Part 26

The accession of Napoleon to power was of no advantage to Portugal; from the very first he showed his hatred of the little country; no amount of submission could win his friendship; he persisted in regarding Portugal, as the Convention, the Committee of Public Safety, and the Directory had done, as a province of England; and he thoroughly understood what an important base of operations it afforded to the English armies. Hardly was Napoleon firmly seated in office, when he despatched his brother Lucien Bonaparte to Madrid in the year 1800 with directions to negotiate with Portugal. He was to insist on the abandonment of the English alliance, on the opening of Portuguese ports to France and the closing of them to England, on the grant of special commercial advantages to French merchants, on the extension of French Guiana to the Amazon, on the cession of a part of Portugal to Spain until the recovery from the English of Trinidad and Minorca, and on the payment of a large sum of money, and he was authorized to offer Spain the assistance of French troops if these hard terms were rejected. The Prince Regent did reject them and declared war against Spain on February 10, 1801, and twenty-two thousand French veterans at once entered the peninsula under the command of Bonaparte’s brother-in-law, General Leclerc. The campaign was a very short one; the French soldiers never came into action, but in the month of May the Spaniards took Olivença, Juromenha, and Campo Mayor, laid siege to Elvas, and defeated the Portuguese in two engagements at Arronches and Flor da Rosa. The Portuguese sued for peace, and on June 6, 1801, a treaty was signed at Badajoz, by which Olivença and the surrounding district was ceded to Spain, followed by another at Paris, by which French Guiana was extended to the Amazon. Napoleon was very dissatisfied with the peace of Badajoz, for he aimed at nothing short of the extinction of the independence of Portugal, and it was many months before he consented to ratify the treaties. Meanwhile an English force under Colonel Henry Clinton had occupied Madeira, and a force of the English East India Company’s troops garrisoned Goa. The pride of the people of Portugal was deeply wounded by the loss of Olivença, which had been an integral part of Portugal ever since the days of Affonso Henriques, and they lost no opportunity of showing their contempt for the Prince Regent and his advisers. Their wrath was kindled against the French, and from this time forth, the mass of the people who did not care for politics, but who did understand the meaning of national disgrace, was ready to dare anything against the nation which had brought about the disintegration of the fatherland.

The Treaty of Amiens gave Europe a moment’s breathing space; the English evacuated Madeira, and the Prince Regent determined on a policy of absolute neutrality. But Napoleon was not to be moved; he had determined on the destruction of Portugal, and it was with the full expectation that he would irritate the Portuguese into declaring war, that he sent General Lannes, one of the most courageous, but one of the roughest and least educated of his generals, as ambassador to Lisbon. Lannes acted in accordance with the expectations of his chief; he insulted the Portuguese Court; he failed to observe the most ordinary customs of diplomatic courtesy; and he finally demanded the instant dismissal of all the ministers who belonged to the English party, and especially of Pina Manique, the Intendant of Police, because he had in former days prosecuted the admirers of the French Revolution. The Prince Regent obeyed, both from fear of France and dislike of the high-handed naval policy of England; and Antonio de Araujo de Azevedo, the head of the French party, became Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, with the Count of Villa Verde, and the Viscount of Anadia as his colleagues, and Lucas de Scabra da Silva succeeded Pina Manique. Even this humble and prompt submission did not satisfy Napoleon, and in 1804 he replaced General Lannes by General Junot whom he ordered to insist upon Portugal’s declaring war against England. For a time, however, he thought it wise to postpone his designs against the country, which he regarded as the most vulnerable province of England, while he was engaged in his great campaigns in Germany, and he even signed a treaty of neutrality with the Portuguese Government. The English were not inclined to submit to this, and in 1806, Admiral the Earl of St. Vincent, General the Earl of Rosslyn, and General Simcoe were sent to Lisbon to remind the Prince Regent of the ancient alliance between the two countries, and to promise ample assistance if Portugal would declare war against France. Dom John declined, and on the advice of his ministers, treated the English ambassadors with something like contempt.

