Meanwhile Junot was leading his army corps from Bayonne towards Salamanca and Ciudad Rodrigo, to give effect to this healthful arrangement. This general, whom it was desirable to remove from Paris on account of his rather too open liaison with one of the Bonaparte princesses, was urged to the utmost speed and address by the Emperor. He must cover the whole 200 leagues in thirty-five days; lack of provisions must not hinder the march, for "20,000 men can live anywhere, even in a desert"; and, above all, as the Prince Regent had again offered to declare war on England, he (Junot) could represent that he came as an ally: "I have already informed you that my intention in authorizing you to enter that land as an ally was to enable you to seize its fleet, but that my mind was fully made up to take possession of Portugal."[[174]] Lisbon, in fact, was to be served as Venice was ten years before, the lion donning the skin of the fox so as to effect a peaceful seizure. But that ruse could hardly succeed twice. The Prince Regent had his ships ready for flight. The bluff and headstrong Junot, nicknamed "the tempest" by the army, was too artless to catch the prince by guile; but he hurried his soldiers over mountains and through flooded gorges until, on November 30th, 1,500 tattered, shoeless, famished grenadiers straggled into Lisbon—to find that the royal quarry had flown.
The Prince Regent took this momentous resolve with the utmost reluctance. For many weeks he had clung to the hope that Napoleon would spare him; and though he accepted a convention with England, whereby he gained the convoy of our men-of-war across the Atlantic and the promise of aggrandizement in South America, he still continued to temporize, and that too, when a[pg.152] British fleet was at hand in the Tagus strong enough to thwart the designs of the Russian squadron there present to prevent his departure. When the French were within two days' march of Lisbon, Lord Strangford feared that the Portuguese fleet would be delivered into their hands; and only after a trenchant declaration that further vacillation would be taken as a sign of hostility to Great Britain, did the Prince Regent resolve to seek beyond the seas the independence which was denied to him in his own realm.[[175]]
Few scenes are more pathetic than the departure of the House of Braganza from the cradle of its birth. Love for the Prince Regent as a man, mingled with pity for the demented Queen, held the populace of Lisbon in tearful silence as the royal family and courtiers filed along the quays, followed by agonized groups of those who had decided to share their trials. But silence gave way to wails of despair as the exiles embarked on the heaving estuary and severed the last links with Europe. Slowly the fleet began to beat down the river in the teeth of an Atlantic gale. Near the mouth the refugees were received with a royal salute by the British fleet, and under its convoy they breasted the waves of the ocean and the perils of the future.
The conduct of England towards Denmark and that of Napoleon towards Portugal call for a brief comparison. Those small kingdoms were the victims of two powerful States whose real or fancied interests prompted them to the domination of the land and of the sea. But when we compare the actions of the two Great Powers, important differences begin to reveal themselves. England had far more cause for complaint against Denmark than Napoleon[pg.153] had against Portugal. The hostility of the Danes to the recent coalition was notorious. To compel them to change their policy without loss of national honour, we sent the most powerful armada that had ever left our shores, with offers of alliance and a demand that their fleet, the main object of Napoleon's designs, should be delivered up to be held in deposit. The offer was refused, and we seized the fleet. The act was brutal, but it was at least open and above board, and the capitulation of September 7th was scrupulously observed, even when the Danes prepared to renew hostilities.
On the other hand, the demands of Napoleon on the Court of Lisbon were such as no honourable prince could accept; they were relentlessly pressed on in spite of the offer of the Prince Regent to meet him in every particular save one; the appeals of the victim were deliberately used by the aggressor to further his own rapacious designs; and the enterprise fell short of ending in a massacre only because the glamour of the French arms so dazzled the susceptible people of the south that, for the present, they sank helplessly away at the sight of two battalions of spectres. Finally, Portugal was partitioned—or rather it was kept entirely by Napoleon; for, after the promises of partition had done their work, the sleeping partners in the transaction were quietly shelved, and it was then seen that Portugal had finally served as the bait for ensnaring Spain. To this subject we shall return in the next chapter.
In Italy also, the Juggernaut car of the Continental System rolled over the small States. The Kingdom of Etruria, which in 1802 had served as an easy means of buying the whole of Louisiana from the Spanish Bourbons, was now wrested from that complaisant House, and in December was annexed to the French Empire.
The Pope also passed under the yoke. For a long time the relations between Pius VII. and Napoleon had been strained. Gentle as the Pontiff was by nature, he had declined to exclude all British merchandise from his States, or to accept an alliance with Eugène and Joseph.[pg.154] He also angered Napoleon by persistently refusing to dissolve the marriage of Jerome Buonaparte with Miss Paterson; and an interesting correspondence ensued, culminating in a long diatribe which Eugène was charged to forward to the Vatican as an extract from a private letter of Napoleon to himself.[[176]] Pius VII. was to be privately warned that Napoleon had done more good to religion than the Pope had done harm. Christ had said that His Kingdom was not of this world. Why then did the Pope set himself above Christ? Why did he refuse to render to Cæsar that which was Cæsar's?—A fortnight later the Emperor advised Eugène to despatch troops in the direction of Bologna—"and if the Pope commits an imprudence, it will be a fine opportunity for depriving him of the Roman States."
No imprudence was committed. Yet, in the following January, Napoleon ordered his troops to occupy Rome, alleging that the Eternal City was a hotbed of intrigues fomented by England and the ex-Queen of Naples, that Neapolitan rebels had sought an asylum in the Papal States, and that, though he had no wish to deprive the Pope of his territories, yet he must include him in his "system." When Pius VII. refused to commit himself to a policy which would involve war with England, Napoleon ordered that his lands east of the Apennines should be annexed to the Kingdom of Italy (April 2nd, 1808). Napoleon thus gained complete control over the Adriatic coasts, which, along with the island of Corfu, had long engaged his most earnest attention.[[177]]
True to his aim of forcing or enticing all maritime States into a mighty confederacy for the humiliation of England, Napoleon had given most heed to lands[pg.155] possessing extensive seaboards. Northern Italy, Holland, Naples, North Germany, Prussia, Russia, Portugal, Spain, Denmark, and Central Italy had, in turn, adopted his system. On Austria he exerted a less imperious pressure; for her coast-line of Trieste and Croatia was so easily controlled by his Italian and Dalmatian territories that English merchandise with difficulty found admittance. Yet, in order to carry out there also his policy of "Thorough," he brought the arguments of Paris and St. Petersburg to bear on the Court of Vienna; and on February 18th, 1808, Austria was enrolled in a league that might well be called continental; for in the spring of that year it embraced every land save Sweden and Turkey.
His activity at this time almost passes belief. While he fastened his grip on the Continent, gallicized the institutions of Italy and Germany, and almost daily instructed his brothers in the essentials of successful statecraft, he found time to turn his thoughts once more to the East, and to mark every device of England for lengthening her lease of life. Noticing that we had annulled our blockade of the Elbe and Weser, with the aim of getting our goods introduced there by neutral ships, Napoleon charged his Finance Minister, Gaudin, to prepare a decree for pressing hard on neutrals who had touched at any of our ports or carried wares that could be proved to be of British origin.[[178]]