But the worst of Wellington’s troubles were yet some months ahead. The Regency with which he had made his bargain[283] was displaced in March 1813, and succeeded by another. The Cortes was jealous of the Executive, and had determined to make for itself a supreme authority which should have neither brains nor energy. The subject of quarrel chosen was the old Regency’s alleged slackness in carrying out a recent Act which had abolished that moribund abuse the Inquisition[284]. After an all-night sitting and a vote of censure, the Regents were dismissed, and replaced by a group appointed under an absurd principle borrowed from the old régime, which was applied because it suited the desires of the assembly for the moment. It was composed of the three senior members of the Council of State—senility and weakness being desired. These were the Cardinal Bourbon—Archbishop of Toledo—an aged scion of the royal house, and the Councillors Pedro Agar and Gabriel Cisgar, who had been Regents before, but had been got rid of for incompetence. Thus all real power went to the Chamber itself—the Regency having become a negligible quantity. Wellington’s position was decidedly impaired by the change—largely because a new minister-of-war had come into office, General Juan O’Donoju, of whom he had an evil memory as Cuesta’s chief-of-the-staff during the Talavera campaign. This clever, shifty, and contentious Irish-Spanish officer broached the theory that the agreement of December 1812 did not bind the new Regents, because they had never assented to it, and because it was contrary to the spirit of the Constitution that a foreigner should have the power to appoint or dismiss Spanish generals.
When Henry Wellesley at Cadiz, instructed by his brother, turned his heaviest diplomatic batteries[285] upon the Regents, and privately warned the leading members of the Cortes of the awkward results that would follow the repudiation of the agreement, O’Donoju was disavowed but not displaced. He continued to give perpetual trouble through the following summer by his persistent intrigues. Wellington was by no means satisfied with the attempts that were made to propitiate him, by the formal recognition of his status as generalissimo by the new Regents, and the gift of a great estate in Granada, the royal domain of Soto de Roma, which had been usurped by Godoy. He did not want grants but real authority. Of his future troubles we shall have to speak in their proper place.
The most enduring of them was provincial maladministration, which rendered so many of his orders futile. For usually when he directed a division to move, he was informed that it was destitute of both munitions and transport[286]. And changes of organization were often made against his protests—e. g. a new army regulation cut down all regimental formations to a single battalion of very heavy strength (1,200 bayonets). Wellington would have preferred a two-battalion formation, in which the second unit should act as a dépôt and feeder to the first[287]. He complained that if a regiment was badly cut up in action, there would be no machinery for keeping it up to a decent average. The experience of the British army with regard to single-battalion corps had been conclusive against the system for the last five years of Peninsular service. But his protests were vain—internal organization of units did not come within the wording of his powers as generalissimo, and the new organization continued, dozens of second battalions being scrapped.
The net result was that, when Wellington took the field in May 1813, he only had with him two of Castaños’s divisions and three of those of the Army of Galicia—less than 25,000 men. The Andalusian ‘Army of Reserve,’ which had been promised to him, started late for want of organization, moved slowly for want of magazines, and only reached the front when the battle of Vittoria had been won and the French had been expelled from Spain[288]. The Cortes had at least 160,000 men under arms; not a sixth part of them were available during the decisive operations. But of this more in its proper place.
Portugal, as usual, contributed its share to the troubles of the Commander-in-Chief, though they were but trifling compared to the Spanish problems. The Prince Regent at Rio de Janeiro was an expensive person, who actually at the worst of the war drew money out of Portugal from the Braganza private domains, though he had all the revenues of Brazil to play with[289]. Moreover, he had a tiresome habit of sending incompetent hangers-on to Europe, with a request that berths might be found for them. But he was not actively noxious—the same could not be said of his wife, the Spanish princess Carlotta, who was still harping on her natural claim to be Regent of Spain on behalf of her imprisoned brother Ferdinand, and still interfered from time to time at Cadiz, by ordering the small knot of deputies who depended on her to attack the existing regency, or to vote in incalculable ways on questions of domestic politics. Fortunately she was so great a clerical and reactionary that the ‘Liberal’ majority in the Cortes had secretly resolved that she should never get into power. When the old regency was evicted in March 1813, it was suspected that the Cardinal Bourbon was put at the head of the succeeding body mainly because the presence of a prince of the blood in the Executive seemed to make it unnecessary to import another member of the royal house. For this small mercy Henry Wellesley wrote a letter of thanksgiving to his brother at the front. It was fortunate that the Prince Regent himself gave no encouragement to his wife’s ambitions, being as indolent as she was active, and very jealous of her secret intrigues with foreigners. At one time during the winter of 1812-13 she showed an intention of departing for Europe, but with the assistance of the British ambassador João succeeded in frustrating her scheme for appearing at Cadiz in person to claim her supposed rights.
Meanwhile the civil government of Portugal continued to be directed by the existing Council of Regency, of whom the majority were honest if not always well-advised. It is true that Wellington’s old enemies[290] the Patriarch of Lisbon and the Principal Sousa still remained members of it: the determination to evict them which he had declared in 1810 was never carried out—the one was so powerful from his position in the Church, the other from the influence of the widespread Sousa family, that in the end he left them undisturbed. They were perhaps less dangerous in the Regency than out of it, with their hysterical appeals to narrow national sentiment, protests against the doings of their colleagues, and perpetual intrigues. A frondeur is partly muzzled when he holds office. And in practical administration they were steadily voted down by the majority of the Regency, consisting of the Marquis of Olhão, the Conde de Redondo[291], Dr. Nogueira, and last but not least the British Minister Sir Charles Stuart, whose presence on the board was perhaps necessary, but certainly very trying to Portuguese amour-propre. The three native regents were genuine patriots, and good friends of the alliance, but a little antiquated in their views as to administration and finance. The Secretary of State, Miguel Forjaz, to whom so many of Wellington’s letters are addressed, was a much more modern personage with a broader intelligence: indeed, Wellington considered him on the whole the most capable statesman in the Peninsula.
