The five remaining articles were unimportant. The eighteenth secured the release of Caraffa and the rest of Junot’s Spanish prisoners, and provided that in return the few French officers of the army of Portugal, whom the Spaniards had captured at Oporto and Elvas, should be liberated. The twenty-first permitted Junot to send one of his aides-de-camp directly to France to carry the news of the Convention, so that preparations might be made for the reception of the troops[257].
Three unimportant supplementary articles were added below the signatures of Murray and Kellermann: one stipulated that French civilian prisoners in the hands of the English and Portuguese should be released, another that Junot’s army should subsist on its own magazines till it embarked, a third that the British should permit the entry of provisions into Lisbon, now that the Convention had been concluded.
Such was the celebrated agreement which was destined to gain a most unhappy notoriety in England under the name of the ‘Convention of Cintra,’ a designation which it is hard to understand, for it was first sketched at Torres Vedras, and was discussed and ratified at Lisbon. The only connexion which it had with Cintra was that Dalrymple’s dispatch to the British Government, enclosing the document in its latest form, was dated from that pleasant spot in the environs of Lisbon. But it would perhaps be pedantic to give any other name to such a well-known document, than that under which it has been known for the last ninety-three years.
After a careful investigation of the details of this famous agreement, the conclusion at which the impartial student will probably arrive is that while on the military side it was justifiable, it presented grave political faults. In order to recover Lisbon with its arsenals, its forts and its shipping, all intact, Dalrymple might without serious blame have granted even more to the French. By the Convention he saved, not only the wealth of the capital, and the lives of the troops who must have fallen in storming it, but, most important of all, time. If he had but known the value of that commodity, he might have been in Madrid at the head of all his British troops by October 1, or even earlier. ‘I do not know what Sir Hew proposes to do,’ wrote Wellesley the morning after the Convention was signed, ‘but if I were in his situation I would have 20,000 men in Madrid in less than a month from this day[258]’ But the importance of time was never realized by the old commander-in-chief: he was superseded long before his army had even moved up to the Portuguese frontier. Looking, therefore, at the Convention in the broadest aspect, we hold that its military advantages entirely outweighed those which might have been secured by a prolongation of hostilities. But this conclusion does not mean that there were not points in the military part of the agreement that might have been modified with advantage.
It is when we turn to the political section of the Convention that we light upon grave faults and mistakes on the part of Dalrymple. The first and foremost was that he signed the document without previously submitting certain portions of it to the Portuguese government. In the sixteenth and seventeenth articles the British general took upon himself to grant certain favours both to French civilians resident in Portugal, and to Portuguese subjects who had taken service under Junot, which he had no authority to concede. These were points which concerned not the British army but the Portuguese civil administration, and should not have been decided without a consultation with our allies, and a permission from them to make terms on their behalf. The sixteenth article allowed Frenchmen resident in Lisbon to remain there for a year after the Convention, if they did not chose to leave the country with Junot and his troops. To permit subjects of the hostile power to remain in Lisbon for so long was, of course, most distasteful to the Portuguese government, which was naturally desirous of expelling at once, according to the ordinary customs of war, a body of persons many of whom had made themselves the partners and instruments of Junot’s peculations, and who for the next twelve months would serve as spies and purveyors of intelligence to the French Emperor. Nothing more than the leave to quit Lisbon in Junot’s wake should have been secured to them, unless the Junta of Regency gave its consent. The seventeenth article is even more objectionable: a considerable portion of the bureaucracy of Portugal had been weak and criminal enough to acquiesce in the French usurpation, and to make themselves the tools of the Duke of Abrantes. It was natural that their countrymen should feel deeply indignant with them; and their lot was likely to be so hard that it was but rational and humane to give them leave to quit the kingdom. But considering that they had deserved very ill of the state, it was surely wrong for the British general to promise to take them under his special protection, and to guarantee them against injury to their persons or property. He had no power to grant them an amnesty for their past ill-doing; that could be given only by the Portuguese government. When the latter resumed its ordinary functions at Lisbon, it was absurd that it should be prevented, by the Convention, from taking into consideration the cases of such of these unpatriotic persons as it might wish to deal with. When, therefore, Kellermann broached to Dalrymple the sixteenth and seventeenth articles, the latter should have refused to accept them without a reference to the Junta at Oporto. He might have granted both the French and the Portuguese satellites of Junot a free passage out of Portugal, with such of their goods as they could carry, but more than this he could not rationally concede on his own authority.
