BOOK VI. CHAPTER I. Transactions in Portugal-State of that country-Neglected by the English cabinet-Sir John Cradock appointed to command the British troops-Touches at Coruña-At Oporto -State of this city-Lusitanian legion-State of Lisbon-Sir John Cradock endeavours to re-enforce Moore-Mr. Villiers arrives at Lisbon-Pikes given to the populace-Desti tute state of the army-Mr. Frere, and others, urge Cradock to move into Spain-The re-enforcements for Sir J. Moore halted at Castello Branco-General Cameron sent to Almeida-French advanced guard reaches Merida-Cradock relinquishes the design of re-enforcing the army in Spain, and concentrates his own troops at Saccavem-Discontents in Lisbon-Defenceless state and danger of Portugal-Relieved by Sir John Moore's advance to Sahagun. TRANSACTIONS IN PORTUGAL. WHEN Sir John Moore marched from Lisbon, the regency, established by Sir Hew Dalrymple, nominally governed that country; but the weak characters of the members, the listless habits engendered by the ancient system of misrule, the intrigues of the Oporto faction, and the general turbulence of the people soon produced an alarming state of anarchy. Private persons usurped the functions of government, justice was disre garded, insubordination and murder were hailed as indications of patriotism, and war was the universal cry; yet military preparations were wholly neglected, for the nation, in its foolish pride, believed that the enemy had neither strength nor spirit for a second invasion.* In Lisbon there was a French faction, the merchants were apprehensive, :he regency unpopular, and the public mind unsettled; in Oporto, the violence of both people and soldiers was such, that Sir Harry Burrard sent two British regiments there, by sea, to preserve tranquillity; in fine, the seeds of disorder were widely cast and sprouting vigorously, before the English cabinet thought fit to accredit a responsible diplomatist near the government, or to place a, permanent chief at the head of the forces left by Sir John Moore. The convention of Cintra was known in England in September; the regency was established and the frontier fortresses occupied by British troops in the same month; yet it was not until the middle of December that Mr. Villiers and Sir John Cradock, charged with the conduct of the political and military affairs in Portugal, reached Lisbon; thus the important interval between the departure of Junot and their arrival was totally neglected by the English cabinet. Sir Hew Dalrymple, who had nominated the regency; Sir Arthur Wellesley, who, to local knowledge and powerful talents, added the influence of a victorious commander; Burrard, Spencer, all were removed from * Appendix, No. XXXII. § ii. Portugal on account of the convention of Cintra at the very moment when the presence of persons acquainted with the real state of affairs, was essential to the well-being of the British interests in that country. And this error was the offspring of passion and incapacity; for if the treaty with Junot had been rightly understood, the ministers, appreciating the advantages of it, would have resisted the clamour of the moment, and the generals would not have been withdrawn from the public service abroad, to meet unjust and groundless charges at home. It may be disputed whether Portugal was the fittest theatre for the first operations of a British army; but when that country was actually freed from the presence of an enemy, when the capital and the frontier fortresses were occupied by English troops, when Sir John Moore leaving his hospitals, baggage, and magazines there, as in a place of arms, had marched to Spain, the question was no longer doubtful. The ancient relations between England and Portugal, the greatness of the port of Lisbon, the warlike disposition of the Portuguese, and, above all, the singularly happy circumstance, that there was neither court nor monarch to balance the English influence, and that even the nomination of the regency was the work of an English general, offered such great and obvious advantages as could nowhere else be obtained. It was a miserable policy that, neglecting such an occasion, retained Sir Arthur Wellesley in England, while Portugal, like a drunken man, at once weak and turbulent, was reeling on the edge of a precipice. The 5th of December, 1808, Sir John Cradock, being on his voyage to Lisbon, touched at Coruña. Fifteen hundred thousand dollars had just arrived there in the Lavinia frigate; but Sir John Moore's intention to retreat upon Portugal being known, Cradock divided this sum, and carried away eight hundred thousand dollars; proposing to leave a portion at Oporto, and to take the remainder to Lisbon, that Moore might find, on whatever line he retreated, a supply of money. From Coruña he proceeded to Oporto, where he found that Sir Robert Wilson had succeeded in organizing, under the title of the Lusitanian Legion, about thirteen hundred men, and that others were on their way to re-enforce him ;* but this excepted, nothing, civil or military, bespoke either arrangement or common sense. The bishop, still intent upon acquiring supreme rule, was deeply engaged with secret intrigues, and, under him, a number of factious and designing persons, instigated the populace to violent actions with a view to profit from their excesses. The formation of this Lusitanian Legion was originally a project of the Chevalier da Souza, Portuguese minister in London; he was one of the bishop's faction, and the legion was raised not so much to repel the enemy as to support that party against the government; the men were promised higher