There were two standing sources of friction between the British army and the Portuguese Regency—both inevitable, and both tiresome from the point of view of the necessary entente between two allied nations. The more irritating but less important was trouble caused by the daily movement of troops, especially troops in small bodies, or individual officers. A perusal of the records of many scores of courts martial, as well as of the correspondence of Wellington and Beresford, leads to the conclusion that there were grave faults on both sides. Parties of British soldiers on the march, when unaccompanied by an officer, were given to the illegal ‘embargoing’ of carts or mules, to the extortion of food by force or threats, to mishandling of the peasantry when denied what they asked: occasionally they went so far as acts of murder or arson[292]. And it cannot be denied that individual officers of unsatisfactory type were occasionally guilty of gross misconduct—drunken orgies, wanton disregard of legal authority in requisitions, even acts of insult or assault on local magistrates[293]. On the other hand, the provocation was often considerable—there were plenty of cases established of the denial of legal billets, which kept parties waiting in the rain for hours, of wanton incivility, of attempts at extortion in prices, of actual highway robbery[294], and false accusations brought up to cover neglect of duty. One of Wellington’s main complaints was that he had to waste time in investigating imaginary outrages, which, on inquiry, turned out to have been invented to serve as countercharges against accusations of slackness or misfeasance. He was determined that outrages by the army should cease—indeed, he hanged, first and last, some fifty soldiers for plunder accompanied with violence, an offence which he would never pardon. But the Portuguese magistrates were prone to make accusations, and then to protest against having to support them by evidence. By a curious turn of official pride many of them refused to testify before courts martial, or even to send witnesses to appear before such bodies, standing to the theory that it was beneath the dignity of a magistrate to come with evidence before a foreign military tribunal[295]. The result of this was that offenders brought up for trial, and often probably guilty, had to be acquitted for lack of proof. On the other hand, accusations, made and supported, were sometimes found to be entirely groundless—in one supposed murder case, the alleged corpse was discovered in perfect health; in another, a magistrate who accused a British officer of assault was found to have been dining with him and frequenting his quarters, long after the supposed offence[296].
The Portuguese Regency was bound to stand up in defence of its magistrates—Wellington, though always ready to punish proved crimes, was determined not to take accusation as equivalent to conviction, merely because it was preferred by a constituted authority. Hence came perpetual friction and recrimination; that things were no worse was certainly due to the fact that the commander-in-chief’s iron discipline, and rigorous dealing with his own people, could not fail to impress the Portuguese with the fact that he was always trying to be just.
The other and more fundamentally dangerous source of wrangling in Portugal was finance. There could be no disputing the fact that the part of the army which was not directly maintained from the British subsidy was often six months in arrears of pay, and still more often on the edge of starvation. Portuguese paper money, in which many transactions had to take place, and which could be legally used for a certain percentage of all army payments, was not only at a habitual discount of at least 25 percent., but also fluctuating in exchange-value from day to day. Hence came all manner of illicit speculations by merchants, both British and Portuguese, who were always trying to buy Government paper at under its quotation for the day, and to put it off on others at an exaggerated estimate. The same took place with Commissariat Warrants, which unscrupulous brokers bought from the ignorant peasantry for a mere song, after setting rumours about concerning impending bankruptcy of the state, and then cashed at full face-value in Lisbon or London.
The Regency maintained that all the trouble came from the simple fact that the war had placed upon the back of Portugal, a small country, half of whose territory had been wasted by Soult and Masséna in 1809 and 1810, a much greater burden than could be borne. The armed forces alone—some 50,000 regular troops, and often as many militia in the garrisons—were so many hands taken away from agriculture, the only staple industry of the land. Money was going out of the realm year by year to purchase wheat, because the people could not produce enough to maintain their existence. Prices had risen to heights that terrified those who remembered pre-war days: the pay of the army was enormous compared to the rates before 1808, and much of it was going, under Marshal Beresford’s system, to the British officers who were now holding a clear majority of all the senior ranks and commands. All available money went to the army, and the civil administration was starved. The Regency acknowledged the deplorable state of its finances, but could only suggest remedies which had grave inconveniences. Another British loan was asked for; but considering the heavy subsidy that Portugal was receiving already, the British Government gave little encouragement to such an idea[297]. The Portuguese minister in London (the Conde de Funchal, one of the Sousas) suggested a large measure of confiscation of Church and Crown lands—which could then be sold. But this would involve a quarrel with the Church party in Portugal, who had been loyal supporters of the British alliance, and probably with the Prince Regent also, since he was drawing a private income from the Braganza estates. It might also produce a general shock to national credit, for it would deal a blow to the general stability of society, and terrify all landholders. Moreover, it appeared doubtful if purchasers of Church lands would present themselves: and Crown lands were largely uncultivated and worthless tracts in the Alemtejo[298]. The measure was carried out, indeed, many years later, during the civil wars of Miguel and Maria; but then it came as a consequence of a purely domestic struggle, in which the Church party had taken the beaten side. The circumstances of 1813 were entirely different. A third expedient suggested was the establishment of a National Bank, after the model of the Bank of England, which should take over the management of the public debt and currency. But credit and guarantees must be at the back of any such association, and unless the British Government were ready to become the guarantor (which was impossible) it was hard to see what new securities could be found.