THE FRENCH EVACUATE PORTUGAL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Admiral Cotton, it is clear, regarded the ships as important and the crews as worthy of small attention. It was profitable to Great Britain to keep down the number of vessels in the power of Napoleon, though now that the Danish fleet was captured, and the Spanish fleet transferred to the other side of the balance, there could be no longer any immediate danger of the French taking the offensive at sea. The easy terms of release granted to the personnel of the Russian squadron suggest that the British admiral had determined to reward its commander for his per............