Second, the annexation of the Duchy of Oldenburg to the French empire, by that edict of Napoleon which proclaimed his seizure of the whole sea-coast of Germany, between Holland and the Baltic. Oldenburg, the hereditary territory of the Emperor Alexander's brother-in-law, had been expressly guaranteed to that prince by the treaty of Tilsit. Napoleon was asked to indemnify the ejected duke by the cession of Dantzick, or some other territory in the neighbourhood of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw; but this he declined, though he professed his willingness to give some compensation elsewhere:
Thirdly, the Czar alleged, and most truly, that the state of his country made it altogether necessary that the regulations of the "continental system" should be dispensed with in his instance, and declared that he could no longer submit to see the commerce of an independent empire trammelled for the purpose of serving the policy of a foreign power. Buonaparte admitted that it might be necessary to modify the system complained of, and expressed his belief that it would be found possible to devise some middle course, by which the commercial interests of France and Russia might be reconciled. His meaning probably was, that, if their other differences could be arranged, this part of the dispute might be settled by admitting the Czar to adopt, to a certain extent, in the north of Europe, a device which he himself had already had recourse to on a large scale, for counteracting the baneful effects of his own favourite system, in his own immediate territories. Napoleon had soon discovered that, to exclude English goods and colonial produce entirely, was actually impossible; and seeing that, either with or without his assent, the decrees of Berlin and Milan would, in one way or other, continue to be violated, it occurred to him that he might at least engross the greater part of the profits of the forbidden traffic himself. This he accomplished by the establishment of a system of custom-house regulations, under which persons desirous to import English produce into France might purchase the imperial licence for so doing. A very considerable relaxation in the pernicious influence of the Berlin code was the result of this device; and a proportional increase of the Emperor's revenue attended it. In after-days, however, he always spoke of this licence-system as one of the few great mistakes of his administration. Some petty riots among the manufacturing population of the county of Derby were magnified in his eyes into symptoms of an approaching revolution in England; the consequence, as he flattered himself, of the misery inflicted on his great enemy by the "continental system"; and to the end he continued to think that, had he resisted the temptation to enrich his own exchequer by the produce of licences, such must have been the ultimate issue of his original scheme. It was, however, by admitting Alexander to a share in the pecuniary advantages of the licence-system, that he seems to have thought the commercial part of his dispute with Russia might be accommodated.
And, indeed, had there been no cause of quarrel between these powers, except what appeared on the face of their negotiations, it is hardly to be doubted that an accommodation might have been effected. The simple truth was, that the Czar, from the hour of Maria Louisa's marriage, felt a perfect conviction that the diminution of the Russian power in the north of Europe would form the next great object of Napoleon's ambition. His subsequent proceedings, in regard to Holland, Oldenburg, and other territories, and the distribution of his troops, in Pomerania and Poland, could not fail to strengthen Alexander in this view of the case; and if war must come, there could be no question as to the policy of bringing it on before Austria had entirely recovered from the effects of the campaign of Wagram, and, above all, while the Peninsula continued to occupy 200,000 of Buonaparte's troops.
Before we return to the war in Portugal (the details of which belong to the history of Wellington, rather than of Napoleon), we may here notice very briefly one or two circumstances connected with the exiled family of Spain. It affords a melancholy picture of the degradation of the old king and queen, that these personages voluntarily travelled to Paris for the purpose of mingling in the crowd of courtiers congratulating their deceiver and spoiler on the birth of the king of Rome. Their daughter, the queen of Etruria, appears to have been the least degenerate of the race; and she accordingly met with the cruellest treatment from the hand which her parents were thus mean enough to kiss. She had been deprived of her kingdom at the period of the shameful scenes of Bayonne in 1807, on pretext that that kingdom would afford the most suitable indemnification for her brother Ferdinand on his cession to Buonaparte of his rights in Spain, and with the promise of being provided for elsewhere. This promise to the sister was no more thought of afterwards than the original scheme for the indemnification of the brother. Tuscany became a French department. Ferdinand was sent a prisoner to the castle of Valençay—a seat of Talleyrand—and she, after remaining for some time with her parents, took up her residence, as a private person, under surveillance, at Nice. Alarmed by the severity with which the police watched her, the queen at length made an attempt to escape to England. Her agents were discovered, tried by a military commission, and shot; and the unfortunate lady herself confined in a Roman monastery. A plan for the liberation of Ferdinand was about the same time detected by the emissaries of the French police: the real agent being arrested, a pretender, assuming his name and credentials, made his way into Valençay, but Ferdinand was either too cunning, or too timid to incur this danger; revealing to his jailers the proposals of the stranger, he escaped the snare laid for him, and thus cheated Napoleon of a pretext for removing him also to some Italian cell.
