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THE OUTBREAK OF THE PORTUGUESE INSURRECTION
Down to the moment of the general outbreak of the Spanish insurrection Junot’s task in Portugal had not been a difficult one. As long as Spain and France were still ostensibly allies, he had at his disposition a very large army. He had entered Portugal in 1807 with 25,000 French troops, and during the spring of 1808 he had received 4,000 men in drafts from Bayonne, which more than filled up the gaps made in his battalions by the dreary march from Ciudad Rodrigo to Abrantes. Of the three Spanish divisions which had been lent to him, Solano’s had gone home to Andalusia, but he had still the two others, Caraffa’s (7,000 strong) in the valley of the Tagus, and Taranco’s at Oporto. The last-named general died during the winter, but his successor, Belesta, still commanded 6,000 men cantoned on the banks of the Douro. The discontent of the Portuguese during the early months of 1808 showed itself by nothing save a few isolated deeds of violence, provoked by particular acts of oppression on the part of Junot’s subordinates. How promptly and severely they were chastised has been told in an earlier chapter. There were no signs whatever of a general rising: the means indeed were almost entirely wanting. The regular army had been disbanded or sent off to France. The organization of the militia had been dissolved. The greater part of the leading men of the country had fled to Brazil with the Prince-Regent: the bureaucracy and many of the clergy had shown a discreditable willingness to conciliate Junot by a tame subservience to his orders.
The Duke of Abrantes himself thoroughly enjoyed his Viceroyalty, and still deluded himself into believing that he might yet prove a popular ruler in Portugal: perhaps he even dreamed of becoming some day one of Bonaparte’s vassal-kings. He persisted in the farce of issuing benevolent proclamations, and expressing his affection for the noble Portuguese people, till his master at last grew angry. ‘Why,’ he wrote by the hand of his minister Clarke, ‘do you go on making promises which you have no authority to carry out? Of course, there is no end more laudable than that of winning the affection and confidence of the inhabitants of Portugal. But do not forget that the safety of the French army is the first thing. Disarm the Portuguese: keep an eye on the disbanded soldiers, lest reckless leaders should get hold of them and make them into the nucleus of rebel bands.... Lisbon is an inconveniently large place: it is too populous, and its people cannot help being hostile to you. Keep your troops outside it, in cantonments along the sea-front’: and so forth. Meanwhile financial exactions were heaped on the unfortunate kingdom to contribute to the huge fine which the Emperor had laid upon it: but there was evidently no chance that such a large sum could be raised, however tightly the screw of taxation might be twisted. Junot accepted, as contributions towards the ￡2,000,000 that he was told to raise, much confiscated English merchandise, church plate, and private property of the royal house, but his extortions did little more than pay for his army and the expenses of government. Portugal indeed was in a dismal state: her ports were blocked and her wines could not be sold to her old customers in England, nor her manufactures to her Brazilian colonists. The working classes in Lisbon were thrown out of employment, and starved, or migrated in bands into the interior. Foy and other good witnesses from the French side speak of the capital as ‘looking like a desert, with no vehicles, and hardly a foot-passenger in the streets, save 20,000 persons reduced to beggary and trying vainly to live on alms.’ The only activity visible was in the arsenal and dockyards, where Junot had 10,000 men at work restoring the neglected material of the artillery, and fitting out that portion of the fleet which had been in too bad order to sail for Brazil in the previous November.
The sudden outbreak of the Spanish insurrection in the last days of May, 1808, made an enormous change in the situation of the French army in Portugal. Before Junot had well realized what was happening in the neighbouring kingdom, his communications with Madrid were suddenly cut, and for the future information only reached him with the greatest difficulty, and orders not at all. The last dispatch that came through to him was one from the Emperor which spoke of the beginnings of the rising, and bade him send 4,000 men to Ciudad Rodrigo to hold out a hand to Bessières, and 8,000 to the Guadiana to co-operate in Dupont’s projected invasion of Andalusia. These orders were dispatched in the last days of May; before they could be carried out the situation had been profoundly modified.
On June 6 there arrived at Oporto the news of the insurrection of Galicia and the establishment of the Provincial Junta at Corunna. The first thought of the new government in Galicia had been to call home for its own defence the division in northern Portugal. When its summons reached General Belesta, he obeyed without a moment’s hesitation. The only French near him were General Quesnel, the Governor of Oporto, his staff, and a troop of thirty dragoons which served as his personal escort. Belesta seized and disarmed both the general and his guard, and forthwith marched for Spain, by Braga and Valenza, with his prisoners. Before leaving he called together the notables of Oporto, bade them hoist the national flag, and incited them to nominate a junta to organize resistance against Junot. But he left not a man behind to aid them, and took off his whole force to join General Blake.
On receiving, on June 9, the news of this untoward event, Junot determined to prevent Caraffa’s troops on the Tagus from following the example of their countrymen. Before they had fully realized the situation, or had time to concert measures for a general evasion, he succeeded in disarming them. Caraffa himself was summoned to the quarters of the commander-in-chief, and placed under arrest before he knew that he was suspected. Of his regiments some were ordered to attend a review, others to change garrisons; while unsuspectingly on their way, they found themselves surrounded by French troops and were told to lay down their arms. All were successfully trapped except the second cavalry regiment, the ‘Queen’s Own,’ whose colonel rode off to Oporto with his two squadrons instead of obeying the orders sent him, and fractions of the infantry regiments of Murcia and Valencia who escaped to Badajoz after an ineffectual pursuit by the French dragoons. But 6,000 out of Caraffa’s 7,000 men were caught, disarmed, and placed on pontoons moored under the guns of the Lisbon forts, whose commanders had orders to sink them if they gave any trouble. Here they were destined to remain prisoners for the next ten weeks, till the English arrived to release them after the battle of Vimiero.
The imminent danger that Caraffa’s force might openly revolt, and serve as the nucleus for a general rising of the Portuguese, was thus disposed of. But Junot’s position was still unpleasant: he had only some 26,500 men with whom to hold down the kingdom: if once the inhabitants took arms, such a force could not supply garrisons for every corner of a country 300 miles long and a hundred broad. Moreover, there was considerable probability that the situation might be complicated by the appearance of an English expeditionary army: Napoleon had warned his lieutenant to keep a careful watch on the side of the sea, even before the Spanish insurrection broke out. All through the spring a British force drawn from Sicily was already hovering about the southern coast of the Peninsula, though hitherto it had only been heard of in the direction of Gibraltar and Cadiz. Another cause of disquietude was the presence in the Tagus of the Russian fleet of Admiral Siniavin: the strange attitude adopted by that officer much perplexed Junot. He acknowledged that his master the Czar was at war with Great Britain, and stated that he was prepared to fight if the British fleet tried to force the entrance of the Tagus. But on the other hand he alleged that Russia had not declared war on Portugal or acknowledged its annexation by the Emperor, and he therefore refused to land his marines and seamen to help in the garrisoning of Lisbon, or to allow them to be used in any way on shore. Meanwhile his crews consumed an inordinate amount of the provisions which were none too plentiful in the Portuguese capital.
Junot’s main advantage lay in the extreme military impotence of Portugal. That realm found its one sole centre in Lisbon, where a tenth of the population of the whole kingdom and half of its wealth were concentrated. At Lisbon alone was there an arsenal of any size, or a considerable store of muskets and powder. Without the resources of the capital the nation was absolutely unable to equip anything fit to be called an army. Oporto was a small place in comparison, and no other town in the kingdom had over 20,000 souls. Almeida and Elvas, the two chief fortresses of the realm, were safe in the hands of French garrisons. The provinces might rise, but without lavish help from Spain or England they could not put in the field an army of even 10,000 men, for assemblies of peasants armed with pikes and fowling-pieces are not armies, and of field-artillery there was hardly a piece outside Lisbon, Elvas, and Almeida. Nor was there left any nucleus of trained soldiers around which the nation might rally: the old army was dissolved and its small remnant was on the way to the Baltic. The case of Spain and of Portugal was entirely different when they rose against Napoleon. The former country was in possession of the greater part of its own fortresses, had not been systematically disarmed, and could dispose—in Galicia and Andalusia—of large bodies of veteran troops. Portugal was without an army, an arsenal, a defensible fortress, or a legal organization—civil or military—of any kind.
It is necessary to remember this in order to excuse the utter feebleness of the Portuguese rising in June, 1808. Otherwise it would have seemed strange that a nation of over 2,000,000 souls could not anywhere produce forces sufficient to resist for a single day a column of 3,000 or 4,000 French soldiers.
The insurrection—such as it was—started in the north, where the departure of Belesta and his division had left the two provinces of Tras-os-Montes and Entre-Douro-e-Minho free from any garrison, French or Spanish. Oporto had been bidden to work out its own salvation by Belesta, and on the day of his departure (June 6), a junta of insurrection had been acclaimed. But there followed a curious interval of apathy, lasting for ten days: the natural leaders of the people refused to come forward: here, just as in Spain, the bureaucracy showed itself very timid and unpatriotic. The magistrates sent secret offers of submission to Junot: the military commandant, Oliveira da Costa, hauled down the national flag from the citadel of San Jo?o da Foz. The members of the insurrectionary junta absconded from the city or kept quiet. It was only on the news that the neighbouring districts and towns had risen, that the people of Oporto threw themselves frankly into the rebellion. The rough mountain districts which lay to the east of them showed a much more whole-hearted patriotism: between the ninth and the twelfth of June the whole of the Tras-os-Montes took arms: one junta at Braganza nominated as commander the aged General Sepulveda, who had been governor of the district in the days of the Prince-Regent: another, at Villa Real on the Douro, also put in its claim and chose as its leader Colonel Silveira, an officer who was destined to see much service during the war of independence. Though the French were no further off than Almeida, the rival governors nearly came to blows, but the final insurrection of Oporto created a new power to which both consented to bow.
On June 18 the false report that a French column was drawing near Oporto so roused the multitude in that city that they broke loose from the control of the authorities, rehoisted the Portuguese flag, threw into prison Da Costa and many other persons suspected, rightly or wrongly, of a wish to submit to the enemy, and called for the establishment of a provisional government. Accordingly a ‘Supreme Junta of the Kingdom’ was hastily elected with the Bishop of Oporto at its head. This was a strange choice, for the aged prelate, Dom Antonio de Castro, though popular and patriotic, was neither a statesman nor an administrator, and had no notion whatever as to the military necessities of the situation. However, the other local juntas of Northern Portugal united in recognizing his authority. His colleagues started on the organization of an army with more zeal than discretion; they called out the militia which Junot had disbanded, and tried to reconstruct some of the old regular battalions, by getting together the half-pay officers, and the men who had been dismissed from the colours in December, 1807. But they also encouraged the assembly of thousands of peasants armed with pikes and scythes, who consumed provisions, but were of no military use whatever. In the seven weeks which elapsed before the coming of the English, the Supreme Junta had only got together 5,000 men properly equipped and told off into regular corps. The fact was that they could provide arms for no more, Northern Portugal having always looked to Lisbon for its supplies. Field artillery was almost wholly wanting—perhaps a dozen guns in all had been found: of cavalry three skeleton regiments were beginning to be organized. But of half-armed peasantry, disguised under the name of militia, they had from 12,000 to 15,000 in the field.
The Supreme Junta also concluded a treaty of offensive and defensive alliance with the Galician Spaniards, from whom they hoped to get arms, and perhaps a loan of troops. Moreover they sent two envoys to England to ask for aid, and eagerly welcomed at Oporto Colonel Brown, a British agent with a roving commission, who did his best to assist in organizing the new levies. The command of the whole armed force was given to General Bernardino Freire, a pretentious and incapable person, who turned his very moderate resources to no profitable account whatever.
A few days later than the outbreak of the insurrection in the regions north of the Douro, there was a corresponding movement, but of a weaker kind, in the extreme south. On June 16 the small fishing-town of Olh?o in Algarve gave the signal for revolt: on the eighteenth Faro, the capital of the province, followed the example. General Maurin, the Governor of Algarve, was lying ill in his bed; he was made prisoner along with seventy other French officers and men, and handed over to the captain of an English ship which was hovering off the coast. The whole shore between the Sierra de Caldeir?o and the sea took arms, whereupon Colonel Maransin, Maurin’s second-in-command, resolved to evacuate the province. He had only 1,200 men, a battalion each of the 26th of the line and the Légion du Midi, and had lost his communications with Lisbon, wherefore he drew together his small force and fell back first on Mertola and then on Beja, in the Alemtejo. The insurgents whom he left behind him could do little till they had obtained muskets from Seville and Gibraltar, and made no attempt to follow the retreating column northwards.
Meanwhile Junot, even after he had succeeded in disarming Caraffa’s Spanish division, was passing through a most anxious time. In obedience to the Emperor’s orders he had sent a brigade under General Avril towards Andalusia, to help Dupont, and another under Loison to Almeida to open communications with Bessières. But these detachments had been made under two false ideas, the one that the troubles in Spain were purely local, the other that Portugal would keep quiet. Avril marched southward with 3,000 men, but, when his vanguard reached San Lucar on the Spanish border, he found Andalusian militia provided with artillery watching him across the Guadiana. He also learnt that a large force was assembling at Badajoz, and that Dupont had got no further than Cordova—more than 150 miles away. After some hesitation he retraced his steps till he halted at Estremoz, facing Badajoz. Loison had much the same experience: starting from Almeida he crossed the border and scared away the small Spanish garrison of Fort Concepcion: but when he drew near Ciudad Rodrigo and learnt that the place was strongly held, that all the kingdom of Leon was in revolt, and that Bessières was still far distant in Old Castile, he drew back to Almeida . Returning thither he heard of the troubles in Northern Portugal, and resolved to march on Oporto, which was still holding back from open insurrection when the news reached him. He determined to hasten to that important city and to garrison it. Taking two battalions and a few guns, while he left the rest of his brigade at Almeida, he marched on Oporto, crossed the Douro at the ferry of Pezo-de-Ragoa, and began to move on Amarante . But the moment that he was over the river, he found himself in the middle of the insurrection: among the mountains the peasantry began to fire from above on his long column, to roll rocks down the slopes at him, and to harass his baggage and rearguard. Seeing that he had only 2,000 men in hand, and that the whole country-side was up, Loison wisely returned to Almeida, which he regained by a circular march through Lamego and Celorico, dispersing several bands of insurgents on the way, for the rebellion had already begun to spread across the Douro into the hills of Northern Beira .
Lisbon in the meanwhile was on the verge of revolt, but was still contained by the fact that Junot held concentrated in and about it the main body of his army, some 15,000 men. On the Feast of Corpus Christi (June 16) the annual religious procession through the streets nearly led to bloodshed. This was the greatest festival of Lisbon, and had always led to the assembly of enormous crowds: Junot allowed it to be once more celebrated, but lined the streets with soldiers, and placed artillery ready for action in the main squares and avenues. While the function was in progress a senseless panic broke out among the crowd, some shouting that they felt a shock of earthquake (always a terror in Lisbon since the catastrophe of 1755), others that the English were landing, others that the soldiers were about to fire on the people. The frantic mob burst through the military cordon, the procession was broken up, the prelate who bore the Sacrament took refuge in a church, and the tumult grew so wild that the artillery were about to open with grape, thinking that they had to deal with a carefully prepared insurrection. A great and miscellaneous slaughter was only prevented by the coolness of Junot, who threw himself into the throng, prevented the troops from firing, cleared the street, prevailed on the clergy to finish the procession, and dispersed the multitudes with no loss of life save that of a few persons crushed or trampled to death in the panic.
But though this tumult passed off without a disaster, Junot’s position was uncomfortable. He had just begun to realize the real proportions of the insurrection in Spain, which had now completely cut him off from communication with his colleagues. He had only the vaguest knowledge of how Dupont and Bessières were faring: and the fact that large Spanish forces were gathering both at Ciudad Rodrigo and at Badajoz inclined him to think that affairs must be going ill in Castile and Andalusia. The long-feared English invasion seemed at last to be growing imminent: General Spencer’s division from Sicily and Gibraltar was at sea, and had showed itself first off Ayamonte and the coast of Algarve, then off the Tagus-mouth. Ignorant that Spencer had only 5,000 men, and that he had been brought near Lisbon merely by a false report that the garrison had been cut down to a handful, Junot expected a disembarkation. But Spencer went back to Cadiz when he learnt that there were 15,000 instead of 4,000 men ready to defend the capital.
Meanwhile the populace of Lisbon was stirred up by all manner of wild rumours: it was said that Loison had been surrounded and forced to surrender by the northern insurgents, that the Spanish army of Galicia was marching south, that an English corps had landed at Oporto. All sorts of portents and signs were reported for the benefit of the superstitious. The most preposterous was one which we should refuse to credit if it were not vouched for by Foy, and other respectable French authorities. A hen’s egg was found on the high-altar of the patriarchal church, with the inscription Morran os Franceses (‘Death to the French’) indented in its shell. This caused such excitement that Junot thought it worth while to show that a similar phenomenon could be produced on any egg by a skilful application of acids. When his chemists exhibited several branded in an equally convincing way with the words, Vive l’Empereur! the enthusiasm of the credulous was somewhat damped.
Recognizing that he could expect no further help from the French armies in Spain, and that the insurrection would certainly spread over every parish of Portugal that did not contain a garrison, Junot wisely resolved to concentrate the outlying fractions of his army, which lay exposed and isolated at points far from Lisbon. At a council of war, held on June 25, he laid before his chief officers the alternatives of evacuating Portugal and retiring on Madrid by the way of Badajoz, or of uniting the army in the neighbourhood of Lisbon and making an attempt to hold Central Portugal, while abandoning the extreme north and south. The latter plan was unanimously adopted: in the state of ignorance in which the generals lay as to what was going on at Madrid and elsewhere in Spain, the retreat by Badajoz seemed too hazardous. Moreover, it was certain to provoke Napoleon’s wrath if it turned out to have been unnecessary. Accordingly it was resolved to place garrisons in the fortresses of Elvas, Almeida and Peniche, to fortify Setuval on the peninsula opposite Lisbon, and to draw in all the rest of the troops to the vicinity of the capital. Dispatches to this effect were sent to Loison at Almeida, to Avril at Estremoz, to Maransin at Mertola, and to Kellermann, who was watching Badajoz from Elvas. Many of the aides-de-camp who bore these orders were cut off by the insurgents, but in the end copies of each dispatch were transmitted to their destinations. In several instances the detached corps had begun to fall back on the Tagus, even before they received the command to do so.
This was the case with Maransin at Mertola, who, finding himself hopelessly isolated with 1,200 men in the centre of the insurrection, had marched on Lisbon via Beja. On June 26 he reached the latter place and found its ancient walls manned by a disorderly mass of citizens, who fired upon him as he drew near. But he stormed the town without much difficulty, cruelly sacked it, and resumed his march on Lisbon unharmed. This was not the first fighting that had occurred in the Alemtejo; four days before Avril had had to march from Estremoz to chastise the inhabitants of Villa Viciosa, who had taken arms and besieged the company of the 86th regiment which garrisoned their town. He scattered them with much slaughter, and, after the usual French fashion, plundered the little place from cellar to garret.
On receiving Junot’s orders, General Kellermann, who bore the chief command in the Alemtejo, left a battalion and a half—1,400 men—in Elvas and its outlying fort of La Lippe. With the rest he retired on Lisbon, picking up first the corps of Avril and then that of Maransin, which met him at Evora. He then entered the capital, leaving only one brigade, that of Graindorge, at Setuval to the south of the Tagus .
Loison in the north did not receive his orders for a full week after they were sent out, owing to the disorderly state of the intervening country. But on July 4 he left Almeida, after making for it a garrison of 1,200 men, by drafting into a provisional battalion all his soldiers who did not seem fit for forced marching. He then moved for seven days through the mountains of Beira to Abrantes, skirmishing with small bands of insurgents all the way. At two or three places they tried to block his path, and the town of Guarda made a serious attempt to defend itself, and was in consequence sacked and partly burnt. Leaving a trail of ruined villages behind him, Loison at last reached Abrantes and got into communication with his chief. He had lost on the way 200 men, mostly stragglers whom the peasantry murdered: but he had inflicted such a cruel lesson on the country-side that his popular nickname (Maneta, ‘One-Hand’) was held accursed for many years in Portugal.
The withdrawal of the French troops from the outlying provinces gave the insurrection full scope for development. It followed close in the track of the retiring columns, and as each valley was evacuated its inhabitants hoisted the national flag, sent in their vows of allegiance to the Junta at Oporto, and began to organize armed bands. But there was such a dearth of military stores that very few men could be properly equipped with musket and bayonet. Junot had long before called in the arms of the disbanded militia, and destroyed them or forwarded them to Lisbon. In the southern provinces the lack of weapons was even worse than in the valley of the Douro: there was practically no armament except a few hundred muskets hastily borrowed from the Spaniards of Badajoz and Seville, and a small dép?t of cavalry equipment at Estremoz which Avril had forgotten to carry off. An insurrectionary junta for the Alemtejo was formed at Evora, but its general, Francisco Leite, could only succeed in equipping the mere shadow of an army. In the north things were a little better: the rising spread to Coimbra in the last week of June, and one of its first leaders, the student Bernardo Zagalo, succeeded in capturing the small coast-fortress of Figueira by starving out the scanty French garrison, which had been caught wholly destitute of provisions . Bernardino Freire then brought up the 5,000 regular troops, which the Junta of Oporto had succeeded in getting together, as far as the line of the Mondego. But the insurrectionary area spread much further southward, even up to Leyria and Thomar, which lie no more than sixty-five miles from the capital. From these two places, however, the rebels were easily cleared out by a small expedition of 3,000 men under General Margaron . Junot’s army in the second week of July held nothing outside the narrow quadrangle of which Setuval, Peniche, Abrantes, and Lisbon form the four points. But within that limited space there were now 24,000 good troops, concentrated and ready to strike a blow at the first insurrectionary force that might press in upon them.
But for a fortnight the Portuguese made no further move, and Junot now resolved to attack the insurgents who lay beyond the Tagus in the plains of the Alemtejo. His chief motive seems to have been the wish to reopen his communications with Elvas, and to keep the way clear towards Badajoz, the direction in which he would have to retreat, if ever he made up his mind to evacuate Lisbon and retire on Spain. Accordingly, on July 25, he sent out the energetic Loison at the head of a strong flying column—seven and a half battalions, two regiments of dragoons, and eight guns—over 7,000 men in all. This force was directed to march on Elvas by way of Evora, the capital of the Alemtejo, and the seat of its new Junta. On July 29 Loison appeared before the walls of that city. To his surprise the enemy offered him battle in the open; General Leite had brought up such of his newly organized troops as he could collect—they amounted to no more than a battalion and a half of infantry and 120 horse; but to help him there had come up from Badajoz the Spanish Colonel Moretti with about the same number of foot, a regiment of regular cavalry (the ‘Hussars of Maria Luisa’), and seven guns. In all the allies had under 3,000 men, but they were presumptuous enough to form a line of battle outside Evora, and wait for Loison’s attack. A mixed multitude of peasants and citizens, more of them armed with pikes than with fowling-pieces, manned the walls of the town behind them. Leite and his colleague should have drawn back their regulars to the same position: they might have been able to do something behind walls, but to expose them in the open to the assault of more than double of their own numbers of French troops was absurd.
Loison’s first charge broke the weak line of the allied army; the Spanish cavalry fled without crossing swords with the French, and General Leite left the field with equal precipitation. But the bulk of the infantry fell back on Evora and aided the peasantry to defend its ruined mediaeval walls. They could not hold out, however, for many minutes; the French forced their way in at four or five points, made a great slaughter in the streets, and ended the day by sacking the city with every detail of sacrilege and brutality. Foy says that 2,000 Spaniards and Portuguese fell; his colleague Thiébault gives the incredible figure of 8,000. Even the smaller number must include a good many unarmed inhabitants of Evora massacred during the sack. The French lost ninety killed and 200 wounded .
On the third day after the fight Loison marched for Elvas, and drove away the hordes which were blockading it. He was then preparing to push a reconnaissance in force against Badajoz, when he received from his commander-in-chief orders to return at once to Lisbon. The long-expected English invasion of Portugal had at last begun, for on August 1 Sir Arthur Wellesley was already disembarking his troops in Mondego Bay. Junot was therefore set on concentrating in order to fight, and Loison’s expeditionary force was too important a part of his army to be left out of the battle. Dropping the battalion of the Hanoverian Legion as a garrison at Santarem, Loison brought the rest of his 7,000 men to his commander’s aid.
LANDING OF THE BRITISH: COMBAT OF ROLI?A
From the first moment when the Asturian deputies arrived in London, with the news of the insurrection in Northern Spain , the English Government had been eager to intervene in the Peninsula. The history of the last fifteen years was full of the records of unfortunate expeditions sent out to aid national risings, real or imaginary, against France. They had mostly turned out disastrous failures: it is only necessary to mention the Duke of York’s miserable campaign of 1799 in Holland, Stewart’s invasion of Calabria in 1806, and Whitelock’s disgraceful fiasco at Buenos Ayres in 1807. As a rule the causes of their ill success had been partly incapable leading, partly an exaggerated parsimony in the means employed. Considering the vast power of France, it was futile to throw ashore bodies of five thousand, ten thousand, or even twenty thousand men on the Continent, and to expect them to maintain themselves by the aid of small local insurrections, such as those of the Orange party in Holland or the Calabrian mountaineers. The invasion of Spanish South America, on the hypothesis that its inhabitants were all prepared to revolt against the mother-country—a fiction of General Miranda—had been even more unwise.
The ‘policy of filching sugar islands,’ as Sheridan wittily called it—of sending out expeditions of moderate size, which only inflicted pin-pricks on non-vital portions of the enemy’s dominions—was still in full favour when the Spanish War began. There was hardly a British statesman who rose above such ideas; Pitt and Addington, Fox and Grenville, and the existing Tory government of the Duke of Portland, had all persisted in the same futile plans. At the best such warfare resulted in the picking up of stray colonies, such as Ceylon and Trinidad, the Cape, St. Thomas, or Cura?ao: but in 1808 the more important oversea possessions of France and her allies were still unsubdued. At the worst the policy led to checks and disasters small or great, like Duckworth’s failure at Constantinople, the abortive Egyptian expedition of 1807, or the catastrophe of Buenos Ayres. Castlereagh seems to have been the only leading man who dared to contemplate an interference on a large scale in Continental campaigns. His bold scheme for the landing of 60,000 men in Hanover, during the winter of 1805-6, had been foiled partly by the hesitation of his colleagues, partly by the precipitation with which Francis II made peace after Austerlitz.