pay than any other Portuguese soldiers, to the great discontent of the latter, and they were clad in uniforms differing in colour from the national troops. The regency, who dreaded the machinations of the turbulent priest, entertained the utmost jealousy of this legion, which, in truth, was a most anomalous force, and as might be expected from its peculiar constitution, was afterwards productive of much embarrassment. Sir John Cradock left three hundred thousand dollars at Oporto, and directed the two British battalions which were in that neighbourhood to march to Almeida, then taking on board a small detachment of German troops, he set sail for Lisbon. Before his departure, he strongly advised * Appendix, No. XXXII. § ii. Sir Robert Wilson to move such of his legionaries as were sufficiently organized, to Villa Real, in Tras os Montes, a place appointed by the regency for the assembly of the forces in the north; Sir Robert, tired of the folly and disgusted with the insolence and excesses of the ruling mob, readily adopted this advice, so far as to quit Oporto, but having views of his own, went to Almeida instead of Villa Real. * The state of Lisbon was little better than that of Oporto; there was arrangement neither for present nor for future defence, and the populace, albeit less openly encouraged to commit excesses, were quite uncontrolled by the government." The regency had a keener dread of domestic insurrection than of the return of the French, whose operations they regarded with even less anxiety than the bishop did, as being further removed than he was from the immediate theatre of war. Their want of system and vigilance was evinced by the following fact. Sataro and another person, having contracted for the supply of the British troops, demanded in the name of the English general, all the provisions in the public stores of Portugal, and then sold them to the English commissaries for his own profit. Sir John Cradock's instructions directed him to re-enforce Moore's army, and not to interfere with that general's command if the course of events brought him back to Portugal. In fact, his operations were limited to the holding of Elvas, Almeida, and the capital; for, although he was directed to encourage the formation of a native army upon a good and regular system and even to act in concert with it on the frontier, he was debarred from political interference: even his relative situation as to rank, was left unsettled until the arrival of Mr. Villiers, to whose direction all political and many military arrangements were intrusted.† It is evident that the influence of a general thus fettered, and commanding only a small scattered force, must be feeble and insufficient to produce any real amelioration in the military situation of the country; yet the English ministers, attentive only to the false information obtained from interested agents, still imagined that not only the Spanish, but the Portuguese armies were numerous, and to be relied upon; and they confidently expected, that the latter would be able to take an active part in the Spanish campaign. Cradock, feeling the danger of this illusion, made it his first object to transmit home exact information of the real strength and efficiency of the native regular troops. They were nominally twenty thousand. But Miguel Pereira Forjas, military secretary to the regency and the ablest public man Portugal possessed, acknow. ledged that this force was a nullity, and that there were not more than ten thousand stand of serviceable arms in the kingdom, the greatest part of which were English. The soldiers of the line were undisciplined and unruly; the militia and the "ordenança," or armed peasantry, were animated by a spirit of outrage rather than of enthusiasm, and evinced no disposition to submit to regulation. Neither was there any branch of administration free from the grossest disorders, but especially the finances. The Spanish dollar had a general acceptance in Portugal. The regency, under the pretence that a debased foreign coin would drive the Portuguese coin out of circulation, deprived the dollar of its current * Appendix, No. XXXII. § v. and vi. + Ibid. No. XXXIII. § i. value. This regulation, being founded on a falsehood, though true in principle and applicable as far as the Portuguese gold coin, which is of peculiar fineness, was concerned, had a most injurious effect. For the Spanish dollar was in reality finer than the Portuguese silver cruzadonova, and would finally have maintained its value, notwithstanding this decree, if the slur thus thrown upon it by the government, had not enabled the money-changers to run its value down for the moment; a matter of infinite importance, because the English soldiers and sailors being all paid in these dollars, at four shillings and sixpence, which was the true value, were thus suddenly mulcted four pence in each, by the artificial depreciation of the moment. The men attributed this to fraud in the shopkeepers, the retail trade of Lisbon was interrupted, and quarrels between the tradesmen and the soldiers took place hourly. To calm this effervescence, a second decree was promulgated, directing that the dollar should be received at the mint, and in the public offices, at its real value; it then appeared that the government could profit by coining the dollar of four shillings and sixpence into cruzado-novas, a circumstance which gave the whole affair the appearance of an unworthy trick to recruit the treasury. This happened in October, and as all the financial affairs were ill managed, and the regency destitute of vigour or capacity, the