During four months after Wellington's famous retreat terminated in his occupation of the lines of Torres Vedras, Massena lay encamped before that position, in vain practising every artifice which consummate skill could suggest for the purpose of drawing the British army back into the field. He attempted to turn first the one flank of the position and then the other; but at either point he found his antagonist's preparations perfect. Meantime his communication with Spain was becoming every day more and more difficult, and the enmity of the peasantry was so inveterate that his troops began to suffer much from the want of provisions. Massena at length found himself compelled to retreat; and, if he executed the military movement with masterly ability, he for ever disgraced his name by the horrible licence which he permitted to his soldiery. Every crime of which man is capable—every brutality which can dishonour rational beings—must be recorded in the narrative of that fearful march. Age, rank, sex, character, were alike contemned; it seemed as if, maddened with a devilish rage, these ferocious bands were resolved to ruin the country which they could not possess, and to exterminate, as far as was in their power, the population which they could neither conciliate nor subdue.
Lord Wellington followed hard on their footsteps until they were beyond the Portuguese frontier; within it they had left only one garrison—at Almeida, and of this town the siege was immediately formed; while the British general himself invested the strong Spanish city and fortress of Ciudad Rodrigo. But Massena, on regaining communication with the French armies in Castile, swelled his numbers so much, that he ventured to resume the offensive. Lord Wellington could not maintain the siege of Ciudad Rodrigo in the face of such an army as Massena had now assembled; but when the marshal indicated his wishes to bring on battle, he disdained to decline the invitation. The armies met at Fuentes d'Onor, on the 5th May 1811, and the French were once more defeated. The garrison of Almeida contrived to escape across the frontier, before the siege, which had been interrupted, could be renewed. Portugal remained in a miserable state of exhaustion indeed, but altogether delivered of her invaders; and Napoleon, as if resolved that each of his marshals in succession should have the opportunity of measuring himself against Wellington, now sent Marmont to displace Massena.
Soult meanwhile had advanced on the southern frontier of Portugal from Estremadura, and obtained possession of Badajos, under circumstances which Lord Wellington considered as highly disgraceful to the Spanish garrison of that important place, and the armies which ought to have been ready to cover it. On the other hand, an English corps, under General Graham, sallied out of Cadiz, and were victorious in a brilliant affair on the heights of Barossa, in front of that besieged city.
As concerned the Spanish armies, the superiority of the French had been abundantly maintained during this campaign; and it might still be said that King Joseph was in military possession of all but some fragments of his kingdom. But the influence of the English victories was by no means limited to the Portuguese, whose territory they had delivered. They breathed new ardour into the Spanish people: the Guerilla warfare, trampled down in one spot only to start up in fifty others, raged more and more widely, as well as fiercely, over the surface of the country: the French troops lost more lives in this incessant struggle, wherein no glory could be achieved, than in any similar period spent in a regular campaign; and Joseph Buonaparte, while the question of peace or war with Russia was yet undecided, became so weary of his situation, that he earnestly entreated Napoleon to place the crown of Spain on some other head.
Such were the circumstances under which the eventful year 1812 began.