At length, in 1807, having defeated the armies of Austria, Prussia, and Russia, Napoleon again turned his thoughts to his projects for the annihilation of Portugal, which had become more than ever a thorn in his side, since it refused to co-operate in his Continental System for the commercial ruin of England. He resolved at first to act with Spain and Godoy, as Pérignon and Lucien Bonaparte had done, and on the 29th of October, 1807, he signed the Treaty of Fontainebleau, by which it was agreed that Portugal should be conquered by the combined armies of France and Spain, and that the northern provinces of the country should be given to the King of Etruria, in exchange for his Italian kingdom, which Napoleon desired to annex, while the southern districts were to be formed into an independent kingdom for Godoy, Prince of the Peace, and the central provinces were to be held by France. The signature of this treaty was followed by immediate action. Junot moved rapidly across Spain with a French army, and in conjunction with a Spanish force, under General Caraffa, invaded Portugal along the line of the Tagus, while General Taranco and General Solano, with two other Spanish armies occupied the Entre Minho e Douro and the Alemtejo. With amazing rapidity Junot accomplished his march, and the Portuguese people hardly realized that war was imminent, until on the 29th of November, Colonel Le Cor rushed into Lisbon with the news that French soldiers were in possession of Abrantes. This alarming intelligence completely unnerved the Prince Regent, who listened to the strongly-worded advice of Sir Sidney Smith, the commander of an English squadron in the Tagus, to abandon his capital for Brazil, and to leave the English to defend Portugal. Dom John believed this the best course to pursue, and after naming a Council of Regency, he went on board an English ship with his wife, Donna Carlotta Joaquina, his two sons, Dom Pedro and Dom Miguel, his six daughters, and his unhappy mother, Queen Maria Francisca, whose disordered brain seemed to understand what was going on, and whose resistance to the efforts to remove her was painful to observe. The English ships had hardly left their moorings in the Tagus, when Junot at the head of two thousand wearied French soldiers, who had survived the fearful fatigue of his rapid march, entered Lisbon on the 30th of November, 1807.

Nothing shows more certainly the great advance of what were called “French principles”--that is to say, of democratic ideas--in Portugal during the last few years, than the cordial reception which Junot received. At Santarem he was welcomed by a deputation of the Freemasons of Portugal, who had been made by persecution, as in other continental countries, a secret society for the propagation of democratic ideas; the army made no attempt to resist; neither villages nor towns rose in insurrection; and the Council of Regency, which consisted of the Marquis of Abrantes, the Marquis of Olhão, General Francisco da Cunha e Menezes, General Francisco Xavier de Noronha, Principal Castro, and Pedro de Mello Breyner, President of the Treasury, instantly submitted. The people of Lisbon had been disgusted with the wavering and unpatriotic policy of the Prince Regent; they complained with reason that he had wasted time in diplomacy instead of preparing for defence; they contrasted his yielding to Spain at the Treaty of Badajoz with the gallant conduct of John I., and the successful wars of John IV.; and they looked upon his departure for Brazil as a base desertion of his country. For all these reasons they welcomed the French, and the democratic leaders hoped that the Emperor Napoleon would annex their country, and grant it representative institutions. Junot at first acted with the greatest prudence; he certainly raised two millions of francs in Lisbon by requisition, and seized all the money in the royal treasury, but at the same time he gratified the Portuguese people by refusing to give the Spaniards any of the plunder, and he encouraged them in the belief that the Emperor would not destroy their independence. His next step was to disband the whole Portuguese army, and to quarter French troops in all the more important cities and fortresses. Not satisfied with this, Junot then raised a powerful Portuguese force, consisting of two divisions of infantry, two regiments of çaçadores or light infantry, and three regiments of cavalry, which he despatched to France under the command of Lieutenant-General Dom Pedro de Almada, Marquis of Alorna, and Major-General Gomes Freire de Andrade. This force which was known as the Portuguese Legion, contained all the most disciplined officers and soldiers of the nation, and did gallant service under Napoleon throughout the French campaigns in Spain, Germany, and Russia, and the remnant of it served under his standards at Waterloo. Thus freed from the presence of the most dangerous element of resistance, Junot began to show his own disposition. He now made no effort to conciliate the Portuguese democrats, and laughed at their idea of a Portuguese constitution; he hoisted the tricolour flag on the Citadel of St. George; he divided the country into military governments under his generals; and finally on the 1st of February, 1807, he issued a proclamation “that the House of Braganza had ceased to reign.”

