The few persons who had thus long obstinately persisted in believing or pretending to believe that France wished and intended to improve the state of Portugal could no longer deceive themselves, and dared not attempt to deceive others. The contribution thus imposed amounted to four millions and a half sterling; the population of Portugal was less than three millions: the sum demanded, therefore, was equivalent to a poll-tax at a guinea and half per head. Yet even this statement inadequately represents its enormity: from at least three-fourths of the people nothing could be collected; and the mercantile part of the community, who had been the most opulent, were already reduced to ruin. The sum required exceeded the whole circulating medium of the country; and the reason why it was permitted to be paid by instalments, and not insisted upon at once, was, that the money received at the first instalment might in the course of circulation find its way to serve for the second! It was levied with the utmost rigour. ♦Observador Portuguez, 203.♦ The lowest hucksters, stall-keepers, and labourers, were summoned before the Juiz do Povo, to be assessed in their portion; and the merchants were ordered to appear in tallies before the Junta of Commerce, and there reciprocally discuss their affairs, and tax each other! The expulsion of the English, the emigration, and the general distress, had left a very large proportion of the best houses vacant, and rents in consequence had fallen nearly to half their former value; but every house was rated at what it had brought in before these events, and the owners of those which were untenanted were compelled to pay three-tenths of what they would have received upon that valuation; and the property of those who had neither money nor commodities to satisfy the demand was seized without mercy. Articles which were needful for the army were received in part of payment in kind. The French officers turned speculators: they purchased colonial goods, which they sent to France by land; and thus the money which they had extorted was re-issued, to answer fresh exactions, or serve as booty again. They carried on also a gainful trade in money; importing French coin, which they forced into circulation, and exchanged for Spanish dollars, or for the fine gold of Portugal, at an enormous profit; or they purchased with it paper-money, which usually fluctuated between 28 and 30 per cent. discount, ... sometimes was as low as 35, and sometimes could find no purchasers. With this paper, according to law, they made half their payments at par: and when all their French money was expended in this manner, Junot issued an edict, by which he fixed a price at which it was to be received for the contribution, lower than that at which he had suffered it to be introduced.
♦Godoy recals the Spanish troops from Portugal.♦
The decree which appointed Junot governor of Portugal, and extended his authority over the whole kingdom, at once abrogated the secret treaty of Fontainebleau. That treaty had served Buonaparte’s purpose, and the Spanish cabinet was at this time too much agitated by home disquietudes to resent this breach of faith, or take warning by it. Godoy, fallen from his dreams of royalty, and trembling for his life, was ready to make any sacrifice which might procure him the protection of France. ♦Neves, i. 313.♦ ♦Part only obey his orders.♦ He had written to Junot, requesting that Carraffa’s division might return to Spain; alleging, that the English threatened a descent upon the coasts of Andalusia: ... but the French were not duped by a pretext which they themselves had invented for a different purpose; and Junot, in conformity to his master’s projects, detained the troops. Godoy probably wanted them to protect the removal of the King and Queen to the coast, but he was in no condition to insist upon any thing; and the abortive principality of the Algarves, and the kingdom of Septentrional Lusitania, came to an end before their intended lords had taken possession, and before their denominations had been made public. The Spanish troops from Algarve and Alentejo were recalled, and obeyed the order; those at Porto, and Carraffa’s division, were more under Junot’s power; they were detained, and Carraffa, upon the death of Taranco, by the French general’s order took command of both.
♦The whole of Portugal under command of the French.♦
Thus had Junot, in pursuance of his instructions, extended his authority over the whole of Portugal. He was, however, far from feeling secure in his usurpation. The temper of the people had shown itself; and if the English had landed a force to attack him, his men were but in ill condition to take the field; for they were sickly during the whole of the winter months. ♦Journal de Coimbra, 2. 74.♦ ♦The flower of the Portugueze army marched into France.♦ For this reason he had disbanded the militia, and broken up so large a part of the native army; ... but the flower of that army was to be selected and sent into France, that they might be made agents in inflicting the same miseries upon other countries which their own endured. A great number of the soldiers who had been picked for this service deserted; and in consequence, the French code of martial law was declared to be applicable to the Portugueze army, and death became thereby the punishment for desertion. Six thousand infantry, and four regiments of cavalry, were marched off, under the Marquez d’Alorna. Gomes Freire d’Andrada, who had the highest military reputation of any officer in the army, was second in command. The Marquez de Valença, the Marquez de Ponte de Lima, the Counts Ega and Sabugal, and many other officers of rank and family, went in this ill-fated army; some by compulsion, others by choice, the leaders being devoted to Buonaparte.