But the policy of sending small auxiliary forces to the Iberian Peninsula was quite a familiar one. We had maintained a few thousand men under Generals Burgoyne and Townsend for the defence of Portugal against Spain in 1762. And again in 1801 there had been a small British division employed in the farcical war which had ended in the Treaty of Badajoz. In the year after Austerlitz, when it seemed likely that Bonaparte might take active measures against Portugal, the Fox-Grenville ministry had offered the Regent military aid, but had seen it politely refused, for the timid prince was still set on conciliating the Emperor.
With so many precedents before them, it was natural that the Portland cabinet should assent to the demands of the Spanish deputies who appeared in London in June, 1808. The insurrection in the Iberian Peninsula was so unexpected and so fortunate a chance, that it was obviously necessary to turn it to account. Moreover, its attendant circumstances were well calculated to rouse enthusiasm even in the breasts of professional politicians. Here was the first serious sign of that national rising against Bonaparte which had been so often prophesied, but which had been so long in coming. Even the Whigs, who had systematically denounced the sending of aid to the ‘effete despotisms of the Continent,’ and had long maintained that Napoleon was not so black as he was painted, were disarmed in their criticisms by the character of the Spanish rising. What excuse could be made for the treachery at Bayonne? And how could sympathy be refused to a people which, deprived of its sovereign and betrayed by its bureaucracy, had so gallantly taken arms to defend its national existence? The debates in the British Parliament during the middle days of June show clearly that both the Government and the Opposition had grasped the situation, and that for once they were united as to the policy which should be pursued. It is only needful to quote a few sentences from the speeches of Canning as Foreign Secretary, and Sheridan as Leader of the Opposition .
‘Whenever any nation in Europe,’ said Canning, ‘starts up with a determination to oppose that power which (whether professing insidious peace or declaring open war) is alike the common enemy of all other peoples, that nation, whatever its former relations with us may have been, becomes ipso facto the ally of Great Britain. In furnishing the aid which may be required, the Government will be guided by three principles—to direct the united efforts of both countries against the common foe, to direct them in such a way as shall be most beneficial to our common ally, and to direct them to such objects as may be most conducive to British interests. But of these objects the last shall never be allowed to come into competition with the other two. I mention British interests chiefly for the purpose of disclaiming them as any material part of the considerations which influence the British Government. No interest can be so purely British as Spanish success: no conquest so advantageous to England as conquering from France the complete integrity of the Spanish dominions in every quarter of the globe.’
Sheridan repeats the same theme in a slightly different key:—‘Hitherto Buonaparte has run a victorious race, because he has contended with princes without dignity, ministers without wisdom, and peoples without patriotism. He has yet to learn what it is to combat a nation who are animated with one spirit against him. Now is the time to stand up boldly and fairly for the deliverance of Europe, and if the ministry will co-operate effectually with the Spanish patriots they shall receive from us cordial support.... Never was anything so brave, so noble, so generous as the conduct of the Spaniards: never was there a more important crisis than that which their patriotism has occasioned to the state of Europe. Instead of striking at the core of the evil, the Administrations of this country have hitherto gone on nibbling merely at the rind: filching sugar islands, but neglecting all that was dignified and consonant to the real interests of the country. Now is the moment to let the world know that we are resolved to stand up for the salvation of Europe. Let us then co-operate with the Spaniards, but co-operate in an effectual and energetic way. And if we find that they are really heart and soul in the enterprise, let us advance with them, magnanimous and undaunted, for the liberation of mankind.... Above all, let us mix no little interests of our own in this mighty combat. Let us discard or forget British objects, and conduct the war on the principle of generous support and active co-operation.’
It may perhaps be hypercritical to point out the weak spot in each of these stirring harangues. But Canning protested a little too much—within a few weeks of his speech the British Government was applying to the Junta of Seville to allow them to garrison Cadiz, which was refused (and rightly), for in the proposal British interests peeped out a little too clearly. And Sheridan, speaking from vague and overcoloured reports of the state of affairs in the Peninsula, went too far when he extolled the unmixed generosity and nobility of the conduct of the Spaniards: mingled with their undoubted patriotism there was enough of bigotry and cruelty, of self-seeking and ignorance, to make his harangue ring somewhat false in the ears of future generations. Yet both Canning and Sheridan spoke from the heart, and their declarations mark a very real turning-point in the history of the great struggle with Bonaparte.
Fortunately for Great Britain, and for the nations of the Iberian Peninsula, we were far better prepared for striking a heavy blow on the Continent in 1808 than we had been at any earlier period of the war. There was no longer any need to keep masses of men ready in the south-eastern counties for the defence of England against a French invasion. There were no longer any French forces of appreciable strength garrisoned along the English Channel: indeed Castlereagh had just been planning a raid to burn the almost unprotected French flotilla which still mouldered in the harbour of Boulogne. Our standing army had recently been strengthened and reorganized by a not inconsiderable military reform. The system had just been introduced by which Wellington’s host was destined to be recruited during the next six years. Every year two-fifths of the 120,000 embodied militia of the United Kingdom were to be allowed to volunteer into the regular army, while the places of the volunteers were filled up by men raised by ballot from the counties. This sort of limited conscription worked well: in the year 1808 it gave 41,786 men to the line, and these not raw recruits, but already more or less trained to arms by their service in the militia. All through the war this system continued: the Peninsular army, it must always be remembered, drew more than half its reinforcing drafts from the ‘old constitutional force.’ Hence came the ease with which it assimilated its recruits. Meanwhile the embodied militia never fell short in establishment, as it was automatically replenished by the ballot. The result of these changes, for which Castlereagh deserves the chief credit, was a permanent addition of 25,000 men to the regular force available for service at home or in Europe.
In June, 1808, there chanced to be several considerable bodies of troops which could be promptly utilized for an expedition to Spain. The most important was a corps of some 9,000 men which was being collected in the south of Ireland, to renew the attack on South America which had failed so disastrously in 1807. The news of the Spanish insurrection had, of course, led to the abandonment of the design, and General Miranda, its originator, had been informed that he must look for no further support from England. In addition to this force in Ireland there were a couple of brigades in the south-eastern counties of England, which had been intended to form the nucleus of Castlereagh’s projected raid on Boulogne. They had been concentrated at Harwich and Ramsgate respectively, and the transports for them were ready. A still more important contingent, but one that lay further off, and was not so immediately available, was the corps of 10,000 men which Sir John Moore had taken to the Baltic. In June it became known that it was impossible to co-operate with the hairbrained King of Sweden, who was bent on invading Russian Finland, a scheme to which the British Ministry refused its assent. Moore, therefore, after many stormy interviews with Gustavus IV, was preparing to bring his division home. With the aid of Spencer’s troops, which had so long been hovering about Cadiz and Gibraltar, and of certain regiments picked out of the English garrisons, it was easily possible to provide 40,000 men for service in Spain and Portugal.
But a number of isolated brigades and battalions suddenly thrown together do not form an army, and though Castlereagh had provided a large force for the projected expedition to the Peninsula, it was destitute of any proper organization. With the expedition that sailed from Cork there was only half a regiment of cavalry, and the brigades from Harwich, Ramsgate, and Gibraltar had not a single horseman with them, so that there were actually 18,000 foot to 390 horse among the contingents that first disembarked to contend with Junot’s army. Transport was almost equally neglected: only the troops from Cork had any military train with them, and that they were provided with horses and vehicles was only due to the prescience of their commander, who had at the last moment procured leave from London to enlist for foreign service and take with him two troops of the ‘Royal Irish Corps of Wagoners.’ ‘I declare,’ wrote Wellesley, ‘that I do not understand the principles on which our military establishments are formed, if, when large corps are sent out to perform important and difficult services, they are not to have with them those means of equipment which they require, such as horses to draw artillery, and drivers attached to the commissariat.’ Without this wise inspiration, he would have found himself unable to move when he arrived in the Peninsula: as it was, he had to leave behind, when he landed, some of his guns and half his small force of cavalry, because the authorities had chosen to believe that both draft and saddle horses could readily be procured in Portugal. Such little contretemps were common in the days when Frederick Duke of York, with the occasional assistance of Mrs. Mary Ann Clark, managed the British army.
But the arrangements as to the command of the expedition were the most ill-managed part of the business. The force at Cork was, as we have already explained, under the orders of Sir Arthur Wellesley, the younger brother of the great viceroy who had so much extended our Indian Empire between 1799 and 1805. He was the junior lieutenant-general in the British army, but had already to his credit a more brilliant series of victories than any other officer then living, including the all-important triumph of Assaye, which had so effectually broken the power of the Mahrattas. In 1808 he was a Member of Parliament and Under-Secretary for Ireland, but Castlereagh (who had the most unbounded belief in his abilities, and had long been using his advice on military questions) had picked him out to command the expedition mustering at Cork. When its destination was changed from America to Spain, the Secretary for War still hoped to keep him in command, but the Duke of York and the War Office were against Wellesley. There were many respectable lieutenant-generals of enormous seniority and powerful connexions who were eager for foreign service. None of them had Wellesley’s experience of war on a large scale, or had ever moved 40,000 men on the field: but this counted for little at head quarters. The command in Portugal was made over to two of his seniors. The first was Sir Hew Dalrymple, a man of fifty-eight, whose only campaigning had been with the Duke of York in Flanders thirteen years back. He had been Governor of Gibraltar since 1806, knew something of Spanish politics, and was now in active communication with Casta?os. The second in command was to be Sir Harry Burrard: he was an old Guards officer who had served during the American rebellion, and had more recently commanded a division during the Copenhagen expedition without any special distinction. The third was Sir John Moore, and to being superseded by him Wellesley could not reasonably have objected. He was at this moment perhaps the most distinguished officer in the British service: he had done splendid work in the West Indies, Egypt, and the Netherlands. He had reorganized the light infantry tactics of the British army, and had won the enthusiastic admiration of all who had ever served under him for his zeal and intelligent activity. But Moore, like Wellesley, was to be placed under Dalrymple and Burrard, and not trusted with an independent command. At the present moment he was still far away in the Baltic, and was not expected to arrive for some time. Meanwhile Wellesley was allowed to sail in temporary charge of the expeditionary force, and still under the impression that he was to retain its guidance. His transports weighed anchor on July 12, and it was only on July 15 that the dispatch from Downing Street, informing him that he had been superseded by Dalrymple and Burrard, was drafted. It did not reach him till he had already landed in Portugal.
His political instructions had been forwarded as early as June 30. They were drawn up mainly on the data that the Asturian and Galician deputations had furnished to the ministry. Both the Juntas had been unwise enough to believe that the national rising would suffice to expel the French—whose numbers they much underrated—from Spain. While empowering their envoys to ask for money, arms, and stores, they had ordered them to decline the offer of an auxiliary force. They requested that all available British troops might be directed on Portugal, in order to rouse an insurrection in that country (which was still quiet when they arrived in London), and to prevent the troops of Junot from being employed against the rear of the army of General Blake. In deference to their suggestions the British Government had sent enormous stores of muskets, powder, and equipment to Gihon and Ferrol, but directed Wellesley to confine his activity to Portugal. The Spaniards, with their usual inaccuracy, had estimated the total of Junot’s army at no more than 15,000 men. Misled by this absurd undervaluation, Castlereagh informed Wellesley that if he found that his own and Spencer’s forces sufficed for the reduction of Portugal, he might ‘operate against the Tagus’ at once. But if more men were required, an additional 10,000 bayonets would be provided from England, and the expeditionary force might meanwhile ask the leave of the Galician Junta to stop at Vigo—a halt which would have cost many weeks of valuable time. Wellesley himself was to choose a fast-sailing vessel and make for Corunna, where he was to confer with the Junta and pick up the latest information as to the state of affairs in the Peninsula.
In accordance with these instructions Sir Arthur preceded the bulk of his armament on the Crocodile, and reached Corunna in the short space of eight days . He found the Galicians somewhat depressed by the disaster of Medina de Rio Seco, whose details they misrepresented in the most shameless fashion to their distinguished visitor. Bessières, they said, had lost 7,000 men and six guns, and although he had forced Blake and Cuesta to retreat on Benavente, those generals had still 40,000 troops under arms, and had no need of any auxiliary force. ‘The arrival of the British money yesterday has entirely renewed their spirits,’ wrote Wellesley, ‘and neither in them nor in the inhabitants of this town do I see any symptom of alarm, or doubt of their final success.’ This vainglorious confidence was supported by an infinity of false news: Lefebvre-Desnouettes was said to have been thrice defeated near Saragossa, and Dupont and his whole corps had been taken prisoners on June 22 in an action between Andujar and La Carolina—a curious prophecy, for it foresaw and placed a month too early the catastrophe of Baylen, which no reasonable man could have predicted. Almost the only correct information which was supplied to Wellesley was the news of the revolt of Oporto and the rest of Northern Portugal. It was clear that there was now an opening for the British army in that country, and as the Galicians continued to display their reluctance to receive any military aid, Sir Arthur went to sea again, joined his fleet of transports off Cape Finisterre, and bade them make for the mouth of the Douro. He himself put into Oporto, where he landed and interviewed the Bishop and the Supreme Junta. He found them in no very happy frame of mind: they had, as they confessed, only been able to arm 5,000 infantry and 300 cavalry, who lay under Bernardino Freire at Coimbra, and 1,500 men more for a garrison at Oporto. The rest of these levies consisted of 12,000 peasants with pikes, ‘and though the people were ready and desirous to take arms, unfortunately there were none in the country’—not even enough to equip the disbanded regulars. The Bishop expressed himself as much alarmed at the news of the disaster at Medina de Rio Seco, and his military advisers acknowledged that in consequence of that battle they had given up any hope of aid from Spain. They asked eagerly for arms, of which the English fleet carried many thousand stand, and were anxious to see Wellesley’s troops landed. The place which they recommended for putting the army ashore was Mondego Bay, near Coimbra, where the mouth of the Mondego River furnishes an indifferent harbour, guarded by the fort of Figueira. That stronghold, it will be remembered, had been seized by the bold exploit of the student Zagalo; it was now garrisoned by 300 British marines, so that the disembarkation would be safe from disturbance by anything save the heavy Atlantic surf, which always beats against the western coast of Portugal. There was no other port available along the shore save Peniche, which was dangerously close to Lisbon, and guarded by a castle still in French hands. Nearer still to the capital, landing is just possible at Cascaes and a few other places: but there was no regular harbour, and Admiral Cotton agreed with Wellesley in thinking that it would be mad to attempt to throw troops ashore on a dangerous rock-bound coast in the midst of Junot’s cantonments. Mondego Bay was therefore appointed as the general place of rendezvous for the fleet, which had now begun to arrive opposite the mouth of the Douro.
As to the Portuguese troops, the Supreme Junta agreed that Bernardino Freire and his 5,000 men should go forward with the British army, while the new levies should blockade Almeida, and guard the frontier along the Douro against any possible advance on the part of Marshal Bessières from Castile. The Junta calculated that, if supplied with arms, they could put into the field from the three northern provinces of Portugal 38,000 foot and 8,000 horse—a liberal estimate, as they had, including their peasant levies, no more than 19,000 collected on July 25. They asked for weapons and clothing for the whole mass, and for a loan of 300,000 Cruzado Novas (about ￡35,000)—no very large sum considering the grants that were being made to the Spaniards at this time. Wellesley would only promise that he would arm the militia and peasantry who were lying along the Mondego in company with Freire’s regulars, ‘if he found them worth it.’ The Bishop undertook to forward from Oporto all the remounts for cavalry and all the draught-mules for commissariat purposes that he could get together. He thought that he could procure 150 of the former and 500 of the latter in six days.
On August 1, 1808, the disembarkation in Mondego Bay began, in the face of a heavy surf which rendered landing very dangerous, especially for the horses, guns, and stores. Many boats were upset and a few lives lost; but the troops and their commander were in good spirits, for the news of the surrender of Dupont at Baylen on July 20 had reached them the day before the disembarkation began. Wellesley was convinced that General Spencer would have sailed from Andalusia to join him, the moment that this great victory made the presence of British troops in the south unnecessary. He was right, for Spencer, before receiving any orders to that effect, had embarked his men for Portugal and came into Mondego Bay on August 5, just as the last of the division from Cork had been placed on shore. It was therefore with some 13,000 men that Wellesley began his march on Lisbon. But to his bitter disappointment the young lieutenant-general had just learnt that three commanders had been placed over his head, and that he might soon expect Dalrymple to arrive and assume charge of the army. Castlereagh’s dispatch of July 15, containing this unwelcome news, was delivered to Wellesley as he lay in Mondego Bay on the thirtieth, and he had to make all his arrangements for disembarkation while suffering under this unexpected slight. Many men would have resigned under such a blow, and Wellesley with his unbounded ambition, his strong sense of his deserts, and his well-marked tendency to take offence must have been boiling over with suppressed indignation. But he felt that to ask to be recalled, because he had been degraded from a commander-in-chief to a mere general of division, would be an unsoldierly act. To Castlereagh he merely wrote that ‘whether he was to command the army or to quit it, he would do his best to ensure its success, and would not hurry operations one moment in order to acquire credit before the arrival of his superiors.’
Meanwhile there were yet a few days during which he would retain the command, and it was in his power to start the campaign on the right lines, even if he was not to reap the reward of its success. His first eight days on shore (August 2-9), were spent in the organization of the commissariat of his army, which the Home Government had disgracefully neglected. Except the two troops of the Irish Wagon Train, which he had insisted on bringing with him, he had no transport at his disposal, and, as he wrote to Castlereagh, ‘the existence of the army depends upon the commissariat, and yet the people who manage it are incapable of managing anything out of a counting-house.’ All that could be got out of the country he utilized: the Bishop of Oporto had sent him a few horses which enabled him to raise his force of mounted men from 180 to 240, and to give some animals to the artillery, to add to those that had come from Ireland. But though he succeeded in equipping his own three batteries, the two which Spencer brought from Andalusia had to be left behind on the Mondego for want of draught-horses: the dismounted men of the 20th Dragoons had also to be dropped. For the commissariat the Bishop of Oporto had sent some mules, which were raised to a total of 500 by purchases in the country-side, while 300 bullock-carts were procured for the heavier stores by requisition from the neighbouring villages. It was only on the ninth that things were so far ready that the army could move forward. It was now divided into six small brigades under Generals Hill, Ferguson, Nightingale, Bowes, Catlin Crawfurd, and Fane: the third, fourth, and fifth brigades had only two battalions each, the other four had three.
Wellesley had resolved to advance by the coast-road on Lisbon, via Alcoba?a, Obidos, and Torres Vedras, and it was along the desolate shore ‘up to the knees in sand and suffering dreadfully from thirst,’ that his men made their first march of twelve miles to Lugar. The distance was moderate, but the troops had been so long cramped on shipboard that some of the regiments had fallen out of condition and left many stragglers.
The reasons which had determined Wellesley to take the coast route, rather than that which leads from the Mondego to Lisbon via Santarem, were, as he afterwards explained, partly a wish to keep in touch with the fleet for the purpose of obtaining supplies—for he found that the country could support him in wine and beef, but not in flour—and partly the fact that he had learnt that new reinforcements from England were likely to appear within a few days. The brigades from Harwich and Ramsgate, under Generals Acland and Anstruther, had sailed on July 19 and might be looked for at any moment. Sir John Moore, with the division from Sweden, was also reported to be on his way to the south, but could not be expected to arrive for some time. Having ascertained that the French force in Portugal was somewhat larger than he originally supposed, Sir Arthur wished to pick up the troops of Acland and Anstruther before giving battle. In this he was even wiser than he knew, for he still estimated Junot’s total disposable force at 18,000 men, while it was really 26,000. To have attacked Lisbon with no more than the 13,000 troops who had originally disembarked at the mouth of the Mondego would have been most hazardous.
Wellesley had at first intended to take on with him the whole of Bernardino Freire’s army. He had visited the Portuguese commander at Montemor Velho on the seventh, and had issued to his ally a supply of 5,000 muskets. Freire was anxious to persuade him to give up the coast route, and to throw himself into the interior on the side of Santarem. But the cogent reasons which compelled him to prefer the road which allowed him to keep in touch with the fleet, made him refuse to listen to this plan, and he invited the Portuguese general to transfer himself on to the same line. Freire so far submitted as to move to Leiria, where he met the British army on August 10. But here the two commanders came to hard words and parted. Freire, a self-willed and shifty man, was determined not to act in unison with Wellesley. Whether he wished to preserve his independent command, or whether he feared (as Napier hints) to oppose his raw levies to the French, even when supported by 13,000 British bayonets, he now showed himself utterly impracticable. He began by laying hands on all the stores of food in Leiria, though they had been promised to Wellesley. Then he made the absurd and impudent statement that he could only co-operate with his allies if Wellesley would undertake to provide rations for his 6,000 men. This proposal was all the more astounding because he had just been trying to persuade his colleague to move into the inland, by the statement that resources of every kind abounded in Estremadura, and that the whole British army could easily live upon the country-side! Wellesley’s men had now been subsisting for ten days on biscuit landed by the fleet, and it was ludicrous that he should be asked to take upon his shoulders the whole burden of feeding the Portuguese in their own country. Accordingly he utterly rejected the proposal, but he insisted that Freire should lend him some cavalry and light troops, and these he promised to maintain. The bulk of the Portuguese, therefore, remained behind at Leiria, their general being left free to take up, if he should choose, his favourite plan of marching on Santarem. But 260 horsemen—the skeletons of three old cavalry regiments—a battalion of Cazadores, and three weak line-regiments were placed at Wellesley’s disposition: they amounted to about 2,300 men, according to the Portuguese official figures, but the British commander repeatedly states that he saw no more than 260 horse and 1,600 infantry; so it is probable that the regiments were somewhat under the estimate given by Freire. They were commanded by Colonel Trant, a British officer in the Portuguese service.
Turning once more into the road that skirts the coast, Wellesley marched on the thirteenth from Leiria, and reached Alcoba?a on the fourteenth. Here he got his first news of the French: a brigade under Thomières had occupied the village till the previous day, and he learnt that General Delaborde, with a weak division, was somewhere in his front, in the direction of Obidos and Roli?a.
Junot had received prompt information of the landing of the British in Mondego Bay; on the very day after it had commenced he was able to send orders to Loison to abandon his post in front of Badajoz and to march at once to join the main army. Meanwhile Delaborde was sent out from Lisbon on August 6 to observe and, if possible, contain Wellesley, till Junot should have concentrated his whole field-army and be ready to fight. He was told to expect Loison from the direction of Thomar and Santarem, and to join him as soon as was possible. For his rather hazardous task he was given no more than five battalions of infantry and a single regiment of chasseurs à cheval, with five guns—not much more than 5,000 men.
Delaborde at first thought of making a stand, and compelling Wellesley to show his force, at Batalha near Alcoba?a, where John I had beaten the Spaniards, four and a half centuries ago, at the decisive battle of Aljubarotta. But, after examining the position, he found it so much surrounded by woods, and so destitute of good points of view, that he feared to be enveloped if he committed himself to a fight. Accordingly he drew back to Roli?a, leaving only a rearguard at Obidos to observe the approach of the British. At the same time he detached six companies of the 4th Swiss to garrison Peniche, thus reducing his available force to 4,350 men.
Wellesley, meanwhile, knowing himself to be close to the enemy, advanced steadily but with caution. He left behind his tents and other weighty baggage at Leiria, and moved forward with a lightly equipped army to Alcoba?a on the fourteenth, to Caldas on the fifteenth. On that day the first shot of the campaign was fired: four companies of the fifth battalion of the 60th and of the second battalion of the 95th Rifles discovered the French outposts at Brilos in front of Obidos, drove them in, and pursuing furiously for three miles, came on the battalion which formed Delaborde’s rearguard. This corps turned upon them, checked them with the loss of two officers and twenty-seven men killed and wounded, and only retired when General Spencer led up a brigade to save the riflemen.
Next morning the French were discovered to have fallen back no further than Roli?a, where Delaborde had found the position that he had sought in vain at Batalha. The road from Caldas and Obidos towards Torres Vedras and Lisbon passes for some miles over a sandy plain enclosed on either flank by bold hills. The southern limit of the basin is a cross-ridge, which connects the other two: in front of it lies Roli?a, on the side-slope of an isolated eminence which overlooks the whole plain: a mile further south the road passes over the cross-ridge by a sort of gorge or defile, on the right hand of which is the village of Columbeira, while to its left rear lies that of Zambugeira. Though Delaborde had drawn up his men on the hill of Roli?a down in the plain, it was not this advanced position that he intended to hold, but the higher and steeper line of the cross-ridge, on either side of the defile above Columbeira. Here he had a short front, only three-quarters of a mile in length, scarped by precipitous slopes, and covered by thickets and brushwood, which served to mask the strength (or rather the weakness) of his division.
Discovering Delaborde drawn up on the isolated hill of Roli?a, where both his flanks could easily be turned, the British commander resolved to endeavour to envelop and surround him. He waited on the sixteenth till the rear of the army had come up, and marched at dawn on the seventeenth with his whole force—13,000 British and 2,000 Portuguese, drawn up in a crescent-shaped formation with the centre refused and the wings thrown far forward. On the right Colonel Trant, with three battalions of Portuguese infantry and fifty horse of the same nation, moved along the foot of the western range of heights, to turn the Roli?a position by a wide circular movement. On the left General Ferguson, with his own brigade, that of Bowes, and six guns, struck over the hills to get round the eastern flank of the French. In the centre the remainder of the army—four brigades of British infantry, 400 cavalry, half English and half Portuguese, with the battalion of Cazadores and twelve guns, advanced on a broad front in two lines, forming a most magnificent spectacle: ‘they came on slowly but in beautiful order, dressing at intervals to correct the gaps caused by the inequalities of ground, and all converging on the hill of Roli?a.’ Hill’s brigade formed the right, Fane’s the left, Nightingale’s the centre, while Catlin Crawfurd’s two battalions and the Cazadores acted as the reserve.
