A history of the Peninsular War, Vol. 3, Sep. 1809-Dec. 1810

by Charles Oman

CHAPTER I

OPERATIONS IN THE NORTH AND EAST OF SPAIN (JULY–DECEMBER 1810)

While tracing the all-important Campaign of Portugal, down to the deadlock in front of Santarem, which began about the 20th of November, 1810, and was to endure till the 1st of March in the succeeding year, we have been obliged to leave untouched events, civil and military, in many other parts of the Peninsula during the autumn. Only the Andalusian campaigns have been carried down to November: in Northern Spain we have traced the course of affairs no further than September[574]: in Eastern Spain no further than August[575]. Moreover, little has been said of the general effect on the French occupation caused by the division of supreme authority which Napoleon sanctioned in the spring[576], or of the importance of the long-deferred meeting of the Spanish Cortes, which assembled at Cadiz in the autumn. With these points we must deal before proceeding to narrate the campaigns of 1811.

The survey of the military operations, none of which were particularly important, must precede the summary of the political situation, with regard to King Joseph on the one side and the Cortes on the other. For the acts of the King and the Cortes had an influence extending far beyond the months in which they began, and were, indeed, main factors in the Peninsular struggle for years to come. But the doings of the armies in Galicia and Asturias on the one flank, in Catalonia and Valencia on the other, can easily be dismissed in a few pages: they were but preliminaries to the greater operations in the spring of 1811.

We may first turn to the north-west. When Masséna plunged into Portugal in September 1810, and was lost to the sight of his colleagues and subordinates for nearly three months, the situation left behind him was as follows:—Leon and Old Castile, as far as the Galician foot-hills and the Cantabrian sierras, were held down by Serras and Kellermann with some 12,000 men—a force none too great for the task that lay before them. The latter general had charge of the provinces of Valladolid, Toro, and Palencia, as one of the ‘military governors’ recently appointed by the Emperor. He gave himself absurd airs of independent authority, and took little more heed of the orders of Masséna than of those of King Joseph, for whom he showed a supreme contempt. General Serras’s troops were more definitely part of the Army of Portugal. They were in charge of the provinces of Zamora, Leon, and Salamanca, thus covering Kellermann’s government on the outer flank, and taking care of the borders both of Galicia on the Spanish and of Tras-os-Montes on the Portuguese side. To cover this long front Serras had only eleven battalions[577], and two provisional regiments of dragoons—some 9,000 men. Out of this force he had to find garrisons for Astorga, Leon, Benavente, Zamora, and several smaller places. Kellermann, who was intended to serve as a reserve for Serras, as well as to guard the central dépôts at Valladolid, had only two regiments of dragoons (part of his original division) and three infantry battalions, making 3,000 men in all[578]. Both of them were directed to keep in close touch with Bonnet, who, at the head of his old troops, the four regiments which never came south of the Cantabrian hills till the Salamanca campaign[579], kept a precarious hold on Central and Eastern Asturias with 9,000 men.

There were also present in the circumscription of Serras’s and Kellermann’s command the garrison of Ciudad Rodrigo (two battalions) and Gardanne’s five squadrons of dragoons, which Masséna had left behind, in the vain hope that they would keep the line clear between Almeida and Salamanca. This force added 2,500 men to the total of the French troops in Leon.

If the French were left rather weak in this direction, the same was not the case in the region further east. From Burgos to the Bidassoa the country-side was full of troops in the latter half of September, when the Army of Portugal had gone westward. In the Government of Burgos were the two infantry divisions of the Young Guard, under Roguet and Dumoustier, with their two cavalry regiments, making 11,464 sabres and bayonets. Navarre was occupied by 8,733 men, Biscay by 8,085. The little province of Santander was held by three provisional battalions 3,500 strong. But this permanent garrison, making over 31,000 men, was at the moment supplemented by Drouet’s 9th Corps, for whose arrival at the front Masséna had waited so long and so vainly. On September 15 its commander, its head quarters, and Claparéde’s division, were at Vittoria: Couroux’s division and the cavalry brigade of Fournier were echelloned between Vittoria and Bayonne. The whole corps mustered over 18,000 sabres and bayonets. Fifty thousand men, therefore, adding the permanent garrisons to the advancing corps of Drouet, were between Burgos and Bayonne, and there were yet a few more troops to come forward from the interior of France, for Caffarelli was bringing up another division, which had the official title of the ‘Division of Reserve of the Army of Spain,’ and consisted of four provisional regiments of infantry and two cavalry regiments, with a strength of 8,000 men[580]. It was ordered to be at Bayonne by October 20, and formed the nucleus of the force which in the next year was styled the ‘Army of the North’.

Without counting this last unit, which was only in process of formation in September, Napoleon had between the Galician frontier and Bayonne no less than 72,000 men[581]. What had his enemies to oppose to this formidable host, whose strength was considerably greater than that of the force with which Masséna invaded Portugal? Of regularly organized troops the number of Spaniards and Portuguese opposed to them was absolutely insignificant. Silveira in the Tras-os-Montes had six regiments of militia and one of the line—this last being the 24th, the absconding garrison of Almeida. The whole made under 7,000 men, including an incomplete cavalry regiment. Mahy in Galicia had recruited up the depleted divisions which La Romana had left with him in the spring to a strength of 12,000 men, mostly raw and untrustworthy; for the best regiments had been destroyed at the siege of Astorga. The remains of the army of Asturias, which had suffered so many defeats at the hands of Bonnet during the spring and summer, consisted of about 6,000 men, of whom half, under Barcena and Losada, were holding the western end of the province, behind the Navia river, with head quarters at Castropol, while the rest lurked in the higher valleys of the Cantabrian Sierra, rendering Bonnet’s communication with Serras in Leon insecure, and sometimes descending to the coast, to make a sudden attack on one of the small garrisons which linked the French garrison in Oviedo with that at Santander. Of these roving bands the chief leader was the adventurous Porlier, the Marquesito[582], as the Asturians called him, who won a well-deserved reputation for his perseverance and never-failing courage. The 25,000 men of Silveira, Mahy, and the Asturian army were the only regular troops opposed to the 75,000 French in Northern Spain. How came it, then, that the enemy was held in check, and never succeeded in pushing on to the support of Masséna any force save the two divisions of Drouet? The answer is simple: the French garrisons were fixed down to their positions partly because of Napoleon’s entire lack of naval power, partly because of the unceasing activity of the guerrilleros, who were far more busy in 1810 than at any preceding time. As to the first-named cause, it may be said that the 20,000 French in Asturias, Santander, and Biscay were paralysed by the existence of a small Anglo-Spanish squadron based on Corunna and Ferrol. As long as this existed, every small port along the whole northern coast of Spain had to be garrisoned, under penalty of a possible descent from the sea, which might cut the road from Oviedo to San Sebastian at any one of a hundred points, and provide arms and stores for the guerrilla bands of the mountains. Many such expeditions were carried out with more or less success in 1810. The first and most prosperous of them took place in July, when Porlier, putting his free corps of some 1,000 men on transports, and convoyed by the British commodore Mends, with a couple of frigates, came ashore near the important harbour of Santona, drove out the small garrison, and then coasted along in the direction of Biscay, destroying shore-batteries and capturing as many as 200 men at one point and another. Of the peasantry of the coast, some enlisted in Porlier’s band, others took to the hills on their own account, when they had been furnished with muskets from the ships. The Marquesito repeated his raid in August, but this time stopped on shore, and put himself at the head of the local insurgents, who made so strong a head in the country about Potes and the upper Pisuerga, that Serras marched against him with almost the whole of his division[583], and spent September in hunting him along the sides of the sierras. But though aided by troops lent by Bonnet, and by detachments from Burgos, the French general could never catch the adroit partisan, who, when too hard pressed, returned to the central mountains of the Asturias.

Pleased with the exploits of Porlier, the Cadiz Regency resolved to keep up the game, and sent up to Corunna Colonel Renovales, the officer who had for so long made head against Suchet in the mountains of Aragon[584]. He was authorized to requisition a brigade from Mahy’s army, and the more seaworthy ships from the arsenal of Ferrol. Applications for naval assistance had also been made to the British Admiralty, and Sir Home Popham came, with four frigates and a battalion of marines, to assist in a systematic raid along the coasts of Asturias and Biscay. The joint expedition started from Corunna on October 14, with a landing force of 1,200 Spanish and 800 British bayonets on board. On the 16th it drew in to land near the important harbour of Gijon, where Bonnet kept a force of 700 men, who depended for their succour on the main body of his division at Oviedo. But the French general chanced to be hunting Porlier further to the east, and had left the Asturian capital almost ungarrisoned. Hence, when Porlier unexpectedly appeared before Gijon on the inland side, having eluded his pursuer, and the ships threw the landing force ashore, the French battalion had to fly. Several ships, both privateers and merchantmen, with a considerable amount of military stores, fell into the hands of Porlier and Renovales. This exploit drew down on them the whole French force in the Asturias, for Bonnet concentrated every man and musket on Gijon. But the Anglo-Spanish squadron, having thus drawn him westward, sailed in the opposite direction, and, after threatening Santona, was about to touch at Vivero, when it was scattered by a hurricane from the Bay of Biscay. A Spanish frigate and brig, an English brig, and several gunboats and transports were dashed on the rocky coast, and lost with all hands. This disaster, which cost 800 lives, compelled Renovales to return to Corunna (November 2). But the raid had not been useless; it had compelled Bonnet to evacuate many posts, distracted the garrisons of Santander and Biscay, and even induced Caffarelli to march down to the coast with his newly-arrived division, the ‘Reserve of the Army of Spain.’ Serras, too, had drawn up the greater part of his scattered division to the north-west, thus leaving the borders of Galicia and the Tras-os-Montes hardly watched. This enabled Mahy to send down troops into the plain of Leon, and to establish something like a blockade around Astorga. But all the operations of the Captain-General of Galicia were feeble and tentative. He passed among his countrymen as an easy-going man, destitute of energy or initiative[585]. Silveira, in the Tras-os-Montes, a more active but a more dangerous man to entrust with troops, took advantage of Serras’s absence to cross the Douro, invest Almeida, and cut the communication between that place and Ciudad Rodrigo[586].

