Much as every patriot should deprecate the employment of coups d’état while a foreign war is on hand, there was much to excuse the conduct of the enemies of the Junta. That body was now more than a year old; it had been from the first regarded as a stop-gap, as a provisional government which was destined to give place to something more regular and constitutional when occasion should serve. A ‘Committee of Public Safety’ which fails to preserve the state stands self-condemned, and the history of the Central Junta had been one record of consistent disaster. A body of over thirty persons is too large for a ministry, too small for a representative assembly. Every intelligent Spaniard, whatever his politics, was desirous of seeing it give place to a regular government. The Conservatives and bureaucrats would have been contented if it had appointed a Regency of four or five persons, and then abdicated. The Liberals demanded that it should summon the national Cortes, and leave to that body the creation of an executive. Pamphlets were showered by dozens from the press—now more or less free, for the first time in Spanish history—to advocate one or other of these courses. The Junta, however, had no intention of surrendering its power, whatever pretence of disinterestedness it might assume and proclaim. Its first attempts to put off the evil day when it must yield to public opinion were ingeniously absurd. It issued, as early as May 22, a proclamation acknowledging the advisability of summoning a Cortes, and then invited all well-thinking Spaniards to send in schemes and suggestions during the next two months concerning the best way in which the national assembly could be organized, and the reforms and constitutional improvements which it should take in hand. These documents were to be read and pondered over by a Commission, mainly composed of members of the Junta, which was to issue a report in due time, embodying the best of the suggestions and the results of its own discussion[10]. This was an admirable device for wasting time and putting off the assembly of the Cortes. The Commission finally decided, on September 19, after many weeks of session, that a supreme Executive Council of five persons should be appointed, carefully avoiding the name of Regency. But only existing members of the Central Junta were to be eligible as Councillors, and the Council was to be changed at short intervals, till every member of the Junta had taken a turn in it[11]. The only laudable clause of this scheme was one providing that Spanish America should be represented in the Junta, and therefore ultimately in the Executive Council. The arrangement satisfied nobody—it merely substituted a rapidly changing committee of the Junta for the whole of that body as the supreme ruling power: and it was clear that the orders of the Council would be those of the Junta, though they might be voiced by fewer mouths. The assembly of the Cortes would be put off ad infinitum.
Any effect which the report of the Commission might have had, was spoilt by the fact that it was followed by a minority report, or manifesto, drawn up by the Marquis of La Romana, who had been one of the Commissioners. The Junta had called him back from Galicia, and compelled him to surrender the army that he had re-formed, under the pretext that he had been co-opted as a member of their own body. A death-vacancy had been created in the representation of the kingdom of Valencia: he had been named to fill it, summoned to Seville, and placed on the constitutional Commission. Dissenting from every word of the report of the majority, he published on October 14 a counter-scheme, in which he declared that the venality, nepotism, and dilatory incapacity of the Junta made it necessary for Spain to seek a new executive which should be wholly independent of that body. Accordingly he suggested that a Regency of five members should be constituted, as the supreme governing body of the realm. No member of the Junta was to sit therein. It was to be assisted, for consultative purposes, by a body of six persons—one of whom was to be a South American. This second committee, to be called ‘the Permanent Deputation of the Realm,’ was to be considered to represent the Cortes till that assembly should meet. It was not to meddle with executive matters, but was to devote itself to drawing up the details of the constitution of the future Cortes, and to suggesting practical reforms.
So far as the declaration in favour of a Regency went, most sensible Spaniards liked La Romana’s scheme, and it obtained Wellesley’s approval also. But the idea of the ‘Permanent Deputation’ frightened the Liberals, who feared that its existence would be made the excuse for putting off the summoning of the Cortes for an indefinite time. Moreover it was rumoured that La Romana intended to resign his seat in the Junta, and to become a candidate for the position of Senior Regent, so that his proposals must be intended to benefit himself. The suspicion that his personal ambitions inspired his patriotic denunciation of the Junta’s misdoings was made the more likely by events that occurred at the same moment in Valencia. There the leading personage of the moment was the governor, General José Caro, the younger brother of La Romana, who had complete control of the local Junta, and exercised what his enemies called a tyranny in the province. He and his following were already on the worst terms with the Seville Government, and now took the opportunity of bursting out into open rebellion. They issued a sounding manifesto against the Supreme Junta, declared their intention of refusing to obey it any longer, and republished and sent in all directions to the other local Juntas La Romana’s report in favour of a Regency, of which Caro had struck off 6,000 copies. They threatened to turn back by force General Castro whom the Supreme Junta had sent to supersede Caro, and declared their second representative in that body, the Conde de Contamina, deposed for ‘disobedience to the will of the people.’ It looked as if La Romana might be intending to overthrow the central government by means of his brother’s Valencian army. Apparently he must be acquitted of this charge, his fiery and ambitious kinsman having gone far beyond his intentions.