Delaborde had warned his men to be ready for a sudden rush to the rear the minute that the enveloping movement should grow dangerous. Waiting till the last possible moment, when Fane’s riflemen were already engaged with his tirailleurs, and Trant and Ferguson were showing on the flanks, he suddenly gave the order for retreat. His men hurried back, easily eluding the snare, and took post on the wooded heights above Columbeira a mile to the rear. Wellesley had to rearrange his troops for an attack on the second position, and half the morning had been wasted to no effect. He resolved, however, to repeat his original man?uvre. Trant and the Portuguese once more made a long sweep to the right: Ferguson’s column mounted the foot-hills of the Sierra de Baragueda and commenced a toilsome detour to the left. In the centre two batteries formed up near a windmill on the northern slope of Roli?a hill and began to bombard the French position, while Fane’s brigade to the left on the main road, and Hill’s and Nightingale’s to the right deployed for the attack.
Wellesley had not intended to assault the Columbeira heights till the turning movements of Trant and Ferguson should be well developed. But, contrary to his intention, part of his centre pushed forward at once, and when it was engaged the other troops in the front line were sent up to its aid. The face of the hill was scarred by four ‘passes’ as Wellesley called them, or rather large ravines, up each of which some of the British troops tried to penetrate. On the extreme right the light companies of Hill’s brigade, supported by the first battalion of the 5th Regiment from the same brigade, delivered their attack up one gully. The second pass, just beyond the village of Columbeira, was assayed by the 29th from Nightingale’s brigade, with the 9th of Hill’s in support. The 82nd went towards the centre, while Fane’s two rifle battalions and the 45th tried the heights far to the left.
The 29th Regiment, urged on by the rash courage of its colonel, Lake, attacked some time before any other corps was engaged. It pushed up a narrow craggy pass, the bed of a dried-up mountain torrent, where in some places only two or three men abreast could keep their footing: the further that the battalion advanced, the more did the ravine recede into the centre of the enemy, and the 29th was soon being fired on from three sides. The right wing, which led, at last forced its way to the brow of the hill, and was able to deploy in a more or less imperfect way, and to commence its fire. In front of it were the few companies of the 4th Swiss, some of whom tried to surrender, calling out that they were friends, turning up their musket butts, and rushing in to shake hands with the British. But before the 29th could fully recover its formation, it was fiercely charged from the rear: some of the French troops on the lower slopes of the position, finding themselves likely to be cut off, formed in a dense mass and rushed straight through the right wing of Colonel Lake’s regiment from behind, breaking it, killing its commander and capturing six officers and some thirty of its rank and file, whom they took back with them in triumph. The 29th reeled down the slope into a wood, where it reformed on its comparatively intact left wing, and then resumed the fight, aided by the 9th, its supporting regiment. About this moment the 5th and Fane’s rifles made other attacks on the two ends of the hostile line, but were at first checked. Delaborde and his brigadier, Brennier, had only four battalions on the ridge, as they had detached three companies of the 70th far to their right in the direction in which Ferguson was moving. But they held their ground very gallantly, waiting till the British skirmishers had begun to get a lodgement on the brow, and then charging each detachment as it tried to deploy, and forcing it down to the edge of the wood that covered the lower slopes. Three assaults were thus repulsed, but the British troops would not be denied—Wellesley wrote that he had never seen more gallant fighting than that of the 9th and the 29th—and after each reverse formed up again and came on once more. After two hours of desperate struggles they made good their lodgement on the crest at several points: Ferguson’s troops (though they had lost their way and wasted much time) began to appear on the extreme left, and Delaborde then saw that it was time for him to go.
He retired by alternate battalions, two in turn holding back the disordered pursuers, while the other two doubled to the rear. His regiment of chasseurs à cheval also executed several partial charges against the British skirmishers, and lost its commander mortally wounded: the Portuguese cavalry refused to face them. In this way the French reached the pass behind Zambugeira, a mile to the rear, without any great loss. But in passing through this defile, they were forced to club together by the narrowness of the road, were roughly hustled by their pursuers, and lost three of their guns and a few prisoners. The rest of the force escaped in some disorder to Cazal da Sprega, where Wellesley halted his men, seeing that it was now impossible to catch Delaborde’s main body. Two miles to the rear the French were rejoined by the three companies of the 70th Regiment which had been detached to the east. They then retreated to Montechique some fifteen miles from Lisbon, where they at last got news of Loison and Junot.
Delaborde had fought a most admirable rearguard action, holding on to the last moment, and escaping by his prompt man?uvres the very serious risk of being enveloped and captured by the forces of the English, who outnumbered him fourfold. But he had lost 600 men and three guns, while his assailants had only suffered to the extent of 474 killed, wounded, and prisoners, nearly half of whom were in the ranks of the 29th. The French flattered themselves that they had somewhat shaken the morale of Wellesley’s men by their obstinate resistance: but this was far from being the case. The English had only put five and a half battalions into the fighting line, and were proud of having turned the enemy out of such a position as that of Columbeira without engaging more than 4,600 men.
It is doubtful whether Delaborde should have fought at all: he was holding on in the hope that Loison’s division would come up and join him, but this junction was very problematical, as nothing had been heard of that general for many days. By fighting at Columbeira, Delaborde risked complete destruction for an inadequate end. It was true that if Loison was now close at hand Wellesley’s further advance might cut him off from Lisbon. But as a matter of fact Loison was still far away. He had reached Santarem on August 13, with his troops so tired by his long march from the Alemtejo, that he halted there for two days to rest them and allow his stragglers to come up. Marching again on the sixteenth, he was at Cercal, fifteen miles from Roli?a to the east, while Delaborde was fighting. He barely heard the distant cannonade, and rejoined the rest of the army at Torres Vedras, by a route through Cadaval and Quinta da Bugagliera, which crossed his colleague’s line of retreat at an acute angle .
It is true that if Wellesley had been accurately informed of Loison’s position on the seventeenth, he could have so man?uvred as to place himself directly between that general and Lisbon on the following day, by seizing the cross-roads at Quinta da Bugagliera. In that case Loison’s division could only have rejoined Junot by a perilous flank march through Villafranca and Saccavem, or by crossing the Tagus and moving along its eastern bank to the heights of Almada opposite the capital. But the English general’s object at this moment was not to cut off Loison, but to pick up a considerable reinforcement, of whose approach he had just heard. On the morning of the eighteenth the brigade of General Acland from Harwich had arrived off the Peniche peninsula, and its advent was reported to Wellesley, with the additional news that that of General Anstruther, which had sailed from Ramsgate, was close behind. It was all-important to get these 4,000 men ashore: they could not be landed at Peniche, whose fort was still in French hands, and the only other anchorage near was that of Porto Novo, at the mouth of the little river Maceira, twelve miles south of Roli?a. To cover their disembarkation Wellesley marched by the coast-road through Lourinh?o, and encamped on the heights of Vimiero. This movement allowed Loison, who moved by the parallel road more inland, to pass the English and reach Torres Vedras.
NOTE TO CHAPTER II
By far the best English account of Roli?a is that by Col. Leslie of the 29th, in his Military Journal, which was not printed till 1887 (at the Aberdeen University Press). He corrects Napier on several points. I have also found useful details in the letters (unpublished) of Major Gell, of the same regiment, which were placed at my disposition by Mr. P. Lyttelton Gell. Leslie and Gell agree that Colonel Lake led on his regiment too fast, contrary to Wellesley’s intentions. The narrative of Colonel Leach of the 2/95th is also valuable. The accounts of Landsheit of the 20th Light Dragoons, of Colonel Wilkie in Maxwell’s Peninsular Sketches (vol. i), and the anonymous ‘T.S.’ of the 71st (Constable, Edinburgh, 1828) have some useful points. Foy and Thiébault, the French narrators of the fight, were not eye-witnesses, like the six above-named British writers.
VIMIERO
Junot much disliked leaving Lisbon: he greatly enjoyed his viceregal state, and was so convinced that to retain the capital was equivalent to dominating the whole of Portugal, that he attached an exaggerated importance to his hold on the place, and was very reluctant to cut down its garrison. But it was clearly necessary to support Delaborde and Loison, and at last he took his departure. As a preliminary precaution he resolved to deal a blow at the Alemtejo insurgents, who, emboldened by Loison’s retreat, were creeping nearer to the mouth of the Tagus, and showing themselves opposite Setuval. On August 11, five days after Delaborde had marched off, General Kellermann was sent out with two battalions and a few dragoons to drive off these hovering bands, a task which he executed with ease, giving them a thorough beating at Alcacer do Sal. Having cleared this flank Junot evacuated Setuval and his other outlying posts beyond the Tagus, and only retained garrisons at Forts Bugio and Trafaria, which command the entrance of the river, and on the heights of Almada, which face Lisbon across the ‘Mar de Palio.’ He put in a state of defence the old citadel which crowns the highest of the seven hills on which the city is built, and established a battalion in each of the suburban villages of Belem and Saccavem, another in Fort San Julian at the mouth of the Tagus, and two at Cascaes, in the batteries which command the only point where a disembarkation from the side of the Atlantic is barely possible. This excess of precaution was largely due to the fact that a small English convoy of transports, carrying the 3rd Regiment (the Buffs) from Madeira, had been seen off the mouth of the Tagus. The duke feared that this portended an attempt to throw troops ashore in the immediate vicinity of the capital, when he should have gone off to meet Wellesley.
Altogether Junot left seven battalions, not less than 6,500 men, in Lisbon and the neighbouring forts, a much greater number than was really required, for, as Napoleon afterwards observed, capitals wait, before declaring themselves, for events outside to cast their shadows before. Knowing that a decisive blow given to the English would be the best way to keep the city quiet, the Duke of Abrantes would have been wise to cut down his garrisons round Lisbon to 3,000 men, however great the risk, and take every available man to meet Wellesley. It is probable that his error, which no French general would have committed at a later period of the war, was due to that tendency to despise the fighting power of the British which was prevalent on the Continent all through the early years of the century.
Not the least of Junot’s troubles was the obstinate torpidity of the Russian admiral, Siniavin, whose 6,000 seamen and marines might have taken over the whole charge of Lisbon, if only their commander had been willing. The Russian had refused to take part in the war as long as only Portuguese were in the field, on the plea that his master had never declared war on the Prince-Regent or recognized the French annexation. But when the British had landed, Junot hoped to move him to action, for there was no doubt that Russia and the United Kingdom were technically at war. The Duke of Abrantes first tried to induce Siniavin to put out from the Tagus, to fall upon scattered British convoys, and to distract the attention of the blockading squadron under Cotton. But the reply that to sally forth into the Atlantic would probably mean destruction in two days by the British fleet was too rational to be overruled. Then Junot proposed that Siniavin should at least take charge of the pontoons containing the captive Spanish division of Caraffa: but this too was denied him, and he had to leave a battalion of Graindorge’s brigade to mount guard on the prisoners. The Russians were perfectly useless to Junot, except in so far as their guns helped to overawe Lisbon, and presented a show of force to deter British vessels from trying to force the passage of the forts at the mouth of the Tagus. The fact was that Siniavin was not so much stupid as disaffected: he belonged to the party in Russia which was opposed to France, and he had perhaps received a hint from home that he was not expected to show too much zeal in supporting the projects of Napoleon.
On the night of August 15, Junot marched out of Lisbon at the head of his reserve, a very small force consisting of a battalion of the 82nd of the line, one of the two regiments of grenadiers, which he had created by concentrating the grenadier companies of the eighteen line battalions in his army, the 3rd provisional regiment of dragoons, a squadron of volunteer cavalry formed by the French inhabitants of Lisbon, and his reserve artillery—ten guns under General Taviel. He also took with him the reserve ammunition-train, a large convoy of food, and his military chest containing a million of francs in specie. On the morning of the seventeenth the troops had reached Villafranca, when a false report that the English were trying to land at Cascaes caused them to retrace their steps for some miles, and to lose half a day’s march. On learning that Lisbon and its neighbourhood were quiet, Junot returned to the front, and growing vexed at the slow march of the great convoy which the reserve was escorting, pushed on ahead, and joined Loison at Cercal. He heard the distant thunder of the guns at Roli?a in the afternoon, but was too far away to help Delaborde.
On the eighteenth Loison and Junot marched southward to Torres Vedras, and heard that Delaborde had fallen back so far that he was ten miles to their rear, at Montechique. He only came up to join them next day , and the reserve with its heavy convoy, much hampered by bad country roads in the Monte Junto hills, did not appear till the twentieth.
Junot had been much exercised in mind by the doubt whether Wellesley would march by the direct road on Lisbon through Torres Vedras and Montechique, or would continue to hug the shore by the longer route that passes by Vimiero and Mafra. Not knowing of the approach of Acland’s and Anstruther’s brigades, he was ignorant of the main fact which governed his adversary’s movements. But learning on the twentieth that the British were still keeping to the coast-road, by which they could in one more march turn his position at Torres Vedras, he determined to rush upon them with his united forces and give battle. At the last moment he resolved to draw a few more men from Lisbon, and called up a battalion of the 66th of the line, and another composed of four picked companies selected from the other corps of the garrison—a trifling reinforcement of 1,000 or 1,200 men, which arrived just too late for the fight at Vimiero.
The organization of the French army had been so much cut up by the numerous garrisons which Junot had thought fit to leave behind him, that although five of his six infantry brigades were more or less represented in his field-army, not one of them was complete. He accordingly recast the whole system, and arranged his force in two divisions under Delaborde and Loison, and a reserve brigade of Grenadiers under Kellermann. His cavalry on the other hand was intact: every one of the four regiments of Margaron’s division was present, and over and above them he had the squadron of French volunteers raised in Lisbon. He had also twenty-three guns: there should have been twenty-six, but Delaborde had lost three at Roli?a. The total of men present amounted to 10,300 foot and 2,000 horse, with 700 artillerymen and men of the military train, or about 13,000 in all.
Hearing that Wellesley was stationary in Vimiero since the morning of the nineteenth, Junot determined to attack him at the earliest possible moment. He was ignorant that his adversary’s halt was due to the arrival of Anstruther and Acland, but knowing that more troops were expected from the sea he resolved to fight at once. The reserve and convoy joined him on the morning of the twentieth: the same night he marched under cover of the darkness and traversed the ten miles which separated him from the hostile position: at dawn he was close under it.
But Wellesley meanwhile had received his reinforcements, and was 4,000 men stronger than the Duke of Abrantes supposed. On the nineteenth Anstruther’s brigade had accomplished its dangerous disembarkation, through the surf that beats upon the sandy shore north of the mouth of the Maceira. It had been a tedious business, many boats having been upset and some lives lost. On the afternoon of the twentieth the convoy that brought Acland’s brigade was got inshore, and the greater part of the men disembarked in the dusk in the actual mouth of the little river, and slept upon the beach. But some of them were still on shipboard on the morning of the twenty-first, and came too late for the battle of that day.
While covering this disembarkation Wellesley had taken up an excellent position on the heights of Vimiero, with the sea at his back. The surrounding country was pleasant, good water was forthcoming in abundance, and the neighbouring villages provided a considerable quantity of food. The region is both more fertile and better wooded than most of central Portugal. The only fault of the position was that it was one from which retreat would have been very difficult. But confident in himself and his men, and somewhat under-estimating the possible maximum of force that Junot could bring against him, Wellesley was thinking of nothing less than of retreat. If he had not been attacked on the twenty-first, he would himself have pushed on towards the enemy next day. He had now 16,778 British troops, besides Trant’s 2,000 Portuguese, and thought himself competent to cope with any force that Junot could collect.
Map of the battle of Vimiero
Enlarge Battle of Vimiero. August 21, 1808.
The position of Vimiero consists of a well-marked line of heights sweeping from the north to the south-west, and cut through the centre by the narrow valley of the river Maceira, on which the village of Vimiero stands. The southern part of the range, which lies nearest the sea, is especially steep and formidable: the northern part, beyond the Maceira, is lower and broader: along its ridge runs a country road leading northward to Lourinh?o. But even here the position is very strong, for a ravine creeps along its eastern foot and acts as a sort of ditch to the broad ridge, or rather plateau, which the British army was holding. Its only accessible side is the north, where it sinks down into a rolling upland beyond the village of Ventosa. In the very centre of the position, well in front of the main ridge, just above the village of Vimiero, lies an isolated hill, well suited to serve as an outwork or first line of defence. It was partly occupied by vineyards and thickets, partly by open fields, and gave admirable cover for its defenders.
This hill Wellesley had chosen as the key of his position: on it were placed the two brigades of Fane and Anstruther, seven battalions in all. The high ridge running from behind it to the sea was held by the brigades of Hill, Bowes, Catlin Crawfurd, Nightingale, and Acland. That of Ferguson lay behind Vimiero, astride of the valley of the Maceira. Trant’s four battalions of Portuguese were near Ferguson, on the lower heights north of Vimiero, ready to act as a reserve to Fane and Anstruther. The handful of cavalry, 240 English and 260 Portuguese sabres, were in the low ground on the banks of the Maceira, close under Crawfurd’s position. Of the three batteries which Wellesley had been able to bring with him, six guns were on the projecting height with Anstruther, eight were on the high mountain south of Vimiero, and four were with the reserve.
A glance at this order of battle shows that Wellesley expected to be attacked from the south, up the valley of the Maceira, and that he thought that the enemy’s plan would be to force his right-centre. Little or no provision is made against the plan which Junot actually adopted, that of assaulting the British left-centre and simultaneously turning their extreme left flank, while leaving the right unmolested. But the whole position was so short—it was less than three miles in length—that there was no difficulty in shifting troops rapidly from one end of it to the other, and, as the event showed, no risk whatever was run.
Wellesley was busy arranging his line of battle, when to his bitter disappointment he received the news that he was superseded, a calamity which he had been expecting to occur at any moment. Sir Harry Burrard had arrived from England at the tail of Acland’s convoy, and was now on board the sloop Brazen in Maceira Bay. Sir Arthur at once went off in a boat to greet him, and to give him an account of the condition in which affairs stood. Burrard heard him out, and then placed a strong embargo on any further offensive movement. He had learnt that Sir John Moore, with the division from the Baltic, was now off the Portuguese coast, and was resolved not to stir till those troops should have been landed. Being, as it seems, a leisurely sort of man, he resolved to sleep on board his ship for one night more, and to come ashore next morning—a resolve which cost him that chance of commanding a British army in a pitched battle which so many generals have in vain desired. Wellesley went back through the surf charged, for a short fifteen hours more, with the destinies of the army of Portugal.
The French cavalry had been hovering around Vimiero all through the twentieth, and knowing that Junot was not far off, Sir Arthur had taken all precautions against being surprised. General Fane, in charge of the outposts, had pushed pickets of riflemen into the wooded heights that faced the British position on the northern bank of the Maceira: vedettes of the 20th Light Dragoons were thrown out three or four miles to the front, and especially watched the Torres Vedras road. About midnight they began to hear the approach of the enemy; the rumbling of his guns and caissons over the wooden bridge of Villa Facaia travelled for miles through the still night air. In half an hour Wellesley was warned that the French were drawing near, and sent the order round all his brigades to be under arms and in line on their designated position an hour before daybreak.
But the enemy was late in appearing: Junot had halted on the near side of the bridge of Villa Facaia, four miles away, to rest his men after their night march and to allow them to cook their breakfast. It was not till nearly nine in the morning that dense clouds of dust rolling along the Torres Vedras road bore witness to the approach of the French. They were indistinctly visible, among woods and rolling upland, as they advanced with a broad front on each side of the village of Villa Facaia—a regiment of cavalry in front, then Loison on the left and Delaborde on the right side of the road, finally Kellermann’s grenadiers, the reserve of artillery, and the bulk of Margaron’s cavalry. The English were surprised to note that the columns showed as masses of dust colour, not of the customary dark blue. On account of the hot weather they had been provided with white linen frocks, and were wearing their uniform coats folded and buckled over their knapsacks.
Wellesley had been expecting to see the great column swerve to its left, and approach him along the valley of the Maceira, by Cunhados and Sobreiro Curvo. But instead of so doing Junot continued his progress northward, till he had completely marched past the English right wing, and only fronted and deployed when he had got on a level with Vimiero. After driving off the small pickets of English riflemen who still lay out in the woods a mile in front of Fane’s brigade, the French began to form a line of battle whose southern end was opposite Wellesley’s centre. But at the same time the cavalry advance-guard was noted riding far away to the north, toward Carrasqueira and Praganza, and it was clear that infantry were following them. Obviously there was going to be an attempt to turn the English position at its northern end, on the comparatively gentle slopes along the Lourinh?o road.
Junot after reconnoitring the British position in a somewhat perfunctory fashion, had resolved to leave alone the formidable heights occupied by the right wing, and to try to storm the low hill in front of Vimiero with his main body, while he turned Wellesley’s left with a secondary column. This detachment was composed of the 3rd provisional regiment of dragoons, and Brennier’s brigade, the same four battalions which had fought so handsomely at Roli?a. But the moment that Wellesley had seen that his right flank was safe, and that his left was about to be attacked, he rapidly changed his line of battle. Ferguson, from behind Vimiero, started to march north. Behind him followed three of the four brigades which had occupied the hills above the sea. Only Hill was still left on the crest to the south-west of Vimiero; Bowes, Nightingale, and Acland—six battalions in all, taking with them six guns—dropped down into the valley of the Maceira, crossed it behind Vimiero, and marched along the Lourinh?o road parallel with Brennier’s movement on the opposite side of the valley. In rear of these troops, and nearer the sea, Catlin Crawfurd and the Portuguese also moved northward, and took up a position near Ribamar, where they covered the flank of the other corps and were in a good position for preventing any movement of the French on the extreme north-west. Junot caught a glimpse of the extensive transference of troops to the left which his adversary was making, and struck with a sudden fear lest Brennier might be overwhelmed, sent off another brigade—Solignac’s of Loison’s division—to support him. He would have been much wiser had he kept these three battalions in hand to support his main attack, and merely directed Brennier to demonstrate against the British left without pressing his attack home. His last movement had divided his army into two halves, separated from each other by a gap of nearly two miles: for the main attack he had only kept eight and a quarter battalions, three regiments of cavalry and seventeen guns, while seven battalions, one regiment of cavalry, and six guns had gone off on the turning movement. How long their flank march was to be he had not calculated, for, not discerning the steepness of the ravine at the foot of the British position, he had not realized that Brennier and Solignac would have to take a vast sweep to the north in order to cross it. As a matter of fact they got completely out of touch with him and, what was worse, with each other. Their diversion did not begin till the main battle was nearly over.
Meanwhile the French general deployed the second brigades of his two divisions, Charlot’s of Loison’s, and Thomières’ of Delaborde’s, only four and a quarter battalions in all, as a first line for the attack on Vimiero. Kellermann’s four battalions of grenadiers in a second line were for the moment held back, as was the cavalry and the reserve artillery. But seven guns went forward with the first line. The French came on in their usual style, a thick line of tirailleurs, supported by battalion columns close in their rear. Fane and Anstruther were very comfortably placed for repelling the attack: the latter had drawn up the 52nd and 97th in line on the slope of the hill, partly hidden by a dip in the ground and largely covered by vines and brushwood: the 9th and 43rd were in open column to the rear, ready to act as a reserve. Fane had got most of the riflemen of the 60th and 95th out in front, at the foot of the hill, in a very thick skirmishing line: only a few companies of them were in reserve along with the 50th (the famous ‘dirty half-hundredth’) at the head of the slope. In consequence of the order which Junot had adopted, Thomières’ two battalions were opposed to Fane, and Charlot’s brigade to Anstruther on the southern half of the hill. In each quarter the course of the fight was much the same: the French tirailleurs pushed up the slope among the brushwood and vineyards, slowly driving the riflemen before them. Then, as they drew near the crest, the two English brigadiers suddenly let loose their formed battalions upon the assailants. There was one fierce volley from the six guns on the hill top, and then the 97th charged Charlot’s men in front, while the 52nd swerved round and took them in flank. One smashing discharge at ten paces blew to pieces the heads of the columns of the 32nd and 82nd, which crumpled up in hopeless disorder and rolled down to the foot of the hill, pursued by their assailants. A few moments later Fane dashed the 50th and the reserve companies of his rifles against Thomières’ troops, and sent them flying down the slope in equal disorder. They could not be rallied till they had got out of musketry range, and the seven guns which they had brought forward with them were all captured: Delaborde and Charlot were wounded: the commander of the 82nd was killed.
Junot’s first attack had failed, but his spirit was not yet broken: he called up half his reserve of grenadiers, two battalions under Colonel St. Clair, and sent them against the hill on the same point, while the débris of the two wrecked brigades were rallied and pushed forward in support. Eight guns under Foy (the historian in after-years of the war), were brought out from the artillery reserve and pushed to the front. The second attack, however, failed even more disastrously than the first: the grenadiers, attacking on a narrow front and a single point, were blown to pieces by the converging fire of the 52nd, the 97th, and Fane’s two rifle battalions, as well as by the battery on the hill, which having no longer any British skirmishers in front of it had a free field. It was here, as Wellesley’s dispatches show, that shrapnell shell, a recent invention of the British colonel of that name, was first used, and with the most effective results. St. Clair’s battalions climbed halfway up the hill, but could do no more, and finally gave way, bearing back with them their half-rallied supports. The fight was rolling down the slope into the pine-wood at its foot, when Junot made his last desperate stroke. His only infantry reserve was now the 1st Regiment of Grenadiers, two battalions under Colonel Maransin. He resolved to throw them into the fight pour en finir, as he said to his chief of the staff, but they ‘made a finish of it’ in a way very different from his intention. This time the assailants, led by General Kellermann in person, made not for the front of the hill, but for the gap between it and the heights to the north, trying to turn Fane’s flank and to penetrate into the village of Vimiero by coasting round the foot of the higher ground. There were at first no troops directly opposed to the column, but soon the grenadiers found themselves under fire from both flanks. On the southern side Anstruther took from his reserve the 43rd, which had not yet fired a shot, and threw it into the cemetery of Vimiero, from whence it descended on the left flank of the leading battalion of grenadiers. On the northern side a new force intervened: General Acland on the heights along the Lourinh?o road had been acting as the reserve of Wellesley’s left wing: he was not needed there, and seeing Kellermann’s attack threatening to break in between himself and Anstruther, took action on his own responsibility. Marching a little southward along the ridge, he sent his two companies of the 95th Rifles, and the light companies of his two line-battalions to fall on the right flank of the grenadiers. At the same time he turned upon them the fire of two field-guns which were in reserve near his brigade.