After issuing this proclamation the French took entire possession of Portugal; the alcaides were dismissed, and the French generals ruled with absolute authority as military governors. A new regency was formed, which included several Frenchmen, notably Junot himself as president, General Herman, M. Lhuillier, and Viennot de Vaublanc as Secretary-General; and a new ministry was constituted of friends to the French alliance, consisting of Pedro de Mello Breyner at the Home Office, Azevedo at the Treasury, the Count of Sampaio at the War Office, and Principal Castro at the Ministry of Justice. Junot then began to intrigue for the throne of Portugal; he knew well that Napoleon had no intention of carrying out the terms of the treaty of Fontainebleau; and he did not see why, after his successful campaign, he should not receive this great reward. He posed as a patron of letters, and was elected President of the “Academia Real das Sciencias” in the place of the Duke of Lafoẽs; he changed his attitude towards and made extravagant promises to the radical party; and in the hope of succeeding the Braganzas, he reduced Napoleon’s requisition of forty millions of francs to twenty millions, on his own authority. The chief agent, through whom he negotiated, was a lawyer, named José de Scabra, who got up a deputation to visit Napoleon, headed by the Grand Inquisitor, the Bishop of Leiria, to ask for the nomination of Junot as King of Portugal. These efforts of Junot’s were, however, of no avail. The tyranny of his generals, and their treatment of the Portuguese as a conquered people; the atrocities which the French soldiers committed, and their deliberate insults to the dearest sentiments of a proud nation, far outweighed the effect of Junot’s policy. General Thomières, for instance, plundered the great abbey of Alçobaça, and destroyed the corpses of the early kings of Portugal; and General Loison trampled on the people, and put down a little riot at Mafra with most frightful cruelty. There were exceptions to this behaviour of course. General Travot and General Charlot made themselves popular by their just administration; but, as a rule, the conduct of the French generals was rapacious in the extreme. At this moment, when the Portuguese people were quivering with indignation, came the news of the rebellion in Spain, and of the victory of Baylen. The Spanish general, Bellesta, who commanded at Oporto in succession to General Taranco, seized the French governor, General Quesnel, and handed him over to a Portuguese junta, and then marched away into Gallicia. It was on the 18th of June, when the French had held Portugal for about nine months, that this great event occurred. Antonio José de Castro, Bishop of Oporto, was declared president of the “junta” of that city. The example was followed from Braga to Faro; everywhere the French officers were murdered or expelled, and independent “juntas” were formed. At this juncture the Portuguese people felt that they could not resist France by their own strength; and the Bishop of Oporto appealed to the old ally of Portugal, England, for assistance.

