. After ten days of secret preparation, the city of Oviedo and the surrounding country-side rose in unison on May 24: the partisans of the new government were imprisoned, and next day the estates formally declared war on Napoleon Bonaparte, and ordered a levy of 18,000 men from the principality to resist invasion. A great part of the credit for this daring move must be given to the president of the Junta, the Marquis of Santa Cruz, who had stirred up his colleagues as early as the thirteenth by declaring that ‘when and wherever one single Spaniard took arms against Napoleon, he would shoulder a musket and put himself at that man’s side.’ The Asturians had knowledge that other provinces would follow their example; there was only one battalion of regular troops and one of militia under arms in the province; its financial resources were small. Its only strength lay in the rough mountains that had once sheltered King Pelayo from the Moors. It was therefore an astounding piece of patriotism when the inhabitants of the principality threw down the challenge to the victor of Jena and Austerlitz, confiding in their stern resolution and their good cause. All through the war the Asturias played a very creditable part in the struggle, and never let the light of liberty go out, though often its capital and its port of Gihon fell into French hands.
One of the first and wisest measures taken by the Asturian Junta was an attempt to interest Great Britain in the insurrection. On May 30 they sent to London two emissaries (one of whom was the historian Tore?o) on a Jersey privateer, whose captain was persuaded to turn out of his course for the public profit. On June 7 they had reached London and had an interview with Canning, the Foreign Secretary of the Tory government which had lately come into power. Five days later they were assured that the Asturias might draw on England for all it required in the way of arms, munitions, and money. All this was done before it was known in England that any other Spanish province was stirring, for it was not till June 22 that the plenipotentiaries of the other juntas began to appear in London.
The revolt of other provinces followed in very quick succession. Galicia rose on May 30, in spite of its captain-general, Filanghieri, whose resistance to the popular voice cost him his popularity and, not long after, his life. Corunna and Ferrol, the two northern arsenals of Spain, led the way. This addition to the insurgent forces was very important, for the province was full of troops—the garrisons that protected the ports from English descents. There were eighteen battalions of regulars and fourteen of militia—a whole army—concentrated in this remote corner of Spain. Napoleon’s plan of removing the Spanish troops from the neighbourhood of Madrid had produced the unintended result of making the outlying provinces very strong for self-defence.
It is more fitting for a Spanish than an English historian to descend into the details of the rising of each province of Spain. The general characteristics of the outburst in each region were much the same: hardly anywhere did the civil or military officials in charge of the district take the lead. Almost invariably they hung back, fearing for their places and profits, and realizing far better than did the insurgents the enormous military power which they were challenging. The leaders of the movement were either local magnates not actually holding office—like the celebrated Joseph Palafox at Saragossa—or demagogues of the streets, or (but less frequently than might have been expected) churchmen, Napoleon was quite wrong when he called the Spanish rising ‘an insurrection of monks.’ The church followed the nation, and not the nation the church: indeed many of the spiritual hierarchy were among the most servile instruments of Murat. Among them was the primate of Spain, the Archbishop of Toledo, who was actually a scion of the house of Bourbon. There were many ecclesiastics among the dishonoured ninety-one that went to Bayonne, if there were others who (like the Bishop of Santander) put themselves at the head of their flocks when the country took arms.
It was a great misfortune for Spain that the juntas, which were everywhere formed when the people rose, had to be composed in large part of men unacquainted with government and organization. There were many intelligent patriots among their members, a certain number of statesmen who had been kept down or disgraced by Godoy, but also a large proportion of ambitious windbags and self-seeking intriguers. It was hard to constitute a capable government, on the spur of the moment, in a country which had suffered twenty years of Godoy’s rule.
An unfortunate feature of the rising was that in most of the provinces, and especially those of the south, it took from the first a very sanguinary cast. It was natural that the people should sweep away in their anger every official who tried to keep them down, or hesitated to commit himself to the struggle with France. But there was no reason to murder these weaklings or traitors, in the style of the Jacobins. There was a terrible amount of assassination, public and private, during the first days of the insurrection. Three captains-general were slain under circumstances of brutal cruelty—Filanghieri in Galicia, Torre del Fresno in Estremadura, Solano at Cadiz. The fate of Solano may serve as an example: he tried to keep the troops from joining the people, and vainly harangued the mob: pointing to the distant sails of the English blockading squadron he shouted, ‘There are your real enemies!’ But his words had no effect: he was hunted down in a house where he took refuge, and was being dragged to be hung on the public gallows, when the hand of a fanatic (or perhaps of a secret friend who wished to spare him a dishonourable death) dealt him a fatal stab in the side. Gregorio de la Cuesta, the Governor-General of Old Castile, who was destined to play such a prominent and unhappy part in the history of the next two years, nearly shared Solano’s fate. The populace of Valladolid, where he was residing, rose in insurrection like those of the other cities of Spain. They called on their military chief to put himself at their head; but Cuesta, an old soldier of the most unintelligent and brainless sort, hated mob-violence almost more than he hated the French. He held back, not from a desire to serve Bonaparte, but from a dislike to being bullied by civilians. The indignant populace erected a gallows outside his house and came to hang him thereon. It was not, it is said, till the rope was actually round his neck that the obstinate old man gave in. The Castilians promptly released him, and put him at the head of the armed rabble which formed their only force. Remembering the awful slaughter at Cabezon, at Medina de Rio Seco, and at Medellin, which his incapacity and mulish obstinacy was destined to bring about, it is impossible not to express the wish that his consent to take arms had been delayed for a few minutes longer.