The double flank attack cost Kellermann many men, and brought his column to a standstill, but he held his ground for some time, till the 43rd closed in upon him at the eastern end of Vimiero village. Both French and English were in great disorder, the houses and enclosure-walls having broken up their formation. There was a furious hand-to-hand fight, volleys were interchanged at the distance of five yards, and both sides used the bayonet freely. At last the grenadiers gave way and retired sullenly towards their original position: they had lost many men, but so had the 43rd, who from a weak battalion of 700 men had forty killed and seventy-nine wounded.
All along the line the French were now falling back, and Junot brought up a regiment of dragoons to cover the retreat of the disordered masses. Wellesley now resolved to make use of his handful of cavalry: close behind Vimiero there were drawn up the 240 sabres of the 20th Light Dragoons, with 260 Portuguese horsemen in two squadrons on their flanks. ‘Now, Twentieth, now is the time!’ cried Wellesley, lifting his cocked hat, and Colonel Taylor wheeled his regiment from behind the sheltering hill and dashed at the retreating Frenchmen. The two Portuguese squadrons started level with him, but after going a few hundred yards and receiving a shot or two, they broke, fell into disorder, and finally galloped to the rear amid the hoots of Anstruther’s brigade. But the 20th rode at the French dragoons who stood in their path, burst through them, and then plunged among the flying infantry, sabring them to right and left and taking many prisoners. They could not be stayed till they had hewn their way through the fugitives, to the place where Junot himself sat watching the rout of his men. The charge had been pushed beyond all reasonable bounds, for the men were mad with excitement and would not halt. But as they rode up the French hill they were checked by a stone wall, and at the same time charged by the two reserve regiments of Margaron’s horse. It was a wonder that the headstrong troopers were not annihilated, but the larger part returned in safety to the English lines, leaving behind them their colonel and twenty men slain, twenty-four wounded, and eleven prisoners.
We must now turn to the northern part of the battle-field, where the main stress of the fighting did not begin till the engagement round Vimiero was nearly over. This was the result of the reckless way in which Junot had sent his flanking brigades to attack over unexplored ground. When Brennier reached the point at which he would naturally have wheeled inward to climb the slopes along the Lourinh?o road, he came upon the deep and rugged valley of Toledo, the steepness of whose slopes he did not realize till he had almost reached its brink. Having guns with him, the French brigadier thought the obstacle impassable, and turned northward again in a long sweep by the village of Carrasqueira, the 3rd Dragoons still heading his march. In this wide flanking movement he passed quite out of sight of the British.
But Solignac, with the second brigade which Junot had told off for the northern diversion, was not so cautious. He too came upon the ravine; but instead of turning it he sought out its least precipitous point and passed it near its head, underneath the farm of Ventosa. Having crossed, he deployed his three battalions, brought up his right shoulder, and ascended the gentle slope. By this movement he was devoting his brigade to destruction. On the hill above he could see only the thin line of British skirmishers, but hidden behind the crest was the main body of Wellesley’s right wing, the seven battalions of Ferguson, Nightingale, and Bowes. They had long watched the approach of the French, and were lying down in battle order. In front were Ferguson’s three regiments, the 36th, 40th, and 71st, and one of Nightingale’s, the 82nd. A couple of hundred yards to the rear was the second line, the 29th of Nightingale’s brigade, and the 6th and 32nd, which formed Bowes’ command. Acland and Catlin Crawfurd were a mile away in different directions, but not too far to have been called in if necessary.
When Solignac’s men reached the brow of the hill, the four British battalions in the front line rose up and marched to meet them. Their long array completely overlapped at both ends the advancing columns and their screen of light troops, At the distance of one hundred yards all the four regiments directed a converging volley on the French, which almost swept away the tirailleurs and shook terribly the supporting masses. Then they reloaded and advanced in silence on the enemy, who were shouting, firing irregularly, and endeavouring to deploy, with their officers all in front. For troops in such disorder the near approach of the majestic two-deep line of 3,300 bayonets was too much. They wavered and fled northward along the summit of the ridge, carrying with them their commander, Solignac, desperately wounded. The British pursued, halting at intervals to pour a volley into the retreating masses, and picking up on the way many prisoners, and also the three guns which the enemy had laboriously dragged up the hill.
The pursuit was stopped by an unexpected development. General Brennier had heard from afar the heavy musketry fire which told him that his supporting brigade was engaged. He was now on the summit of the heights, having at last accomplished his long flank march. Pushing hastily forward, he came to the edge of a saddle-backed depression in the ridge, and had the spectacle of the fight at his feet. The 36th and 40th were engaged in driving the wrecks of Solignac’s men back in a north-westerly direction, while the 71st and 82nd, halted around the captured guns, were resting and reforming their ranks. Without a moment’s hesitation, Brennier threw his four battalions upon the two regiments that lay beneath him. He had taken them by surprise; attacked diagonally by fresh troops, and charged by the two squadrons of dragoons that accompanied the French, they reeled back in some disorder and abandoned the guns that they had taken. But they rallied in a moment, and returned to the fight aided by the 29th, the reserve regiment of Nightingale’s brigade. There was heavy firing for a moment, but very soon Brennier’s troops broke and fled up the slope which they had just descended. Their flight was covered by the dragoons, who suffered severely in holding off the pursuers, losing many officers, among them the young Arrighi, a kinsman of the Bonaparte family. Brennier was left on the field wounded and a prisoner, and not only did his men lose the guns which they had just recaptured, but they also left behind the three which had accompanied their own column. Their hurried retreat was accelerated by the fire of a half-battery, brought up from the reserve, which played upon them with effect till they had plunged down into the ravine and regained their original position on the opposite heights.
All the fighting here had been done by Ferguson’s and Nightingale’s five battalions. Bowes’ brigade did not fire a shot or lose a man, and Catlin Crawfurd and the Portuguese were only beginning to approach the scene of action when Brennier’s column broke up and fled. The main honours of the fight must be given to the 71st and 82nd, who lost respectively 112 and 61 men out of the total of 272 casualties suffered in this part of the action.
Two and a half hours after the battle began the French, both in the north and the south of the field, were retiring in confusion. The British were awaiting eagerly the order for a general advance—especially Ferguson, who, with the 36th and 40th, had got part of Solignac’s brigade pinned into an angle of the hills, from which they could not easily escape when attacked. But instead of the order to advance there came a prohibition to move, and the French were allowed to withdraw unmolested. The stream of fugitives from Brennier’s and Solignac’s fight joined that from the centre; then both shook themselves together and formed up in more or less order on the heights. The reserve artillery under Hulot and Prost (Foy had been wounded) kept up a distant and ineffective fire towards the hill of Vimiero, more to put heart into their own infantry by the noise of their guns than in any hope of harming the English. Margaron’s cavalry showed a front behind them, and the two belated battalions from Lisbon, which arrived about noon, were sent to the front and displayed on the edge of the heights to make some show of force. But the French would not have stood a serious attack: every single unit of their infantry had been deeply engaged and had suffered a thorough defeat. More than half their guns (thirteen out of twenty-three) had been captured. The cavalry was in better case, though two of its regiments had suffered severely, yet it could not by itself have resisted the attack of the victorious British. A vigorous push would have sent the whole mass reeling backward, not on Torres Vedras or Lisbon—for these roads would have been barred to them when Wellesley advanced—but on the rugged path, over the spurs of the Sierra da Baragueda, which leads to Santarem.
But while the French were striving to rally and to form a new front, the leaden hand of Sir Harry Burrard was laid upon the British army. That leisurely person had only landed on the morning of the twenty-first, and the battle was in full progress before he rode up from the beach to Vimiero. He had the grace not to interfere with the movements of troops which Wellesley had already ordered; but when the victory was won, and his subordinate rode up to him crying, ‘Sir Harry, now is your time to advance, the enemy is completely beaten, and we shall be in Lisbon in three days,’ he refused to listen. The army, he said, had done enough for one day, and he intended to wait for the arrival of Sir John Moore and the division from the Baltic before making any further move. Greatly disconcerted by this stolid opposition, Wellesley launched forth into argument: the French army, as he pointed out, was now so placed that it had lost control of its line of retreat on Torres Vedras and Lisbon. Hill’s intact brigade, and those of Fane and Anstruther had but to advance a mile or so, and the French were irretrievably cut off from their base of operations. At the same time the five brigades of the left wing, of which those of Bowes and Crawfurd were absolutely intact, might so hustle and press the retreating enemy that he could never rally. At this moment arrived an aide-de-camp from Ferguson, who begged to be allowed to go on: ‘a column of broken troops 1,500 to 2,000 strong had in their confusion got into a hollow, and could be cut off from their main body by a movement in advance of his brigade.’ The enemy had lost all their artillery, were retiring in the utmost confusion, none of them save the cavalry were regularly formed, and it was his hope that he might be allowed to continue to go forward. Burrard still remained obdurate, though Wellesley pointed out to him that he had nine thousand fresh troops in hand, that every soldier had a day’s food cooked in his haversack, that the ammunition reserve was ready to move, and that, with twelve days’ provisions in the camp and an ample store of munitions, he had it in his power to march forward both rapidly and with complete security. But all these arguments were of no effect. The slow and cautious Burrard chose to believe that Junot might still have a large and intact reserve, that his cavalry was too dangerous to be meddled with, and that the dispersion of the British brigades (there were more than three miles between Hill’s extreme right and Ferguson’s extreme left) would make a general advance a very dislocated and hazardous business. He utterly refused to listen to any further discussion, and, as the French were now in full retreat and disappearing over the eastern horizon, ordered the troops back to camp. They returned with colours flying and bands playing, dragging the captured French guns, and with a considerable column of prisoners in their midst. But every one, from Generals Spencer and Ferguson down to the youngest private, was utterly puzzled at the tame and inconsequent end to such a glorious day.
The losses had been very moderate—four officers and 131 men killed, thirty-seven officers and 497 men wounded, two officers and forty-nine men missing. Of the total of 720 no less than 573 were from the ten battalions of Fane’s, Anstruther’s, and Ferguson’s brigades. Those of Hill, Bowes, and Catlin Crawfurd did not return a single casualty. The handful of prisoners were mainly supplied by the 20th Light Dragoons, and by the two rifle battalions, whose pickets had been driven in at the commencement of the fight. The French losses were very different: both Foy and Thiébault acknowledge a total of 1,800, and this may be taken as a minimum: of these some 300 or 400 were unwounded prisoners. Delaborde and three brigadier-generals—Charlot, Brennier, and Solignac—as well as Colonels Foy and Prost of the artillery, were wounded. Two battalion commanders were killed, a third and the disabled Brennier were prisoners. Men and officers were alike disheartened: every single corps present had been engaged: even the squadron of volunteer cavalry had been in action against Taylor’s dragoons: more than half the guns had been lost, and the officers who brought back those that remained asked themselves in wonder how they had ever been permitted to get away. But at least they were unmolested in their retreat: using the two battalions that had just come up from Lisbon as his rearguard, Junot retired unharmed, but full of despair, on Torres Vedras. It was not till early on the next morning that the last stragglers of his scattered army drifted in to join the main body.
THE CONVENTION OF CINTRA
For only one single day did the incubus of Burrard rest upon the British army in Portugal, though that day was one on which he succeeded in changing a decisive victory, which might have laid a whole kingdom at his feet, into an ordinary successful defensive action. He had stopped Wellesley’s triumphant march at noon on August 21; early on the morning of the twenty-second Sir Hew Dalrymple appeared in Maceira Bay, disembarked, and took over the command. He naturally began his tenure of control by interviewing his two predecessors, whose divergent views as to the situation and its requirements were laid before him. He was an old man, and unpractised in the field: he had only seen war in the wretched Flanders campaign of 1793-4. His prejudice was in favour of caution, and he was not slow to let it be seen that he regarded Wellesley’s actions in the past, and still more his plans for the future, as rash and hazardous. ‘On the first interview that I had with Sir Hew Dalrymple,’ said Wellesley at the Court of Inquiry in the following winter, ‘I had reason to believe that I did not possess his confidence: nay more, that he was prejudiced against any opinions which I should give him.’ The veteran’s ill-concealed hostility was, we cannot doubt, mainly due to an unhappy inspiration of Castlereagh, who had sent him a letter bidding him ‘take Sir Arthur Wellesley into his particular confidence, as he had been, for a length of time past, in the closest habits of communication with His Majesty’s ministers with respect to the affairs of Spain.’ He was also directed ‘to make the most prominent use of him which the rules of the service would permit.’ Such a letter very naturally caused Dalrymple to look upon the young lieutenant-general as a sort of emissary from the Government, sent to overrule his plans and curb his full power of command. He was inclined, consciously or unconsciously, to entertain a strong prejudice against anything that Wellesley might recommend: and we cannot doubt that the latter, always stiff and haughty, was at this moment in a state of suppressed fury at the foiling of his plans by Burrard on the preceding day. Probably, in his own cold way, he let his indignation appear, and Dalrymple may have been glad of an excuse for repressing him.
The plan which Wellesley had drawn up for the conduct of the campaign, and which he now urged upon his chief, is detailed in the proceedings of the Court of Inquiry. He had hoped to get Sir John Moore’s division, whose arrival was just reported, sent to Santarem, to cut off any attempt of Junot to escape out of the Lisbon peninsula by following the road along the right bank of the Tagus: the Portuguese were to be brought up to assist. Meanwhile the army which had fought at Vimiero was to turn the position of Torres Vedras, on which the enemy had retired, by marching along the sea-coast by the route that leads to Mafra. If Junot let them march past him, he would infallibly lose Lisbon; for they could, by forcing the pace, arrive in the capital as soon as he. If he abandoned Torres Vedras, and fell back on Mafra or Montechique as soon as he saw them moving, he would have to fight a second battle on the twenty-third or twenty-fourth, with an army which had been gravely demoralized by the events of Roli?a and Vimiero, and which could not receive much succour from Lisbon: for the populace of that city, when apprised of the defeat of the French, would undoubtedly have burst into insurrection, and would have required for its repression every man of the 5,000 troops who had been left to hold it down. There was a third possibility, that Junot, on hearing that the English were marching past his flank, might have hastened from Torres Vedras to attack their line of march by one of the cross-roads (such as that from Torres Vedras to Puente de Roll), which cut down to the Atlantic coast. But Wellesley had convinced himself that this chance would not occur: he reckoned, very rightly, on the exhaustion of the enemy on the day after such a crushing blow as Vimiero. As a matter of fact, on the morning of the twenty-second, at the moment when the head of the British column, if it had marched, would have been outflanking their position, Junot and those of his generals who were not hors de combat were sitting in council of war at Torres Vedras, with despair in their souls, and resolving to ask for terms on which to evacuate Portugal. Kellermann was just about to ride in to the English lines to open negotiations. The idea of an ‘offensive return’ by the French was in the head of the cautious Burrard: but not in that of Wellesley, who had made up his mind ‘that they would act in Portugal as they did in Egypt: they tried their strength once in the field, and having failed they would have continued to retreat till they could have got into safety. I do not believe that any corps could have fallen on the flank of our march on the twenty-third.’ The only course open to the French, in his opinion, was to throw over any idea of holding the capital, withdraw its garrison, and cross the Tagus at Saccavem or Villafranca, or Santarem, by means of the ships which lay in the river, and the large fleet of barges which is always to be found in and near Lisbon. Having passed the Tagus they might cut their way through the insurgents of the Alemtejo, disperse the Spanish levies about Elvas and Badajoz, and press north through Estremadura to join Bessières. This very idea did for a moment flash through the brains of some of Junot’s council of war at Torres Vedras: but there lay on their minds, like a nightmare, the remembrance of their awful march through the Estremaduran mountains in the preceding autumn. If, journeying unopposed from Ciudad Rodrigo to Lisbon, they had been nearly starved in that wilderness, what would be their fate if they had to cut their way through an insurrection, with the English army hanging on their heels? The most hopeful could only say that perhaps half the army might struggle through to Old Castile.
Wellesley’s arguments to Dalrymple had no further effect than to induce that general to make up his mind that the troops should march not on the twenty-second but on the twenty-third, and not on Mafra but on Torres Vedras. Sir John Moore’s division was to be brought down at once to Maceira Bay, to join the main army, and not to be sent (as Wellesley had urged) to Santarem. With the aid of this reinforcement Dalrymple hoped to be strong enough to force back Junot into Lisbon. The resolve meant fatal delay: Moore did not begin to disembark till August 25, and his last men did not get ashore till August 30. On that day only could Junot have been attacked seriously, and meanwhile he would have obtained nine days in which to fortify his positions and to place Lisbon in a thorough state of defence. The consequences entailed would have been a long siege, the probable devastation of the Portuguese capital, and the protraction of operations into November and December. Even then there would still have been Elvas and Almeida to be recaptured.
But things were not destined to take this course. Dalrymple was busy drafting his orders for the movement of the next day on Torres Vedras, when an alarm ran through the camp that the French were at hand, and the whole force flew to arms. This rumour was caused by the folly of a Portuguese cavalry officer, whose vedettes had seen French horsemen in the distance; he imagined an army on the move and reported its approach. What he had really seen was General Kellermann, with two squadrons of dragoons as his escort, bearing the white flag, and about to propose to the British commander-in-chief the evacuation of Portugal by the French army under a convention.
We have already mentioned the fact that on the early morning of the twenty-second, Junot had called together at Torres Vedras a council of war composed of all his surviving generals—Loison, Kellermann, Delaborde (who attended though suffering from two severe wounds), Thiébault, the chief of the staff, Taviel, the commander of the artillery, Col. Vincent, the chief engineer, and Trousset, the chief commissary at Lisbon. Junot’s spirits were very low: he began by explaining that he had only fought at Vimiero to save the honour of the French arms, not because he hoped for victory—a statement which will not bear investigation in the light of his previous dispatches and letters. The British, he said, were expecting huge reinforcements from the sea: Freire was now moving on Obidos, another Portuguese corps on Santarem: the reports of the state of public opinion in Lisbon were most alarming. Under these circumstances, ought the army to try the fortune of battle a second time? And if it must, what plan should be adopted? If it could not, what alternative remained? When such was the spirit of the leader, it was easy to foresee the replies of his subordinates. The army, they soon resolved, had done its best in the most honourable fashion, but it was not ready for another fight. Indeed the stragglers had not yet finished pouring into Torres Vedras, and the wearied rearguard which covered them had only reached the defile in front of the town two hours after midnight. The army, unmolested as it was, did not get into fighting trim again till two days after Vimiero. On the twenty-second it was still in a state of complete disorganization: if Dalrymple had marched on Mafra he would not have found a man in his path.
Having resolved that the army was not ready for another battle, the council of war had three alternatives before it: to fall back to cover Lisbon on the positions of Mafra and Montechique; to evacuate Lisbon, cross the Tagus, and make for Elvas; or to try to negotiate with the British. The decision was soon made in favour of the third: Lisbon, without regular fortifications, and swarming with a discontented populace, would be a mere snare for the army. The retreat via Elvas on Old Castile would mean the slow but certain destruction of the whole corps. For it was now known that Joseph Bonaparte had evacuated Madrid, and that Burgos was probably the nearest point where a French force was to be found. Not one of the officers present had the heart to make a serious proposal for such a retreat. It only remained to try whether Dalrymple was open to receive an offer: if he could be tempted by the prospect of receiving Lisbon with all its magazines and riches intact, he might allow the French army to return under safe conduct to their own land. Kellermann, who could understand English, more or less, and was considered a skilful diplomatist, was charged with the negotiations. He rode out of Torres Vedras between ten and eleven in the morning with his escort, charged with ample powers to treat. As he passed the rearguard in the pass, four miles outside the town, he told the officer in command that he was going to visit the English ‘to see if he could get the army out of the mousetrap.’
By two o’clock Kellermann was conferring with the English commander—he was astonished to find that it was Dalrymple and not Wellesley. The reception that he met was an agreeable surprise to him. Dalrymple showed his pleasure at the broaching of the idea of a convention in the most undisguised fashion. The fact was that he was very glad to avoid the possible dangers of an immediate advance and a second fight. He called in Burrard and Wellesley to the interview, and from his unguarded ‘asides’ to them, Kellermann soon learnt that Moore had not yet landed, and that till he was ashore Dalrymple did not feel safe. This gave the Frenchman a confidence which he had not at first possessed, and he at once assumed an air of self-reliance which he had been far from showing when he rode out of Torres Vedras. Instead of merely trying to save the army at all costs, he began to haggle about details, and to speak about the possibility of resuming hostilities—the last thing in the world that he really desired.
There was no doubt that a convention by which Portugal and all its fortresses could be recovered without the necessity of firing another shot was an eminently desirable thing. Wellesley did not hesitate a moment in advising his superiors to take the offer. Burrard had given away the certainty of recapturing Lisbon yesterday: Dalrymple, by delaying his advance, had on this very morning sacrificed the second chance (a much less brilliant one, it must be confessed) of ending the campaign by a single blow. If Junot’s proposals were rejected and hostilities were resumed, there lay before the British army either a siege of Lisbon, which could not fail to ruin the city, or a long stern-chase after the French, if they should resolve to cross the Tagus and march off through the Alemtejo. No doubt it would sound better in the ears of the British public if the surrender or destruction of Junot’s army could be reported. But as a matter of practical expediency, the recovery of Lisbon and all its wealth unharmed was worth far more than the capture of a French army at the cost of much time, many lives, and the ruin of the Portuguese capital. The loss of 25,000 soldiers would be nothing to Napoleon, who disposed of more than half a million men: the blow to his pride would be almost as great if he lost Portugal by a convention as if he lost it by a capitulation. As a matter of fact he was much incensed at Junot, and would have dealt hardly with him if Dupont had not drawn off his wrath by failing in an even more disastrous fashion.
After hearing what Kellermann had to say, the three English generals withdrew into an inner room, and after a very short discussion agreed to treat. They told their visitor that he might have a forty-eight hours’ suspension of hostilities at once, and that they would open negotiations on the general base that Junot and his army should be allowed to evacuate Portugal by sea without any of the forms of capitulation, and be returned to their own country on British ships. The details would take much discussion: meanwhile they invited Kellermann to dine with them and to settle the main lines of the Convention before he returned to his commander. There was a long post-prandial debate, which showed that on two points there was likely to be trouble; one was the way in which Siniavin’s Russian fleet in the Tagus was to be treated: the other was how much the French should be allowed to carry away with them from Portugal. Kellermann said that he asked for no more than their ‘military baggage and equipments,’ but he seemed to have a large idea of what came under these headings.
Meanwhile the terms of the suspension of hostilities were successfully drafted; the line of the Zizandre river was to be fixed as that of demarcation between the two hosts. Neither of them was to occupy Torres Vedras: Dalrymple undertook to get the armistice recognized by Freire and the other Portuguese generals in the field. They were not to advance beyond Leiria and Thomar. The garrisons at Elvas, Almeida, Peniche, and elsewhere were to be included in the Convention, unless it should turn out that any of them had surrendered before August 25—which as a matter of fact they had not. The Russian fleet in the Tagus was to be treated as if in a neutral port. This last clause was much objected to by Wellesley, who found also several minor points in the agreement of which he could not approve. But by the directions of Dalrymple he signed the suspension of arms after a protest; his superior had told him that it was ‘useless to drive the French to the wall upon points of form.’
The subsequent negotiations for a definite convention occupied seven days, from August 23 to 30. On the first-named day Junot evacuated Torres Vedras, according to the stipulations of the agreement made by Kellermann. He retired to the line of hills behind him, establishing Loison’s division at Mafra and Delaborde’s at Montechique. Dalrymple, on the other hand, moved his head quarters forward to Ramalhal, a position just north of Torres Vedras, and only nine miles from Vimiero. In this respect he profited less than the French from the suspension of hostilities: it is true that he got leisure to disembark Moore’s troops, but Junot gained the much more important advantage of a safe retreat to a good position, and of leisure to strengthen himself in it. It must not be supposed, however, that he was in a comfortable situation; Lisbon was seething with suppressed rebellion. The news of French victories, which had been published to quiet the people, had soon been discovered to be nothing more than an impudent fiction. At any moment an insurrection might have broken out: the garrison and the mob were alike in a state of extreme nervous tension, which took shape on the one side in assassinations, and on the other in wanton firing at every person who approached a sentinel, or refused to stand when challenged by a patrol.
The negotiations for a definitive convention suffered several checks. At one moment it seemed likely that the Portuguese army might give trouble. General Freire arrived at Ramalhal in a state of high wrath, to protest that he ought to have been made a party to the suspension of hostilities. There was, as Napier remarks, more plausibility than real foundation in his objection, for his motley army had taken no part whatever in the operations that had brought Junot to his knees. But he could make a distinct point when he asked by what authority Dalrymple had given promises as to his neutrality in the agreement with Kellermann, or laid down lines which he was not to pass. Freire was all the bolder because his levies were now being strengthened by the forces from Oporto which the Bishop had lately raised, while a small Spanish brigade under the Marquis of Valladares, lent by the Galician Junta, had come down as far as Guarda. But he contented himself with protests, without committing any definite act that might have rendered the Convention impossible.
A more dangerous source of possible rupture was the view of the situation taken by Sir Charles Cotton, the admiral in command of the British blockading squadron off the mouth of the Tagus. As Wellesley had foreseen, the naval men were determined to secure the possession of the Russian ships of Siniavin. Cotton refused to entertain the proposal that such a force should be allowed a free departure from Lisbon, as if from a neutral port, and should be given a long start before being pursued. He had held the Russians under blockade for many a weary month, and was not going to abandon his hold upon them. Why should the French evacuation of Portugal place Siniavin in a better position than he had ever occupied before? The admiral declared that he saw no reason why the Russians should be included in the Convention at all. If there was going to be any agreement made with them, he should conduct it himself, treating directly with Siniavin instead of through a French intermediary.