Such was the effect of the sea-power, even when it was used sparingly and by unskilful hands. The raids along the northern coast had kept Bonnet and the troops in Santander and Biscay fully employed; they had distracted Serras, Caffarelli, and even the garrisons of the province of Burgos. They had saved Mahy and Silveira from attack, and had lighted up a blaze of insurrection in the western hills of Cantabria which, thanks to the energy of Porlier and his colleague Louga, was never extinguished.

Meanwhile the mass of French troops between Burgos and Pampeluna—the 9th Corps, the Young Guard Divisions, and the garrison in Navarre—had been ‘contained’ by an enemy of a different sort. Here the influence of the British naval supremacy was little felt: it was due to the energy of Spaniards alone that the 38,000 men under Drouet, Roguet and Dumoustier, and Reille were prevented during the months of September, October, and November from doing anything to help Masséna. Old Castile, Navarre, and the lands of the Upper Ebro, were kept in a constant turmoil by a score of guerrillero chiefs, of whom the elder Mina was the leading figure. We have already had occasion to speak of the exploits of his relative, ‘the Student’ as he was called, to distinguish him from his uncle, and have noted his final capture by Suchet[587]. Francisco Espoz y Mina had rallied the relics of his nephew’s band, and began his long career of raids and counter-marches in April 1810. His central place of refuge was the rough country on the borders of Navarre and Aragon, where he kept his main dépôt at the head of the valley of Roncal; but he often ranged as far afield as Biscay and the provinces of Soria and Burgos. Almost from his first appearance he obtained a mastery over the other chiefs who operated on both sides of the Upper Ebro, having won his place by the summary process of seizing and shooting one Echeverria, ‘who,’ as he writes, ‘was the terror of the villages of Navarre, which he oppressed and plundered in a thousand ways, till they complained to me concerning him. I arrested him at Estella on June 13, 1810, caused him to be shot with three of his principal accomplices, and incorporated his band (600 foot and 200 horse) with my own men[588].’ Mina was the special enemy of Reille, then commanding in Navarre, but he also attracted the attention of Drouet, one of whose divisions was entirely absorbed in hunting him during the autumn of 1810. This was the main cause of the non-appearance of the 9th Corps at Rodrigo and Salamanca, when Masséna was so anxiously awaiting its arrival. Mina’s lot during this period was no enviable one: he was beset on all sides by flying columns, and was often forced to bid his band disperse and lurk in small parties in the mountains, till the enemy should have passed on. Sometimes he was lurking, with seven companions only, in a cave or a gorge: at another he would be found with 3,000 men, attacking large convoys, or even surprising one of the blockhouses with which the French tried to cover his whole sphere of activity. The Regency, admiring his perseverance, gave him, in September, the title of ‘Colonel and Commandant-General of all the Guerrilleros of Navarre.’ He asserts with pride, in his memoir, that he was at one and the same time being hunted by Dorsenne, commanding at Burgos, Reille from Navarre, Caffarelli and his ‘division of Reserve of the Army of Spain,’ by D’Agoult, Governor of Pampeluna, Roguet, commanding the Young Guard, and Paris, one of Suchet’s brigadiers from the Army of Aragon. Yet none of the six generals, though they had 18,000 men marching through his special district, succeeded in catching him, or destroying any appreciable fraction of his band.

There is no exaggeration in this; his services were invaluable during the campaign of Portugal, since he was wearing out a French force of five times his own strength in fruitless marches, under winter rains, and over roads that had become all but impassable. The archives of the French War Office show lists of officers by the dozen killed or wounded ‘dans une reconnaissance en Navarre,’ or ‘dans une rencontre avec les bandes de Mina,’ or ‘en combat près de Pampelune,’ during the later months of 1810. Wellington owed him no small gratitude, and expressed it to him in 1813, when he entrusted him with much responsible work during the Campaign of the Pyrenees. The suffering inflicted on the provinces of the Upper Ebro by Mina’s activity was of course terrible: the French destroyed every village that sheltered him or furnished him with recruits, and were wont to shoot every prisoner from his band that they caught, till he began to retaliate by corresponding or greater numbers of executions from the considerable number of prisoners in his hands. In 1811 this barbarous system was in full swing on both sides, but it was put to an end by mutual agreement in 1812. In addition to the woes that Navarre and its neighbours suffered under the French martial law, and by the monstrous requisitions imposed upon them to feed the mass of troops forming the flying columns, they had also to maintain the patriotic bands. Mina declares that he always took rations for his men, but avoided levying money contributions on the peasantry, depending on his booty, the rents of national and ecclesiastical property, on which he laid hands, on fines inflicted on ‘bad Spaniards,’ i. e. those who had done anything to help his pursuers, and on ‘the custom-houses which I established upon the very frontier of France; for I laid under contribution even the French custom-house at Irun, on the Bidassoa, which engaged to deliver, and actually paid to my delegates, 100 gold ounces (about £320) per month.’ By this strange secret agreement private goods passing Irun and the other frontier posts were guaranteed against capture in the district which Mina’s bands infested[589].

Eastward of Mina’s sphere of activity the guerrilleros were more numerous but less powerful. Among the chief of them was Julian Sanchez, who, with a mounted band of 300 to 500 lancers—infantry would have been easily caught in the plain of Leon—busied himself in cutting the communication between Salamanca, Ciudad Rodrigo, Zamora, and Valladolid, and was Kellermann’s chief tormentor. He was in regular communication with Wellington, and sent him many captured dispatches and useful pieces of information. In Old Castile the priest Geronimo Merino, generally known as ‘El Cura,’ was the most famous and most active among many leaders. It was his band, aided by that of Tapia, also a cleric, which on July 10, 1810, fought a most daring and desperate action at Almazan, near Soria, with two French battalions of marines, who were marching, the one to join Masséna the other to join Soult. It cost the enemy no less than 13 officers hors de combat, as the Paris archives show[590], and over 200 men, though the guerrilleros were finally beaten off. In October he surprised and captured an enormous convoy of corn and munitions of war, whose loss put the French garrison of Burgos in considerable straits for some weeks. He waged with Dorsenne the same horrible contest of retaliation in the shooting of prisoners which Mina was at the same time carrying on with the generals in Navarre. There were many other bands in Old Castile, those of Abril, Tenderin, Saornil, Principe, and others, of whom some are accused by their own colleagues of being more harmful to the country-side than to the French, from their reckless and miscellaneous plundering, and their refusal to combine for any systematic action[591]. Yet even the worst of them contributed to distract the activity of the French garrisons, and to retard the communication of dispatches and the march of isolated detachments. Under the easy excuse that it was dangerous to move any small body of men along the high-roads, the French commanders of every small town or blockhouse detained for weeks, and even months, drafts on their way to the south or the west, with the result that the number of recruits received at Madrid, Seville, or Salamanca never bore any proper proportion to the total that had crossed the Bidassoa.

Northward from Old Castile, on the skirts of the mountains of Santander and Biscay, the dominating personality among the guerrilleros was Louga, who afterwards rose to some distinction as a commander of regular troops. His special task was the cutting of the communications between Burgos and Bilbao, and Bilbao and Santander; but he often co-operated with Porlier, when that restless partisan made one of his descents from the Asturian mountains, either on to the coast region or on the southern skirts of the Cantabrian sierras.

On the whole, there were probably never more than 20,000 guerrilleros in arms at once, in the whole region between the Sierra de Guadarrama and the shore of the Bay of Biscay. They never succeeded in beating any French force more than two or three battalions strong, and were being continually hunted from corner to corner. Yet, despite their weakness in the open field, their intestine quarrels, their frequent oppression of the country-side, and their ferocity, they rendered good service to Spain, and incidentally to Great Britain and to all Europe, by pinning down to the soil twice their own numbers of good French troops. Any one who has read the dispatches of the commandants of Napoleon’s ‘military governments,’ or the diaries of the officers who served in Reille’s or Dorsenne’s or Caffarelli’s flying columns, will recognize a remarkable likeness between the situation of affairs in Northern Spain during 1810 and 1811 and that in South Africa during 1900 and 1901. Lightly moving guerrilla bands, unhampered by a base to defend or a train to weigh them down, and well served as to intelligence by the residents of the country-side, can paralyse the action of an infinitely larger number of regular troops.

