History of the Peninsular War, Volume 1 (of 6)

by Robert Southey

♦Condition of the army.♦

The armies partook of the general degradation. The forms of military power existed like the forms of justice: but they resembled the trunk of a tree, of which the termites have eaten out the timber, and only the bark remains. There appeared in the yearly almanacks a respectable list of regiments, and a redundant establishment of officers: but, brave and capable of endurance as the Portugueze and Spaniards are, never were there such officers or such armies in any country which has ranked among civilized nations. Subalterns might be seen waiting behind a chair in their uniforms, or asking alms in the streets; and the men were what soldiers necessarily become, when, without acquiring any one virtue of their profession, its sense of character and of honour, its regularity, or its habits of restraint, they possess all its license, and have free scope for the vices which spring up in idleness. Drawn by lot into a compulsory service, ill-disciplined, and ill-paid, they were burthensome to the people, without affording any security to the nation.

♦State of religion.♦

The state of religion was something more hopeful, though it is scarcely possible to imagine any thing more gross than the idolatry, more impudent than the fables, more monstrous than the mythology of the Romish church, as it flourished in Spain and Portugal. Wherever this corrupt church is dominant, there is no medium between blind credulity and blank, hopeless, utter unbelief: and this miserable effect tends to the stability of the system which has produced it, because men who have no religion accommodate themselves to whatever it may be their interest to profess. The peasantry and the great mass of the people believed with implicit and intense faith whatever they were taught. The parochial clergy, differing little from the people in their manner of life, and having received an education so nearly worthless that it can scarcely be said to have raised them above the common level, were for the most part as superstitious and as ill-informed as their flock. ♦Improvement of the higher clergy.♦ The higher clergy, however, had undergone a gradual and important change, which had not been brought about by laws or literature, but by the silent and unperceived influence of the spirit of the times. While their principle of intolerance remained the same (being inherent in popery, and inseparable from it), the practice had been greatly abated; and the autos-da-fe, the high festival days of this merciless idolatry, were at an end: for it was felt and secretly acknowledged, that these inhuman exhibitions were disgraceful in the eyes of Europe, and had brought a stain upon the character of the peninsular nations in other catholic countries, and even in Rome itself. The persecution of the Jews therefore (which the founder of the Braganzan line would never have permitted if he had been able to prevent it) ceased; and the distinction between Old and New Christians had nearly disappeared. At the same time, an increased intercourse with heretical states, the power and prosperity of Great Britain, and the estimation in which the British character is held wherever it is known, had insensibly diminished, if not the abhorrence in which heresy was held, certainly the hatred against heretics. Thus the habitual feelings of the clergy had been modified, and they were no longer made cruel by scenes of execrable barbarity, which in former times compelled them to harden their hearts. They became also ashamed of those impostures upon which so large a portion of their influence had been founded: though they did not purge their kalendar, they made no additions to it; miraculous images were no longer discovered: when a grave-digger, in the exercise of his office, happened to find a corpse in a state of preservation, no attempt was made to profit by the popular opinion of its sanctity: miracles became less frequent as they were more scrupulously examined; and impostures[2], which, half a century ago, would have been encouraged and adopted, were detected, exposed, and punished. The higher clergy in both countries were decorous in their lives, and in some instances exemplary in the highest degree.

♦State of the religious orders.♦

To the monastic orders the influence of the times had been less beneficial. There were ages during which those institutions produced the greatest blessings in Europe; when they kept alive the lamp of knowledge, mitigated barbarian manners, and carried the light of Christianity among a race of ferocious conquerors. These uses had long since gone by; and the dissolution of the Jesuits had extinguished the missionary spirit which that extraordinary society had provoked in its rivals, and by which it had itself almost atoned to humanity and to religion for its own manifold misdeeds. The wealthy orders still afforded a respectable provision for the younger sons of old or opulent families; the far more numerous establishments of the mendicants were more injuriously filled from the lower classes. The peasant who was ambitious of seeing a son elevated above the rank in which he was born, destined him for a friar; and he who was too idle to work, or who wished to escape from military service, took shelter in the habit. The mendicant orders were indeed a reproach to Catholicism, and a pest to the countries wherein they existed; they contributed not only to keep the people ignorant, but to render them profligate. Yet even among the Franciscans men were found, who, by their irreproachable conduct, their sincere though misdirected piety, and sometimes by their learning and industrious lives, preserved the order from the contempt into which it would otherwise have fallen even among the vulgar. The nunneries of every description produced nothing but evil, except in those cases where persons went into them by their own choice, who in Protestant countries would have been consigned to a Bedlam.

♦Improving literature.♦

Literature had revived in both kingdoms, and was flourishing, notwithstanding the restraints which the government and the Inquisition continued to impose. Few similar institutions have equalled the Royal Academies of Madrid and Lisbon in the zeal and ability with which they have brought to light their ancient records, and elucidated the history and antiquities of their respective countries. There was one most important subject from which men of letters were compelled to refrain ... the old free constitution: but it met them every where in their researches; and its restoration was the object of their wishes, if not of their hopes.

♦Morals of the lower classes.♦

The lower classes, who in great cities are every where too generally depraved, were perhaps peculiarly so in Spain, from the effect of what may be called their vulgar, rather than their popular, literature. This had assumed a curious and most pernicious character, arising partly from the disregard in which ill-executed laws must always be held, and partly from the faith of the people in the efficacy of absolution. The ruffian and the bravo were the personages of those ballads which were strung for sale along dead walls in frequented streets, and vended by blind hawkers about the country. In these pieces, which, as they were written by men in low life for readers of their own level, represent accurately the state of vulgar feeling, the robberies and murders which the hero commits are described as so many brave exploits performed in his vocation; and, at the conclusion, he is always delivered over safely to the priest, but seldom to the hangman. Fables of a like tendency were not unfrequently chosen by their dramatists for the sake of flattering some fashionable usage of superstition, such as the adoration of the cross and the use of the rosary; and the villain who, in the course of the drama, has perpetrated every imaginable crime, is exhibited at the catastrophe[3] as a saint by virtue of one of these redeeming practices. Such works were more widely injurious in their tendency than any of those which the Inquisition suppressed. They infected the minds of the people; and the surest course by which a coxcomb in low life could excite admiration and envy among his compeers was by appearing habitually to set justice at defiance. It became a fashion among some of the higher classes in Spain to imitate[4] these wretches; and, by a stranger and more deplorable perversion of nature, women were found among those of distinguished rank, who affected the dress and the manners of the vilest of their sex. No such depravity was known in Portugal: the court set an example of decorum and morality there; and as there were fewer large towns, in proportion to the size of the kingdom, there was consequently less corruption among the people.