Sir Hew Dalrymple was forced to report to the French commander these objections of the admiral. It seemed possible for a moment that the difficulty would not be got over, and that war must recommence. Wellesley strongly advised his chief to try the game of bluff—to announce to Junot that operations would be resumed at the end of the stipulated forty-eight hours, as Sir Charles Cotton had objected to the terms of the armistice, but that he was prepared to take into consideration any new proposals which might be made to him before the interval of two days expired. Such a firm policy, he thought, would induce the French to yield the point—all the more because Junot and Siniavin were known to be on very bad terms. But Dalrymple would not accept this plan. He merely reported the admiral’s proposals to Junot, without any intimation that the resumption of hostilities must result from their rejection. This move placed the power of playing the game of brag in the Frenchman’s hands. Seeing that Dalrymple did not seem to desire to break off negotiations, he assumed an indignant tone, and began to talk of his determination not to concede an inch, and of the harm that he could do if he were forced to fight. ‘The English might take away the half-drafted convention: he would have none of it. He would defend Lisbon street by street: he would burn as much of it as he could not hold, and it should cost them dear to take from him what remained.’ At the same time he made a final proposal to Siniavin, that he should put ashore his 6,000 seamen and marines, to take part in the defence of Lisbon on the land side. This was only part of the game of bluff, and intended for the benefit of the English rather than of Siniavin, for Junot knew perfectly well, from the latter’s previous conduct, that he was bent on playing his own hand, and would not fire a single shot to help the French.
All Junot’s desperate language was, in fact, no more than a device to squeeze better terms out of Dalrymple. The actual point on which the argument grew hot was a mere pretext, for the Russian admiral utterly refused to assist the French, and intimated that he should prefer to conclude a separate convention of his own with Sir Charles Cotton. Clearly it was not worth while for the Duke of Abrantes to risk anything on behalf of such a torpid ally.
Accordingly the Convention was reduced to a definitive form between August 27 and 30. Colonel George Murray, the quartermaster-general, acted as the British negotiator, while Kellermann continued to represent Junot. The details were settled in Lisbon, where Murray took up his residence, sending back frequent reports to his superior officer at Ramalhal. Dalrymple and Cotton carried their point in that no allusion whatever was made to the Russians in the document. Junot found a salve for his injured pride by remembering that he had slipped a mention of Napoleon as ‘Emperor of the French,’ into the text of the suspension of hostilities: in this he thought that he had won a great success, for the British Government had hitherto refused to recognize any such title, and had constantly irritated its adversaries by alluding to the master of the Continent as ‘General Bonaparte,’ or the ‘actual head of the French executive.’
The terms of the Convention need close study: it comprised twenty-two articles and three supplementary paragraphs of addenda. The first article provided that the French should surrender Lisbon and the Portuguese fortresses in their existing condition, without harming or dismantling them. The second and third granted the army of Junot a safe departure by sea in English vessels: they were not to be considered prisoners of war, might take their arms and baggage, and were to be landed at any port between Rochefort and L’Orient. The fourth, fifth, and sixth articles attempted to define the property which the French might take away—their horses, their guns of French calibre (but not any that they might have found in the Portuguese arsenals), with sixty rounds for each piece, their wagons, their military chest, in short, ‘all their equipment, and all that is comprehended under the name of property of the army.’ It was found, later on, that these paragraphs had been too loosely worded, and gave much endless occasion for disputes. The next six articles settled the manner in which the departing army was to embark, and the order in which each of the strongholds that it evacuated was to be given up to the British. The thirteenth and fourteenth articles arranged for the appointment of commissaries by each side, to deal with disputed points in the Convention, and added the curious clause that ‘where a doubt arose as to the meaning of any article, it should be explained favourably to the French army.’
But the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth articles were the most objectionable part of the Convention. It was true that they secured that no more taxes or contributions were to be raised by Junot, and that undischarged fines which he had laid on the Portuguese should be regarded as cancelled. But they also provided that French civilians in Portugal might either depart with the army, or, if they preferred it, might be allowed to remain behind unmolested, and have a year in which to dispose of their property. This might perhaps pass: not so, however, the ensuing clause, which provided that Portuguese subjects should not be rendered accountable for their political conduct during the French occupation: all who had taken service with the usurping government were to be placed under the protection of the British, and to suffer no injury in person or property. They were also to be granted liberty to depart with the French army if they chose.
The five remaining articles were unimportant. The eighteenth secured the release of Caraffa and the rest of Junot’s Spanish prisoners, and provided that in return the few French officers of the army of Portugal, whom the Spaniards had captured at Oporto and Elvas, should be liberated. The twenty-first permitted Junot to send one of his aides-de-camp directly to France to carry the news of the Convention, so that preparations might be made for the reception of the troops.
Three unimportant supplementary articles were added below the signatures of Murray and Kellermann: one stipulated that French civilian prisoners in the hands of the English and Portuguese should be released, another that Junot’s army should subsist on its own magazines till it embarked, a third that the British should permit the entry of provisions into Lisbon, now that the Convention had been concluded.
Such was the celebrated agreement which was destined to gain a most unhappy notoriety in England under the name of the ‘Convention of Cintra,’ a designation which it is hard to understand, for it was first sketched at Torres Vedras, and was discussed and ratified at Lisbon. The only connexion which it had with Cintra was that Dalrymple’s dispatch to the British Government, enclosing the document in its latest form, was dated from that pleasant spot in the environs of Lisbon. But it would perhaps be pedantic to give any other name to such a well-known document, than that under which it has been known for the last ninety-three years.
After a careful investigation of the details of this famous agreement, the conclusion at which the impartial student will probably arrive is that while on the military side it was justifiable, it presented grave political faults. In order to recover Lisbon with its arsenals, its forts and its shipping, all intact, Dalrymple might without serious blame have granted even more to the French. By the Convention he saved, not only the wealth of the capital, and the lives of the troops who must have fallen in storming it, but, most important of all, time. If he had but known the value of that commodity, he might have been in Madrid at the head of all his British troops by October 1, or even earlier. ‘I do not know what Sir Hew proposes to do,’ wrote Wellesley the morning after the Convention was signed, ‘but if I were in his situation I would have 20,000 men in Madrid in less than a month from this day’ But the importance of time was never realized by the old commander-in-chief: he was superseded long before his army had even moved up to the Portuguese frontier. Looking, therefore, at the Convention in the broadest aspect, we hold that its military advantages entirely outweighed those which might have been secured by a prolongation of hostilities. But this conclusion does not mean that there were not points in the military part of the agreement that might have been modified with advantage.
It is when we turn to the political section of the Convention that we light upon grave faults and mistakes on the part of Dalrymple. The first and foremost was that he signed the document without previously submitting certain portions of it to the Portuguese government. In the sixteenth and seventeenth articles the British general took upon himself to grant certain favours both to French civilians resident in Portugal, and to Portuguese subjects who had taken service under Junot, which he had no authority to concede. These were points which concerned not the British army but the Portuguese civil administration, and should not have been decided without a consultation with our allies, and a permission from them to make terms on their behalf. The sixteenth article allowed Frenchmen resident in Lisbon to remain there for a year after the Convention, if they did not chose to leave the country with Junot and his troops. To permit subjects of the hostile power to remain in Lisbon for so long was, of course, most distasteful to the Portuguese government, which was naturally desirous of expelling at once, according to the ordinary customs of war, a body of persons many of whom had made themselves the partners and instruments of Junot’s peculations, and who for the next twelve months would serve as spies and purveyors of intelligence to the French Emperor. Nothing more than the leave to quit Lisbon in Junot’s wake should have been secured to them, unless the Junta of Regency gave its consent. The seventeenth article is even more objectionable: a considerable portion of the bureaucracy of Portugal had been weak and criminal enough to acquiesce in the French usurpation, and to make themselves the tools of the Duke of Abrantes. It was natural that their countrymen should feel deeply indignant with them; and their lot was likely to be so hard that it was but rational and humane to give them leave to quit the kingdom. But considering that they had deserved very ill of the state, it was surely wrong for the British general to promise to take them under his special protection, and to guarantee them against injury to their persons or property. He had no power to grant them an amnesty for their past ill-doing; that could be given only by the Portuguese government. When the latter resumed its ordinary functions at Lisbon, it was absurd that it should be prevented, by the Convention, from taking into consideration the cases of such of these unpatriotic persons as it might wish to deal with. When, therefore, Kellermann broached to Dalrymple the sixteenth and seventeenth articles, the latter should have refused to accept them without a reference to the Junta at Oporto. He might have granted both the French and the Portuguese satellites of Junot a free passage out of Portugal, with such of their goods as they could carry, but more than this he could not rationally concede on his own authority.
It was fortunate, therefore, that the practical harm done did not turn out to be very great. Both the aliens and the natives covered by these two clauses were so perfectly aware of their own unpopularity in Lisbon, that they absconded almost en masse. The populace of the capital had given them fair warning of what they might expect, for not only were they threatened and insulted in the streets whenever they were out of sight of a French sentry, but unknown hands posted on the walls lists of houses to be sacked and individuals to be hung as soon as Junot’s army should have sailed. The watchwords, ‘Death to the French’ and ‘Death to the traitors,’ were muttered even under the muzzles of the cannon, which had been trained on all the main streets, to keep down the insurrection for the few days which had to elapse before the embarkation. The invaders, therefore, had to take away with them a very large body of civilian dependants, headed by the Comte de Novion, a French émigré, who, after being hospitably entertained in Lisbon for many years, had shown his gratitude by accepting the post of head of Junot’s police—a capacity in which he had much odd business to transact.
But besides Articles XVI and XVII of the Convention there were other clauses to which Dalrymple should not have given his assent without consulting the representatives of his allies. Almeida was being blockaded by a mass of Portuguese militia, and Elvas, a few days after the treaty had been signed, was attacked by a Spanish force sent out from Badajoz by Galluzzo, the Captain-General of Estremadura. No British soldier had yet been seen within a hundred miles of either fortress. What was to be done if the generals of the besieging troops refused to abide by an agreement which they had not been asked to sign, and which had not even been laid before their respective governments ere it was definitively ratified? A grave crisis, as we shall find, was created by Dalrymple’s neglect to foresee this difficulty. His conduct all through the days of negotiation was very strange; not only did he make no proper attempt to communicate with the Portuguese authorities, but he actually left his own government uninformed of his proceedings for a fortnight. He failed to send them any dispatch to announce the armistice of August 22, and only forwarded that detailing the Convention of August 30 on the fourth day of the succeeding month.
Dalrymple’s main reason for leaving the Portuguese out of the negotiations was that the Junta at Oporto had not yet been formally recognized as the legitimate government of Portugal. Wellesley, no doubt, had conferred with the Bishop, given him arms and munitions, procured from him food and draught animals, and asked his advice, but the British ministry had not yet acknowledged the existence of any regular executive in Portugal. This being so, Dalrymple thought himself justified in acting as if there were none in being; and it cannot be denied that thereby he saved himself much present trouble, at the cost of future friction. All, therefore, that he did was to inform the Junta’s agent at the British head quarters, one Pinto da Souza, that he was negotiating with Junot for the evacuation of Lisbon, and that he was open to receive any observations which the Junta might make. The same announcement was made to Bernardino Freire, who had ridden over to Ramalhal to complain that he and his army were not mentioned in the armistice of August 22. Both Freire and the Junta were treated as persons whose opinions it was useful to obtain, not as constituted authorities whose consent to the definitive convention was necessary in order to make it binding. Dalrymple tried to cover himself during the subsequent inquiry by maintaining that the Convention was purely military, and concerned the French and English armies alone: but this plea cannot seriously be put forward in face of Articles XV, XVI, and XVII, all of which are concerned with problems of civil government, which would arise after the French army should have embarked. Each of these articles clearly required the ratification of some proper Portuguese authority to make it valid.
Both the Bishop of Oporto and General Freire were deeply wounded by the way in which Dalrymple ignored their status—the prelate more justly than the soldier, for he had done his best to assist the British army, while Freire by his captious and impracticable behaviour had been more of a hindrance than a help. The Bishop charged the representative of the Supreme Junta in London to complain to the British Government as to the behaviour of their generals, denouncing not only their neglect to make the Junta a party to the Convention, but also the terms of that document, which were stated to be far too favourable to Junot. Owing to Dalrymple’s extraordinary delay in apprising the ministry of the details of the treaty, the Bishop’s excited denunciations of the agreement had currency for nearly a fortnight, before any one in England knew what exactly had been granted to Junot, or how far the Junta was justified in its wrath.
THE FRENCH EVACUATE PORTUGAL
The Convention of Cintra being once signed, the difficulties which were bound to arise from the unwisdom of some of its articles were not long in showing themselves. Indeed the first fortnight of September turned out to be a very critical time.
The Portuguese authorities were furious: Dalrymple found the greatest trouble in preventing the insurgents of the Alemtejo, who had gathered opposite the mouth of the Tagus under the Conde de Castro Marim, from attacking the French detachments in the forts on the left bank. Their commander protested against the Convention, and actually appealed to Admiral Cotton to repudiate it: fortunately he was content to confine his opposition to words. But there was much more trouble at Elvas: the Junta of Estremadura did not object to the settlement, and liberated the French prisoners who were in its hands, according to the proposal in the eighteenth article. But Galluzzo, the Captain-General of that province, showed himself much more disobliging. He refused to call off the troops under his lieutenant De Arce, who were beleaguering Elvas, and behaved in the most dictatorial manner within Portuguese territory, raising not only requisitions of food but contributions of money. He even seized, at Campo Mayor, the military chest of the Portuguese general Leite, who commanded the wrecks of the force that had been beaten at Evora by Loison in July. His detestable behaviour had the good effect of throwing the natives of the country on the English side, and Leite welcomed the arrival of troops from Lisbon, which enabled him to protest with effect against the misdoings and plunderings of the Spaniards. De Arce’s troops were doing no real good: they only maintained a distant and futile bombardment of the citadel of La Lippe, in which the garrison of Elvas had taken refuge. The French commandant, Girod de Novillars, laughed their efforts to scorn, and refused to listen to the proposals for a capitulation which they kept pressing upon him. In spite of orders from the Junta of Seville, bidding him abandon the siege and march for Madrid with his army, Galluzzo persisted in his ridiculous proceedings till nearly the end of September. It was only when Dalrymple moved up to the neighbourhood first the 20th Regiment, and then two whole brigades under Sir John Hope, that the Captain-General drew off his men and retired into Spanish territory . Then Girod and his garrison, which was mainly composed of the 4th Swiss Regiment, were able to march to Lisbon under British escort and embark for France. They did not sail till October 9, so long had Galluzzo’s freaks delayed them.
The garrison of Almeida departed about the same time: they had maintained themselves without difficulty against the Portuguese insurgents, but duly yielded up the place on the arrival of British troops. They were marched down to Oporto under an escort of 200 men, a force so weak that it nearly led to a disaster. For the mob of Oporto, under the pretext that church plate and other public plunder was being carried off by the French, fell upon them as they were embarking and nearly made an end of them. It required all the exertions of the escort, the Bishop of Oporto, and Sir Robert Wilson—who was then on the spot organizing his well-known ‘Lusitanian Legion’—to prevent the populace from boarding the transports and slaying the whole of the French battalion. The baggage of the departing troops was seized and plundered, and they barely succeeded in escaping with their lives.
Meanwhile, long before the garrisons of Elvas and Almeida had been brought down to the coast, Junot and the main body of his army had departed. The commander-in-chief himself had sailed on September 13, the first division of his army on the fifteenth, the rest between that day and the thirtieth. The last weeks of the French occupation of Lisbon had been most uncomfortable for all parties concerned. The populace was seething with discontent, assassinating isolated soldiers, and threatening a general rising. The French were under arms day and night, with cannon trained down every street and square. Unpopular officers, such as Loison, could not stir from their quarters without a large escort. Sullen at their defeat, and still more angry at having to abandon the heaps of plunder which they had amassed, the French were in a most disobliging mood in their dealings with the Portuguese, and in a less degree with the English. The main source of irritation was the very necessary measures which had to be taken for searching the baggage of the departing army. A commission had been formed, consisting of Kellermann on the one side and General Beresford and Lord Proby on the other, to settle in all disputed cases what was military equipment and legitimate personal property, and what was not. The English commissioners discovered the most astounding hoards of miscellaneous goods among the bags and boxes of the invaders. The conduct of most of the French officers, from the commander-in-chief downwards, was most disgraceful. A few examples may suffice: Junot, by the twenty-first article of the Convention, had been granted leave to send a single officer to France with news for the Emperor. This officer, his aide-de-camp Lagrave, took with him for his general’s private profit the most valuable set of books in the Royal Library of Lisbon, fourteen volumes of a manuscript Bible of the fifteenth century, illustrated with miniatures by the best Florentine artists—a gift to King Emanuel from one of the Renaissance popes. Junot’s widow afterwards sold it to the French government for 85,000 francs. Lagrave, having started before the commissioners had begun to work, got off with his boxes unsearched. But other interesting items were discovered in the baggage of the Duke of Abrantes—one was ￡5,000 worth of indigo in fifty-three large chests, another was a quantity of valuable specimens of natural history from the public museum. General Delaborde was found to be in possession of a large collection of sacred pictures which had adorned Lisbon churches. Scattered through the baggage of many officers was a quantity of church plate—apparently part of the property seized to pay the war contributions which Napoleon had imposed on Portugal: but it had in some mysterious way passed from public into private possession. In the military chest were gold bars to the value of 1,000,000 francs which had come from the same source, but the paymaster-general tried to get them out of the country without paying the numerous accounts owed by his department to private individuals in Lisbon. They were not discharged till this individual, one Thonnellier, had been put under arrest, and threatened with detention after the rest of the army should have sailed. Another most scandalous proceeding discovered by the commissioners was that Junot, after the signature of the Convention, had broken open the Deposito Publico, the chest of the Supreme Court of Lisbon, which contained moneys whose rightful ownership was in dispute between private litigants. He took from it coin to the value of ￡25,000, which was only wrung out of him with the greatest difficulty. Even after a vast amount had been recovered, the French sailed with a military chest containing pay for three months ahead for the whole army, though they had entered Portugal penniless. For a general picture of their behaviour it may suffice to quote the report of the British commissioners. ‘The conduct of the French has been marked by the most shameful disregard of honour and probity, publicly evincing their intention of departing with their booty, and leaving acknowledged debts unpaid. Finally they only paid what they were obliged to disgorge.... Unmindful of every tie of honour or justice, the French army has taken away a considerable sum in its military chest, still leaving its debts unpaid to a very large amount.’
It was no wonder that the resentment of the Portuguese was so great that the last French who embarked could only get away under the protection of British bayonets, and that many of those who straggled or lingered too long in remote corners of the town lost their lives. The wild fury of the Lisbon mob surprised the British officers who were charged with the embarkation: they knew little of what had been going on in the capital for the last nine months, and could not understand the mad rage displayed against the garrison.
But finally the last French bayonet disappeared from the streets of Lisbon, and the populace, with no object left on which to vent their fury, turned to illuminations, feasts, and the childish delights of fireworks. They did not show themselves ungrateful to the army of liberation; all the British officers who have described the first weeks after the evacuation of Lisbon, bear witness to the enthusiasm with which they were received, and the good feeling displayed by their allies. It was only in the highest Portuguese quarters that dissatisfaction was rampant: the Bishop of Oporto, General Freire, and the Monteiro Mor, had all suffered what they considered an insult, when their consent was not asked to the Convention of Cintra, and made no secret of their anger against Dalrymple. But it does not seem that their feelings affected any large section of the people.
The French army embarked for its native soil still 25,747 strong. It had entered Portugal in the previous November with a strength of nearly 25,000, and had received during the spring of 1808 some 4,500 recruits: in the month of May, before hostilities began, its full force had been 26,594. Of this total 20,090 were under arms at the moment that the Convention was signed, 3,522 were in hospital, sick or wounded: 916 were prisoners in the hands of the English or the Portuguese. There remain, therefore, some 4,500 men to be accounted for: these, however, were not all dead. More than 500 had deserted and taken service with the British before the embarkation: they came, almost without exception, from the ranks of the three foreign battalions which had been serving with Junot, the 1st Hanoverians and the 2nd and 4th Swiss. As the total force of these corps had been only 2,548, it is clear that about one man in five deserted. This was natural in the case of the Germans, who were old subjects of George III, and most unwilling recruits to the French army, but the equally well-marked defection of the Swiss is very notable. Most of the latter were enlisted for the 5th Battalion of the 60th Rifles, while the Hanoverians joined their countrymen in the ranks of the King’s German Legion. The real deficit, then, in Junot’s army was about 4,000 men: this represents the total loss of life by the fights of Roli?a and Vimiero, by the numerous combats with the Portuguese, by the stragglers cut off during the forced marches of July and August, and by the ordinary mortality in hospital. It must be considered on the whole a very moderate casualty list: Junot’s corps, when it re-entered Spain to serve once more under the Emperor, was still 22,000 strong. It would have been even a trifle higher in numbers if a transport carrying two companies of the 86th Regiment had not foundered at sea, with the loss of every man on board.
It is necessary to give some account of the fate of Siniavin’s Russian squadron, before dismissing the topic of the evacuation of Portugal. The admiral, as we have already had occasion to state, had steadfastly refused to throw in his lot with Junot and to join in the Convention of Cintra. He preferred to make an agreement of his own with Sir Charles Cotton. It was a simple document of two articles: the first provided that the nine sail of the line and one frigate, which formed the Russian fleet, should be given up, sent to England, and ‘held as a deposit’ by his Britannic majesty, to be restored within six months of a peace between Great Britain and Russia. The second was to the effect that Siniavin, his officers and crews, should be sent back to Russia on English ships without being in any way considered prisoners of war, or debarred from further service.
Admiral Cotton, it is clear, regarded the ships as important and the crews as worthy of small attention. It was profitable to Great Britain to keep down the number of vessels in the power of Napoleon, though now that the Danish fleet was captured, and the Spanish fleet transferred to the other side of the balance, there could be no longer any immediate danger of the French taking the offensive at sea. The easy terms of release granted to the personnel of the Russian squadron suggest that the British admiral had determined to reward its commander for his persistent refusal to help Junot. It almost appears that Cotton looked upon Siniavin as a secret friend, and treated him accordingly. Milder terms could hardly have been devised, for the moment that the harbour-forts of Lisbon were surrendered to the British, the Russians must obviously be made prisoners, since they could not get out of the river. It is probable that the two admirals thoroughly understood each other’s mind, and that the Russian was undisguisedly pleased at the disaster of his detested French allies.
The most pressing necessity in Portugal, after the French had departed, was the construction of a new national government, for it was clear that the Supreme Junta at Oporto represented in reality only the northern provinces of the realm, and could not be accepted—as its president, the Bishop, suggested—as a permanent and legitimate executive for the whole kingdom. Constitutionally speaking, if one may use such a phrase when dealing with a country like Portugal, the only body which possessed a clear title of authority was the Council of Regency, which Prince John had nominated nine months before, on the eve of his departure for Brazil. But this council had long ceased to act; its members were dispersed; several had compromised themselves by submitting to the French and taking office under Junot; and its composition gave no promise of vigorous action for the future. If a choice must be made between the Junta at Oporto, which was active and patriotic, though perhaps too much given up to self-assertion and intrigue, and the effete old Regency, there could be no doubt that the former possessed more claims to the confidence of the Portuguese nation and its English allies. But it was not necessary to adopt either alternative in full: Wellesley, who had already got a firm grip upon the outlines of Portuguese politics, advised Dalrymple to invite the old Regency, with the exception of those members who had compromised themselves with the French, to reassemble, and to bring pressure upon them to co-opt to the vacant places the Bishop of Oporto and the other prominent members of the Junta. This proposal would have secured legality of form (since the old Regency would theoretically have continued to exist), while introducing new and vigorous elements of undoubted patriotism into the body. But Dalrymple preferred to reinstate, by a proclamation of his own, those members of the Regency who had never wavered in their allegiance to Prince John . He called upon all public bodies and officials in the realm to obey this reconstituted executive. Here was an undoubted mistake; it was wounding to Portuguese pride to see the central governing body of the kingdom created by the edict of an English general: Dalrymple should surely have allowed the Regents to apprise the nation, by a proclamation of their own, that they had resumed their former functions. However, they fell in with Wellesley’s plans so far as to co-opt the Bishop of Oporto as a colleague, though refusing any places to the rest of his Junta. The whole body now consisted of three original members, the Conde de Castro Marim (otherwise known as the Monteiro Mor), Francisco Da Cunha, and Xavier de Noronha, of two persons chosen from a list of possible substitutes, which the Prince-Regent had left behind, Joam de Mendon?a and General Miguel Forjas Coutinho, and of two co-opted members, the Bishop and the Conde das Minas, an old nobleman who had shown a very determined spirit in resisting Junot during the days of his power.
On the reconstitution of the Regency the Junta of Oporto, with more self-denial than had been expected, dissolved itself. The minor juntas in the Algarve, the Alemtejo, and the Tras-os-Montes followed its example, and Portugal was once more in possession of a single executive, whose authority was freely recognized throughout the kingdom. Unfortunately it turned out to be slow, timid, and divided into cliques which were always at variance with each other.
We have already seen that owing to various causes of delay, of which Galluzzo’s preposterous proceedings at Elvas were the most prominent, the last French troops did not quit Portugal till September had expired, and that Junot himself and the main body of his army had only begun to leave on the fifteenth of that month. It would have been impossible for Dalrymple to advance into Spain till the French had left Lisbon, however urgently his presence might have been required. But it would perhaps have proved feasible to push forward towards the Spanish frontier a considerable part of his army, and to make preparations for the movement of the whole towards Madrid or Salamanca as soon as the evacuation should be complete. Dalrymple, however, was as leisurely as the generals of the old days before the Revolutionary War. He kept his troops cantoned about Lisbon, only pushing forward two brigades towards Elvas in order to bring Galluzzo to reason, and dispatching the 6th Regiment as a garrison to Almeida. He seems to have been quite as much interested in the administration of Portugal as in the further prosecution of the war in Spain. We find him much busied in the reconstruction of the Portuguese government and army, reviewing and rearming the Spanish division of Caraffa before shipping it off to Catalonia , and spending a great deal of time over the redistribution into brigades and divisions of his army, which had now swelled to something like 35,000 men, by the arrival of Moore’s force and certain regiments from Madeira, Gibraltar, and England. He was also engaged in endeavours to organize a proper commissariat for this large body of men, a hard task, for every brigade arrived in the same state of destitution as to means of transport as had those which landed with Wellesley at Mondego Bay on the first of August. But in all his actions there was evident a want of vigour and of purposeful resource, which was very distressing to those of his subordinates who were anxious for a rapid and decisive advance towards the main theatre of war in Spain.