In the north-east of Spain, where the French were engaged not with mere scattered bands of guerrilleros, but with two regular armies, O’Donnell’s Catalans and Caro’s Valencians, the fortune of war took no decisive turn during the autumn of 1810, though one dreadful blow to the Spanish cause—the loss of Tortosa—was to fall in the winter which followed.

We left Suchet in August 1810, established in his newly-conquered positions at Lerida and Mequinenza, master of all the plain-land of Aragon, as well as of a strip of Western Catalonia, and only waiting for the co-operation of Macdonald and the 7th Corps to recommence his operations[592]. That co-operation, however, was long denied him. The Emperor’s last general orders, which had reached Suchet in June, briefly prescribed to him that the conquest of the city and kingdom of Valencia was his final object, but that he must first break the Spanish line by capturing Tortosa, the great fortress of the Lower Ebro, and Tarragona, the main stronghold of Southern Catalonia[593]. For both these latter operations he was to count on the aid of Macdonald and the Army of Catalonia[594]. Relying on this support, Suchet, after less than a month had elapsed since the capture of Mequinenza, had pushed his advanced guard down the Ebro, till it was at the very gates of Tortosa. One detachment even passed the town, and seized the ferry of Amposta, the only passage of the Ebro near its mouth, actually cutting the great road from Tarragona to Valencia, and only leaving the bridge of Tortosa itself open, for the linking of the operations of Caro and O’Donnell. Meanwhile Suchet was preparing his siege-train at Mequinenza, and waiting for a rise in the Ebro, which would commence to become navigable with the arrival of the autumn rains, in order to ship his guns down-stream to their destined goal. He was at the same time making the land route to Tortosa passable, by repairing the old military road from Caspe to Mora and Tivisa, which had been constructed during the wars of the Spanish Succession, but had long ago fallen into ruin.

Suchet was quite aware that by thrusting a comparatively small force—he had only brought up 12,000 men—into the near neighbourhood of Tortosa, he was risking the danger of being attacked at once by the Army of Valencia from the south and O’Donnell’s Catalans from the north. But he trusted that Macdonald and the 7th Corps would keep the latter—the more formidable enemy—employed, while he had a well-founded contempt for the generalship of Caro, who had always proved himself the most incompetent and timid of commanders. But Macdonald arrived late, having been forced to spend the whole summer, as has been already related[595], in his triple revictualling of Barcelona, and meanwhile the Valencian army came to the front. Its leading division, under Bassecourt, threatened Morella, on Suchet’s flank, early in August, hoping to draw him away to defend this outpost. But a single brigade under Montmarie sufficed to turn back the Valencian detachment, and Suchet kept his positions. O’Donnell meanwhile, vainly hoping for solid help from Caro, had joined the division of his army which was kept at Falcet[596], and after threatening Suchet’s head quarters at Mora on July 30, so as to distract his attention, suddenly turned aside and entered Tortosa with 2,500 men. Calling out all the troops available for a sortie, he issued from the town on August 3, and beat up the outposts of the division under Laval, which was in observation before his gates. But though the Catalans fought fiercely, and drove in the first French line, they were not strong enough to push the enemy away from Tortosa. O’Donnell should have brought a heavier force if he intended to accomplish his end. Shortly after he returned to Tarragona, whither he was called by the movements of Macdonald.

Some days later than he had covenanted, Caro came up to Vinaros, on the coast-road from Valencia, and to San Mateo on the parallel inland road, with his whole army, including the force which Bassecourt had been commanding. It consisted of no more than 10,000 ill-organized troops of the Line, who had been joined by nearly as many unregimented peasants in loose guerrilla bands. The whole mass was far from being formidable, as Suchet knew. Wherefore the French general, cutting down to the smallest possible figure the containing troops left before Tortosa, and at his head quarters at Mora, marched with eleven battalions and a cavalry regiment—only 6,000 men in all—to meet the Valencians. He drove their advanced cavalry from Vinaros, and advanced against their positions at Calig and Cervera del Maestre. Caro at once ordered a precipitate retreat, and did not stop till he had placed thirty miles between himself and the enemy. His obvious terror and dismay at the approach of the French roused such anger that he was summoned to give up the command by his own officers, and obeyed without hesitation[597]. He fled by sea to Majorca, knowing, it is said, that he would have been torn to pieces if he had shown his face before the populace at Valencia, over which he had exercised a sort of dictatorship for more than a year. Suchet, unable to catch such an evasive enemy, and regarding the routed army as a negligible quantity, returned to Mora, where he received the news that the long-expected Macdonald was at last about to appear (August 20).

The Duke of Tarentum had thrown the third and last of his great convoys into Barcelona on the 18th of August, having brought with him as its escort the French division of his army, which was now commanded by Frère[598], and the Italian divisions of Severoli and Pignatelli. He had left behind him General Baraguay d’Hilliers, in the position which Reille had been wont to hold, as the defender of the Ampurdam and Northern Catalonia as far as Hostalrich. Eighteen thousand men were told off for this task, including all the German brigades; but after garrisoning Gerona, Rosas, Figueras, and Hostalrich, d’Hilliers had no great field-force left, and found full employment in warding off the raids of Manso, Rovira, and the other miquelete leaders upon the communication between Gerona and Perpignan. Nearly 10,000 men had also been left in Barcelona, including many sick, and the three divisions with which Macdonald marched to join Suchet did not exceed 16,000 sabres and bayonets, though the whole force of the 7th Corps was reckoned at over 50,000 men.

On August 13 Macdonald forced the Pass of Ordal, after some skirmishing with the somatenes, and entered the plain of Tarragona. It was the news of his approach to the Catalan capital which brought O’Donnell back in haste from Tortosa. He concentrated the greater part of his troops, on the hypothesis that the 7th Corps might be intending to lay siege to the place. He brought down Campoverde’s division from the north to join those of Ibarrola, Sarsfield, and the Baron de Eroles, which were already on the spot. It soon became known, however, to the Spaniards that Macdonald could not be bent on siege operations, for he was bringing with him neither the heavy artillery nor the enormous train of provisions that would be required in such a case. He marched past Reus and Valls to Momblanch, skirmishing all the way with O’Donnell’s detachments, and thence to Lerida, which he reached on August 29. There he found Suchet awaiting him for a conference. The orders from Paris, on which both were acting, seemed to prescribe that Tortosa and Tarragona should both be attacked[599]. But the General and the Marshal agreed that their joint strength was not more than enough for one siege at a time. They agreed that the 3rd Corps should undertake the leaguer of Tortosa, and ‘the containing’ of the Valencian army, while the 7th should cover these operations by keeping O’Donnell and the Catalans fully employed. Suchet therefore drew his detachments southward from Lerida and the plains of the Segre, handing over all that tract to Macdonald. From this fertile region alone could the Marshal have fed his corps, Central Catalonia being barren, and so overrun by O’Donnell’s detachments that it was impossible to forage freely within its bounds. Suchet undertook to provide for his own corps during the siege of Tortosa by bringing up stores from Saragossa and the valley of the Ebro, via Mequinenza. Macdonald lent him, meanwhile, the weakest of his three divisions, 2,500 Neapolitans under Pignatelli, who were to escort the siege-train for Tortosa along the Ebro, when the autumn rains made the river navigable from Mequinenza to the sea.

While Suchet was moving southward and making ready for the siege, the Duke of Tarentum established himself with head quarters at Cervera on the Barcelona-Lerida road, and brigades at Lerida, Agramunt, and Tarrega, all in the plain; he was ready to fall upon O’Donnell’s flank if the Catalans should make any attempt to succour Tortosa, by marching from Tarragona along the roads parallel to the sea coast. Meanwhile he had completely lost touch both with the garrison of Barcelona and with Baraguay d’Hilliers in the Ampurdam. This was the regular state of things during the Catalan war; for if the French left detachments to guard a line of communication, they were invariably cut off by the enemy; while, if they did not, the roads were blocked and no information came through. So vigorous were the somatenes at this moment, that small parties moving from Tarrega to Cervera,—places only twelve miles apart, and in the middle of the cantonments of the 7th Corps,—were not unfrequently waylaid and destroyed. Macdonald, despite his well-known humanity, was forced to burn villages, and shoot road-side assassins caught red-handed. He lay in the position which he had taken up on September 4-6 for the greater part of that month and the succeeding October, concentrating at intervals a part of his forces for an expedition into the hills, when the Catalans pressed him too closely. At the commencement of his sojourn in the plains, he sent Severoli with an Italian brigade to collect provisions in the valley of the Noguera Palleresa. This raid led to dreadful ravaging of the country-side, but Severoli returned with no spoil and many wounded. He had pushed his advance as far as Talarn, skirmishing the whole way, and driving the somatenes before him, but could accomplish nothing save the burning of poor villages evacuated by their inhabitants. A week later other expeditions scoured the mountain sides eastward, with little more success[600].