taxes were unpaid, the hard cash exhausted, and the treasury paper at a heavy discount when Cradock arrived. Upon the scroll thus unfolded he could only read confusion, danger and misfortune; and such being the fruits of victory, what could be expected from disaster? yet at this period, the middle of December, Sir John Moore was supposed to be in full retreat upon Portugal, followed by the emperor with one French army, while another threatened Lisbon by the line of the Tagus. The English troops in the kingdom did not amount to ten thousand men, including the sick, and they were ill equipped and scattered; moreover, the capital was crowded with women and children, with baggage and non-combatants, belonging as well to the army in Spain as to that in Portugal. There were in the river three Portuguese ships of the line, two frigates, and eight other smaller vessels of war, but none were in a state for sea, and the whole were likely to fall into the hands of the enemy, for in the midst of this confusion the English admiral Sir Charles Cotton was recalled, without a successor being appointed. The zeal and talents of Captain Halket, the senior officer on the station, amply compensated indeed for the departure of the admiral as far as professional duties were concerned, but he could not aid the general, in dealing with the regency as vigorously as an officer of higher rank, and formally accredited, could have done. Sir John Cradock, although fully sensible of his own difficulties, with a very disinterested zeal, resolved to make the re-enforcement of Sir John Moore's army his first care; but his force at this time was, as I have already said, less than ten thousand men of all arms. It consisted of eight British and four German battalions of infantry, four troops of dragoons, and thirty pieces of artillery, of which, however, only six were horsed so as to take the field.* There was, also, a battalion of the 60th regiment, composed principally of Frenchmen recruited from the prison. ships, but it had been sent back from Spain, as the soldiers could not be trusted near their countrymen. Of these thirteen battalions two were in * Sir John Cradock's Papers, MSS. Abrantes, one in Elvas, three at Lamego on the Duero, one in Almeida, and the remaining six at Lisbon. Three of the four battalions in the north were immediately directed to join Sir John Moore by the route of Salamanca, and of those in the south, two, accompanied by a demibrigade of artillery, were sent to him from Abrantes, by the road of Castello Branco and Ciudad Rodrigo. Meanwhile, Mr. Villiers arrived, and Sir John Cradock forwarded to the regency a strong representation of the dangerous state of Portugal. He observed that there was neither activity in the government, nor enthusiasm among the people; that the army, deficient in numbers, and still more so in discipline, was scattered and neglected, and, notwithstanding the aspect of affairs was so threatening, the regency were ap parently without any system, or fixed principle of action. He proposed, therefore, that a general enrolment of all the people should take place, and from the British stores he offered a supply of a thousand muskets and ten thousand pikes.* This giving of pikes to the people, which appears to have been in compliance with Mr. Villiers's wishes, betrayed more zeal than prudence; a general levy, and arming with pikes of the turbulent populace of a capital city, at such a conjuncture, was more likely to lead to confusion and mischief than to any effectual defence: the main objects pressing upon the general's attention were however sufficiently numerous and contradictory, to render it difficult for him to avoid errors. It was a part of his instructions, and of manifest importance, to send re-enforcements to Sir John Moore; yet it was equally necessary to keep a force towards the frontier on the line of the Tagus, seeing that the fourth French corps had just passed that river at Almaraz, had defeated Galluzzo's army, and menaced Badajoz, which was without arms, ammunition, or provisions; moreover, the populace there, were in commotion and slaying the chief persons.† Now, Sir John Cradock's instructions directed him to keep his troops in a position that would enable him to abandon Portugal, if a very superior force should press him; but as, in such a case, he was to carry off the British army, and the Portuguese navy and stores, destroying what he could not remove, and to receive on board his vessels all the natives who might be desirous of escaping, it was of pressing necessity to ship the women, children, baggage, and other incumbrances belonging to Moore's army, immediately, that his own rear might be clear for a sudden embarkation. In short, he was to send his troops to Spain, and yet openly to carry on the preparations for abandoning that country. The populace of Lisbon were, however, already uneasy at the rumours of an embarkation, and it was doubtful if they would permit even the British non-combatants to get on board quietly, much less suffer the forts to be dismantled, and the ships of war to be carried off, without a tumult, which, at such a conjuncture, would have been fatal to all parties. Hence it was imperative to maintain a strong garrison in Lisbon and in the forts commanding the mouth of the river; and this draft, together with the troops absorbed by the fortresses of Almeida and Elvas, reduced the fighting men in the field to insignificance. The regency, knowing the temper of the people, and fearing to arm * Sir J. Cradock's Correspondence, MS. Appendix, No. XXXIII. § i. † Appendix, No. XXXI. § i. |