No one felt this more clearly than Wellesley, whose views as to his commander’s competence had never changed since that hour on the morning of August 22, when Dalrymple had refused to march on Mafra, and had decided to delay his advance till the advent of Moore. Since then he had offered his advice on several points, and had almost always seen it refused. Dealing with the disputed details of the Convention of Cintra, he had spoken in favour of meeting the French demands with high-handed decision: hence he was vexed by Dalrymple’s tendency towards weakness and compromise. One of his special grievances was that he had been ordered to sign the armistice of August 22 as representing the British army, although he had privately protested against its details. His unofficial letters home during the first half of September are full of bitter remarks on the weakness of the policy that had been adopted, and the many faults of the Convention. Seeing that warlike operations appeared likely to be postponed for an indefinite time, he at last asked and obtained leave to return to England, after declining in somewhat acid terms an offer made to him by Dalrymple that he should go to Madrid, to concert a plan for combined operations with Casta?os and the other Spanish generals. ‘In order to be able to perform the important part allotted to him,’ he wrote, ‘the person sent should possess the confidence of those who employ him, and be acquainted with their plans, the means by which they hope to carry them into execution, and those by which they intend to enable the Spanish nation to execute that which will be proposed to them. I certainly cannot consider myself as possessing these advantages.’ Wellesley also refused another and a less tempting offer of a mission to the Asturias, for the purpose of seeing what facilities that province would offer as the base of operations for a British army. He was not a ‘draftsman,’ he wrote, or a ‘topographical engineer,’ and he could not pretend to describe in writing the character of such a region. In short he was set on going home, and would not turn from his purpose. But before leaving Portugal he wrote two remarkable letters. One was to Sir John Moore, the third in command of the army, telling him that he regarded him as the right person to take charge of the British forces in the Peninsula, and would use every effort with the ministers to get the post secured to him. ‘It is quite impossible that we can go on as we are now constituted: the commander-in-chief must be changed, and the country and the army naturally turn their eyes to you as their commander.’ The second and longer was a letter to his patron Castlereagh, in which he laid down his views as to the general state of the war in Spain, and the way in which the British army could be best employed. It is a wonderful document, as he foretells in it all the disasters that were about to befall the Spaniards from their reckless self-confidence. The only real fighting-force that they possessed was, he said, the army of Casta?os: the rest, with the possible exception of Blake’s Galicians, were ‘armies of peasantry,’ which could not be relied upon to meet the French in the field. Though they might on some occasions fight with success in their own mountains, ‘yet in others a thousand French with cavalry and artillery will disperse thousands of them.’ They would not, and indeed could not, leave their native provinces, and no officer could calculate upon them for the carrying out of a great combined operation. How then could the British army of Portugal be best employed to aid such allies? The only efficient plan, Wellesley concludes, would be to place it upon the flank and rear of any French advance to Madrid, by moving it up to the valley of the Douro, and basing it upon Asturias and Galicia. Posted in the kingdom of Leon, with its ports of supply at Gihon, Corunna, and Ferrol, it should co-operate with Blake, and hang upon the right flank of the French army which was forming upon the line of the Ebro. The result would be to prevent the invaders from moving forward, even perhaps (here Wellesley erred from ignorance of the enemy’s numbers) to oblige them to retire towards their own frontier. But Bonaparte could, unless occupied by the affairs of Central Europe, increase his armies in Spain to any extent. The moment that he heard of an English force in the field, he would consider its destruction as his first object, and so multiply his numbers in the Peninsula that the British commander would have to give back. ‘There must be a line of retreat open, and that retreat must be the sea.’ Accordingly, Sir Arthur recommended that the Asturias should be made the ultimate base, and the transports and stores sent to its port of Gihon.
This letter was different in its general character from the other reports which Castlereagh was receiving: most of the correspondents of the Secretary for War could write of nothing but the enthusiastic patriotism of the Spaniards and their enormous resources: they spoke of the French as a dispirited remnant, ready to fly, at the first attack, behind the line of the Pyrenees. It is therefore greatly to the credit of Castlereagh that he did not hesitate to pin his faith upon Wellesley’s intelligence, and to order the execution of the very plan that he recommended. It was practically carried out in the great campaign of Sir John Moore, after the collapse of the Spanish armies had justified every word that Sir Arthur had written about them.
Wellesley sailed from Lisbon on September 20, and reached Plymouth on October 4. On his arrival in England he was met with news of a very mixed character. On the one hand he was rejoiced to hear that both Dalrymple and Burrard had been recalled, and that Sir John Moore had been placed in command of the British forces in the Peninsula. He wrote at once to the latter, to say that there could be no greater satisfaction than to serve under his orders, and that he would return at once to Spain to join him: ‘he would forward with zeal every wish’ of his new commander. It was also most gratifying to Wellesley to know that the dispatch of September 25, by which Moore was given the command of the army of Portugal, directed him to move into Northern Spain and base himself upon the Asturias and Galicia, the very plan which formed the main thesis of the document that we have been discussing. There can be no doubt that Castlereagh had recognized the strategical and political verities that were embodied in Wellesley’s letter, and had resolved to adopt the line therein recommended.
THE COURT OF INQUIRY
There was another and a less pleasant surprise in store for Wellesley when he landed at Plymouth. He learnt that if he himself disliked the armistice of August 22, and the Convention of Cintra, the British public had gone far beyond him, and was in a state of frantic rage concerning them. To his anger and amazement he also learnt that he himself was considered no less responsible for the two agreements than were Dalrymple and Burrard. The fact that the former had told him to set his signature opposite to that of Kellermann on the document signed at Vimiero, had misled the world into regarding him as the negotiator and framer of the armistice. ‘Every whisperer who disliked the name of Wellesley’—and Sir Arthur’s brother, the Governor-General, had made it very unpopular in certain quarters—was busy propagating the story that of the three generals who had lately commanded in Portugal, each one was as slack and supine as the others.
The wave of indignation which swept across England on the receipt of the news of the Convention of Cintra is, at this distance of time, a little hard to understand. Successes had not been so plentiful on the Continent during the last fifteen years, that an agreement which gave back its liberty to a whole kingdom need have been criticized with vindictive minuteness. But the news of Baylen had set the public mind on the look-out for further triumphs, and when the dispatches which gave an account of Roli?a and of Vimiero had come to hand, there had been a confident expectation that the next news received would be that Junot’s army had been scattered or captured, and that Lisbon had been set free. Then came a gap of thirteen days, caused by Dalrymple’s strange fit of silence. The only intelligence that reached London in this interval was the Bishop of Oporto’s letter of protest against the armistice, in which, without giving any definite details about that agreement, he denounced it as insulting to Portugal and unworthy of England. The public was prepared, therefore, to hear that something timid and base had been done, when Dalrymple’s dispatch of September 3, enclosing the Convention of Cintra, came to hand. It was easy to set forth the terms of that treaty in an odious light. Junot, it was said, had been beaten in the field, he was completely isolated from all the other French armies, and his surrender must have followed in a few days, if the British generals had only chosen to press their advantage. Instead of this, they preferred to let him return to France with the whole of his troops, and with most of his plunder. He was not even compelled to release a corresponding number of British prisoners in return for the freedom secured to his army. In fact, his position was much better after than before his defeat at Vimiero, for the Convention granted him a quiet and safe return home with his force intact, while, even if he had won some success in battle, the best that he would have been able to secure himself would have been a retreat on Northern Spain, through the midst of great dangers. Excitable politicians and journalists used the most exaggerated language, and compared the Convention with that of Kloster Seven, and the conduct of the generals who had not pressed the campaign to its logical end with Admiral Byng’s shirking before Minorca. Caricatures were issued showing Dalrymple, Burrard, and Wellesley sporting the white feather, or hanging from three gibbets as traitors. Nor was Admiral Cotton spared: he was denounced in bitter terms for taking the Russian ships as ‘deposits,’ when he should have towed them into Spithead as prizes: moreover the repatriation of the Russian crews was asserted to be a deadly blow at our unfortunate ally the King of Sweden.
The rage against the Convention was not confined to any one class or faction in the state. If some Whigs tried to turn it into the shape of an attack on the government, there were plenty of Tories who joined in the cry, begging their leaders in the ministry to dismiss and punish the three unpopular generals. A number of public meetings were held with the object of forcing the hands of the Duke of Portland and his colleagues, but the most prominent part in the agitation was taken by the Corporation of London. Recalling the old days of Wilkes and Beckford, they resolved that the Lord Mayor, with a deputation of Sheriffs, Aldermen, and Common-Councillors, should present a petition to the King begging him to order ‘an inquiry into this dishonourable and unprecedented transaction, for the discovery and punishment of those by whose misconduct and incapacity the cause of the kingdom and its allies has been so shamelessly sacrificed.’
Accordingly such a petition was laid before the King on October 12. Its terms are worth a moment’s attention, as they show very clearly the points on which popular indignation had been concentrated. ‘The treaty,’ it states, ‘is humiliating and degrading, because after a signal victory, by which the enemy appears to have been cut off from all means of succour or escape, we had the sad mortification of seeing the laurels so nobly acquired torn from the brows of our brave soldiers, and terms granted to the enemy disgraceful to the British name.... By this ignominious Convention British ships are to convey to France the French army and its plunder, where they will be at liberty immediately to recommence their active operations against us and our allies. And the full recognition of the title and dignity of Emperor of France, while all mention of the Government of Portugal is omitted, must be considered as highly disrespectful to the authorities of that country.’ There was another clause denouncing the sending back of the Russian sailors, but not so much stress was laid on this point. Finally the King is asked ‘in justice to the outraged feelings of a brave, injured, and indignant people, whose blood and treasure have been thus expended,’ to cause the guilty persons to be punished.
King George III replied to these flowers of oratory by a short speech which displays admirably that power of getting an occasional lucid glimpse of the obvious in which he was by no means deficient. He was fully sensible, he said, of the loyalty and good intentions of the City of London, but he wished the deputation to remember that to pronounce judgement without previous trial and investigation was hardly consonant with the principles of British justice. He was always ready to institute an inquiry when the honour of the British arms was in question: and the interposition of the City of London was not necessary to induce him to set one on foot in this case, when the hopes and expectations of the nation had been so much disappointed.
It was not, however, till seventeen days later that his majesty’s formal orders for the summoning of a Court of Inquiry ‘to investigate into the late Armistice and Convention concluded in Portugal, and all the circumstances connected therewith,’ were communicated to the Commander-in-Chief. Dalrymple and Burrard, both of whom had now returned to England, were directed to hold themselves in readiness to present themselves before the court, and Wellesley, for the same reason, was directed to abandon his project of going back to the Peninsula in order to serve under Sir John Moore.
The members of the celebrated Court of Inquiry, which commenced its sittings on November 14, 1808, were seven in number, all general officers of great respectability and advanced years, men more likely, for the most part, to sympathize with caution than with daring. The president was Sir David Dundas, the author of a celebrated drill-book which had long been the terror of young officers: the other members were Lord Moira, Lord Heathfield, the Earl of Pembroke, and Generals Craig, Sir G. Nugent, and Nicholls. Not one of them has left behind a name to be remembered, save indeed Lord Moira, who, as Lord Rawdon in the old American War, had won the victory of Hobkirk’s Hill, and who was destined to be the next Viceroy of India and to make the name of Hastings famous for a second time in the East.
The court began its sittings on November 14, and did not terminate them till December 22. In the great hall of Chelsea Hospital, where its proceedings were held, there was much warm debate. As the details of the Campaign of Portugal were gradually worked out, not only by the cross-examination of Dalrymple, Burrard, and Wellesley, but by that of many of the other officers of rank who had been in Portugal—Spencer, Acland, Ferguson, Lord Burghersh, and others—the points on which the verdict of the court must turn gradually became clear. They were six in number:—Had Burrard been justified in preventing Wellesley from pursuing the French at the end of the battle of Vimiero? Had Dalrymple erred in refusing to take Wellesley’s advice to march on Mafra the next morning? Should Kellermann’s offer of an armistice have been accepted on the twenty-second, and, if so, were the terms granted him too favourable? Lastly, was the Convention of Cintra itself justifiable under the existing circumstances, and were all its articles reasonable and proper? Much evidence was produced for and against each view on every one of these topics. On the first two Wellesley practically impeached Burrard and Dalrymple for unwarrantable slackness and timidity. He was so much in love with his own bold plans that his superior’s caution appeared to him contemptible. He stood up to them and cross-questioned them with an acidity and a complete want of deference that seemed very reprehensible to military men steeped in the old traditions of unquestioning deference to one’s senior officers. Sir Walter Scott, who followed the inquiry with great interest, called him ‘a haughty devil,’ but expressed his admiration for him at the same moment. It is curious to find that Wellesley showed less anger with Burrard, whose caution on the afternoon of the twenty-first really wrecked his plan of campaign, than with Dalrymple. The latter had snubbed him on his first arrival, had persistently refused him his confidence, and would not state clearly to the court that the armistice, though it bore Wellesley’s name, had not been drawn up or approved in detail by him. Of the numerous minor witnesses who were examined, all who had served at Roli?a and Vimiero spoke on Wellesley’s side: Spencer and Ferguson were especially strong in their statements. The fact was that they were intensely proud of their two fights, and looked upon Burrard as the man who had prevented them from entering Lisbon in triumph after capturing Junot and his whole host. So strong was this feeling that the brigadiers and field-officers of the eight brigades that fought at Vimiero had presented Wellesley with a handsome testimonial—a service of plate worth ￡1,000—as a sort of mark of confidence in him, and of protest against those who had stayed his hand.
On the other hand, Burrard and Dalrymple urged all the justifications of caution. Each had arrived at a crisis, the details of which could not be properly known to him from sheer want of time to master them. Each acknowledged that Wellesley had vehemently pressed him to strike boldly and promptly, but thought that he had not been justified in doing so till he had made out for himself the exact situation of affairs. Burrard pleaded that Junot might have possessed reserves unknown to him, which might have changed the fortune of the fight if a headlong pursuit had been ordered. Wellesley had told him that none such existed (and this turned out to have been the fact), but he himself had not seen any clear proof of it at the time. Dalrymple went even further, and stated that he had considered the whole conduct of the campaign, from the landing in Mondego Bay till the battle of Vimiero, terribly rash. If he had permitted the army to march on Mafra on the twenty-second, the French from Torres Vedras might have taken him in the flank as he passed through a very difficult country, and the most disastrous results might have ensued. He was positive that nothing hazardous ought to have been attempted, and that it was necessary to wait for Sir John Moore’s division before pressing the French to extremity.
With regard to the armistice and the Convention, all the three generals, when defending themselves, agreed that they were wise and justifiable. To clear the French out of Portugal without further fighting, and to recover Lisbon and all its resources intact, were ends so important that it was well worth while to sacrifice even the practical certainty of capturing all Junot’s army, after a resistance that might have been long and desperate. But as to the wisdom of certain clauses and articles, both in the document of August 22 and that of August 30, there was considerable difference of opinion. Wellesley proved that he had opposed many details of each agreement, and that he was in no way responsible for the final shape taken by them. He only assented to the general proposition that it was right to let the French army depart under a convention, rather than to force it to a capitulation. He considered that Dalrymple had yielded far too much, from his unwillingness to ‘drive Junot into a corner.’
On December 22 the Court of Inquiry issued its report. It was a very cautious and a rather inconclusive document. But its main point was that nothing had been done in Portugal which called for the punishment of any of the parties concerned: ‘On a consideration of all the circumstances, we most humbly submit our opinion that no further military proceeding is necessary,’ i.e. there was no ground for a court-martial on any one of the three British generals. As to Burrard’s refusal to pursue the French on the afternoon of Vimiero, there were ‘fair military grounds’ for his decision: the court omitted to say whether the decision itself was right or wrong. ‘It could not pronounce with confidence whether or not a pursuit could have been efficacious.’ As to the halt on the following day, for which Dalrymple no less than Burrard was responsible, ‘under the extraordinary circumstances that two new commanding generals arrived from the ocean and joined the army within the space of twenty-four hours, it is not surprising that the army was not carried forward until the second day after the action, from the necessity of the generals becoming acquainted with the actual state of things, and of their army, and proceeding accordingly.’ Finally, as to the Convention, ‘howsoever some of us may differ in our sentiments respecting its fitness in the relative situation of the two armies, it is our unanimous declaration that unquestionable zeal and firmness appear to have been exhibited throughout both by Sir Hew Dalrymple, Sir Harry Burrard, and Sir Arthur Wellesley.’ There was a special compliment inserted for Wellesley’s benefit, to the effect that his whole action, from the landing in Mondego Bay down to the battle of Vimiero, was ‘highly honourable and successful, and such as might have been expected from a distinguished officer.’
Such a report amounted to a plain acquittal of all the three generals, but it left so much unsaid that the Government directed the Commander-in-Chief to require from the members of the court their decision as to whether the armistice of the twenty-second and the Convention of the thirtieth were advisable, and, if they were advisable, whether their terms were proper, and honourable. On the twenty-seventh the court returned its answer: there was, this time, no unanimous report, but a series of written opinions, for the members of the body differed from each other on many points. As to the armistice, six members replied that they approved of it, one, but he the most distinguished of the seven—Lord Moira—said that he did not. On the question as to the definitive Convention there was more difference of opinion: Dundas, Lord Heathfield, Craig, and Nugent thought it fair and reasonable; Lord Moira, the Earl of Pembroke, and Nicholls considered it as unjustifiable, considering the relative situations of the two armies. The two last-named officers added short explanatory notes to their opinions, while Lord Moira subjoined to his a long and elaborate argument, a document which does not seem in the least to deserve the slighting reference made to it by Napier. It is very sensible in its general drift. Lord Moira contended that while on August 22 there was no reason why an armistice should not have been concluded, yet the paper drawn up by Kellermann contained clauses that limited unduly the demands which the British commander might make in the subsequent Convention. Dalrymple ought, before conceding them, to have reflected that Junot’s anxious and hurried offer of terms betokened demoralization. If the French had been pressed, and a confident and haughty answer returned to their envoy, Junot would have accepted any conditions that might be imposed upon him. His army was in such a state of disorder and dismay that it was most unlikely that he would have tried either to burn Lisbon or to retreat across the Alemtejo. Moreover, the contention that the deliverance of Portugal was the one object of the expedition, and that it was duly secured by the Convention, was a mistake. Lord Moira wished to point out that our armies were sent forth, not only to emancipate Portugal, but also to destroy the forces and lower the prestige of France by every means in their power. By forcing Junot to a capitulation, or by making the terms of the Convention more stringent, a much greater blow might have been dealt to Bonaparte’s reputation. As an instance of what might have been done, he suggested that some remote and inconvenient landing-place—Belle Isle for example—might have been imposed upon the French troops, or they might have been compelled to engage not to serve for some specified time against England and her allies.
The Court of Inquiry had thus delivered its last opinion. But the matter of the Convention was not even yet at an end. The ministry resolved to inflict a rebuke on Dalrymple, not for his military action, on which they completely accepted the verdict of the seven generals, but for his political action in allowing the Articles XV, XVI, and XVII to be inserted in the Convention. These, it will be remembered, were the clauses which conceded certain privileges to the French inhabitants of Lisbon, and to the Portuguese who had compromised themselves by taking service under Junot. The Duke of York, as commander-in-chief, was ordered to convey to Dalrymple ‘His Majesty’s disapprobation of those articles in the Convention in which stipulations were made affecting the interests and feelings of the Spanish and Portuguese nations.’ It was to be impressed upon Sir Hew that it was most improper and dangerous to admit into a military convention articles of such a description, which (especially when carelessly and incautiously framed) might lead to the most injurious consequences. Furthermore, Dalrymple was to be gravely censured for his extraordinary delay in not sending the news of the armistice of the twenty-second till September 3, whereby ‘great public inconvenience’ had been caused.
It cannot be denied that these rebukes were well deserved: we have already pointed out that the three articles to which allusion is made were the only part of the Convention for which no defence is possible. It is equally clear that it was the thirteen days’ gap in the information sent home which gave time for the rise and development of the unreasoning popular agitation against the whole agreement made with Junot.
As to the verdict of the court, it does substantial justice to the case. There existed ‘fair military reasons’ for all that Burrard and Dalrymple had done, or left undone. In a similar way ‘fair military reasons’ can be alleged for most of the main slips and errors committed during any campaign in the Napoleonic War—for Dupont’s stay at Andujar, or for Murray’s retreat from Tarragona, or for Grouchy’s operations on June 17 and 18, 1815. It would be unjust to punish old and respectable generals for mere errors of judgement, and inability to rise to the height of the situation. Burrard and Dalrymple had sacrificed the most brilliant possibilities by their torpid caution, after refusing to listen to Wellesley’s cogent arguments for bold action. But their conduct had resulted neither from cowardice nor from deliberate perversity. The blame must rest quite as much on the government, which had entrusted the expedition to elderly men unaccustomed to command in the field, as on those men themselves. And as to the details of the armistice and Convention, we may well accept Wellesley’s verdict, that the gain secured by the rescue of Lisbon with all its wealth intact, and by the prompt termination of the campaign, fully justified the resolve not to drive Junot to extremity.
But there was an unexpressed corollary to the verdict of the court which the ministry fully realized, and upon which they acted. Burrard and Dalrymple, with their ‘fair military reasons,’ must never again appear in the field. It was not by such men that Bonaparte would be foiled and Spain emancipated, and so they were relegated to home service and quiet retirement for the rest of their lives. Wellesley, on the other hand, was marked out as a man of energy, resource, and determination, eminently fit to be employed again. Within four months of the termination of the proceedings of the Court of Inquiry he was once more in command of the British army in the Peninsula.
DUHESME’S OPERATIONS: FIRST SIEGE OF GERONA (JUNE-JULY, 1808)
There is still one corner of the Iberian Peninsula whose history, during the eventful summer months of 1808, we have not yet chronicled. The rugged and warlike province of Catalonia had already begun that heroic struggle against its French garrison which was to endure throughout the whole of the war. Far more than any other section of the Spanish nation do the Catalans deserve credit for their unswerving patriotism. Nowhere else was the war maintained with such resolution. When the struggle commenced the French were already masters by treachery of the chief fortresses of the land: the force of Spanish regular troops which lay within its borders was insignificant: there was no recognized leader, no general of repute, to head the rising of the province. Yet the attack on the invaders was delivered with a fierceness and a persistent energy that was paralleled in no other quarter of the Peninsula. For six years marshal after marshal ravaged the Catalan valleys, sacked the towns, scattered the provincial levies. But not for one moment did the resistance slacken; the invaders could never control a foot of ground beyond the narrow space that was swept by the cannon of their strongholds. The spirit of the race was as unbroken in 1813 as in 1808, and their untiring bands still held out in the hills, ready to strike at the enemy when the least chance was offered. Other provinces had equal or greater advantages than Catalonia for protracted resistance: Biscay, the Asturias, and Galicia were as rugged, Andalusia far more populous, Valencia more fertile and wealthy. But in none of these was the struggle carried on with such a combination of energy and persistence as in the Catalan hills. Perhaps the greatest testimony that can be quoted in behalf of the people of that devoted province is that Napier, bitter critic as he was of all things Spanish, is forced to say a good word for it. ‘The Catalans,’ he writes, ‘were vain and superstitious; but their courage was higher, their patriotism purer, and their efforts more sustained than those of the rest. The somatenes were bold and active in battle, the population of the towns firm, and the juntas apparently disinterested.’ No one but a careful student of Napier will realize what a handsome testimonial is contained in the somewhat grudging language of this paragraph. What the real credit due to the Catalans was, it will now be our duty to display.
It will be remembered that in the month of February the French general Duhesme had obtained possession of the citadel and forts of Barcelona by a particularly impudent and shameless stratagem. Since that time he had been lying in the city that he had seized, with his whole force concentrated under his hand. Of the 7,000 French and 5,000 Italian troops which composed his corps, all were with him save a single battalion of detachments which had been left behind to garrison Figueras, the fortress close to the French frontier, which commands the most important of the three roads by which the principality of Catalonia can be entered.
Duhesme believed himself to be entirely secure, for of Spanish regular troops there were barely 6,000 in all scattered through the province, and a third of these were Swiss mercenaries, who, according to the orders of Bonaparte, were to be taken at once into the French service. That there was any serious danger to be feared from the miqueletes of the mountains never entered into the heads of the Emperor or his lieutenant. Nor does it seem to have occurred to them that any insurrection which broke out in Catalonia might be immediately supported from the Balearic Isles, where a heavy garrison was always kept, in order to guard against any descent of the British to recover their old stronghold of Port Mahon. If Napoleon had realized in May that the Spanish rising was about to sweep over the whole Peninsula, he would not have dared to leave Duhesme with such a small force. But persisting in his original blunder of believing that the troubles which had broken out were merely local and sporadic, he was about to order Duhesme to make large detachments from a corps that was already dangerously weak.
The geography of Catalonia, as we have had occasion to relate in an earlier chapter, is rather complicated. Not only is the principality cut off by its mountains from the rest of Spain—it faces towards the sea, while its neighbour Aragon faces towards the Ebro—but it is divided by its numerous cross-ranges into a number of isolated valleys, between which communication is very difficult. Its coast-plain along the Mediterranean is generally narrow, and often cut across by spurs which run down from the mountains of the inland till they strike the sea. Except on the eastern side of the principality, where it touches Aragon in the direction of Lerida, there is no broad expanse of level ground within its borders: much the greater part of its surface is upland and mountain.
Catalonia may be divided into four regions: the first is the district at the foot of the Eastern Pyrenees, drained by the Fluvia and the Ter. This narrow corner is called the Ampurdam; it contains all the frontier-fortresses which protect the province on the side of France. Rosas commands the pass along the sea-shore, Figueras the main road from Perpignan, which runs some twenty miles further inland. A little further south both these roads meet, and are blocked by the strong city of Gerona, the capital of all this region and its most important strategical point. South of Gerona a cross-range divides the Ampurdam from the coast-plain of Central Catalonia; the defile through this range is covered by the small fortified town of Hostalrich, but there is an alternative route from Gerona to Barcelona along the coast by Blanes and Arens de Mar.
