Having accomplished this successful stroke La Romana was desirous of pursuing his way to the Asturias, where he was determined to make his power felt[472]. He took with him only one regiment (that of La Princesa, one of his old corps from the Baltic), and handed over the temporary command of the army to General Mahy, with orders to hold on to the Vierzo as long as possible, but to retire on the Asturias if Ney came up against him in force. The Marshal, however, did not move from Lugo; when he heard of the fall of the garrison of Villafranca, he was already so much entangled with the insurrection that he could spare no troops for an expedition to the Vierzo. In order to reopen the communication with Astorga he would have had to call in his outlying brigades, and at the present moment he was more concerned about the fate of Tuy and Vigo than about the operations of La Romana. Accordingly, Mahy was left unmolested for the greater part of a month in his cantonments along the banks of the Sil; it was a welcome respite for the much-wandering army of Galicia.
Romana meanwhile betook himself to Oviedo with his escort, and on arriving there on April 4 entered into a furious controversy with the Junta. Finding them obstinate, and not disposed to carry out his plans without discussion, he finally executed a petty coup d’état[473]. It bears an absurd resemblance to Cromwell’s famous dissolution of the Long Parliament. Coming into their council-room, with Colonel Joseph O’Donnell and fifty grenadiers of the Princesa regiment, he delivered an harangue to the members, accusing them of all manner of maladministration and provincial selfishness. Then he signed to his soldiers and bade them clear the room[474].
La Romana then, on his own authority, nominated a new Junta; but many of its members refused to act, doubting the legality of his action, while the dispossessed delegates kept up a paper controversy, and sent reams of objurgatory letters to the Government at Seville. Ballasteros and his army, at the other side of the Principality, seem to have paid little attention to La Romana, but the Marquis so far got his way that he began to send much-needed stores, medicines, munitions, and clothing to his troops in the Vierzo. He even succeeded in procuring a few field-pieces for them[475], which were dragged with difficulty over the passes viâ Cangas de Tineo.
Thus strengthened Mahy, much to his chief’s displeasure, advanced from the Vierzo towards Lugo, with the intention of beating up the French brigade there stationed. He took post at Navia de Suarna, just outside the borders of the Asturias, and called to his standards all the peasantry of the surrounding region. La Romana wrote him urgent letters, directing him to avoid a battle and to await his own return. ‘He should remember that it was the policy of Fabius Maximus that saved Rome, and curb his warlike zeal[476].’ It is satisfactory to find that one Spanish general at least was free from that wild desire for pitched battles that possessed most of his contemporaries.
Mahy, thus warned, halted in his march towards Lugo, and remained in his cantonments in the valley of the Navia. His chief should have returned to him, but lingered at Oviedo till April was over, busy in the work of reorganization and in the forwarding of supplies. Meanwhile the French hold on Southern Galicia had completely disappeared: Vigo had fallen in March, Tuy had been evacuated. Maucune’s column had cut its way back to Santiago with some difficulty, bringing to Ney the news of Soult’s capture of Oporto, but also the assurance that the whole valley of the Minho and the western coast-land had passed into the hands of the insurgents.
What the Duke of Elchingen’s next move would have been, if he had not received further intelligence from without, we cannot say. But in the first week in May the long-lost communication with Madrid was at last reopened, and he was ordered to take his part in a new and broad plan of operations against La Romana’s army and the Asturias.
Ever since La Romana had stormed Villafranca, and all news from Galicia had been completely cut off, King Joseph and his adviser Jourdan had been in a state of great fear and perplexity as to the condition of affairs in the north-west. Soult had long passed out of their ken, and now Ney also was lost to sight. In default of accurate information they received all manner of lugubrious rumours from Leon and Astorga, and imagined that the Sixth Corps was in far more desperate straits than was actually the case. Fearing the worst, they resolved to find out, at all costs, what was going on in Galicia. To do so it was necessary to fit out an expedition sufficiently strong to brush aside the insurgents and communicate with Ney. Troops, however, were hard to find. Lapisse had already marched from Salamanca to join Victor. In Old Castile and Leon there were but Kellermann’s dragoons and a few garrisons, none of which could leave their posts. Marshal Bessières, to whom the general charge of the northern provinces had been given by the Emperor, could show conclusively that he was not able to equip a column of even 5,000 men for service in Galicia.
The only quarter whence troops could be procured was Aragon, where everything had remained quiet since the fall of Saragossa. The Emperor had issued orders that of the two corps which had taken part in the siege, the Third only should remain to hold down the conquered kingdom: hence Mortier and the Fifth should have been disposable to reinforce the troops in Old Castile. But, with the Austrian war upon his hands, Napoleon was thinking of withdrawing Mortier and his 15,000 men from Spain. In a dispatch dated April 10, he announced that the Marshal was to retire from Aragon to Logroño in Navarre, from whence he might possibly be recalled to France if circumstances demanded it[477]. At the same moment King Joseph was writing to Mortier to summon him into Old Castile, and pointing out to him that the safety of the whole of Northern Spain depended upon his presence. Much perplexed by these contradictory orders, the Duke of Treviso took a half-measure, and marched to Burgos, which was actually in Old Castile, but lay only three marches from Logroño and upon the direct route to France. A few days later the Emperor, moved by his brother’s incessant appeals, and seeing that it was all-important to reopen the communication between Ney and Soult, permitted Mortier to march to Valladolid, where he was in a good position for holding down the entire province of Old Castile. He also gave leave to the King to employ for an expedition to Galicia the two regiments of the Third Corps, which had escorted the prisoners of Saragossa to Bayonne, and which were now on their homeward way to join their division in Aragon.
It was thus possible to get together enough troops to open the way to Galicia. The charge of the expedition was handed over to Kellermann, who was given his own dragoons, the two regiments from Bayonne, a stray battalion of Leval’s Germans from Segovia, a Polish battalion from Buitrago, and a provisional regiment organized from belated details of the Second and Sixth Corps, which had been lying in various garrisons of Castile and Leon[478]. He had altogether some 7,000 or 8,000 men, whom he concentrated at Astorga on April 27. Marching on Villafranca he met no regular opposition, but was harassed by the way by the peasantry, who had abandoned their villages and retired into the hills. Mahy had moved off the main road by making his advance to Navia de Suarna, and was not sighted by Kellermann, nor did the Spaniard think fit to meddle with such a powerful force as that which was now passing him.
On May 2 the column reached Lugo, where it fell in with Maurice Mathieu’s division of the Sixth Corps, and obtained full information as to Ney’s position. The Marshal was absent at Corunna, but sent his chief of the staff to meet Kellermann and concert with him a common plan of operations. It was settled that they should concentrate their attention on La Romana and the Asturians, leaving southern Galicia alone for the present, and taking no heed of Soult, of whom they had received no news for a full month.