Wilson and Miller came up next day, and sweeping the roads towards Condeixa and Pombal, picked up 300 more stragglers and marauders from the tail of Masséna’s marching column. Trant handed over Coimbra to them, and escorted his prisoners to Oporto with his own division: there were 3,507 sick and wounded, of whom half could march, while the rest were taken off in carts. Of able-bodied men not more than 400 soldiers were taken: but some hundreds of commissariat and hospital employés and men of the train brought up the total figures of the prisoners to 4,500 men. Trant has been accused by some French writers[465] of deliberately exposing his captives to the fury of the peasantry, and parading the wounded in an indecent fashion through the streets of Oporto. But the handsome testimonial to his humanity signed by a committee of French officers, which Napier prints in the Appendix no. 5 to his third volume, is enough to prove that Trant did his best for his prisoners, and that the unfortunate incident which occurred just after the surrender must not be laid to his account[466].
Masséna’s army received the news of the fall of Coimbra with indignation. It produced a painful impression on every mind; and while the rank and file murmured at the Marshal’s cruelty in abandoning their comrades to death—for it was falsely reported that the Portuguese had massacred them all—the officers blamed his blind improvidence, and observed that a brigade might well have been spared to protect not only the hospitals but the invaluable base-dépôt behind them[467].
There was heavy skirmishing between the British rearguard cavalry and Montbrun’s advance, both on the 8th and 9th of October. On the first of these days the horse-artillery troop attached to Anson’s brigade was, by some extraordinary mistake, left encamped out in front of the squadrons which were told off as its escort, and was nearly surprised in Alcoentre by an irruption of Sainte-Croix’s dragoons in a storm of rain[468]. Somers Cocks’s squadron of the 16th Light Dragoons charged just in time to save the guns, and to jam the head of the enemy’s column, as it was crossing the bridge which leads into the village. Alcoentre was held till dusk, when Taupin’s infantry came up, and Anson’s brigade retired, having lost only one trooper wounded, while the French had sixteen disabled or taken.
From this day onward, the weather, which had been fine and dry since the army left Coimbra, broke up for the autumn rains, and the last three days of the retreat to the Lines were spent in torrential downpour. This had the advantage of delaying the French; for while the British infantry, who were two days ahead of them, reached their destined position on the 9th (with the exception of the Light Division and Pack’s Portuguese), the enemy was marching on flooded roads from the 8th to the 11th.
On the 9th there was continual bickering in the rain, from Quinta da Torre as far as Alemquer, between Lamotte’s light cavalry brigade, which had again replaced Sainte-Croix’s dragoons at the head of the pursuing column, and Anson’s two much-enduring regiments. On this day the 1st Hussars of the King’s German Legion had the thick of the work: Linsingen’s squadron of that admirable regiment, which formed the rear detachment of the whole army, turned back to charge no less than four times in five miles, and always with success. At dusk the French infantry got up, and the allied cavalry retired on to Alemquer after a fatiguing day of fighting, in which the hussars had lost two killed, two officers and nine men wounded, and seventeen missing; the supporting regiment, the 16th Light Dragoons, had one killed, three wounded, and four missing, and the Royals of Slade’s brigade, who only got engaged in the late evening, one wounded and four missing. Lamotte’s loss was a little more—six killed, twenty-two wounded, and twenty-one prisoners[469]. Three of his officers were hurt, one taken.
On the next day (Oct. 10) the whole of the British cavalry marched from Alemquer to within the Lines, distributing themselves to the cantonments which had been arranged for them. But Craufurd’s and Pack’s infantry, which had hitherto been completely covered by the horsemen, did not follow their example with quite sufficient promptitude, and got engaged in an unnecessary skirmish. The Light Division should have withdrawn at noon, but Craufurd, believing the French infantry to be still far away, and despising the cavalry which hovered around him, remained in Alemquer, intending to spend another night in a dry cantonment, for the torrential rain which was falling promised a fatiguing march to his men. At four o’clock Taupin’s infantry came up, and engaged the pickets of the Light Division in a skirmish. Having been strictly forbidden by Wellington to get entangled in a rearguard action, and remembering perhaps his experience at the Coa, Craufurd tardily and unwillingly moved off. But dusk coming on, his column missed its road, and instead of retiring into the section of the Lines which it was destined to occupy, between the Monte Agraça and the valley of Calandriz, went too far to the west, and came in upon the position of the 1st Division in front of Sobral. This would have been dangerous if the French had had any infantry to the front, to take advantage of the unoccupied gap in the lines. But Montbrun’s advanced guard had pressed more than thirty miles in front of the main body of Masséna’s army, and this force contained nothing but cavalry, save the single brigade of Taupin—less than 3,000 men[470]. This force, such as it was, did not pass Alemquer that night—Craufurd, in his retreat on Sobral, was followed by cavalry alone. It was not till next morning, when Montbrun sent out reconnaissances in all directions, that he found himself in front of fortifications drawn across every road, and gradually realized that he was in front of the famous ‘Lines of Torres Vedras.’