Meanwhile, though Macdonald imagined that he was not only protecting Suchet’s northern flank, but also attracting the attention of O’Donnell to himself, the enterprising Spanish general had contrived an unwelcome surprise for him. He knew that he was not strong enough to fight the 7th Corps in the open field, nor even to face Suchet by making another attempt to relieve Tortosa—which place, for the moment, was in no immediate danger. He therefore resolved to draw Macdonald from his present position, by a blow at the corner of Catalonia where the French were weakest.

The Marshal considered that Baraguay d’Hilliers was perfectly safe in the northern region which he garrisoned, since no regular Spanish force was now in arms in that direction. O’Donnell resolved to undeceive him. Leaving the two divisions of Obispo and Eroles to block the road from Macdonald’s post at Cervera to Barcelona, with orders to retire into Tarragona if hard pressed, he ordered a third division, that of Campoverde, to prepare for a forced march to the north. At the same time a force, consisting of the British frigate Cambrian and the Spanish frigate Diana, convoying a few transports with 500 men on board for disembarkation, sailed from Tarragona, for a destination which was kept secret to the last moment. The troops were under Doyle, the British commissioner in Catalonia; Captain Fane of the Cambrian was senior naval officer.

O’Donnell’s march was perilous: he had to pass close to the front of the garrisons of Barcelona, Hostalrich, and Gerona, through a most difficult and mountainous country, without giving any signs of his presence; for, if his movement were discovered, Baraguay d’Hilliers might concentrate his scattered brigades, and crush him by force of numbers. The march, however, was carried out with complete success, and on September 13 O’Donnell lay with 6,000 infantry and 400 horse at Vidreras, south of Gerona, while the naval force was hovering off Palamos, the nearest point on the coast. The rough region between Gerona and the sea was at this moment occupied by half Rouyer’s division of troops of the Confederation of the Rhine, under Schwartz—the ever-unlucky general whose name was connected with the disasters of Bruch[601] and Manresa[602]. He had with him four weak battalions of the 5th (Anhalt-Lippe) and 6th (Schwartzburg-Waldeck-Reuss) regiments, and a squadron of cuirassiers: a force which, owing to the sickliness of the autumn season, did not amount to much more than 1,500 men in all. But he was so close to Gerona[603], where lay Rouyer’s other two regiments, and some French troops, that he was not considered in any danger by his superiors. Schwartz’s main duty was to prevent any communication between the somatenes of the inland and the cruisers which were always passing up and down the coast. Provoked by a recent raid at Bagur, on September 10, where an English landing-party had stormed one of his coast batteries, and captured the garrison of 50 men, Schwartz had just strengthened all his posts along the shore. He had only 700 men at his head quarters at La Bispal; the rest were dispersed between Bagur, San Feliu, Palamos, and the connecting post at Calonje. On the morning of the fourteenth he was stricken with horror when his outposts informed him that they had been driven in by Spanish infantry and cavalry in overwhelming force. He sent orders, too late, for his troops on the coast to concentrate, and prepared to fall back on Gerona with his whole force. But his messenger had hardly gone when he was attacked by O’Donnell, who drove him into the indefensible castle of La Bispal, which was commanded by a neighbouring hill and the church tower of the village. After losing some men shot down from these points of vantage, Schwartz surrendered at nightfall, when the Spaniards were preparing to storm his refuge. His defence cannot have been very desperate, as he had lost only one officer and four men killed, and three officers and sixteen men wounded. But this was only part of the disaster which befell the German brigade that day: by a careful timing of the attacks Doyle and Fane stormed Palamos with the landing-force at the same moment that La Bispal was being attacked, while Colonel Fleires, with a detachment of O’Donnell’s land troops, surprised San Feliu, and Colonel Aldea with another cut off the companies at Calonje. In all the Spaniards captured on that day one general, two colonels, fifty-six officers, and 1,183 rank and file, with seventeen guns. Schwartz’s brigade was absolutely destroyed; only a few stragglers reached Gerona, from which no help had been sent, because O’Donnell had turned loose all the somatenes of the region to demonstrate against the place[604].

Without waiting for Rouyer and Baraguay d’Hilliers to assemble their forces, O’Donnell departed from the scene of his exploits without delay. He himself, having received a severe wound in the foot, embarked with the prisoners on board Fane’s ships and returned to Tarragona. Campoverde, with the land-force, retired hastily past Gerona to the mountains of the north, retook Puycerda, beat up the outposts of the French garrison of Montlouis on the frontier of Cerdagne, and raised some contributions on the other side of the Pyrenees. From thence he descended the Segre, and established himself at Cardona and Calaf, facing Macdonald’s northern flank.

So thoroughly had the main body of the 7th Corps lost touch with the troops left behind at Gerona and in the Ampurdam, that the news of the disaster of La Bispal only reached Macdonald, via France and Saragossa, more than a fortnight after it had happened. It alarmed him for the safety of the north, but did not suffice to draw him away from Suchet, as O’Donnell had hoped. The news that the Spanish raiding division had disappeared from the neighbourhood of Gerona encouraged him to remain in his present position, which alone made the siege of Tortosa possible. Presently he was informed that a considerable force had appeared in his own sphere of operations—this being the same division of Campoverde which had done all the mischief in the north. He therefore marched on October 18, with two French and two Italian brigades, to attack this new enemy. On the next day he occupied Solsona, where the Junta of Upper Catalonia had hitherto been sitting. The place was found deserted by its inhabitants, and was plundered; its great cathedral was burnt—either by accident or design. On the twenty-first, however, when the Marshal came in front of Cardona, he found the town, the inaccessible castle above it, and the neighbouring heights, manned by Campoverde’s division, strengthened by several thousand somatenes of the district. The Italian general Eugenio marched straight at the position, with Salme’s French brigade in support, despising his enemy, and not waiting for the Commander-in-Chief and the reserves. He met with a sharp repulse, for the Spaniards charged his columns just as they drew near the crest, and hurled them down with loss. Macdonald refused to throw in all his troops, and contented himself with bringing off the routed brigade. He then returned to Solsona and Cervera, much harassed in his retreat by the somatenes. It is curious that he did not press the combat further, as he had a large superiority of numbers over the Catalan division, and had not lost much more than 100 men in the first clash[605]. But the position was formidable, and the Marshal more than once in this campaign showed himself averse to taking risks. Perhaps, also, he may have already made up his mind to return to the east and abandon Suchet, since it was at about this time that more disquieting information from Baraguay d’Hilliers reached him by way of France.

This new budget of troubles contained two main items. The first was that the August supplies thrown into Barcelona were nearly exhausted, and that the town urgently required revictualling. The second was that it was impossible to send on the necessary convoys, because of the extreme activity of the somatenes, and the inadequate number of troops left in Northern Catalonia. One considerable train of waggons had been captured and destroyed near La Junquera, on the very frontier of France, by the Baron de Eroles, who had now taken up the command of the northern insurgents. Another was standing fast at Gerona for want of sufficient escort, a third had been collected at Perpignan, but dared not start. So pressing was the need for the relief of Barcelona, that Macdonald made up his mind that he must break up from his present cantonments—even at the risk of making the siege of Tortosa impossible—and transfer himself to the north-east.

Accordingly, on November 4, he commenced a toilsome march by way of Calaf, Manresa, and Hostalrich to Gerona, where he arrived in safety on the 10th. Campoverde followed him, for some way, by parallel paths along the mountains, but never dared to strike, the strength of the 7th Corps when it marched in a mass being too great for him. It is probable that the Marshal would have had more trouble if O’Donnell had been in the field, but that enterprising general was not yet healed of the wound which he had received at La Bispal. It had gangrened, and he had been sent to Majorca by his physicians, who declared that a complete cessation from military work was the only chance of saving his life. The interim command was turned over in November to the senior Lieutenant-General in Catalonia, Miguel Iranzo, a very poor substitute for the hard-fighting Spanish-Irish general.

Macdonald, having joined Baraguay d’Hilliers, had now an imposing mass of troops under his hand. Moreover, he got back the services of his old divisional generals Souham and Pino, who arrived from sick leave, and took over charge of the divisions lately in the charge of Frère and Severoli. A great draft from France and Italy had rejoined in their company. The Marshal was therefore able to collect the fractions of the great convoy destined for Barcelona, and to conduct it to that city after a slow and cautious march on November 25. He then changed the battalions in the garrison of Barcelona, where he left both Pino and Souham, sent back to the Ampurdam the troops he had borrowed from Baraguay d’Hilliers, as escort for the returning convoy, and marched for the second time to join Suchet; moving by way of Momblanch, he got once more into touch with the Army of Aragon at Falcet, near Mora, on December 12.