It was fortunate, therefore, that the practical harm done did not turn out to be very great. Both the aliens and the natives covered by these two clauses were so perfectly aware of their own unpopularity in Lisbon, that they absconded almost en masse. The populace of the capital had given them fair warning of what they might expect, for not only were they threatened and insulted in the streets whenever they were out of sight of a French sentry, but unknown hands posted on the walls lists of houses to be sacked and individuals to be hung as soon as Junot’s army should have sailed. The watchwords, ‘Death to the French’ and ‘Death to the traitors,’ were muttered even under the muzzles of the cannon, which had been trained on all the main streets, to keep down the insurrection for the few days which had to elapse before the embarkation. The invaders, therefore, had to take away with them a very large body of civilian dependants, headed by the Comte de Novion, a French émigré, who, after being hospitably entertained in Lisbon for many years, had shown his gratitude by accepting the post of head of Junot’s police—a capacity in which he had much odd business to transact.
But besides Articles XVI and XVII of the Convention there were other clauses to which Dalrymple should not have given his assent without consulting the representatives of his allies. Almeida was being blockaded by a mass of Portuguese militia, and Elvas, a few days after the treaty had been signed, was attacked by a Spanish force sent out from Badajoz by Galluzzo, the Captain-General of Estremadura. No British soldier had yet been seen within a hundred miles of either fortress. What was to be done if the generals of the besieging troops refused to abide by an agreement which they had not been asked to sign, and which had not even been laid before their respective governments ere it was definitively ratified? A grave crisis, as we shall find, was created by Dalrymple’s neglect to foresee this difficulty. His conduct all through the days of negotiation was very strange; not only did he make no proper attempt to communicate with the Portuguese authorities, but he actually left his own government uninformed of his proceedings for a fortnight. He failed to send them any dispatch to announce the armistice of August 22, and only forwarded that detailing the Convention of August 30 on the fourth day of the succeeding month.
Dalrymple’s main reason for leaving the Portuguese out of the negotiations was that the Junta at Oporto had not yet been formally recognized as the legitimate government of Portugal[259]. Wellesley, no doubt, had conferred with the Bishop, given him arms and munitions, procured from him food and draught animals, and asked his advice, but the British ministry had not yet acknowledged the existence of any regular executive in Portugal. This being so, Dalrymple thought himself justified in acting as if there were none in being; and it cannot be denied that thereby he saved himself much present trouble, at the cost of future friction. All, therefore, that he did was to inform the Junta’s agent at the British head quarters, one Pinto da Souza, that he was negotiating with Junot for the evacuation of Lisbon, and that he was open to receive any observations which the Junta might make. The same announcement was made to Bernardino Freire, who had ridden over to Ramalhal[260] to complain that he and his army were not mentioned in the armistice of August 22. Both Freire and the Junta were treated as persons whose opinions it was useful to obtain, not as constituted authorities whose consent to the definitive convention was necessary in order to make it binding. Dalrymple tried to cover himself during the subsequent inquiry by maintaining that the Convention was purely military, and concerned the French and English armies alone: but this plea cannot seriously be put forward in face of Articles XV, XVI, and XVII, all of which are concerned with problems of civil government, which would arise after the French army should have embarked. Each of these articles clearly required the ratification of some proper Portuguese authority to make it valid.
Both the Bishop of Oporto and General Freire were deeply wounded by the way in which Dalrymple ignored their status—the prelate more justly than the soldier, for he had done his best to assist the British army, while Freire by his captious and impracticable behaviour had been more of a hindrance than a help. The Bishop charged the representative of the Supreme Junta in London to complain to the British Government as to the behaviour of their generals, denouncing not only their neglect to make the Junta a party to the Convention, but also the terms of that document, which were stated to be far too favourable to Junot. Owing to Dalrymple’s extraordinary delay in apprising the ministry of the details of the treaty, the Bishop’s excited denunciations of the agreement had currency for nearly a fortnight, before any one in England knew what exactly had been granted to Junot, or how far the Junta was justified in its wrath.