The people of Leiria and the peasantry who had collected there had had little time for preparation when they heard that the French were approaching. They had paraded through their streets the banner of the city, bearing for its device a crow upon a pine tree; in memory of one which, when Affonso Henriquez attacked the city, perched there in the midst of his camp, and clapped its wings and croaked in a manner that was accepted as a good omen. They had proclaimed the Prince, restored and repainted the royal arms, and assisted at the performance of Te Deum in the cathedral; but school-boys in a rebellion could not have been more unprepared with any plan of defence, or unprovided with means for it. They were in an open city. They had not a single piece of cannon. Of some 800 men who were stationed at outposts and other points of danger, scarcely a fourth part were armed with muskets, and for these three or four round of cartridges were all that could be found. To persons unacquainted with the character and condition of the Portugueze it might appear almost incredible that resistance should have been attempted under circumstances thus absolutely hopeless. But the people were goaded by insult, and stung by the feeling of insupportable wrong. They had been wantonly invaded, ... grievously, inhumanly, and remorselessly oppressed. They knew that the nation was rising against its oppressors: they felt instinctively what the strength of a nation is; and were too ♦Neves, iv. 31–36.♦ much exasperated to consider, or too little informed to understand, that without order and discipline numbers are of little avail, and even courage not to be relied on.
♦The French enter the city.♦
The higher orders were perfectly sensible of their imminent danger, but they would have exposed themselves to certain destruction if they had attempted to reason with the infuriated multitude. The magistrates therefore, and the person who had been appointed to the command, withdrew secretly from the city during the night, and fled. In the morning five Frenchmen, who had been surprised upon a marauding party, were ♦July 5.♦ brought in prisoners. A short-lived and senseless exultation was excited at their appearance. At noon it was known that the enemy were close at hand; they sent forward a peasant who had fallen into their hands, and whom, contrary to their custom, they had spared, to offer pardon to the people if they would return to their obedience; that offer being refused, they attacked the insurgents. By their own account the resistance was so momentary, that there was no time for the artillery, nor for half the troops to take part in the action. The insurgents threw away their arms, like terrified villagers, imploring the clemency of an irritated conqueror. From 800 to 900 were left upon the field. The city was ♦3d Bulletin. Observador Portuguez, 357.
Thiebault, 143.♦ entered on all sides. But, by their own account, the moment the action was over, General Margaron restrained the indignation of his troops; their moderation was equal to their valour, and victory was immediately followed by order. Margaron, in a proclamation to the inhabitants, dwelt upon his clemency. “A decree had been issued,” he said, “commanding that every town where the French were fired upon should be burnt, and its inhabitants put to the sword.” They had incurred that penalty, and his duty required him to inflict it. Nevertheless he had prevented the massacre and the conflagration; not a house, not a cottage had been burnt; he had protected their persons and their property, as far as was possible under such circumstances; and instead of seeking for the guilty, he repeated to them his offers of peace and union. He called upon them to learn who were their real friends, and ♦Thiebault, Pièces Justificatives, No. 10.♦ lay aside their arms. “Leave,” said he, “the noble task of protecting and defending you to the soldiers of the great nation. Submit yourselves to the power which Heaven supports, and obey our holy church as I do, ... you in renouncing your projects of exterminating the French, I in forgiving all that you have done against them.”
♦Massacre of the prisoners.
This is what the French relate of their conduct at Leiria. “Sepulchres of Leiria,” exclaims the Portugueze historian of these events, “prove ye the falsehood with which these robbers, as cruel as they are perfidious, have deceived the world!” What they have not related is now to be recorded. It is not dissembled by the Portugueze that the defence was as feeble and as momentary as the enemy describe it. They entered the city on all sides, and began an indiscriminate butchery; old and young, women and babes, were butchered, in the streets, in the houses, in the churches, in the fields. The most atrocious acts of cruelty were committed, and not by the common soldiers only. One of the superior officers related of himself, that a feeling of pity came over him when upon entering the town he met a woman with an infant at her breast, but calling to mind that he was a soldier, he pierced mother and child with one thrust! Free scope was given to every ♦Memoir of the early Campaigns of the Duke of Wellington, p. 8.♦ abominable passion; and in the general pillage the very graves were opened, upon the supposition that treasure might have been hidden there, as in a place where no plunderer would look to find it. When the slaughter in the streets had ceased, they began to hunt for prisoners, and all who were found were taken to an open space before the Chapel of S. Bartholomew, there to be put to death like the prisoners at Jaffa. The greater number of these poor wretches fell on their knees, some stretching their hands in unavailing agony toward their murderers for mercy; others, lifting them to heaven, directed their last prayers where mercy would be found. The murderers, ♦Neves, iv. 37–42.♦ as if they delighted in the act of butchery, began their work with the sword and bayonet and the but-end of the musket, and finished it by firing upon their[16]victims.