Thus the campaign came back, at mid-winter, to the same aspect that it had shown in the first days of September. It has been the wont of military critics to throw the blame for the lost three months on Macdonald[606]. But this seems unfair: it is true that he was absent from the post which he had promised to hold, for the protection of Suchet’s rear, from November 4 to December 13. But why had so little been done to forward the siege of Tortosa during the time from September 4 to November 4—two whole months—while the Marshal was in the covenanted position, and actually carrying out his promise to contain the Catalans, and leave Suchet’s hands free for the actual prosecution of the projected siege? The commander of the Army of Aragon had been given two of the best campaigning months of the year—September and October—and had no enemy about him save the ever-unlucky Valencian army, the local somatenes of the Lower Ebro, and the scattered bands of Villacampa in the hills of Upper Aragon. It was only sixty miles from his base at Mequinenza, where his siege-train had been collected months before, to the walls of Tortosa, and he had brought up his field army before that place as early as August. No doubt the country between Mequinenza and Tortosa is rough, and its roads execrable, while water-transport along the Ebro was rendered more difficult than usual by a rather dry autumn, which kept the river low. But twenty-six heavy siege-guns were got down to Xerta, only ten miles from Tortosa, as early as September 5, during a lucky flood, while a considerable number more were pushed to the front during the same month, by the land route, formed by Suchet’s new military road from Caspe to Mora. It seems, therefore, that Suchet’s inactivity in September and October can be explained neither by laying blame on Macdonald, nor by exaggerating the difficulties of transport. If, as he wrote himself, ‘Notre corps d’armée se trouvait enchaîné sur le bas Ebre, sans pouvoir agir, et son chef n’avait d’espoir que dans une crue d’eau et dans le secours des circonstances[607],’ he was himself responsible for his failure, either from over-caution or because he had undertaken a task beyond his means. The real cause of his two months’ delay was the vigorous action of the enemy. There was no danger from the disorganized Valencian army, which only made a feeble attempt on November 26-27 to beat up the small force under General Musnier, which lay at Uldecona to cover the blockade of Tortosa from the south; the attack, led by Bassecourt, was driven off with ease. The real opponents of Suchet were the irregular forces of the Catalans, and the Aragonese insurgents in his rear. The former, though few in numbers, since Macdonald was attracting their main attention, attacked every convoy that tried to float down the gorge of the Ebro, and sometimes with success. On the 15th of September they captured a whole battalion of Pignatelli’s Neapolitans, which was acting as guard to some boats. On other occasions they took or destroyed smaller or greater portions of flotillas carrying guns or stores to Xerta, where the siege park was being collected. But Villacampa’s Aragonese gave even greater trouble; from his lair in the Sierra de Albaracin that enterprising partisan made countless descents upon Suchet’s rear, and so molested the garrisons of Upper Aragon, that the French general had repeatedly to send back troops from his main body to clear the roads behind him. Villacampa was beaten whenever he tried to fight large bodies, even though he was aided by a General Carbajal, whom the Regency had sent from Cadiz with money and arms, to stir up a general revolt in the Teruel-Montalban region. The Polish General Chlopiski, detached in haste from the blockade of Tortosa, broke the forces of Carbajal and Villacampa in two successive engagements at Alventosa, on the borders of Valencia (October 31), and Fuensanta, near Teruel (November 11). The insurrection died down, Villacampa retired into his mountains, and Chlopiski returned to the main army. But only a few days later Suchet had to cope with a new danger: Macdonald having taken himself off to Gerona, the Catalans were at last able to detach regular troops to reinforce the somatenes of the Lower Ebro. A brigade under General Garcia Navarro came up to Falcet, opposite Mora, and formed the nucleus of a raiding force, which beset the whole left bank of the Ebro, and made its navigation almost impossible. Suchet had to detach against it seven battalions under Abbé and Habert, who attacked Navarro’s entrenched camp at Falcet on November 12, and stormed it. The Spanish general, who showed distinguished personal courage, and charged valiantly at the head of his reserves, was taken prisoner with some 300 men. The somatenes fled to the hills again, and the regulars retired to Reus, near Tarragona, where they were out of Suchet’s sphere of operations. It was just after this combat that the unfortunate Army of Valencia made the useless diversion of which we have already spoken[608]. It, at least, kept Suchet busy for a few days. By the time that it was over, the greater part of the remaining siege-material was ready at Xerta, the water-carriage down the Ebro having become easy since Garcia Navarro’s defeat. When, therefore, Macdonald’s arrival at Momblanch was reported at Suchet’s head quarters, and an adequate covering-force was once more placed between him and the Catalan army in the direction of Tarragona, the actual leaguer of Tortosa could at length begin. It lasted, short though it was, till the New Year of 1811 had come, and must, therefore, be described not here but in the fourth volume of this work.

Thus six months had elapsed between the fall of Lerida and the commencement of the next stage of the French advance in Eastern Spain. If it is asked why the delay was so long, the answer is easy: it was due not, as some have maintained, to Suchet’s slowness or to Macdonald’s caution, but solely to the splendid activity displayed by Henry O’Donnell, a general often beaten but never dismayed, and to the tenacity of the Catalans, who never gave up hope, and were still to hold their own, after a hundred disasters, till the tide of success in the Peninsula at last turned back in 1812-13.

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SECTION XXII: CHAPTER II

KING JOSEPH AND THE CORTES AT CADIZ: GENERAL SUMMARY

It only remains that we should deal shortly with the higher politics of Spain during the last months of 1810—the troubles of King Joseph, and the complications caused by the meeting of the Cortes at Cadiz.

Of the growing friction between the King and the commanders of the ‘military governments’ created by the Emperor in February, we have already spoken[609]. Joseph did well to be angry when his dispatches to Saragossa or Barcelona were deliberately disregarded by his brother’s special orders. But things became worse, when he was not merely ignored, but openly contemned. A few examples may suffice. In the early summer a brigade sent out by Marshal Ney raided the province of Avila, which was not included in any of the military governments, raised requisitions there, and—what was still more insulting—seized and carried off the treasure in the offices of the civil intendant-general of the province[610]. Joseph wrote to Paris that ‘the Emperor cannot be desirous that his own brother—however unworthy—should be openly humiliated and insulted; that he asked for justice, and abstained from any further comment’[611]. Napoleon replied by placing Avila in the block of provinces allotted to the Army of Portugal, and withdrew it for the time from the King’s authority. It was soon after that he created Kellermann’s new ‘military government’ of Valladolid, thus taking another region from under the direct authority of Joseph. Some months later Kellermann asserted the complete independence of his viceroyalty, by causing the judges of the high-court of Old Castile, which sat at Valladolid, to take a new oath of allegiance to the Emperor of the French, as if they had ceased to be subjects of the kingdom of Spain[612]. Soult, too, continued, as has been shown before, to cut off all revenues which the King might have received from Andalusia, and Joseph’s financial position became even worse than it had been in 1809[613].

The summary of his complaints, containing a declaration that he wished to surrender his crown to the Emperor, was drawn up as the autumn drew near; it deserves a record; it is absolutely reasonable, and confines itself to hard facts. ‘Since Your Majesty withdraws Andalusia from my sphere of command, and orders that the revenues of that province should be devoted exclusively to military expenses, I have no choice left but to throw up the game. In the actual state of affairs in Spain the general who commands each province is a king therein. The whole revenues of the province will never suffice to keep him; for what he calls his “absolute necessities” have never been formally stated, and as the revenues rise he augments his “necessities.” Hence it results that any province under the command of a general is useless for my budget. From Andalusia alone I hoped to get a certain surplus, after all military expenses had been paid. But its command is given over to a general who would never recognize my authority; and with the command, he gets the administrative and governmental rights. Thus I have been stripped of the only region which could have given me a sufficient maintenance. I am reduced to Madrid [i.e. New Castile], which yields 800,000 francs per mensem, while the indispensable expenses of the central government amount to 4,000,000 francs per mensem. I have around me the wrecks of what was once a great national administration, with a guard, the dépôts and hospital of the army, a garrison, a royal household, a ministry, a council of state, and the refugees from the rebel provinces. This state of affairs could not endure for two months longer, even if my honour, and the consciousness of what is due to me, would allow me to remain in this humiliating position. Since the Army of Andalusia has been taken from me, what am I? The manager of the hospitals and magazines of Madrid, the head jailer of the central dépôt of prisoners!’ Joseph then states his conditions. If he is allowed (1) to have a real control over the whole army; (2) to send back to France officers, of whatever rank, notoriously guilty of maladministration; (3) to reassure his Spanish partisans as to rumours current concerning his own forced abdication and the dismemberment of the monarchy; (4) to issue what proclamations he pleases to his subjects, without being placed under a sort of censorship, he will retain his crown, and pledge himself to reduce all Spain, and ‘make the country as profitable to the interests of France as it is now detrimental.’ If not, he must consider the question of retiring across the Pyrenees and surrendering his crown[614].