The river-basin of Central Catalonia is that of the Llobregat, near whose estuary Barcelona stands. Its lower course lies through the level ground along the coast, but its upper waters and those of its tributaries drain a series of highland valleys, difficult of access and divided from each other by considerable chains of hills. All these valleys unite at the foot of the crag of Montserrat, which, crowned by its monastery, overlooks the plain, and stands sentinel over the approach to the upland. In the mountains behind Montserrat was the main stronghold of the Catalan insurrection, whose rallying-places were the high-lying towns of Manresa, Cardona, Berga, and Solsona. Only three practicable roads enter the valleys of the Upper Llobregat, one communicates by the line of Manresa and Vich with the Ampurdam; a second goes from Manresa via Cervera to Lerida, and ultimately to the plains of Aragon; the third is the high-road from Barcelona to Manresa, the main line of approach from the shore to the upland. But there is another route of high importance in this section of Catalonia, that which, starting from Barcelona, avoids the upper valleys, strikes inland by Igualada, crosses the main watershed between the coast and the Ebro valley below Cervera, and at that place joins the other road from Manresa and the Upper Llobregat, and continues on its way to Lerida and the plains of Aragon. This, passing the mountains at the point of least resistance, forms the great trunk-road from Barcelona to Madrid.
Map of Catalonia
Enlarge Catalonia.
The third region of the principality is the coastland of Tarragona, a district cut off from the coastland of Barcelona by a well-marked cross-ridge, which runs down from the mountains to the sea, and reaches the latter near the mouth of the Llobregat. The communication between the two maritime districts is by two roads, one passing the cross-ridge by the defile of Ordal, the other hugging the beach and finding its way between the hills and the water’s edge by Villanueva de Sitjas. The coastland of Tarragona is not drained by a single river of considerable volume, like the Llobregat, but by a number of small streams such as the Francoli and the Gaya, running parallel to each other and at right angles to the coast. Each is separated from the next by a line of hills of moderate height. The southern limit of this region is the Ebro, whose lower course is protected by the strong fortress of Tortosa. Its main line of internal communication is the great coast-route from Barcelona to Tarragona, and from Tarragona to the mouth of the Ebro. Its touch with Aragon and Central Spain is maintained by a good road from Tarragona by Montblanch to Lerida.
The fourth and last region of Catalonia is the inland, which looks not towards the Mediterranean but to the Ebro and Aragon. It is drained by the Segre, an important stream, which after being joined by its tributaries, the Noguera and the Pallaresa, falls into the Ebro not far to the south of Lerida. The tracts around that town are flat and fertile, part of the main valley of the Ebro. But the head-waters of the Segre and its affluents flow through narrow and difficult mountain valleys, starting in the highest and wildest region of the Pyrenees. They are very inaccessible, and served by no roads suitable for the use of an army. Hence, like the upper valley of the Llobregat, they served as places of refuge for the Catalan insurgents when Lerida and the flat country had been lost. The only place of importance in these highlands is the remote town of Seu d’ Urgel, a mediaeval fortress near the sources of the Segre, approached by mule-paths only, and quite lost in the hills.
Catalonia, then, is pre-eminently a mountain land, and one presenting special difficulties to an invader, because it has no central system of roads or valleys, but is divided into so many heterogeneous parts. Though not fertile, it was yet rich, and fairly well peopled when compared with other regions of Spain. Its wealth came not from agriculture but from commerce and manufactures. Barcelona, a city of 180,000 souls, was the greatest Mediterranean port of Spain: on each side of it, along the coast, are dozens of large fishing-villages and small harbour-towns, drawing their living from the sea. Of the places which lay farther back from the water there were many which made an ample profit from their manufactures, for Catalonia was, and still remains, the workshop of Spain. It is the only province of the kingdom where the inhabitants have developed industries on a large scale: its textile products were especially successful, and supplied the whole Peninsula.
More than any other part of Spain, Catalonia had suffered from the war with England and the Continental System. The closure of its ports had told cruelly upon its merchants and manufacturers, who were fully aware that their sufferings were the logical consequence of the French alliance. They had, moreover, a historic grudge against France: after encouraging them to revolt in the seventeenth century, the Bourbons had then abandoned them to the mercies of the King of the Castilians. In the great war of the Spanish Succession, Catalonia had taken sides against France and Don Philip, and had proclaimed Charles of Austria its king—not because it loved him, but because it hated the French claimant. Even after the Peace of Utrecht the Catalans had refused to lay down their arms, and had made a last desperate struggle for provincial independence. It was in these wars that their miqueletes had first made their name famous by their stubborn fighting. These bands were a levy en masse of the population of military age, armed and paid by their parishes, not by the central government, which could be called out whenever the principality was threatened with invasion. From their liability to turn out whenever the alarm-bell (somaten) was rung, they were also known as somatenes. The system of the Quinta and the militia ballot, which prevailed in the provinces under the crown of Castile, had never been applied to the Catalans, who gloried in the survival of their ancient military customs. The somatenes had been called out in the French war of 1793-5, and had done good service in it, distinguishing themselves far more than the troops of the line which fought on the frontier of the Eastern Pyrenees. The memories of that struggle were still fresh among them, and many of the leaders who had won a name in it were still fit for service. In Catalonia then, more than in any other corner of Spain, there were all the materials at hand for a vigorous popular insurrection, even though the body of regular troops in the principality was insignificant. The Catalans rose to defend their provincial independence, and to recover their capital, which had been seized so shamelessly by the trickery of Duhesme. They did not concern themselves much with what was going on in Aragon and Valencia, or even in Madrid. Their fight with the invader forms an episode complete in itself, a sort of underplot in the great drama of the Peninsular War, which only touches the main struggle at infrequent intervals. It was not affected by the campaigns of Castile, still less had it any noticeable influence on them. It would be equally possible to write the history of the war in Catalonia as a separate treatise, or to compile a general history of the war in which Catalonia was barely mentioned.
When the echoes of the cannon of the second of May went rolling round Spain, they stirred up Catalonia no less than the other provinces which lie at a distance from the capital. The phenomena which appeared in the South and the West were repeated here, in much the same sequence, and at much the same dates, as elsewhere. But the rising of the Catalans was greatly handicapped by the fact that their populous and wealthy capital was occupied by 12,000 French troops. Barcelona could not set the example to the smaller places, and for some time the outburst was spasmodic and local. The chief focus of rebellion was Lerida, where an insurrectionary Junta was formed on May 29. At Tortosa the populace rose a few days later, and murdered the military governor, Santiago de Guzman, because he had been slow and reluctant to place himself at their head. On June 2 Manresa, in the upper valley of the Llobregat, followed their example, and from it the flame of insurrection spread all over the central upland. In Barcelona itself there were secret meetings, and suspicious gatherings in the streets, on which Duhesme had to keep a watchful eye. But the main preoccupation of the French general was that there were still several thousand Spanish troops in the town, who might easily lead the populace in an émeute. He had got rid of one regiment, that of Estremadura, in May: he gave it orders to march to Lerida, where the magistrates and people refused to receive it within their walls, dreading that it might not be ready to join in their projected rising. This was a vain fear, for the corps readily took its part in the insurrection, and marched to join Palafox at Saragossa. But there still remained in Barcelona a battalion each of the Spanish and the Walloon Guards, and the cavalry regiment of Borbon, some 2,500 men in all. To Duhesme’s intense satisfaction, these troops, instead of keeping together and attacking the French garrison when the news of the revolt reached them, began to desert in small parties. Far from attempting to compel them to stay by their colours, Duhesme winked at their evasion, and took no notice of their proceedings, even when a whole squadron of the Borbon Regiment rode off with trumpets sounding and its officers at its head. Within a few days the greater part of the Spanish troops had vanished, and when Duhesme was directed by his master to disarm them, there were very few left for him to deal with. These scattered remnants of the Guard Regiments drifted in small bands all over Catalonia, some were found at Gerona, others at Tarragona, others at Rosas. Nearly 400 went to Aragon and fought under Palafox at Epila: another considerable body joined the Valencian insurgents. But these two strong veteran battalions never were united again, or made to serve as a nucleus for the Catalan levies.
Saved from the peril of a rising of the Spanish regiments in Barcelona, Duhesme had still the insurrection of the province on his hands. But he was not left free to deal with it according to his own inspirations. By the last dispatch from Napoleon which reached him before the communications with Madrid and Bayonne were cut, a plan of campaign was dictated to him. The Emperor ordered him to chastise the insurgents of Lerida and Manresa, without ceasing to keep a strong grip on Barcelona, and on the line of touch with France through Figueras. But, as if this was not enough to occupy his small army of 12,000 or 13,000 men, he was to provide two strong detachments, one of which was to co-operate with Moncey in Valencia, and the other with Lefebvre-Desnouettes in Aragon. A glance at the Emperor’s instructions is enough to show how entirely he had misconceived the situation, and how thoroughly he had failed to realize that all Spain was up in arms. The first detachment, 4,000 strong, was to march on Lerida, and to enter Aragon along the line of the Ebro. It was then to move on Saragossa to join Lefebvre. The second detachment, also 4,000 strong, was to move on Valencia via Tortosa, join Marshal Moncey, and finally occupy the great naval arsenal of Cartagena. With the 5,000 men that remained Duhesme was to hold down Barcelona and Central Catalonia, while keeping open the line of communications with Figueras and Perpignan.
Either Duhesme was as blind to the real state of affairs as his master, or he considered that unquestioning obedience was his first duty. He told off the two columns as directed, only cutting down their strength a little, so as not wholly to ungarnish Barcelona. For the Valencian expedition he told off General Chabran, with the best brigade in his army, three veteran French battalions of the 7th and 16th of the line. With this force he sent his single brigade of French cavalry, two regiments under General Bessières (the brother of the Duke of Istria). The whole amounted to 2,500 foot and 600 horse. For the attack on Lerida, he had to send out troops of more doubtful value—all foreigners, for there were no more French to be spared. General Schwartz was given one Swiss, two Neapolitan, and one Italian battalion, with no more than a single squadron of cavalry, for his march was to lie over a very mountainous country. His whole force was 3,200 strong. To the general directions given by Napoleon, Duhesme added some supplementary orders of his own. Chabran was to pass by Tarragona, leave a battalion in its citadel, and take as a compensation the two battalions of Wimpfen’s Swiss Regiment, which was to be incorporated in the French army. It was expected that he would get into touch with Marshal Moncey when he should reach Castellon de la Plana. Schwartz, on the other hand, was told to march by the mountain road leading to Manresa, in order to punish the inhabitants of that town for their rebellion. He was to fine them 750,000 francs, and to destroy a powder-mill which they possessed. He was then to march on Lerida, from which he was to evict the insurrectionary Junta: the city was to pay a heavy war-contribution, and to receive a garrison of 500 men. With the rest of his brigade Schwartz was to join the French forces before Saragossa, not later than June 19.
Schwartz started from Barcelona on June 4: a tempest forced him to wait for a day at Martorel, in the coast-plain, but on the sixth he reached the pass of Bruch, at whose foot the roads from Igualada and from Manresa join. Here he met with opposition: the news of his approach had spread all up the valley of the Llobregat, and the somatenes of the upland towns were hurrying forward to hold the defile by which the high-road from Barcelona climbs into the upper country. At the moment when the invaders, marching in the most careless fashion, were making their way up the hill, only the levy of Manresa was in position. They were a mere handful, 300 or 400 at most, and many were destitute of muskets. But from the cover of a pine-wood they boldly opened fire upon the head of Schwartz’s column. Surprised to find himself attacked, the French general deployed a battalion and drove the somatenes out of their position: they retired in great disorder up the hill towards Manresa. Schwartz followed them with caution, under the idea that they must be the vanguard of a larger force, and that there were probably regular troops in support, further along the defile. In this he was wrong, but the retreating Manresans received reinforcements a few miles behind the place of the first skirmish. They were joined by the levies of San Pedor and other villages of the Upper Llobregat, marching forward to the sound of the single drum that was to be found in the upland. The peasants ensconced themselves in the rocks and bushes on either side of the road, and again offered battle. Schwartz took their opposition much too seriously, extended a long front of tirailleurs against them, but did not push his attack home. Soon other bands of somatenes from the direction of Igualada began to gather round his left flank, and it seemed to him that he would soon be surrounded and cut off from his line of communications with Barcelona. His regiments were raw and not of the best quality: the Neapolitans who composed more than half his force passed, and with reason, as the worst troops in Europe. He himself was a cavalry officer who had never held independent command before, and was wholly unversed in mountain warfare. Reflecting that the afternoon was far spent, that he was still twelve miles from Manresa, and that the whole country-side was on the move against him, he resolved to abandon his expedition. Instead of hurling his four battalions upon the somatenes, who must have been scattered to the winds if attacked by such superior numbers, he drew back, formed his men in a great square, with the cavalry and guns in the middle, and began a retreat across the more open parts of the defile. The Spaniards followed, pressing in the screen of tirailleurs by which the square was covered, and taking easy shots into the solid mass behind them. After six miles of marching under fire, Schwartz’s Swiss and Italians were growing somewhat demoralized, for nothing could be more harassing to raw and unwilling troops than such a retreat. At last they found their way blocked by the village of Esparraguera, where the inhabitants barricaded the streets and opened a hot fire upon the front face of the square. Seeing his men hesitate and break their ranks, Schwartz hastily bade them scatter right and left and pass round the village without attempting to storm it. This device succeeded, but when the two halves of the column reunited beyond Esparraguera, they were in such disorder that there was no means of stopping them. The whole streamed into Martorel in a confused mass at nightfall, after a retreat whose incidents remind the military reader, in every detail, of the rout of the British troops in the march to Lexington, on the first day of the old American War of 1775.
When he reached the plains Schwartz was able to retire unharmed to Barcelona, having saved three of his four guns and lost no very large proportion of his men. But he had suffered the disgrace of being worsted by inferior numbers of undisciplined peasantry, and brought his troops back in a state of demoralization, which was very discouraging to the rest of the garrison of the Catalonian capital. Duhesme, instead of taking him to task, fully approved of his retreat, on the ground that if he had pushed on for Manresa and Lerida he would probably have lost his whole brigade. Realizing at last the true strength of the insurrection, and learning that the somaten was sounding in every village, and that the peasantry were flocking together in thousands, Duhesme determined to concentrate his whole force, and sent orders to Chabran to abandon his Valencian expedition and return at once to Barcelona. He was probably quite right in his resolve, though Chabran’s retreat was the determining fact that ruined Moncey’s campaign in the province south of the Ebro. The Emperor had sketched out the whole plan of operations on false premises, and when the new military situation had developed itself, it would have been absurd for his lieutenants to carry out his original orders in blind and servile obedience.
Chabran’s column had reached Tarragona when it received Duhesme’s letters of recall. It had started on June 4, and found the coastland still quiet, the insurrection not having yet spread downwards from the hills. On arriving at Tarragona Chabran took possession of the citadel, and issued orders to the two battalions of Wimpfen’s Swiss Regiment, which formed the garrison of the place, to prepare to march with him against Valencia. The Swiss officers showed no alacrity in falling in with this plan. They were not animated by the patriotic fury which had carried away the rest of the Spanish regular troops into the insurgent camp. On the other hand they felt no enthusiasm at the idea of joining the French in an attack on their late employers. They were deferring obedience to the orders of the French general on various futile pleas, when the news of Schwartz’s defeat at Bruch reached Tarragona. Directed to return in haste and to rejoin Duhesme, General Chabran marched off on June 9, leaving Wimpfen’s mercenaries behind: they would not follow him, and declared in favour of the insurgent Junta at Lerida the moment that his back was turned. The retreating French column had to brush aside several considerable bands of somatenes, which tried to arrest its progress, for the coastland had taken arms after the combat of Bruch, and its levies hoped to treat Chabran as their compatriots of the upland had treated Schwartz. But the three veteran French battalions were of tougher material than the Neapolitans and Italians who had been routed on the sixth, and successfully cut their way back to Barcelona. They were aided by the unwisdom of the insurgents, who, instead of trying to defend the difficult defile of Ordal, came down into the plain. When they attacked Chabran at Vendrell and Arbos, they were charged by his cavalry and scattered to the winds with heavy loss. The French, when the actions were over, sacked with every circumstance of brutality all the villages which lay along their path. On June 11 they got into touch with Duhesme’s outposts, and on the twelfth re-entered Barcelona.
The whole of the ‘Army of the Eastern Pyrenees’ was now reunited under its commander’s hand, and Duhesme thought himself strong enough to punish the peasantry of the Upper Llobregat for their victory at Bruch. On the fourteenth Chabran, with his own brigade and the Swiss and Italians of Schwartz, marched from Martorel to assault once more the pass which the uplanders had defended so well eight days before. But the woods and rocks of Bruch were now manned by many thousands of somatenes: all Central Catalonia had sent its levies thither, and they were supported by 400 regulars from Lerida and four pieces of artillery. After feeling the position, and directing against it at least one serious attack, Chabran drew back and refused to press on the action—apparently influenced by the manifest reluctance of Schwartz’s troops to advance, no less than by the strength of the ground. After losing nearly 400 men he retired to the plain and marched back to Barcelona .
Duhesme had a more pressing business in hand than the chastisement of the mountaineers of the Upper Llobregat. He had now learnt, by the fact that couriers from France had ceased to arrive, that his communications with Figueras and Upper Catalonia had been cut, and it was absolutely necessary that they should be reopened. This was to prove a harder task than he imagined: the somatenes were now up in every valley as far as the French frontier; they had driven into the citadel of Figueras the weak battalion of detachments that had been left to hold that town, and some of the bolder spirits were feeling their way through the Pyrenean recesses to commence raids on Roussillon. Such alarm was felt at Perpignan that the general commanding the district had begun to call out the national guards, for he had no regulars at his disposal save a few hundred men of details and detachments, who were waiting to go forward to join their regiments in Duhesme’s corps. But all this was unknown at Barcelona, and it was with very little conception of the difficulties before him that Duhesme resolved to march on Gerona and reopen the main road to France. He told off for this service one half of the infantry battalions which composed his army—the Italian division of Lecchi, consisting of the brigades of Schwartz and of Milosewitz, the latter of which had hitherto remained in garrison at Barcelona, and had not taken part in the futile attacks on the defile of Bruch. He also took with him nearly the whole of his cavalry, four French and three Italian squadrons of cuirassiers and chasseurs, and a battery of eight guns. This gave him a formidable force of 5,900 men, about half of the total strength of his corps when the losses suffered at Bruch and elsewhere are deducted.
Duhesme had resolved to march on Gerona by the comparatively easy road along the sea-coast, rather than by the alternative route which passes further inland by the valley of the Besos and the town of Hostalrich. Even in the lowland, however, he found the somatenes prepared to oppose him. At the castle of Mongat, only six miles outside Barcelona, he met the first swarm 8,000 or 9,000 strong. They had procured a few guns, which they had mounted so as to sweep the road, and lay in disorderly masses along the crest of a rising ground. Duhesme, amusing them in front by a false attack, sent a strong column to turn their right flank: seeing themselves likely to be enveloped, the peasants fled after a short skirmish, in which they suffered considerable loss. Pushing onward, Duhesme arrived that same afternoon at the large open town of Mataro, a place of 20,000 souls given over to the manufacture of glass and cotton goods. The populace had hastily barricaded the outlets of the streets with carts and piles of furniture, and discharged two or three cannon against the approaching enemy. But Milosewitz’s Italian brigade easily burst through the feeble defences and took Mataro by storm. Its attempt at resistance was considered by Duhesme to justify its sack, and he granted the plunder of the town to his men, who only moved on the next day after having thoroughly robbed every dwelling of its portable goods and murdered a considerable number of the inhabitants. The French army of Catalonia was the most motley and undisciplined force of all the imperial hosts in Spain, and for that reason it was by far the most cruel and brutal in its behaviour to the natives, who had not as yet justified any such treatment by their manner of conducting the war. Any ferocity which they showed from this time onward was a well-deserved revenge for what they had suffered.
Leaving Mataro on the eighteenth, Duhesme arrived before Gerona on the twentieth, after burning most of the villages on the road, in revenge for the constant molestation which he suffered from the somatenes. He found the city placed in a state of defence, so far as was possible in the case of an old-fashioned fortress called upon to stand a siege at ten days’ notice. There was a small regular garrison, the Irish regiment of Ultonia, under its two lieutenant-colonels, O’Donovan and O’Daly: but this corps only counted 350 bayonets. In addition there were a few trained artillerymen, and the armed citizens of the town, not more than 2,000 in all, for Gerona had but 14,000 inhabitants. The place lies on either side of the small stream of the O?a, just above its confluence with the river Ter. On the south bank is the main part of the town, straggling up the side of a steep hill, which is crowned at its eastern end by an ancient citadel, known (like those of several other Catalonian towns) by the name of Monjuich. Further westward, along the crest of this hill, lie three other forts, those of the Constable, Queen Anne, and the Capuchins. These, like the citadel, are detached works, not connected by any line of wall but only by a ditch. The town, which is completely commanded by the four forts, has no protection on the south side of the O?a but a mediaeval wall, destitute of a ditch and not more than twenty feet high. But on the other side of the river, the northern suburb, known as the Mercadal, having no line of outlying heights to protect it, had been fortified in the style of Vauban with a regular front of five bastions, though, like the fortifications of the city, it was without a ditch.
Duhesme had no battering-train, and his force of 5,900 men was insufficient to invest the whole circumference of the city of Gerona and its forts. But, like Moncey before Valencia, he was resolved to make an attempt to storm the city by escalade, or by battering in its gates. He left alone the citadel and the line of works on the hill, only sending a single battalion to demonstrate against the fort of the Capuchins. His real attack was directed against the sole point where the old enceinte of the city is not fully protected by the forts, the gate of the Carmen, on the very brink of the O?a. In no very honourable spirit, he sent in one of his aides-de-camp, with a white flag, to demand the surrender of Gerona, and while that officer was conferring with the governor and the local Junta, suddenly launched his column of assault against the gate, hoping to catch the Spaniards off their guard. The attack was a failure: the heavy guns from the forts above silenced the French field-artillery which tried to batter in the gate. Then Duhesme sent forward a storming party, with artillerymen at its head bearing petards with which to blow open the entrance: but the heavy musketry-fire from the walls laid low the head of the column, and the rest swerved, and fell back to get under cover. A feeble demonstration beyond the O?a against the bastions of Santa Clara and San Francisco had not even the desired effect of distracting the attention of the defenders of the Carmen Gate.
Seeing his attack foiled, Duhesme sent in at dusk a second flag of truce, inviting the Junta of Gerona to send out deputies to confer with him on certain points which he was desirous of submitting to them. The Catalans were simple enough to comply with his offer: they would have been wiser to avoid all negotiations with such an enemy. For this parley was only intended to cover a second assault. Seeing that he could not hope to batter his way into the place by means of his light field-artillery, Duhesme was preparing a great escalade under cover of the night. The point which he chose for it was the bastion of Santa Clara, on the centre of the low front of the Mercadal, beyond the O?a. He collected a quantity of ladders from the neighbouring villages, and told off for the assault the three battalions of the brigade of Schwartz.
At ten o’clock the Italians crept up beneath the ramparts, where the citizens on guard do not seem to have kept a good look out, and delivered their attack. But these raw troops, moving in the darkness, made many mistakes: the chief one was that many of the ladder-party went astray among the water-courses and field-walls, so that the provision of ladders proved insufficient. The garrison of the bastion, however, had been taken completely by surprise, and allowed the head of the column to escalade the twenty-foot wall with no more hindrance than a few musket-shots. The Neapolitan Colonel Ambrosio and the leading files had actually mounted, and driven back the citizens to the gorge of the bastion, when there arrived reinforcements, a company of the Regiment of Ultonia, which charged with the bayonet, drove the Italians back, and hurled them over the rampart. An Irish lieutenant, Thomas Magrath, and a Carmelite friar seized and overturned the ladders, at the cost of the life of the former. When the garrison began firing down into the mass of assailants crowded at the foot of the wall, and the neighbouring bastion commenced to discharge a flanking fire of artillery, the Italians broke and fled. A second attempt at an escalade, made two hours later at another bastion, failed even more lamentably, for the garrison were on the alert and detected the assailants before they drew near the walls.
Convinced that he was too weak to take Gerona without siege-artillery, Duhesme broke up his camp and fled under cover of the night, marking his retreat by a third insincere attempt to open negotiations with the garrison. He hastily made off by the same road by which he had come, and returned to Barcelona by forced marches, dropping on the way one of his Italian brigades at Mataro . In the whole expedition he had lost 700 men.
So ended the first attempt on Gerona, to the great credit of its gallant defenders, and more especially to that of the weak Irish regiment which had borne the brunt of the fighting. Duhesme’s whole campaign bore a singular resemblance to that which Moncey was making at the same moment in Valencia, and, like it, was wrecked on the initial blunder of supposing that Spanish towns, defended by a population in a high state of patriotic enthusiasm, could be carried by escalade without any proper preparation by artillery. French generals soon got to know their adversaries better: the same levies that could be easily scattered in the open field were formidable under cover of stone walls.
On returning to Barcelona, Duhesme found that the insurgents of Central Catalonia had drawn close to the capital in his absence. Eight or ten thousand somatenes had come down to the line of the Llobregat, had broken its bridges, had entrenched themselves opposite its fords, and were preparing to blockade Barcelona. They had brought up a considerable number of guns taken from the batteries on the coast, which had so long kept watch upon the English. But of regular troops there were only a few present—a mixed body of 400 men from Lerida, and some small remnants of the old Spanish garrison of Barcelona. The command seems to have been held by Juan Baget, a lawyer of Lerida, who had been named colonel of miqueletes by the Junta of his native town. Duhesme was determined not to be deprived of his hold on the coast-plain by this tumultuary army. On the thirtieth he sallied out from Barcelona with Goulas’s French brigade and three of Lecchi’s Italian battalions, accompanied by the cuirassiers of Bessières. Though the line of the Llobregat is marked by steep banks, and though a considerable number of guns were mounted behind it, the position was too long and too much exposed to be capable of defence by undisciplined bands of mountaineers. While the Italians menaced its front, Goulas and Bessières forded the river and turned the flank of the Catalans. Chased out from the villages of San Boy and Molins de Rey by a sweeping charge, they were pursued across the plain, stripped of all their artillery, and forced to take refuge in their old positions along the edge of the mountains of Montserrat, after losing a considerable number of men.