In the midst of all these intrigues, plots, and manifestos the Central Junta had only one hope—to rehabilitate themselves by means of a great military success. With ruinous consequences they tried to direct the course of the war with political rather than strategical ends in view. Of the unhappy autumn campaign which their rashness precipitated we shall speak in its proper place; but before narrating the disasters of Ocaña and Alba de Tormes, we must turn back for some months to consider the situation of Eastern Spain, where the continuous chronicle of events has been conducted no further than Blake’s rout at Belchite in June, and St. Cyr’s victory of Valls in February 1809. Much had happened in Catalonia and Aragon even before the day of Talavera. Much more was to take place before the ill-judged November campaign of the Junta’s armies in New Castile and Leon had begun.
N.B.—This is a military history: for the war of pamphlets and manifestos, plots and intrigues, between the Seville Government and its adversaries, the reader who is anxious to master the disheartening details may consult Toreno’s Tenth Book; Schepeler, iii. 460-86; Baumgarten, vol. i. chapter viii; Arteche, vol. vii. chapter vi, and above all the volume of the Marquis of Wellesley’s Spanish Dispatches (London, 1838). There is a good and lively description of the chief members of the Junta and the ministry, and of the intrigues against them, in William Jacob’s Travels in the South of Spain (London, 1811).
SECTION XVII: CHAPTER II
EVENTS IN EASTERN SPAIN DURING THE SUMMER AND AUTUMN OF 1809. THE SIEGE OF GERONA BEGUN
In the spring of 1809 the theatres of operations of the two French army-corps entrusted with the reduction of Aragon and of Catalonia were still divided by a broad belt of territory which was in the hands of the Spaniards, around the fortresses of Lerida, Mequinenza, and Tortosa. Only once had communication been opened between Suchet and St. Cyr, and then the force which had crossed from Aragon into Catalonia found itself unable to return. The only way of getting a dispatch from Saragossa to Barcelona was to send it by the circuitous road through France. Co-operation between the 3rd and the 7th Corps would have been difficult in any case; but since each of the two corps-commanders was interested in his own problems alone, and found them all-absorbing, the war in Catalonia and the war in Aragon went on during 1809 and the first half of 1810 as separate affairs from the French point of view. It was otherwise with the Spaniards: Blake had been placed in command of the whole of the Coronilla, the three provinces of Valencia, Aragon, and Catalonia which had formed the ancient kingdom of Aragon[12]. He had Suchet on his left and St. Cyr on his right, was equally interested in the operations of each, and might, so far as the rules of strategy go, have turned his main force against whichever of the two he might please, leaving a comparatively small force to ‘contain’ the other. Unfortunately he proved unable to make head against either of his adversaries. We have already seen how, in the early summer, he threw himself upon Suchet, and was beaten off at Maria and routed at Belchite. In the later months of the year it was mainly with St. Cyr that he had to deal, and his efforts were equally unsuccessful. It would seem that he found it very difficult to concentrate any preponderant portion of his troops for a blow to either side: very few battalions from Catalonia accompanied his Valencians and Aragonese to Maria: very few Valencians were brought up to aid the Catalans in the operations about Gerona. The problems of food and transport had something to do with this, but the main difficulty was that the armies of both provinces, more especially the Catalans, were essentially local levies, and disliked being drawn far from their homes. There was always some threatening danger in their own district which made them loath to leave it unguarded, while they were taken off on some distant expedition. The complaints and arguments of the Juntas, the manifest unwillingness of the officers and men, fettered the hands of the commander-in-chief, whenever he strove to accomplish a general concentration. Hence it came to pass that for the most part St. Cyr was opposed by Catalan troops only, Suchet by Valencians and Aragonese only, during the campaigns of 1809.
The tasks of the commander of the 3rd Corps in the months that followed his victories over Blake were both less interesting and less important than those imposed upon his colleague in Catalonia. They were however laborious enough; after having driven the Spanish regular armies out of Aragon, Suchet had now to tame the country-side. For even after Belchite he held little more than the towns of Saragossa and Jaca, and the ground on which his camps were pitched from day to day. When he had concentrated his corps to fight Blake, the rest of the province had slipped out of his hands. Its reconquest was a tedious matter, even though he had only to contend with scattered bands of peasants, stiffened by stragglers from the army that had dispersed after Belchite. The plain of the Ebro, which forms the central strip of Aragon, was easily subdued, but the mountains to the north and south were well fitted to be the refuge of insurgents. The Aragonese, along with the Galicians, were the first of the Spaniards to take to systematic guerrilla warfare. Undismayed by the fate of Blake’s army, they had resolved to defend themselves to the last. There was more than one focus of resistance: a colonel Renovales, who had been one of the defenders of Saragossa, and had escaped after the capitulation, was at the head of the bands of the north-western mountains, in the vale of Roncal and on the borders of Navarre. In the north-eastern region, about the upper waters of the Cinca and the hills beyond Jaca, two local chiefs named Perena and Sarasa kept the war on foot, getting their stores and ammunition from the Catalans on the side of Lerida. In an entirely distinct part of the province, south of the Ebro, lay Gayan and Villacampa, whose centres of activity were Daroca and Molina, mountain towns from which they were often driven up into that central ganglion of all the ranges of Spain, the Sierra de Albaracin, from which descend in diverging directions the sources of the Tagus, the Guadalaviar, and the Xucar. Both Gayan and Villacampa were officers of the regular army, holding commissions under Blake: the band of the former had as its nucleus the regiment of La Princesa, whose extraordinary escape across northern Spain after the combat of Santander has been told in another place[13].