Napoleon could not give any such promises, and for good reasons: he rightly distrusted his brother’s military ability, and knew that—whatever was the title given to Joseph—men like Soult or Masséna would disregard his orders. Apparently he considered that a conflict of authorities in Spain, such as had been existing for the last six months, was at least better than the concentration of power in the hands of one indifferent commander-in-chief. It is doubtful whether he did not err in his conclusion. Almost anything was better than the existing anarchy, tempered by orders, six weeks late, from Paris. But a second, and a more fatal, objection to granting Joseph’s conditions was that the ‘rumours current concerning the dismemberment of the Spanish monarchy’ were absolutely true. Napoleon was at this moment at the very height of his wild craze for adding alien and heterogeneous provinces to the French Empire, in the supposed interest of the Continental System. It was in 1810 that he declared Holland and the Valais, Hamburg and Bremen, Oldenburg and Dalmatia, integral parts of his dominions. And Northern Spain was destined to suffer the same fate. Mina and Rovira, Eroles and Manso, were to wake some morning to find themselves French subjects! On October 12 the Emperor wrote to Berthier: ‘You will inform General Caffarelli, in strict confidence, that my intention is that Biscay shall be united to France. He must not speak of this intention, but he must act with full knowledge of it. Make the same private communication to General Reille about Navarre[615].’ Aragon, or at least the portion of it north of the Ebro, and Catalonia were to suffer the same fate. Already justice was administered there in the name of the Emperor, not in that of the King of Spain, and a coinage was being struck at Barcelona which no longer bore the name of ‘Joseph Napoleon King of Spain and the Indies[616].’

The line of argument which Napoleon adopted with regard to this proposed annexation is very curious. His directions to his Foreign Minister, Champagny, run as follows[617]: ‘Herewith I send you back the Spanish documents with six observations, which are to serve as the base for negotiation. But it is important that you should broach the matter gently. You must first state clearly what are my opinions on the Convention of Bayonne [viz. that the Emperor regards his guarantee of the integrity of Spain as out of date and cancelled]. Then speak of Portugal[618], and next of the expense that this country [Spain] costs me. Then let the Spanish envoys have time to reflect, and only after an interval of some days tell them that I must have the left bank of the Ebro, as an indemnity for the money and all else that Spain has cost me down to this hour. I think that, as in all negotiations, we must not show ourselves too much in a hurry.’ The mention of Portugal means that the Emperor contemplated making his brother a present of the Lusitanian realm, where Spain was hated only one degree less than France, as a compensation for Catalonia and the rest. On the same morning that Mina found himself a Frenchman, all the Ordenança of the Beira hills were to discover that they were Castilians! Mad disregard of national feeling could go no further.

A letter to the French ambassador at Madrid explained at much greater length the Emperor’s reasons for breaking the oath that he had sworn to his brother at Bayonne, when he named him King of Spain. ‘When the promise was made, His Majesty had supposed that he had rallied to his cause the majority of the Spanish nation. This has proved not to be the case: the whole people took arms, the new king had to fly from Madrid, and was only restored by French bayonets. Since then he has hardly rallied a recruit to his cause; it is not the King’s own levies that have fought the rebels: it is the 400,000 French sent across the Pyrenees who have conquered every province. Therefore all these regions belong not to the King, but to the Emperor, by plain right of conquest. He intends, for this reason, to regard the Treaty of Bayonne as null; it has never been ratified by the Spanish nation. One only chance remains to the King: let him prevail upon the newly-assembled Cortes at Cadiz to acknowledge him as their sovereign, and to break with England. If that can be done, the Emperor may revert to his first intentions, and ratify the Treaty of Bayonne, except that he must insist on a “rectification of frontiers sufficient to give him certain indispensable positions”’—presumably San Sebastian, Pampeluna, Figueras, Rosas, &c.[619]

The mere first rumour of his brother’s intentions, transmitted by Almenara and the Duke of Santa-Fé, his ambassadors ordinary and extraordinary at Paris, drove Joseph to despair. ‘The Spanish nation,’ he wrote[620], ‘is more compact in its opinions, its prejudices, its national egotism, than any other people of Europe. There are no Catholics and Protestants here, no new and old Spaniards; and they will all suffer themselves to be hewn in pieces rather than allow the realm to be dismembered. What would the inhabitants of the counties round London say if they were menaced with being declared no longer English? What would Provençals or Languedocians say if they were told that they were to cease to be Frenchmen? My only chance here is to be authorized to announce that the promise that Spain should not be dismembered will be kept. If that is granted, and the generals who have misbehaved are recalled to France, all may be repaired. If not, the only honourable course for me is to retire into private life, as my conscience bids me, and honour demands.’ On November 18, after having received more formal news of the Emperor’s intentions from his envoys, Joseph declared that the die was cast: he would return to his castle of Mortefontaine, or to any other provincial abode in France that he could afford to purchase, as soon as his brother’s resolve was made public.

Yet the crisis never came to a head. The annexation of the Ebro provinces was never published, though private assurances of their impending fate were laid before the Spanish ministers and the King. What caused the Emperor to hesitate, when all was prepared? The answer may be found in his dispatch to Laforest on November 7: ‘I need hardly warn you,’ he writes, ‘that these insinuations (the ultimatum to the King) are to be made only on condition that the French army has entered Lisbon, and that the English have taken to their ships.’ And again, ‘The Emperor is acting in sincerity: if in reality the capture of Lisbon, and an offer from the cabinet of Madrid, might possibly decide the rebels to treat, His Majesty might consent, &c., &c.’ It was the Lines of Torres Vedras which saved King Joseph from abdication and Spain from dismemberment. The evacuation of Portugal by Wellington was the indispensable preliminary to the carrying out of the great annexation scheme: its completion was deferred till the ominous silence of Masséna should be ended by a triumphant dispatch proclaiming the capture of Lisbon. Since that dispatch never came, Napoleon kept postponing his ultimatum. Then followed the news, delivered at Paris by Foy on November 21, showing that Masséna had been brought to a standstill. Even then the Emperor’s plan was kept back, not abandoned. It was not till the Army of Portugal had recoiled in despair and disarray to the banks of the Coa that Napoleon abandoned his cherished scheme, and consented to treat with his brother on reasonable terms. But Joseph’s visit to Paris in the spring of 1811 and its consequences belong to another chapter of this history. It must suffice here to point out that he spent all the winter of 1810-11 in a state of mental anguish, expecting every day to be forced to publish his abdication[621], and, meanwhile, living a life of shifts and worries—selling his last silver plate to feed his courtiers[622], and exchanging an endless correspondence of remonstrances and insinuations with Soult and the commanders of the ‘military governments’ of the North[623]. Even from the military point of view he did not consider himself safe; the Empecinado and other guerrillero chiefs carried their incursions up to the very gates of Madrid; and La Mancha, from which, by the Emperor’s orders, much cavalry had been withdrawn for the benefit of Soult[624], was frequently raided by detachments from Blake’s Army of Murcia. ‘À chaque instant du jour et de la nuit,’ wrote the unhappy sovereign, ‘je suis exposé à monter à cheval pour défendre ma vie contre les bandes exaspérées des insurgés, qui entourent Madrid: cette ville est aux avant-postes[625].’

Meanwhile, the other government which claimed to be the legal representative of Spanish nationality was even more truly ‘aux avant-postes.’ The Cortes had assembled at Cadiz, where the booming of the French cannon was perpetually heard, and where an occasional shell from Villantroys’ celebrated mortars would plump harmlessly into the sand of the Peninsula or the outskirts of the town itself. The Cortes had opened its sessions on September 24, though less than half its members had assembled. The difficulty of collecting them had been very great, since all had to arrive by sea, and many had to come from regions very remote, such as Asturias, Galicia, or Catalonia. The assembly could not be called satisfactory or representative. The scheme drawn up for its election by the commission that had sat in the preceding winter was complicated. There was to be a deputy for every 50,000 souls throughout Spain; but the form of selection was indirect: the villages chose each one primary elector; the primary electors met at the chief town of the district to choose a second body of secondary electors; the secondary electors chose a final committee for the whole province (Junta provincial electoral) and these last, aided by the Governor, Archbishop, and Intendant of the province, nominated the deputies. But this complicated system could only work in the regions which were in the hands of the patriots. Only Valencia, Murcia, Estremadura, the Balearic Isles, and Galicia were wholly free at the moment. In Catalonia the capital, Barcelona, and large tracts of the country were occupied by the French. In the Asturias three-quarters of the province were held down by Bonnet. The two Castiles, Andalusia (excepting Cadiz), Biscay, Navarre, Leon, and Aragon were entirely or almost entirely in the hands of the enemy. The delegates supposed to represent them were either chosen in hole-and-corner meetings of insurgent juntas lurking in some remote fastness, or—where even this semblance of local election was not possible—by nomination by the Regency, or in wholly casual assemblies of the natives of those districts who chanced to be in Cadiz at the time. The representatives of Madrid, for example, were chosen in this fashion by the body of exiles from that city meeting in the spacious courtyard of a large public building[626]. The result of this informal and irregular method of choice was that many provinces purported to be represented by deputies who had no real local influence therein, but had chanced to commend themselves to the insurgent juntas, or to the persons—in some cases a mere handful—who happened to have fled from that particular region to Cadiz. It is said that the very names, and much more the persons, of a good many of the deputies were absolutely unknown to their supposed constituents. Most of all was this the case with the members of the Cortes who were supposed to represent Spanish America. It had been decreed by the late Central Junta that the colonies formed an integral part of the Spanish monarchy, and were therefore entitled to representation. But the modest number of twenty-six members allotted to them were elected at Cadiz, by a committee of Americans nominated by the Regency from those who happened to be resident in that town. Most of the deputies were out of touch with the people beyond the seas, of whom they were theoretically the delegates.