Less successful was another stroke against the insurgents which Duhesme endeavoured to deal five days later. General Chabran, with the Italian brigade that had been left at Mataro, a regiment of French cavalry and a field-battery, moved out to clear the hills above the coast, and to sweep the valley of the Besos. He had before him the somatenes of the regions about Vich, Hostalrich, and Santa Coloma, under Francisco Milans, a half-pay lieutenant-colonel, who had been placed at their head by the local Junta. Chabran forced his way for some distance inland till he reached Granollers, always harassed but never seriously attacked by the insurgents. Milans, who showed all through his career a real genius for guerilla warfare, had ordered his levies never to stand when pressed, but to hang about the enemy’s line of march, cut off his pickets and scouting parties, and fall upon the baggage-train which trailed at the rear of his column. These tactics were perfectly successful: having reached Granollers after a most toilsome march, Chabran refused to push further among the mountains, turned back, and retreated to Mataro, accompanied home by the somatenes, who pursued him to the very outskirts of the town, and cut off his stragglers and many of his baggage animals .
The moment that the Catalan insurrection grew serious, Duhesme had sent repeated appeals for help to the Emperor: the land route to Perpignan being cut, he had to use small vessels which put out to sea at night, risked capture by the English ships lying off the coast, and when fortunate reached the harbours of Collioure or Port-Vendres, just beyond the Pyrenees. Napoleon looked upon the Catalonian war as a very small matter, but he was fully resolved that Duhesme must be succoured. Accordingly he determined to concentrate a division at Perpignan, but he refused to allot to it any of his veteran French troops. He swept together from the Southern Alps and Piedmont a most heterogeneous body of 7,000 or 8,000 men, even worse in quality than the motley army which he had entrusted to Duhesme. The command was entrusted to a capable officer, General Reille, one of the Emperor’s aides-de-camp, who was told to advance and relieve Figueras, after which he was to stretch out his hand to Duhesme, who would push northward to meet him. His improvised army consisted of two battalions of recruits just levied in the lately annexed duchy of Tuscany, and constituting the nucleus of a new regiment with the number 113, of a battalion of national guards, some mobilized gendarmerie, a battalion of the ‘Legion of Reserve of the Alps’ from Grenoble, five ‘battalions of detachments,’ and the single battalion which formed the contingent of the little republic of the Valais. The cavalry comprised two squadrons of Tuscan dragoons, and two escadrons de marche of French cuirassiers and chasseurs. There seem to have been no more than two batteries of artillery allotted to the force. Reille was informed that other troops from Italy would ultimately arrive at Perpignan, but that they were not to be expected till the end of July or the beginning of August. For the relief of Figueras and the opening up of communications with Duhesme he must depend on his own forces.
Travelling with commendable rapidity, Reille arrived at Perpignan on July 3. Of all the detachments that were marching to join him he found that nothing had yet reached the frontier but the local national guards and gendarmerie, the two Tuscan battalions, a company of the 2nd Swiss Regiment, and artillerymen enough to serve a couple of guns. With no more than the Tuscans and the Swiss, less than 1,600 men in all, he marched on Figueras on July 5, dispersing on the way some bands of somatenes, who tried to oppose him at the passage of the Muga. He threw a convoy into the place and strengthened its garrison, but could do no more, for all the country beyond Figueras was up in arms, and his raw Italian recruits could hardly be kept to their colours. Indeed he was forced to make them march in solid columns whenever he moved them, for when ordered to deploy they always fell into disorder, and tried to make off to the rear.
But by July 11 Reille had begun to receive many of the drafts and detachments which the Emperor was pouring into Perpignan, and having now three or four thousand men disposable, he resolved to strike a blow at Rosas, the small seaport town which blocks the coast-road from Perpignan to Barcelona. Marching through the plains of the Ampurdam he reached his objective, an insignificant place with a dilapidated outer entrenchment and a citadel of some small strength. It was defended by no more than 400 miqueletes, and had but five guns on its land-front. But the little garrison showed a bold face, and when Reille proceeded to invest Rosas he found himself attacked from the rear by four or five thousand somatenes levied by Don Juan Claros, a retired infantry captain who had called to arms the peasantry of the coast. They beset the besiegers so fiercely that Reille resolved to abandon the investment, a determination which was assisted by the sight of a British line-of-battle ship landing marines to strengthen the garrison. Accordingly he cut his way back to Figueras on the twelfth, harassed all the way by the bands of Claros, who killed or took no less than 200 of his men. Rosas was to defy capture for some months more, for Reille’s next effort was, by his master’s direction, devoted to a more important object—the clearing of the great road from Perpignan to Barcelona, and the opening up of communications with Duhesme.
THE STRUGGLE IN CATALONIA (JULY-AUGUST, 1808): THE SECOND SIEGE OF GERONA
For the first six weeks of the war in Catalonia Duhesme and Reille had been opposed only by the gallant somatenes. Of the handful of regular troops who had been stationed in the principality when the insurrection broke out, the greater part had drifted off to the siege of Saragossa, or to the struggle in the south. Only the Irish regiment at Gerona, and certain fragments of the disbanded battalions of the Guards from Barcelona had aided the peasantry in resisting the invader. The success of the Catalans, in hemming in Duhesme and checking Reille’s advance, is all the more notable when we reflect that their levies had not been guided by any central organization, nor placed under the command of any single general. The Junta at Lerida had done little more than issue proclamations and serve out to the somatenes the moderate amount of munitions of war that was at its disposition. It had indeed drawn out a scheme for the raising of a provincial army—forty tercios of miqueletes, each 1,000 strong, were to be levied and kept permanently in the field. But this scheme existed only on paper, and there were no means of officering or arming such a mass of men. Even as late as August 1, there were only 6,000 of them embodied in organized corps: the mass of the men of military age were still at their own firesides, prepared to turn out at the sound of the somaten, whenever a French column appeared in their neighbourhood, but not ready to keep the field for more than a few days, or to transfer their service to the more distant regions of the principality. The direction of these irregular bands was still in the hands of local leaders like Claros, Milans, and Baget, who aided each other in a sufficiently loyal fashion when they had the chance, but did not obey any single commander-in-chief, or act on any settled military plan. Their successes had been due to their own untutored intelligence and courage, not to the carrying out of any regular policy.
This period of patriotic anarchy was now drawing to an end; regular troops were beginning to appear on the scene in considerable numbers, and the direction of the military resources of Catalonia was about to be confided to their generals. The change was not all for the better: during the whole struggle the Spaniards showed themselves admirable insurgents but indifferent soldiers. After one more short but brilliant period of success, the balance of fortune was about to turn against the Catalans, and a long series of disasters was to try, but never to subdue, their indomitable and persevering courage.
We have already shown that the only body of regular troops available for the succour of Catalonia was the corps of 10,000 men which lay in the Balearic Islands. That these thirteen battalions of veterans had not yet been thrown ashore in the principality was mainly due to the over-caution of the aged General Vives, the Captain-General at Palma, to whom the charge of the garrisons of Majorca and Minorca was committed. He had a deeply rooted idea that if he left Port Mahon unguarded, the English would find some excuse for once more making themselves masters of that ancient stronghold, where the union Jack had waved for the greater part of the eighteenth century. Even the transparent honesty of Lord Collingwood, the veteran admiral of the Mediterranean fleet, could not reassure him. It was only when strong pressure was applied to him by his second in command, the Marquis del Palacio, governor of Minorca, and when he had received the most explicit pledges from Collingwood concerning the disinterested views of Great Britain, that he consented to disgarnish Port Mahon. His mind was only finally made up, when the Aragonese and Catalan battalions of his army burst out into open mutiny, threatening to seize shipping and transport themselves to the mainland without his leave, if any further delay was made . A fortnight later Vives permitted Del Palacio, with the greater part of the Balearic garrisons, to set sail for the seat of war. The Aragonese regiment landed near Tortosa, and marched for Saragossa: but the bulk of the expeditionary force, nearly 5,000 strong, was put ashore in Catalonia between July 19 and 23.
Meanwhile affairs in the principality had taken a new turn. Duhesme had remained quiet for six days after Chabran’s check at Granollers, though his position at Barcelona grew daily more uncomfortable, owing to the constant activity of the somatenes. But when he learnt that Reille’s vanguard had reached Figueras, and that he might expect ere long to be aided by a whole division of fresh troops from the north, he resolved to renew his attack on Gerona, the fortress which so completely blocked his communications with France. Sending messages by sea to bid his colleague meet him under the walls of that place, he sallied out from Barcelona, on July 10, with the larger half of his army. This time he took with him the French brigades of Goulas and Nicolas only, leaving Barcelona to the care of Lecchi and the foreign troops. He felt that the situation was too grave for him to trust the fate of Catalonia to the steadiness of Lombard or Neapolitan regiments. So leaving four Italian and one Swiss battalion, 3,500 men in all, in the Barcelona forts, he marched for Gerona with seven French battalions, a regiment of Italian cavalry, and twenty-two guns, of which ten were heavy siege-artillery. At Mataro he picked up Chabran, who had been resting there since his check at Granollers on July 4, and incorporated with his expedition the Italian battalions which that officer had with him, as well as a regiment of French cavalry. This gave him a total force of some 7,000 men; yet his march was slow and difficult. Milans with the somatenes of the upland was always hanging upon his left flank, and Lord Cochrane with two British frigates followed him along the coast, bombarding his columns whenever the road came within cannon-shot of the sea. At Arens de Mar Duhesme halted for no less than five days, either from sheer indecision as to the advisability of proceeding with his project, or because he was waiting for definite news of Reille. At last he made up his mind: two routes meet at Arens, the main chaussée from Barcelona to Gerona via Tordera, and a cross-road which seeks the same end by a detour through the small hill-fortress of Hostalrich. The three battalions of Goulas’s brigade were sent by this latter path, with orders to endeavour to seize the place if they could. The main column, with the battering-train, followed the high-road. Goulas found Hostalrich too strong for him: it was garrisoned by 500 miqueletes under Manuel O’Sullivan, a captain of the Regiment of Ultonia, who gallantly held their own against an attempt at escalade. The French brigadier thereupon abandoned the attack, crossed the mountains, and joined his chief before Gerona on July 22. Duhesme meanwhile had been harassed for three days by the somatenes of Milans, and, though he always drove them off in the end, had lost much of his baggage, and an appreciable number of men, before he reached the banks of the Ter. On the day after he was rejoined by Goulas he forced the passage of that river and took post before Gerona. On the next morning he was rejoiced to meet with the vanguard of Reille’s division descending from the north. That general had started from Figueras two days before, with all the fractions of his motley force that had reached the front, two Tuscan battalions, the Swiss from the Valais, three French bataillons de marche, the two ‘Provisional Battalions of Perpignan,’ and some other improvised units, with a total strength of some 6,500 men. He established his head quarters at Puente Mayor to the north of the city, on the right bank of the Ter, while Duhesme placed his at Santa Eugenia on the left bank. There were good and easy communications between them by means of two fords, and the bridge of Salt, a little further from Gerona, was also available.
Thirteen thousand men seemed enough to make an end of an old-fashioned fortress like Gerona, held by a garrison which down to the first day of the siege counted no more than 400 regular troops—that same Irish regiment of Ultonia which had stood out against Duhesme’s first attack in June. It was fortunate for the defenders that at the very moment of the arrival of the French they received a powerful reinforcement. The light infantry regiment named the 2nd Volunteers of Barcelona, 1,300 strong, entered the city on the night of July 22, slipping between the heads of Duhesme’s and Reille’s columns. This corps had formed part of the garrison of Minorca: instead of being landed at Tarragona with the rest of Del Palacio’s troops, it was dropped at San Feliu, the nearest port on the coast to Gerona, and had just time to reach that place before its investment was completed.
Duhesme had resolved to avoid for the future the fruitless attempts at escalade, which had cost him so many men during his first siege of Gerona, and to proceed by the regular rules of poliorcetics. He had with him a battering-train more than sufficient to wreck the ancient walls of the city: accordingly he opened a secondary attack on the lower town on the left of the O?a, but turned the greater part of his attention to the citadel of Monjuich. If this work, which from its lofty hill commands the whole city, were once mastered, the place could not hold out for a day longer. By this arrangement the charge of the main attack fell to Reille, and Duhesme himself undertook only the demonstration against the Mercadal. The French began by establishing themselves on the lower slopes of the tableland of which Monjuich occupies the culminating point. They found shelter in three ruined towers which the garrison was too weak to occupy, and raised near them three batteries with six heavy guns and two howitzers, which battered the citadel, and also played upon certain parts of the town wall near the gate of San Pedro. The batteries in Duhesme’s section of the siege-lines consisted only of mortars and howitzers, which shelled and several times set fire to the Mercadal, but could make no attempt to open breaches in its walls.
The siege-approaches of the French before Gerona were conducted with an astonishing slowness: it was not till sixteen days after they had established themselves on the slopes round Monjuich, that they began to batter it in a serious fashion . This delay was partly due to the steepness of the ground up which the guns had to be dragged, partly to the necessity for sending to Figueras for extra artillery material, which could only be brought slowly and under heavy escort to the banks of the Ter. But Duhesme’s slackness, and the want of skill displayed by his engineer officers, were responsible for the greater portion of the delay. Moreover the investment of Gerona was so badly managed, that not only did the garrison keep up a regular communication at night with the chiefs of the somatenes who lay out on the hills to the west, but convoys repeatedly left and entered the town in the dark, without meeting a single French picket or patrol.
This delay of a fortnight in pressing the attack on Gerona led to two important results. The first was that the news of the capitulation of Baylen reached both camps, producing grave discouragement in the one, and a disposition for bold action in the other. The second was that Del Palacio and the troops from Minorca had time granted to them to prepare for interference in the siege. The marquis had landed at Tarragona on July 23, with all his division, save the regiment sent to St. Feliu and the Aragonese battalion which had been directed on Tortosa. Immediately on his arrival the insurrectionary Junta of Catalonia transferred itself from Lerida to Tarragona and elected Del Palacio Captain-General of the principality. Thus a real central authority was established in the province, and a single military direction could at last be given to its armies. The new Captain-General was well-intentioned and full of patriotism, but no great strategist. His plan was to press Barcelona with the bulk of his regular forces, so that Lecchi might be compelled to call for instant help from Duhesme, while a small column under the Conde de Caldagues was to march on Gerona, not so much with the hope of raising the siege, as to aid the somatenes of the Ampurdam in harassing the investing force and throwing succours into the city.
Accordingly the main body of Del Palacio’s army, the regiments of Soria, Granada, and Borbon, with Wimpfen’s two Swiss battalions from Tarragona, marched on the Llobregat, drove in Lecchi’s outposts, and confined him to the immediate environs of Barcelona. The somatenes came to give help in thousands, and a cordon of investment was established at a very short distance from the great city. On the seaside Lord Cochrane, with the Impérieuse and Cambrian frigates, kept up a strict blockade, so that Lecchi, with his insufficient and not too trustworthy garrison of 3,500 Swiss and Italian troops, was in a most uncomfortable position. If it had not been that Barcelona was completely commanded by the impregnable citadel of Monjuich, he could not have maintained his hold on the large and turbulent city. His last outpost was destroyed on July 31: this was the strong castle of Mongat, six miles out on the coast-road from Barcelona to Mataro. It was held by a company of Neapolitans, 150 men with seven guns. Attacked on the land-side by 800 miqueletes under Francisco Barcelo, and from the sea by the broadside of the Impérieuse, the Italian officer in command surrendered to Lord Cochrane, in order to save his men from massacre by the Catalans. Cochrane then blew up the castle, and destroyed the narrow coast-road on each side of it by cuttings and explosions, so that there was no longer any practicable route for guns, horses, or wagons along the shore. Thus hemmed in, Lecchi began to send to Duhesme, by various secret channels, appeals for instant aid, and reports painting his situation in gloomy but not much exaggerated colours. He asserted that the somatenes were pushing their incursions to within 600 yards of his advanced posts, and that there were now 30,000 Catalans in arms around him. If he had said 10,000 he would have been within the limits of fact.
On August 6 the Captain-General, after carefully arranging his troops in the positions round Barcelona, sent off Caldagues to harass Duhesme in the north. This enterprising brigadier-general was given no more than four companies of regulars, three guns, and 2,000 miqueletes from the Lerida district under their colonel, Juan Baget. Marching by the mountain road that goes by Hostalrich, and picking up many recruits on the way, he established himself on the fourteenth at Castella, in the hills that lie between Gerona and the sea. Here he was met by all the somatenes of Northern Catalonia, under their daring leaders, Milans and Claros.
The investment of Gerona was so badly managed, that when the news of Caldagues’ approach was received, two colonels (O’Donovan of the Ultonia Regiment and La Valeta of the Barcelona Volunteers) were able to penetrate the French lines and to confer with the commander of the army of succour. These two officers were really conducting the defence, for the titular governor, Bolivar, seems to have been a nonentity, who exercised no influence on the course of events. At a council of war which they attended, it was resolved to try a stroke which was far bolder than anything that the Captain-General had contemplated when he sent Caldagues northward. The relieving force was to attack from the rear Reille’s troops on the heights before Monjuich, while at the same time every man that could be spared from the garrison was to be flung on the breaching batteries from the front. Duhesme’s army in the plain beyond the O?a was to be left alone: it was hoped that the whole business would be over before he could arrive at the spot where the fate of battle was to be decided. There were somewhat over 8,000 men disposable for the attack: 1,000 regulars and four hundred miqueletes were to sally out of Gerona: Caldagues could bring up 7,000 more, all raw levies except the four companies of old troops that he had brought from Tarragona. He had also five field-guns. As Duhesme and Reille had 13,000 men, of whom 1,200 were cavalry, it was a daring experiment to attack them, even though their forces were distributed along an extensive line of investment.
A bold and confident general, placed in Duhesme’s position, would not have waited to be attacked in his trenches. The moment that he heard of the approach of Caldagues, he would have drawn off half his battalions from the siege, and have gone out to meet the relieving army, before it could get within striking distance of Gerona. But Duhesme was not in the mood for adventurous strokes: he was chilled in his ardour by the news of the disaster of Baylen: he was worried by Lecchi’s gloomy reports; and he had been pondering for some days whether it would not be well to raise the siege and march off to save Barcelona. But the ravages which his bombardment was producing in the beleaguered city, and the fact that a breach was beginning to be visible in the walls of Monjuich, induced him to remain before the place, hoping that it might fall within the next few days. If this was his determination, he should at least have made preparations to receive Caldagues: but no attempt whatever appears to have been made to resist an attack from without.
On the morning of August 16, the Spaniards struck their blow. Between nine and ten o’clock in the morning, the 1,400 men of the garrison deployed from behind the cover of the citadel, and charged down upon the trenches and batteries of the besiegers. They completely swept away the battalion of the 5th Legion of Reserve, which was furnishing the guard of the trenches, captured the siege-guns, and set fire to the fascines of the batteries. Then pushing on, they drove off the Swiss battalion of the Valais, and the two Tuscan battalions of the 113th Regiment, pressing them down hill towards Reille’s head quarters at Puente Mayor. The French general rallied them upon the 1st Régiment de Marche, which formed his reserve at this point of the line, and mounting the slope retook some of the works which had been lost. But at this moment Caldagues’ whole army appeared upon the heights, pressing forward in four columns with great confidence. The sight of these multitudes checked Reille, who hastily drew back, evacuated Puente Mayor and withdrew to the other bank of the Ter. Duhesme, on his side, abandoned all his outlying positions and concentrated his whole force in front of the village of Santa Eugenia.
The Catalans were wise enough not to descend into the plain, where Duhesme’s cavalry and guns would have had a free hand. Caldagues refrained from passing the Ter, and merely drew up his army on the slopes above Puente Mayor, ready to receive battle. But the expected attack never came; Duhesme held back all the afternoon, and then fled away under cover of the darkness. His losses in the fighting on the hills had not been heavy—seventy-five killed and 196 wounded—but his spirit was broken. He would not risk an assault on such a strong position with his motley and somewhat demoralized army. For a moment he thought of leading his whole force back to Reille’s base at Figueras: but the reflection that in this case Lecchi would probably be destroyed, and he himself be made responsible for the loss of Barcelona by the Emperor, deterred him from such a cowardly move. Bidding Reille take the northern road and keep open the communications with France, he drew off the rest of his army to the south to rejoin his Italian comrades. The move was made with some panic and precipitation: the remaining siege-guns were buried in a perfunctory fashion, and some stores destroyed. Then Duhesme marched away over the mountains, pursued by the somatenes of Milans; while Reille retired across the plains of the Ampurdam, and had a fairly easy journey to Figueras. Claros, who tried to harass his retreat, never dared to close in upon him in the open country, fearing his cavalry and guns. Far more toilsome was the lot of Duhesme’s column, which had to march for twenty miles through very broken ground, chased by the levies of Milans, to whom the whole district was familiar. When he reached the sea at Malgrat he found that his troubles were only growing worse. The somatenes hung on his right flank, while Lord Cochrane’s frigate the Impérieuse followed him on the left hand, giving him a broadside whenever his march lay within cannon-shot of the beach. Moreover, the peasants had been cutting and blasting away the road under Cochrane’s direction; and at each point where one of these obstructions had been made, it was necessary to drag the guns and wagons of the column across almost impassable hillsides. Finding that he was making no appreciable progress, and that his men were growing utterly demoralized, Duhesme at last took a desperate step. He blew up his ammunition, burnt his baggage, cast his field-guns into the sea, and fled away by hill-tracks parallel with the shore. After long skirmishing with the somatenes he reached Mongat, where Lecchi came out to his aid with 1000 men and a battery—all that could be spared from the depleted garrison of Barcelona. There the Catalans stayed their pursuit, and Duhesme’s harassed battalions poured back into the city, sick of mountain warfare, half-starved, and carrying with them nothing but what they brought in on their backs . As a fighting force for offensive operations they were useless for some weeks, and all that their general could do was to hold for foraging purposes as much of the open ground about Barcelona as he could manage to retain. Nothing more could be essayed till Napoleon should vouchsafe to send heavy reinforcements to Catalonia, for the purpose of reopening the severed communications with France.
Two obvious criticisms on these operations in the month of August must be made. The first is that Del Palacio might probably have destroyed Duhesme’s whole army, if, instead of sending out his lieutenant Caldagues with a handful of regulars and 2,000 miqueletes, he had marched on Gerona with his entire force, the 5,000 old troops from Port Mahon and the whole of the local levies of Central Catalonia. Lecchi was so weak in Barcelona that a few thousand somatenes could have kept him in check, for he dared not ungarnish the city. If the Captain-General had thrown every man into the struggle at Gerona, it seems certain that Duhesme must either have been annihilated or have fled away with Reille to Figueras, abandoning Barcelona to its inevitable fate.
The second comment is equally obvious: Duhesme’s generalship was even worse than that of Del Palacio. Since the Spaniards came against him not with the whole army of Catalonia, but with a mere detachment of 7,000 somatenes, he should have formed a covering force of 5,000 men, and have fallen upon them while they were still at some distance from Gerona. Instead of doing this, he allowed them to encamp for three days unmolested at Castella, a village no more than five miles distant from Reille’s outposts. There they concerted their operations with the garrison, and fell upon the investing force at the moment that suited them best. It is the extraordinary apathy or neglect displayed by Duhesme that justifies Caldagues’ bold stroke at the French lines. Finding the enemy so torpid, he might well venture an assault upon them, without incurring the charge of rashness of which Napier finds him guilty. In other circumstances it would have been mad for the Spaniard, who had no more than 7,000 somatenes, to attack a French army 13,000 strong. But seeing Duhesme so utterly negligent—and his army strung out on a long front of investment, without any covering force—Caldagues was quite justified in making the experiment which turned out so successfully. Duhesme tried to extenuate his fault, by giving out that he had been about to abandon the siege even before he was attacked, and that he had orders from Bayonne authorizing such a step. But we may be permitted to join his successor St. Cyr in doubting both the original intention and the imperial authorization. There is at least no trace of it in the correspondence of Napoleon, who as late as August 23, seven days after the fight outside Gerona, was under the impression that Reille’s division alone might suffice to capture the city, though he was prepared if necessary to support him with other troops. On the seventeenth of the same month, the day on which Duhesme began his disastrous retreat on Barcelona, Napoleon had already made up his mind to supersede him, and had directed St. Cyr, with two fresh divisions, to take post at Perpignan. But in the orders given to the new commander in Catalonia there is no sign that the Emperor had acquiesced in the raising of the siege of Gerona, though it may perhaps be deduced from a later dispatch that he had not disapproved of the strengthening of Lecchi’s garrison at Barcelona by the withdrawal of Chabran’s division from the leaguer.
Meanwhile Napoleon had recognized that even with Reille’s reinforcements, Catalonia was not adequately garrisoned, and on August 10 had directed 18,000 fresh troops upon the principality. These, moreover, were not the mere sweepings of his dép?ts, like Reille’s men, but consisted of two strong divisions of old troops; Souham’s was composed of ten French battalions from Lombardy, Pino’s of 10,000 men of the best corps of the army of the kingdom of Italy. A little later the Emperor resolved to send one division more, Germans this time, to Catalonia. Instead of the 13,000 men whom he had originally thought sufficient for the subjugation of the province, he had now set aside more than 40,000 for the task, and this did not prove to be one man too many. No better testimonial could be given to the gallant somatenes, than that they had forced the enemy to detach so large a force against them. Nor could any better proof be given of the Emperor’s fundamental misconception of the Spanish problem in May and June, than the fact that he had so long been under the impression that Duhesme’s original divisions would be enough to subdue the rugged and warlike Catalan principality.
Before Souham, Pino, and the rest could arrive on the scene, many weeks must elapse, and meanwhile we must turn back to the main course of the war in Central Spain, where the condition of affairs had been profoundly modified by the results of the Capitulation of Baylen.