All over Spain there took place, during the last days of May and the first week of June, scores of murders of prominent men, of old favourites of Godoy, of colonels who would not allow their regiments to march, of officials who had shown alacrity in obeying the orders of Murat. In the Asturias and at Saragossa alone do the new juntas seem to have succeeded in keeping down assassination. The worst scenes took place at Valencia, where a mad priest, the Canon Baltasar Calvo, led out a mob of ruffians who in two days murdered 338 persons, the whole colony of French merchants residing in that wealthy town. It is satisfactory to know that when the Junta of Valencia felt itself firmly seated in the saddle of power, it seized and executed this abominable person and his chief lieutenants. In too many parts of Spain the murderers went unpunished: yet remembering the provocation which the nation had received, and comparing the blood shed by mob-violence with that which flowed in Revolutionary France, we must consider the outburst deplorable rather than surprising.
When the insurrection had reached its full development, we find that it centred round five points, in each of which a separate junta had seized on power and begun to levy an army. The most powerful focus was Seville, from which all Andalusia took its directions: indeed the Junta of Seville had assumed the arrogant style of ‘supreme Junta of Spain and the Indies,’ to which it had no legitimate title. The importance of Andalusia was that it was full of troops, the regular garrisons having been joined by most of the expeditionary corps which had returned from southern Portugal. Moreover it was in possession of a full treasury and a fleet, and had free communication with the English at Gibraltar. On June 15 the Andalusians struck the first military blow that told on Napoleon, by bombarding and capturing the French fleet (the relics of Trafalgar) which lay at their mercy within the harbour of Cadiz.
The second in importance of the centres of resistance was Galicia, which was also fairly well provided with troops, and contained the arsenals of Ferrol and Corunna. The risings in Asturias, and the feebler gatherings of patriots in Leon and Old Castile, practically became branches of the Galician insurrection, though they were directed by their own juntas and tried to work for themselves. It was on the army of Galicia that they relied for support, and without it they would not have been formidable. The boundaries of this area of insurrection were Santander, Valladolid, and Segovia: further east the troops of Moncey and Bessières, in the direction of Burgos and Aranda, kept the country-side from rising. There were sporadic gatherings of peasants in the Upper Ebro valley and the mountains of Northern Castile, but these were mere unorganized ill-armed bands that half a battalion could disperse. It was the same in the Basque Provinces and Navarre: here too the French lay cantoned so thickly that it was impossible to meddle with them: their points of concentration were Vittoria and the two fortresses of Pampeluna and San Sebastian.
The other horn of the half-moon of revolt, which encircled Madrid, was composed of the insurrections in Murcia and Valencia to the south and Aragon to the north. These regions were much less favourably situated for forming centres of resistance, because they were very weak in organized troops. When the Aragonese elected Joseph Palafox as their captain-general and declared war on France, there were only 2,000 regulars and one battery of artillery in their realm. The levies which they began to raise were nothing more than half-armed peasants, with no adequate body of officers to train and drill them. Valencia and Murcia were a little better off, because the arsenal of Cartagena and its garrison lay within their boundaries, but there were only 9,000 men in all under arms in the two provinces. Clearly they could not hope to deliver such a blow as Galicia or Andalusia might deal.
The last centre of revolt, Catalonia, did not fall into the same strategical system as the other four. It looked for its enemies not at Madrid, but at Barcelona, where Lecchi and Duhesme were firmly established ever since their coup de main in February. The Catalans had as their task the cutting off of this body of invaders from its communication with France, and the endeavour to prevent new forces from joining it by crossing the Eastern Pyrenees. The residence of the insurrectionary Junta was at Tarragona, but the most important point in the province for the moment was Gerona, a fortress commanding the main road from France, which Napoleon had not had the foresight to seize at the same moment that he won by treachery Barcelona and Figueras. While the Spaniards could hold it, they had some chance of isolating the army of Duhesme from its supports. In Catalonia, or in the Balearic Isles off its coast, there were in May 1808, about 16,000 men of regular troops, among whom there were only 1,200 soldiers of the cavalry arm. There was no militia, but by old custom the levée en masse might always be called out in moments of national danger. These irregulars, somatenes as they were called (from somaten, the alarm-bell which roused them), turned out in great numbers according to ancient custom: they had been mobilized thirteen years before in the French War of 1793-5 and their warlike traditions were by no means forgotten. All through the Peninsular struggle they made a very creditable figure, considering their want of organization and the difficulty of keeping them together.
The French armies, putting aside Duhesme’s isolated force at Barcelona, lay compactly in a great wedge piercing into the heart of Spain. Its point was at Toledo, just south of Madrid: its base was a line drawn from San Sebastian to Pampeluna across the Western Pyrenees. Its backbone lay along the great high road from Vittoria by Burgos to Madrid. The advantageous point of this position was that it completely split Central Spain in two: there was no communication possible between the insurgents of Galicia and those of Aragon. On the other hand the wedge was long and narrow, and exposed to be pierced by a force striking at it either from the north-east or the north-west. The Aragonese rebels were too few to be dangerous; but the strong Spanish army of Galicia was well placed for a blow at Burgos, and a successful attack in that direction would cut off Madrid from France, and leave the troops in and about the capital, who formed the point of the intrusive wedge, in a very perilous condition. This is the reason why, in the first stage of the war, Napoleon showed great anxiety as to what the army of Galicia might do, while professing comparative equanimity about the proceedings of the other forces of the insurrection.
Having thus sketched the strategic position of affairs in the Peninsula during the first days of June, we must set ourselves to learn the main characteristics of the military geography of Spain, and to estimate the character, organization, and fighting value of the two armies which were just about to engage. Without some knowledge of the conditions of warfare in Spain, a mere catalogue of battles and marches would be absolutely useless.