It must not be supposed that Wellington’s final arrangements for the reception of the army of Masséna in front of Lisbon were made at leisure, or at a moment when he had nothing to distract him. Though the actual retreat of his army from the position of Bussaco to the position of Torres Vedras was conducted at an easy pace, and practically unmolested by the enemy, yet the days during which it was being carried out were a time of political, though not of military, storm and stress. Ever since the French had started from Almeida, and made their first advance into the mountains of Beira, Wellington had been engaged in an endless and tiresome controversy with the Portuguese Regency. Though they had assented, long before, to the scheme for devastating the country-side and bringing Masséna to a check only in front of Lisbon, yet when the actual invasion began, and the first hordes of fugitives were reported to be leaving their homes, and burning their crops, and taking to the mountains, several of the members of the Regency became appalled at the awful sacrifices which they were calling upon the nation to endure. The Principal Sousa put himself at the head of the movement, and was supported by the Patriarch, the Bishop of Oporto, so famous in 1808. Sousa brought before the Regency proposals that Wellington should be formally requested to try the chances of a pitched battle on the frontier, before retiring on Coimbra or Lisbon. In addition, he was always maintaining in private company that the people should not be required to take in hand the scheme of devastation and wholesale emigration, till it was certain the allied army was unable to stop Masséna somewhere east of the Serra da Estrella. He also laid before the Regency documents intended to prove that the system of devastation was physically impossible, and that it would prove incapable of stopping the advance of the French, owing to the difficulty that would be found in persuading the peasantry to destroy instead of hiding their stores of food[471]. There was a certain modicum of truth in this last argument, and the French did succeed in living for a longer time in the evacuated districts than Wellington had considered possible. On the other hand, the Principal was hopelessly wrong in his contention that the French would suffer little inconvenience. They were starved out of Portugal by Wellington’s device, even though it took longer to work out its results than he had calculated. There is no reason to suppose that Sousa was in any way treacherously inclined: he and his whole family stood or fell with the English alliance, and the victory of the French would mean ruin to them. But his private and public utterances and those of his satellites had a deplorable effect. In the mouth of the common people it took the form of a widely-spread rumour that Wellington had refused to fight at all, and intended to re-embark the British army. This did not lead to any wish to submit to Napoleon, but to a desperate determination to resist even if deserted. Wellington’s dispatches are full of a riot which took place in Lisbon on September 7th, when the militia proposed to seize on St. Julian’s, the Citadel, and the Bugio fort because they were informed that the English garrisons were about to evacuate them and put to sea[472]. When Masséna had already passed Coimbra, Sousa was mad enough to propose, at the Regency board, that the Portuguese troops should not retire within the Lines, but remain outside and offer battle in the open, even if the British refused to stand by them. The nervous activity of the government had been shown some three weeks before by the sudden arrest and deportation of some fifty persons in Lisbon, who were suspected, rightly or wrongly, of ‘Jacobinism,’ and had been accused of having secret communication with d’Alorna and the other renegades in Masséna’s army. They included a few officers, and a good many lawyers, doctors, merchants, and minor officials, as well as some dependants and relatives of the exiles. The case against most of them was so weak that Wellington protested against their banishment, holding that the alarm caused by the arrests would make the people of Lisbon unreasonably suspicious, and give rise to a belief in wide-spread plots. But despite his letter to the Regency all were shipped off to the Azores[473]. Some were ultimately allowed to go to England, others to Brazil, but the majority were not allowed to return to Portugal till 1816.
‘All I ask from the Government,’ wrote Wellington, on October 6th, in the midst of the retreat, ‘is tranquillity in the town of Lisbon, and provisions for their own troops[474].’ These two simple requirements were precisely those which he did not obtain. The capital of Portugal was kept disturbed by arbitrary arrests, by proclamations which often contained false news, and sometimes pledged the Regency to measures which the Commander-in-Chief disapproved, and by senseless embargoes laid on vehicles and commodities, which were never turned to use[475]. At the same time the Portuguese troops were not fed, and the tents which had been ordered forward to the positions behind the lines never started from the magazines of Lisbon[476].
Wellington’s temper, tried to the uttermost by these distractions, when his mind was entirely engrossed by military problems, grew sharp and irritable at this time. He went so far as to write to the Prince Regent at Rio de Janeiro, to declare that either he or Principal Sousa must leave the country. He suggested that some post as ambassador or special envoy should be found for the man who troubled him so. The Patriarch, as ‘a necessary evil,’ he did not wish to displace, but only to scare. Unfortunately, an appeal to Brazil was hopeless, since the Regent was entirely in the hands of the Principal’s brother, the Conde de Linhares. Much acrimonious correspondence, delayed by the vast time which was consumed in getting letters to and from Rio, only led in the end to a proposal from Linhares that his brother should leave the Regency, if Charles Stuart, the British Ambassador, was also withdrawn from it, and if the War-Minister, General Miguel Forjaz, whom Wellington considered a necessary person and the ablest man in Portugal, should also be removed from his post[477]. To this proposal neither Wellington nor the British government would consent, and as it only came in when Masséna’s invasion had already been foiled, and the French had retired into Spain, the crisis was over. The Principal remained at the Council Board, to talk much impracticable and mischievous stuff, but to do little positive harm. When the invasion was past Wellington could afford to disregard him.