This fact was specially unfortunate when the first symptoms of discontent and sedition in Buenos Ayres, Mexico, and the Caraccas had begun to show themselves. Though few realized it as yet, the insurrection of Spanish America was just about to break forth. The least foreseen of all the results of Napoleon’s aggressions in Old Spain was that the colonies, which had been called upon to take their part in the national war against the French, and had been promised a share in the administration of the empire, should accept the show of freedom and equality that was offered in a serious spirit. The Americans demanded that they should no longer be treated as subjects and tributaries of the mother country, but recognized as possessing rights and interests of their own, which must be taken into consideration when the general governance of the dominions of Ferdinand VII was in question. And these rights and interests included not only a claim to such self-government as other Spanish provinces possessed, but a demand that their commercial and economic needs should no longer be subordinated to the convenience of the mother country. The colonies could not see why the monopoly of all their trade should be left in the hands of the merchants of Old Spain. They wished to traffic on their own account with Great Britain and the United States. This claim was one which no inhabitant of Old Spain could view with equanimity. The monopoly of South American commerce had always been believed to be the most essential item in the greatness of the realm. It had been preserved almost as strictly in the eighteenth century as in the seventeenth or sixteenth. The old Asiento, which gave Great Britain a minute share in that commerce, had been conceived to be a humiliation and a disgrace to the king who granted it. Spain had fought more than once to preserve the American monopoly—it is only necessary to allude to the war of ‘Jenkins’s Ear’ to show what she was prepared to face in its defence.

And now, when the mother country was in such desperate straits, the questions of American self-government and American trade were raised in the crudest form. Great Britain had provoked the distrust of her Spanish allies by many of her acts, even when they were done in good faith and with no ulterior motive. But the most irritating of all was the request, which had been already made more than once in a tentative fashion, for a measure of free trade with South America. Wellington had recommended that the point should not be pressed, when Spain was in her extremity; but it was inevitable that since nearly all British subjects, and nearly all Americans, were desirous to see the old barriers removed, the question should crop up again and again. The opening of the American trade was the only return that Spain could make for the aid that Great Britain had now been giving her for more than two years of war. When Canning in 1809 wrote that ‘in questions of commerce any proper occasion must be used to recommend a more enlarged and liberal policy than has hitherto been acted upon in Spain,’ it is easy to see what was in his mind. The ministers in power in 1810 were mostly of the same opinion. But to ask for free trade with America in the year when Hidalgo was making his first rising in Mexico, and the cabildos on the Rio de la Plata were quietly substituting municipal self-government for the ancient autocratic rule of their viceroys, was to provoke acute suspicion. In 1806-7 Great Britain had backed Miranda and other colonial separatists, either with the hope of getting a footing for herself in South America, or at least with that of establishing republics which would grant her all the commercial privileges that she asked. The successive Spanish governments of 1808-10 could never convince themselves that the scheme had been completely dropped, and mistook British demands for open trade with America for a desire to sever the discontented colonies from their mother country. The most unpopular act of the Regency of 1810 was their decree of May 7, issued, as all Spaniards held, in base subservience to their allies, which had granted England and Portugal a certain limited right of exchanging their products with the colonies, on paying the heavy customs-due of ten and a half or fifteen and a half per cent[627]. So great was the cry raised against it in Cadiz that the Regency was cowardly enough to cancel it on June 22, under the pretext that it had not been ratified in a session at which all its members were present!

But it was not the American question alone which lay as a source of danger before the newly-assembled Cortes, nor was it the American deputies alone who misrepresented their constituents. Speaking in general, it may be said that the whole assembly showed a disproportionate number of liberals, when the relative numbers of the democratic and the conservative parties throughout Spain were taken into consideration. The events of the next ten years were to show that the Serviles, as their opponents called them, were really in a majority in the whole country-side and in many towns. If that had not been so, Ferdinand VII could not have restored autocratic government with such ease when the Peninsular War was over. Reactionaries of the blackest dye, who would have liked to restore the Inquisition, and would have put back the press into the shackles which it had endured before 1807, were probably in a clear majority in the nation. The clerical interest was in many ways the mainstay of the War of Independence, and the clergy, with very few exceptions, would gladly have gone back to the system of the eighteenth century[628]. The majority of the old official class sympathized with them, and the peasantry were almost everywhere under their control. On the other hand, the liberals, if all shades of them were reckoned together, had a clear majority in the Cortes, both because the regions which were properly represented in that assembly chanced to be those in which they were most numerous, and because they had secured a disproportionate number of the seats belonging to the lost provinces, which had been filled up by more or less fictitious elections within the walls of Cadiz. That town itself was the least conservative place in Spain, and the refugees who had served as electors because they happened to be on the spot, were not drawn from the bulk of the population—were neither priests nor peasants,—but mainly came from those sections of the upper and middle classes where liberal opinions had made more progress.

The Cortes on the whole was a democratic body: Spain, on the whole, was reactionary. The number of those who hated Napoleon because they regarded him as the enemy of the Church, the jailer of the Pope, and the breaker-up of old laws, was much greater than that of those who hated him because he was the embodiment of autocracy, and the foe of all free self-government. Intense national pride was common to both parties, and all could unite against a foe whose aim was the dismemberment of Spain. But the union was made difficult by the fact that men who had imbibed, more or less consciously, some of the ‘Principles of 1789’ had to co-operate with men who looked back on the régime of Philip II as a Golden Age. ‘I can see no prospect of Liberty behind the crowd of priests who everywhere stand foremost to take the lead of our patriots. I cannot look for any direct advantage from the feeling which prompts the present resistance to Napoleon, as it arises chiefly from an inveterate attachment to the religious system whence our present degradation takes source. If the course of events enables us to attempt a political reform, it will be by grafting the feeble shoots of Liberty upon the stock of Catholicism, an experiment which has hitherto, and must ever, prove abortive’ wrote a desponding Liberal[629]. How could the writer of such words and his friends work cordially in company with such fanatics as the Estremaduran deputy who, in one of the earlier sessions of the Cortes, proposed the astonishing motion that, in spite of all that had happened since 1807, ‘the Inquisition remains in full possession of its ancient authority, and can make free use of all the powers which it has ever enjoyed in the past[630].’ There were others who objected to the use of the dangerous word ‘constitution,’ and even to the phrase las leyes de España, as implying an authority independent of the crown[631].

When it is remembered that the form in which the Cortes had been summoned was new and experimental, that the elections had been—even according to that form—irregular, that no single member was accustomed to parliamentary usages, that the parties represented in it held views of the most divergent kinds, the wonder is not that the assembly displayed many weaknesses, but that it did no worse. Observers of a pessimistic frame of mind had feared that it would break up altogether after a few stormy sittings. ‘It was too full,’ wrote the regent Lardizabal, ‘of youths, and of men who yesterday were mere adventurers, without any practice in command, knowledge of business, or experience of the world. Whole provinces were represented by deputies whom they had not chosen, and were expected to conform to a constitution, and to accept sweeping reforms, made by men to whom they had given no mandate, faculty, or authority to take such changes into consideration. For neither the Regency, nor even the King, had the legal right to nominate deputies: no one could choose them save the provinces or cities which were integral parts of the nation, and no one could claim to represent a province save the men to whom that same province had given powers, and instructions to act in conformity with its wishes.’

This motley assembly, so many of whose members were of doubtful legitimacy, held its opening session on September 24, 1810. The meeting-place was not within the walls of Cadiz itself, but in the large suburban town of La Isla, in the centre of the great island of Leon, which forms the outwork of the city. It was hoped that the six miles which separated its sitting-place from Cadiz would prevent interruption by popular demonstrations, such as had been so pernicious to the French chamber during the Revolution. The Cortes had as their home the large but bare theatre of San Fernando, which had been roughly fitted up with benches and tribunes. After high mass had been celebrated by the old Cardinal Bourbon, the only male member of the royal family who was not in captivity[632], the Regency declared the session opened, and then withdrew, after a brief speech by the Senior Regent, the Bishop of Orense, who bade the assembly constitute itself in due form and elect its president and secretaries.