♦Discontent of the people.♦
Though the French despised the Portugueze troops as heartily as they did the people, it was observed that they became more insufferable in their personal conduct after the army was disbanded. As a body they might safely despise them; but every individual was in some measure restrained by the apprehension of individual vengeance, and the certainty that if in any tumult the military, as was natural, should take part with the people, the contest, though the event was not doubtful, must be far more severe. When this restraint was removed, they gave way to that insolence which adds a sting to oppression, and rouses even those who have submitted to heavier wrongs. A peasant at Mafra, Jacinto Correia was his name, killed two of these robbers with a reaping-hook; and when he was put to death for it by military process, he gloried to his last breath in what he had done, and repeated that if all his countrymen were like him, there should not a single Frenchman remain alive among them. ♦Observador Portuguez, 156.♦ The punishment was carefully made known in a proclamation, but the nature of the crime was as carefully suppressed, lest it should find imitation. It had, however, been determined to strike terror into the people by an execution, which should furnish in its example nothing but what was intimidating. ♦Executions at Caldas.♦ Insignificant as the cause was, the circumstances of this insulated tragedy deserve to be stated, as a specimen of the spirit in which the military government of Portugal was conducted. A number of French soldiers had been sent to the hospital at the Caldas, a munificent establishment of royal charity, to be cured of the itch by the baths at that place. They complained to General Thomiers, who commanded at Peniche, that the peasantry insulted them; and Thomiers sent a few stout grenadiers to take the first opportunity of resenting any mockery which might be offered to their comrades. These men paraded the streets, and drank at the wine-houses till they began to invite a quarrel. A countryman, heated like them with liquor, said to his companion as they were passing, I have killed seven of these fellows myself. The vaunt, which was probably as false as it was foolish, might have cost him his life in a regular way; but one of the French, who heard him, immediately attempted to cut him down; ... he ran to his mother’s house, which was close at hand, and calling out to his sister to help him, she stood in the door-way, let him enter, and instantly locking the door on the outside, put the key in her bosom. The French endeavoured to force the key from her; the woman was strong and determined: her cries were heard at a billiard table near, where a cadet of the regiment of Pato, which was quartered in the town, seeing a woman struggling upon the dunghill with three or four French soldiers, jumped out of the window, and ran to her assistance; the surgeon and a few others of the same regiment followed. A French captain also came up: by this time a considerable crowd had collected; the sword was knocked out of his hand by a stone, and he would have been in some danger, if a Portugueze sergeant had not called out to the mob to forbear, for he was a French officer. The soldiers now came up, and the tumult ended with no other immediate evil than that one or two of the first aggressors were slightly wounded: ... the woman was the greatest sufferer; for one of them, with the pummel of his sword, had beaten her cruelly upon the bosom. When the circumstances were made known to Thomiers, his first intention was to pass it over lightly: as the Juiz de Fora of the town happened to be with him at the time, he desired him immediately to send him any four fellows of bad character, to whom a little punishment would do no harm, and who might represent the town on this occasion. Such an arrangement, curious as it is, would have been an improvement upon the ordinary course of Portugueze justice. Four men, accordingly, against whom complaints had been recently preferred by their wives, but who were entirely innocent of the matter in question, were arrested, and put in confinement. Nine days afterward, Loison, who commanded in the district, appeared at the head of three or four thousand men, bringing Thomiers with him. The woman was called upon to declare which of the soldiers had beaten her: she pointed out the man, and there ended this part of the inquiry: but on the other part, fifteen Portugueze were condemned to death; among them the Escrivam da Camara, and one of the most respectable inhabitants of the place, who happened to be in the room with her when the tumult took place. They had been seen from an opposite house each to take a musket and load it: ... this they acknowledged that they had done; but they had taken no part in the disturbance, nor even gone into the street. It was argued that they could not have loaded those guns with any other intention than that of discharging them against the French troops, and therefore they had incurred the penalty of death. That sentence was passed against them; and the uncle of the Escrivam, being one of the magistrates of the town, was ordered and compelled by Loison to be present at the execution! Five of the condemned persons took the alarm in time, and escaped. The surgeon leaped from a window, and broke his leg: he was carried to the place of butchery upon a hand-barrow, covered with a piece of sacking. While the execution was going on, the Prince of Salm Kirburg, a young officer in the French service, lifted up the cloth to see what was under it: the sight shocked him, and he said to the French general it was monstrous to bring a man in such a condition to suffer death, ... let them heal him first, and then do with him what they would. ♦Neves, Ch. 30.♦ This intercession availed: the surgeon was remanded to the hospital, and Loison was content with having seen nine men put to death for an affray in which not a single life had been lost.
The place where this tragedy was perpetrated is a little town, containing not more than three hundred inhabitants; for its baths and for the beauty of the surrounding country it was frequented by strangers and invalids, and more wealth and more comforts were to be found there than in any other of the provincial towns. In such a place, where every one of the victims was known to the whole neighbourhood, and all had their nearest relations and connexions upon the spot, it may well be conceived what horror and what deep and inextinguishable hatred this bloody execution would excite. The hatred Junot despised; ... Buonaparte prided himself upon setting the feelings of mankind at defiance, and systematically outraging them for the purpose of displaying his power; and in this, as in every thing else, his generals were his faithful agents. The murders at Caldas were committed upon this system, merely to strike terror through the country.... Junot had refrained from making such an exhibition at Lisbon after the riot which the first act of open usurpation provoked, because there were native troops in the city; the population of a great capital would become formidable if it were made desperate; and, moreover, there was the English squadron in sight. But an opportunity had been watched for when it might be done safely and with more effect; and an affair which the nearest general passed over at the time as unworthy of serious notice was made the pretext.
♦Conduct of the French Generals.♦
The immediate superintendence of these murders had been intrusted to Loison. This general, whose military talents were considerable, had lost an arm in action with the Portugueze in Rousillon; for which reason the people now called him the Maneta, a name which will long be held in abhorrence: not that he was more rapacious, or more merciless, than his comrades; but, from the rank he held, he had better opportunities for pillage; and it was his fortune to preside at almost all the butcheries which were committed during the first invasion. Of all the French generals in this army, it is said that there were only two who preserved a fair character. These were, Travot, who commanded at Cascaes, and Charlot at Torres Vedras. They mitigated, as far as in them lay, the evils of which they were the instruments; but they could do little toward repressing the cruelty, the excesses, and the abandoned licentiousness of their officers and men. The language which the French openly held was, that Portugal was a conquered country, and therefore they, as conquerors, had a right to take what they chose and do what they pleased there; ♦Neves, ii. 132.♦ and they acted in full conformity to this principle[21].