The English Government willingly listened to this appeal; they had long wished for a base on the Continent from which to act against Napoleon by land, and, in the words of Canning, “the arm of Great Britain became the lever, and Portugal the fulcrum, to wrench from its basis the power that had subdued the rest of Europe.” In the previous year, a force under Colonel Beresford had occupied Madeira, but up to this time, no attempt had been made to dislodge the French from Portugal itself. On the receipt of this appeal from Oporto however, a small army, which had been collected at Cork under the command of Lieutenant-General the Honourable Sir Arthur Wellesley, for an expedition to South America, was ordered instead to proceed to Portugal; reinforcements were collected at Ramsgate and Harwich, and a division under Major-General Brent Spencer was ordered to sail from Gibraltar to join him. A Lusitanian Legion was also formed out of the Portuguese who happened to be in England, and despatched to Portugal under the command of Colonel Sir Robert Wilson and Colonel Mayne. It was indeed time that help should arrive; all the best troops and most skilled officers had been sent out of Portugal in the Portuguese Legion to join the Grand Army of France, and the undisciplined peasants and apprentices hastily collected by the “juntas” were easily defeated in many places by the French veterans. Sir Arthur Wellesley landed at the mouth of the Mondego River, and advanced southwards upon Lisbon. He first defeated Laborde’s division at Roliça on the 17th of August, 1808; and, after receiving reinforcements, he routed Junot himself at Vimeiro on the 21st of August. These victories were followed by the Convention of Cintra by which Junot agreed to evacuate Portugal and surrender all the fortresses in his possession, on condition that his troops and their plunder should be transported safe to France. This convention, however disappointing from a military point of view to the English authorities, was eminently satisfactory to the Portuguese people, who saw themselves delivered from the French, as speedily as they had been conquered by them.

The former Council of Regency, nominated by the Prince Regent before his departure, was re-established at Lisbon, and at once began to quarrel with the “junta” of Oporto, but both bodies perceived how dependent they were on the English Government, and the Regency sent Domingos Antonio de Sousa Coutinho to London to ask that an English ambassador with full powers should be accredited to Lisbon, and that Sir Arthur Wellesley might be appointed to reorganize their army. In compliance with these requests the Right Honourable J. C. Villiers was sent as ambassador to Lisbon, and, as Sir Arthur Wellesley could not be spared, Major-General Beresford, who had learnt the Portuguese language, when governor of Madeira, was sent to command and discipline the Portuguese troops. Meanwhile, Portugal was again exposed to the attacks of the French; when Sir John Moore advanced to Salamanca, he had left very few English troops behind, and Napoleon ordered three French armies to invade the country by different routes. Of these armies only one actually entered Portugal, that from the north under the command of Marshal Soult. Parties of the Lusitanian Legion, under Sir Robert Wilson and Baron Eben, made a spirited resistance, and even the unorganized Portuguese levies, under General Antonio de Silveira, showed courage, if not discipline; but their efforts were in vain, and Soult occupied Oporto. Fortunately for the Portuguese, Soult, like Junot, was led away by the idea of becoming King of Portugal, and did not advance on Lisbon, while Lapisse and Victor did not support him by entering the Beira and the Alemtejo, as they had been ordered to do, and this delay gave time for Sir Arthur Wellesley to reach the Tagus with a powerful English army. On the 12th of May, 1809, he drove Soult out of Oporto, and into Gallicia; and after this success he invaded Spain, and defeated Joseph Bonaparte and Marshal Victor at the battle of Talavera.

From these successes of the English general, it is necessary to turn to the condition of the Portuguese regency. After the departure of the Prince Regent, all the able men of the English party and the trained administrators had left Portugal for Brazil; the leaders of the radical party were either in disgrace, or had fled to France, and none were left to compose the regency save a set of intriguers, whose chief idea was to get as much money from England as possible, and convey it into their own pockets. The Portuguese people acted very differently; they were indignant at the outrageous conduct of the French soldiery, and were ready to sacrifice their lives for the national cause. This enthusiasm was reported to the English Government, which determined to take ten thousand Portuguese soldiers into English pay, and to send out a number of English regimental officers to discipline and command them. No better man than Beresford could have been selected as commander-in-chief of the Portuguese army. He proved himself in after-years, and especially at the battle of Albuera, to be but a poor general; but as an organizer his firmness, which almost amounted to severity, made him at once obeyed and feared. His chief assistants in this work were the English officers who had been sent to him, and a small body of Portuguese officers whom patriotism had forced into exile in preference to serving in the French Portuguese Legion, and at the head of these two classes were his Quartermaster-General, Major-General Benjamin D’Urban, an Englishman, and his Adjutant-General, Colonel Manoel de Brito Mousinho, a Portuguese. So hard did Beresford work during the winter of 1809, while Lord Wellington, as Sir Arthur Wellesley had been created, was in Spain, that in the spring of 1810, certain Portuguese regiments were brigaded with the English, and showed themselves worthy of the honour. They fought side by side with the English soldiers at the battle of Busaco, and the behaviour of the 8th Portuguese Infantry is one of the most disputed points in the history of that battle, every historian of the war stating that it behaved well, but all differing as to the time it came into action, and the effect of its bayonet charge.