This was done with no delay; the president chosen was a Catalan, Ramón Lazaro de Dou, while the two secretaries were Evaristo Perez de Castro and Manuel Lujan. Both of them were well known to entertain Liberal opinions, and their choice marked the predominance of their party in the Cortes. Sitting till midnight was long past, the assembly passed six decrees drawn up by Muñoz Torrero, one of the few clerical deputies who held Liberal views, and Manuel Lujan. By these the Cortes declared itself in possession of supreme power in the State, but resolved that, of the three branches of authority—the legislative, the executive, and the judicial—it intended to take only the first-named under its own charge, handing over the executive to the late Regency, and the judicial to the ordinary courts of law. The Regency should be responsible to the Cortes for all its acts of administration, and liable to be called to account. It was ordered to make an instant oath of obedience to the assembly, ‘recognizing the sovereignty of the nation represented by the deputies of this general and extraordinary Cortes.’ This Castaños and the other regents did with an ill grace, all save the Bishop of Orense, who misliked the oath, contending that its terms spoke of the nation as being sovereign in its own right, without consideration of the King’s indefeasible majesty[633]. He would not swear, and so vacated his place. He did not lose much by his early dismissal, for on October 28 the Cortes abruptly deposed his four colleagues—Castaños, Lardizabal, Saavedra, and Escaño—and replaced them by a new Regency of three members. These were Joaquim Blake, that most unlucky of generals; Admiral Cisgar, then commanding the Cartagena squadron, who passed as an able administrator; and an obscure naval captain, Pedro Agar, of whom little was known save that he was American born, and might, therefore, theoretically represent the colonies. The change in regents was decidedly for the worse as far as character and ability went. Apparently the Cortes were jealous of an administration whose power was older than their own, and had not originally been created by them. They wished to have an executive more entirely dependent on themselves. Some of the Liberals pretended that the old regents were plotting to hold a sort of ‘Pride’s Purge’ of the Cortes, and to restore themselves to power. But of this no proof was ever given[634]. Considering the difficult times which they had passed through, and their well-intentioned if rather feeble attempt to serve the state, Castaños and his colleagues deserved a better fate than arbitrary dismissal, without thanks, and with a tacit accusation of treason laid to their charge.

Between the time of the first assembly of the Cortes and the change in the Regency an infinite number of subjects had been dealt with. The Liberal majority, led by Agustin Argüelles, had decreed liberty of the Press in all political discussions, but very illogically refused it for discussions on matters of religion. They had abolished all feudal rights and privileges of nobility. They passed a decree of amnesty for all rebels in America who should lay down their arms, and proposed many projects for improving the position of the Colonies, few of which, unfortunately, happened to bear any relation to the chief grievances under which the South Americans conceived themselves to be labouring. The insurrection still went on, and, though the mother country was placed in such a desperate condition, troops were actually withdrawn from the Murcian army to sail with General Elio, who was directed to restore order at Buenos Ayres and in the provinces of the Rio de la Plata. Discussions continued, with much heat and a considerable amount of eloquence, on many other points, during the early days of the Junta. The subjects of debate were generally constitutional, occasionally financial. It was worthy to be observed that the two topics on which all the deputies rallied together were the question of opposition to the French, and the question of the defence of their own sovereign rights. Even the majority of the Serviles would join with the Liberals whenever any doubt was raised with regard to the right of the Cortes to arrogate to itself the title of Majesty or the attributes of supreme power. When, for example, the Bishop of Orense refused to take the oath of obedience, several clericals of most reactionary views took part against him; and when a few weeks later the Marqués del Palacio, named as a deputy-regent during the absence of Blake, also displayed reluctance to swear to the same form on similar grounds, he did not receive the report that he had expected from the reactionaries. Indeed, he was put under arrest for some time, without, as it seems, any attempt to protect him being made by the Serviles. Like the Bishop of Orense, he ended by swallowing his scruples and accepting the prescribed formula[635].

A similar desire to assert its own absolute supremacy impelled the Cortes to refuse to countenance two dynastic intrigues which came from different quarters. The eldest daughter of Charles IV, Carlotta, Princess of the Brazils and wife of the Regent João of Portugal, was the nearest of kin to Ferdinand VII who had escaped Napoleon’s claws in 1808. She was of opinion that she had a good right to expect the Regency during her brother’s captivity at Valençay, and her agents repeatedly urged her claims, both during the days of the first Regency and after the Cortes had assembled. Sousa-Holstein, the Portuguese ambassador, naturally lent them his aid, and she had Spanish partisans, though few of them were persons of good reputation. Yet, by constant persuasion and promises, Carlotta’s representatives actually succeeded in inducing great numbers of the deputies to pledge themselves to push her interests. It is said that, at one time or another, a full half of the members had given the intriguers encouragement. But to do this, and to make a formal attempt to pass a decree conferring the Regency on her, were very different things. When overt action was urged by her agents, or their partisans in the Cortes, nothing came of the attempt. The assembly was naturally unwilling to surrender its own sovereignty, and to introduce a court and its intrigues into Cadiz. It must be added that João of Portugal had no liking for his wife’s scheme, that Wellington saw its disadvantages[636], and that the great bulk of the Spaniards would have resented the whole affair, as a Portuguese intrigue, if it had ever been laid before the nation as a definite proposal.

The second dynastic scheme which was running its course at this time was engineered by another branch of the Spanish royal house. The restless and unscrupulous Queen Caroline of Sicily could not forget that if Carlotta of Portugal was the nearest relative of the captive King, yet her husband Ferdinand was his nearest male kinsman, save the princes in Napoleon’s hands. She availed herself of this fact to urge that one of her children would be a very suitable person to be entrusted with power in Spain, and thought of her younger son Prince Leopold as a possible candidate for the Regency. But since he had not the necessary reputation or age, the Queen soon fell back upon her son-in-law Louis Philippe, Duke of Orleans, the exiled son of the infamous Philippe Égalité. He had not only a good military record for his services at Jemappes and elsewhere in the early Belgian campaigns, but was universally known as a man of ability. Unfortunately, he had fought on the Republican side in 1792—a thing hard to forget, and certain to cause suspicion: and his ability was always displayed for purposes of self-interest, and savoured of unscrupulousness.

Nevertheless, Orleans had already made overtures to the old Regency in the spring of 1810, and had been promised by them a command on the borders of Catalonia. They had failed to keep the pledge, and he now appeared at Cadiz, and wished to present himself before the Cortes and plead his cause. He took small profit thereby, for the assembly regarded him and his relatives as suspicious persons, refused to give him an audience when he presented himself before its doors, and politely but firmly insisted that he should return to Sicily in a few days—an order which he was forced to obey. ‘Whether it was that he was a Frenchman, though a Bourbon, or whether it was that he had once been a Republican, though he had ceased to be one, or whether it was that he was a prince of the royal house, and therefore distasteful to the newly-assembled Cortes, who were secretly inclined to democratic views, the majority viewed him with disfavour[637].’ On October 3 he set sail for Palermo.

At the end of 1810 we leave the Cortes still indulging in fiery constitutional debates, still busy in asserting its own supreme power, and curbing many attempts at self-assertion in the new Regency which it had created. With the English government it was not on the best of terms: though it decreed the erection of a statue to George III as the friend and deliverer of Spain—a monument which (it need hardly be said) was never erected—it was very slow to seek or follow the advice of the allied power. It clamoured for subsidies, but refused the opening of the South American trade—the only return that could be given for them. Money in hard gold or silver Great Britain could no longer supply—for the years 1810-11 were those when the paper-issues of the Bank were our sole currency; cash had almost disappeared, and could only be procured by offering six pounds or more in notes for five guineas. But the Spaniards did not want paper, but gifts or loans in gold or silver. They got no more of the precious metals—Great Britain had none to spare, and found it almost impossible even to procure dollars to pay Wellington’s army in Portugal. All that was given after 1809 was arms and munitions of war.

English observers in the Peninsula were not well pleased with the first months of the rule of the Cortes. ‘The natural course of all popular assemblies,’ wrote Wellington to his brother, Henry Wellesley, now minister at Cadiz, ‘and of the Spanish Cortes among others, is to adopt democratic principles, and to vest all the powers of the State in their own body. This assembly must take care that they do not run in that tempting course, as the wishes of the nation are decidedly for monarchy. Inclination to any other form of government would immediately deprive them of the confidence of the people, and they would become a worse government, and more impotent, because more numerous, than the old Central Junta.’ A few weeks later he doubted whether even a Regency under Carlotta of Portugal, with all its disadvantages, would not be better than mere democracy[638].

Vaughan, on the spot at Cadiz, gave quite a different view of the situation, but one equally unfavourable to the Cortes as a governing power. ‘It is full of priests, who (united with the Catalans) are for preserving the old routine, and adverse to everything that can give energy and vigour to the operation of government. Fanaticism and personal interest direct their opinions.... Be assured that the Cortes is, as at present constituted, anything but revolutionary or Jacobinical.... If there is not soon some new spirit infused into it, it will become an overgrown Junta, meddling with every paltry detail of police, and neglecting the safety of the country—and the Regency will be content to reign (very badly) over Cadiz and the Isla[639].’

There was much truth in both these verdicts, though Vaughan underrated the force of self-interest in driving a popular assembly to claim all power for itself, while Wellington underrated the dead-weight of clerical conservatism, which was the restraint upon that tendency. Both were right in asserting that, whatever the Cortes might be, the mass of the nation had no wish to set out on the path of Jacobinism. They both perceived the danger that the Cortes might turn itself into a constitutional debating society, and at the same time prevent any really efficient executive from being established. Such was its actual fate. Except that Spain now possessed a governing authority which, with all its faults, had infinitely more pretension to claim a legal mandate from the people than any of its predecessors, the situation was not greatly changed. From the military point of view, as we shall see in the next volume, the aspect of the Peninsula was in no degree improved. The same blunders that had marked the administration of the old Provincial Juntas, of the Supreme Central Junta, and of the first Regency, continued to exhibit themselves under the rule of the Cortes.

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