♦Loison’s march from Almeida to Abrantes.♦
On the same day actions of the same devilish character were committed by Loison’s division on their way from Almeida. Leaving a garrison of 1250 men in that place, and having blown up the works of Fort Conception, he set out towards Lisbon, in pursuance to the orders which he had received, with between 3000 and 4000 troops. The next day he approached the city of Guarda; it happened to be Sunday, and also the annual festival of Queen St. Isabel, whose name, stripped of all fable and idolatrous observances, deserves always to be held in dear and respectful remembrance by the Portugueze. The assemblage of people was therefore much greater than at other times; but they were assembled to keep holyday, not to provide for their defence. A Junta had been constituted there two days before; and with that miscalculation of strength, or ignorance of the state of things, which prevailed so generally among their countrymen, they seem not to have considered themselves as in danger of an attack till Loison was within two miles of the city. An old iron gun, rusty and dismantled, and lying useless in the ruins of the castle, was their whole artillery; ... a few peasants mounted it upon a cart, and so carried it to a rising ground near the road, as if the sight of it would deter the French from advancing. According to the ♦Bulletin 4.
Observador Portuguez, 366.♦ French official account, the rebels, as they insolently styled the Portugueze, drew up in two ♦Thiebault, 153.♦ lines, having their flanks well supported, and two pieces of cannon to protect their centre; their lines were forced at all points, their guns taken, themselves surrounded as well as routed; the disorder was general, the slaughter dreadful; more than a thousand dead were left upon the field, and Loison in pursuit of the fugitives entered the city. The truth is, that a disorderly multitude fled as soon as they were attacked; and that, as all who could not escape were cut down, the number of the slain has not perhaps been much exaggerated. A night of licentiousness and pillage followed, and Loison then proceeded. The ancient and flourishing town of Covilham escaped a similar visitation, because it lay somewhat out of the line of his march, and he had no time to spare. Alpedrinha, a place containing between two and three thousand inhabitants, was not so fortunate. On the same day that Margaron entered Leiria, and with as little resistance, General Charlot entered this ♦July 5.♦ unhappy town; that General was one of the few commanders who had hitherto obtained a character for honour and humanity, ... here, however, all horrible crimes and cruelties were committed; one inoffensive old man was taken out of the town, and burnt alive within sight and hearing of the fugitives upon the mountains; and the French, having carried off every thing ♦Neves, iv. 77.♦ that was portable, set the place on fire. They proceeded, plundering as they went, by Sarzedas, Cortiçada, and Sardoal to Abrantes.
♦Language of the French bulletins.♦
The French stated in their bulletin that they had lost upon their march twenty killed, and from thirty to forty wounded, whereas the rebels had left at least three thousand upon the different fields of battle[17]. The character of the intrusive government would be imperfectly understood hereafter, if its language as well as its acts were not faithfully recorded. The bulletin which announced this statement to the Portugueze, and to that great portion of the civilized world in which the events of the war were anxiously observed, proceeded to say, “this is the mournful result of a frenzy which nothing can justify, which nothing can excuse, and which obliges us to multiply the number of victims who excite sorrow and compassion, but upon whom a terrible necessity compels us to inflict the strokes of just vengeance. Thus it is that the Portugueze people, blind instruments of the unfeeling calculations of the British cabinet, destroy with their own hands the happiness which we with all our power were endeavouring to make them enjoy! Thus it is that from the bosom of tranquillity, of good order, and of repose, they draw upon themselves the destructive scourge of war, and bring devastation even upon the very fields where God had given abundance! Thus it is that deluded men, ungrateful children as well as guilty citizens, change all the claims which they had to the benevolence and protection of government, for deserved misfortune and wretchedness, ruin their families, carry desolation, flames, and death, into their dwellings, transform flourishing cities into heaps of ashes and vast tombs, and by their fatal union draw upon the whole country the calamities which they provoke, which they deserve, and from which (weak victims as they are) they cannot escape, covering themselves with shame, and completing her destruction. Thus it is that no other resource remains to them than the clemency of those whom they sought to assassinate, ... a clemency which they do not implore in vain, when, acknowledging their crime, they ask pardon from the French, who, incapable of belying their noble character, are ♦Bulletin 4.
Observador Portuguez, 368.♦ always as full of generosity as of valour.” This was the[18]language of Buonaparte’s governor in Portugal! “To be the victim,” says Mr. Wordsworth, commenting upon these things and words at the time, in that strain of profoundest feeling and philosophy by which his higher compositions are so eminently distinguished, “to be the victim of such bloody-mindedness, is a doleful lot for a nation; and the anguish must have been rendered still more poignant by the scoffs and insults, and by that heinous contempt of the most awful truths, with which the perpetrator of those cruelties has proclaimed them. Merciless ferocity is an evil familiar to our thoughts; but these combinations of malevolence historians have not yet been called upon to record; and writers of fiction, if they have ever ventured to create passions resembling them, have confined, out of reverence for the acknowledged constitution of human nature, those passions to reprobate spirits. Such tyranny is, in the strictest sense, intolerable; not because it aims at the extinction of life, but of every thing which gives life its value, ... of virtue, of reason, of repose in God, or in truth.”