While Beresford was doing this good work, and the flower of the Portuguese youth was rushing to arms in the regular army, or in the militia reserve, the regency at Lisbon was going from bad to worse. The Prince Regent at Rio de Janeiro had no control over it, and it was divided into parties, which quarrelled over the disposition of the English subsidies as if they were legitimate spoil. There is no need to study the intrigues of these parties, but it is worth notice, that Dom Pedro de Sousa Holstein, better known in after-years as the Duke of Palmella, was despatched to the Spanish junta to claim the Regency of Spain for Donna Carlotta Joaquina the Queen of Portugal, when Portugal could not even defend its own territory. Neither Wellington nor Beresford could work with this factious regency, and the English cabinet had to insist that the English ambassador at Lisbon, Sir Charles Stuart, the son of General the Honourable Sir Charles Stuart, should receive a seat upon the council. His great ability and tact soon made him the master of his colleagues, and a certain portion of the money, sent by England to pay the Portuguese troops, did at last find its way to its proper destination. The Regency, even when thus strengthened, failed to become popular; it was hotly criticized and abused; and the murmuring radical party in Lisbon, which hankered after peace with France, was only suppressed by the deportation of eighteen leading journalists to the Azores in September, 1810.

It is little wonder that some opposition to the war existed in 1810, for in that year the most formidable invasion of French troops took place. This was the famous invasion of Masséna. The Portuguese nation showed all the valour of a people, fighting for its very existence as a nation, and when Lord Wellington, on being obliged to retire into the lines of Torres Vedras, commanded the peasants to abandon their homes and leave nothing for the French to subsist upon, they obeyed him with touching fidelity. While Wellington was entrenched within his lines, Beresford established his headquarters at Lisbon, and continued the work of reorganization with the help of a fresh contingent of English regimental officers, which reached him at this time. He proceeded rapidly, but in regular order, and having organized and disciplined the Portuguese regiments in the winter of 1809, he made them into independent Portuguese brigades in the winter of 1810. In all he formed a powerful Portuguese army of twelve infantry brigades, partly commanded by English brigadiers, such as Ashworth, Pack, Bradford, and Archibald Campbell, partly by native officers, such as Le Cor, Fonseca, Palmeirim, and Bernadim Ribeiros, four cavalry brigades, under Povoa and Barbacena, Madden and Hawker, and an artillery park of forty-eight guns under Colonel Alexander Dickson. While Beresford was engaged at Lisbon in organizing the Portuguese army, the Portuguese militia was doing good work in the northern provinces, where the chief command was held by Major-General Manoel Pinto Bacellar. Brigades of militia under such dashing commanders as Antonio de Silveira, John Miller, Nicholas Trant, and John Wilson, harassed Masséna’s lines of communication with Spain; and while he was before the lines of Torres Vedras and at Santarem, he had to keep three divisions employed in keeping open his line of retreat and escorting his convoys. In the field, the Portuguese militia was always defeated, but Masséna could never feel safe from their attacks, and to mention but one brilliant exploit, Trant’s capture of Coimbra seriously inconvenienced him at a critical moment.