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[166]. 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 Vice[p. 207]royalty, 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[167]. 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[168].’ 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[p. 208] 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[169]. 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[p. 209] 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[p. 210] 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[170]. 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[p. 211] 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[171]. 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[p. 212] 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 com............